Key Points
The most atrocious sort of cruelty occurred, recorded the chronicler Bernardo Rucellai: babies ripped from the breasts of their parents and taken into slavery, parents killed under the eyes of their sons, wretched mothers dragged from the last embrace of their children, with silent sadness in the useless wait to be able to welcome the last breath, nuns terrorised and chased from their sanctuaries and slaughtered before their venerated saints...
The eleventh-century fortress of Monte San Giovannisometimes summer home to Pope Adrian IV, retreat for the poet Vittoria Colonna, and prison for the Saint Thomas Aquinaswas battered into submission by French guns inside less than eight hours one day in 1495.The images, if not the events, are familiar in a world which has seen the horrors unleashed by Hamas attack on Israel...
The fall ofMonte San Giovanni marked the spectacular rise of gunpowder warfare in Europe..
Florentine aristocrat Francesco Guicciardini recorded this extraordinary lament to the languid, less-lethal era of war practised before 1495: When war did break out, he claimed the sides were so evenly balanced, the methods of warfare so slow, and the artillery so inefficient that it took nearly a whole summer to take a castle..
The police actions, interventions, and wars of self-defence waged under these conditions since 1945 have been justified by a sense of moral superiority and consequentialist arguments which would have been familiar to medieval clerics, historian Stephen Bowd has argued in a superb book on the savagery of the Renaissance wars...
