Red Commissars of the Serene Republic: The Venetian Way of War

The gap between operations and strategy is the hardest to span. Although military questions are ultimately subordinate to political prerogatives, generals and politicians must in some sense meet as counterparts of two coequal domains: whereas generals have risen through the ranks and understand the problems facing their own subordinates, the apprenticeship for political leadership only rarely affords them any deep understanding of military affairs. Generals may similarly misunderstand why political prerogatives override operational considerations, and fail to adapt their operations accordingly.

This problem is all the more acute when the generals have no preexisting loyalty to the state. Mercenary generals are rare today (although perhaps not for too much longer), but they were once the rule: Renaissance Italy, most of Europe in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, and countries in many other times and places relied on them as a rule. Machiavelli identified the problem with this in a famous passage from The Prince:

Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one founds his state on the power of mercenary arms, it will never be firm or secure, because they are disunited, ambitious, undisciplined, faithless; brave among friends, cowardly among enemies; they have neither fear of God nor faith with men; and ruin is only delayed as long as the assault; in peace you are despoiled by them, in war by the enemy.¹

Had the Florentine playwright been less tendentious in his reading of history, he would have admitted that one Italian state was able to use hired arms to great effect, carving out and holding a sizable land empire.² Over the course of two centuries, the Republic of Venice learned how to align the incentives of their mercenaries with the interests of their state, while avoiding the worst liabilities of employing them. Part of this owed to the inherent advantages of their political system: they had money to pay their soldiers on time (at least compared to their rivals), they were politically united, and they had faithful agents who helped manage the army in the field.

The last was especially important. The office of provveditore was one of the most important positions in the Venetian war machine. The title literally means overseer, but proveditors are better described as commissioners or commissaries. Among their many duties, they oversaw the supply and pay for ad hoc assemblages of mercenary companies that lacked a permanent administrative apparatus. Bad administration was one of the biggest causes of breakdown in discipline, so the proveditors’ efforts went a long way toward ensuring the mercenaries’ good behavior.

Political Officers

But proveditors also resembled a very different kind of commissioner. The Russian form of this word is commissar, which in Soviet usage was the notorious political officer tasked with ensuring the army’s loyalty to the Communist Party. Commissars originally served to provide political indoctrination to the ranks, educating revolutionary soldiers in an ideology whose details they might have only vaguely understood. But they also came to serve as the political authorities’ eyes and ears, a means to ensure the loyalty of the officer class.

Commissars were assigned to all levels of the Red Army, with two serving on the staff of every army and army group. Commanding officers and political officers were of equal rank; although they theoretically had different roles, the presence of the latter naturally created a dual command structure, and they could overrule the commander’s decisions as they saw fit. Soviet commissars played an especially important role during the Russian Civil War, when they were used to stoke zeal for the Communist cause, and during the first year of Operation Barbarossa, when they were used to stiffen resistance amidst a collapsing front.

Such an office is common in revolutionary states, where the regime’s survival depends on a loyal and competent military. The French Revolutionary government sent pairs of representatives to its field armies—two such officers jumpstarted Napoleon Bonaparte’s career at the siege of Toulon, overruling his commander to allow the young artillery captain to enact an audacious plan that won the day.

Napoleon at Toulon.

Venice was an altogether more conservative regime, but its proveditors fulfilled the same functions as revolutionary political officers: keeping tabs on commanders, ensuring the morale and loyalty of the rank and file, and sending back great volumes of reports on both. They also presided at war councils and added their voices to strategic debates, ensuring that military operations reflected Venice’s political prerogatives. These combined administrative, political, and strategic functions helped assure that the condottieri and their men fought faithfully under the red standard of St. Mark.

Unknown Venetian condottiere of the 16^th century, with his company in the background.

Part I: The Venetian Military System

The question of loyalty was one of the foremost military concerns in Renaissance Italy. Unlike the Communist regimes of the 20^th century, their concerns were far less ideological than practical: their foremost concern was the loyalty of the captains and the discipline of the troops. Machiavelli greatly exaggerated in his characterization of mercenaries, but he was not entirely wrong in identifying their liabilities. A great condottiere might be reluctant to end a lucrative war or to put their troops at too great a risk; but they also fought hard for their employers at great personal risk.

Where Machiavelli erred was in identifying the cause. The debate over the virtues of civic militias against mercenaries was a distraction from the real problem facing the Italian city-states: their inherent weakness. Although many were quite wealthy in relative terms, they lacked either the funds or the territory to sustain a large fighting force, no matter their military organization. Aggravating things, their leadership was often fractious and lacked knowledge of military affairs. They could not command the respect of the captains or effectively square political and military demands.

Money was by far the biggest reason for breakdowns in civil-military relations. Pay was quite often in arrears—even wealth merchant cities like Florence simply could not afford the enormous costs required to keep an army fed, equipped, and happy year after year. This had knock-on effects, as cities were loath to employ mercenaries until absolutely necessary, and kept their contracts to the minimum possible—a situation that was less than ideal for men who made their living by their swords. Italy was moreover a seller’s market, encouraging captains with good reputations to change employers often. Even then, outright defect in the middle of a contract was rare, usually occurring during times of political instability that put future prospects in doubt.

Some workarounds to this fundamental problem proved reasonably successful. Italian states often sought to retain the long-term loyalty of a mercenary by paying them a retainer’s stipend during lulls in hostilities, during which they were free to take up service with other city-states (though not against the initial employer), provided they return by a certain date in the event of a mobilization. This regular semi-employment kept them basically faithful.

Venice’s Landward Lurch

Compared to other major Italian states, Venice was late to the mercenary game. Throughout the Middle Ages, their attention was concentrated on the Stato da Mar, their network of islands, port cities, and fortresses across the eastern Mediterranean. They had conquered this mostly using their own manpower: sons of patrician families officered the galleys and the lower classes pulled the oars, and it was these same men who fought in occasional land engagements. As their territory expanded across the Adriatic and into the eastern Mediterranean, they increasingly recruited rowers from outside Venice itself, but their military power was nonetheless drawn from their own territory.

This changed as they became embroiled in Italian affairs. The Venetians had always maintained a small toehold on the mainland, but the growing strength of their neighbors caused them to fear that this was insufficient, and drove them to expand their lodgment. This in turn required mercenaries—their untrained sailors and half-trained marines could not square off with trained professionals. It was not until 1336 that Venice began hiring mercenaries in any substantial way, in a war against Verona, the great power of northeastern Italy whose expansion threatened to cut off the land routes to Venice. The Venetians joined Florence, that frequent employer (and sometime victim) of mercenaries, to contract a captain-general to lead their armies.

The allies were successful in breaking Verona’s hold on the region, and Venice gained a small enclave on the adjacent mainland. But other mainland powers rose in its place, while the long rivalry with Genoa at sea continued unabated. Venice’s worst fears were realized in 1379, when Genoa allied with land powers and nearly managed to choke off the city in a protracted blockade. Venice survived, and in the following quarter century carved out a sizeable buffer zone in northeastern Italy. Buffer zones always need their own buffers to be entirely secure, and before long territorial conquest became an end in its own right: by the 1420s, her borders reached to within 30 km of Milan itself (for more on Venetian policy and expansion, see Venice and the Problem of Grand Strategy).

The Battle of Chioggia, fought to break the blockade of the Venetian lagoon.

The Venetian Political System

Venice was able to do in a short time what no other city could through careful management of their condottieri, mitigating their worst tendencies while making best use of their undeniable talents. The city enjoyed one natural advantage over its rivals: the vast moat of the Venetian lagoon, impenetrable without a fleet that could equal the Venetians’ own—a moot concern after the War of Chioggia.

As a political entity, Venice was also uniquely suited to following a long-term strategy. Most Italian states were riven by a destabilizing factionalism: the bloody conspiracies that haunted Milan and Naples’ monarchs, the fighting between the great houses that raged in the streets of Genoa and Florence. This made it very difficult to formulate coherent war strategy, as a wary eye always had to be kept on internal political factors. Human nature makes it impossible to purge factional conflict from political life, but the Venetian Republic probably came as close as possible. Political power was restricted to members of the Great Council: patrician men aged 25 or older who owed no debt to the state—about 1% of the city’s population.

The Council elected members from within its ranks to higher offices. The first of these was the Senate, the chief legislative body, while the Council of Forty served as the highest court. Supreme executive authority was nominally held by the Doge, who was elected for life by the Great Council in a complex process designed to prevent any one family from making the position hereditary (as had nearly happened early in the Republic’s history).

In practice, executive power was devolved to other committees. Broadly speaking, the College maintained responsibility for executing war policy, while the Senate had ultimate say on matters of strategy. The College was comprised of the Doge, his elected councilors, the heads of the Forty, and members of various subcommittees who were elected from within the Senate. One of these, the five Savi di Terraferma, was established in the first half of the 15^th century to deal with mainland affairs, and by extension with war. They were aided by the Council of Ten, yet another executive body responsible for internal security, which often exercised its authority when dealing with mercenary captains suspected of treason.

The strength of the Venetian system lay in how it prevented any man or group of men from exercising undue influence while still being able to form consensus. The profusion of organs and committees with overlapping authorities seems recondite, yet these were all filled by a fairly small group of men who had long experience in public service, often including service in the field. This created a common strategic understanding which, by virtue of constant rotation through various offices, preserved a balance of power among the various organs of state.

A session of the Venetian College.

Mercenary Management

Political unity alone did not guarantee the army’s good behavior. Broadly speaking, civilian authorities faced two types of problems with mercenaries. The first was overreliance on individual captains, which gave them undue leverage in contract negotiations and encouraged fickleness—in extreme cases, he could effectively hold his employers hostage. The second was the indiscipline and lack of enthusiasm among the rank-and-file, which could doom a campaign.