Abstract

In The Art of War (1521), Machiavelli describes the horse as ‘a feeling animal’, highlighting animal individuality and human-horse understanding. This chapter explores such interspecies interaction, approaching Renaissance warfare as a multispecies experience. It considers the impact of war on animals, and vice versa, arguing that animal agency fundamentally affected the military enterprise. The chapter begins with theories of agency and, in relation to the Italian Wars (1494–1559), takes up the proposal that the well-functioning horse and rider worked as a ‘unity’. Moving beyond the equine, it examines canine, feline, and parasitic agents of war. This chapter's more-than-human perspective calls for inclusive conception of agency, serious investigation of interrelationships among and between species, and the rethinking of traditional military histories.

Keywords: Renaissance warfare, Italian Wars, historical animal studies, animals, agency, interspecies interaction

‘[m]any times it happens that a spirited man will be on a vile horse or a vile [man] on a spirited [horse]. Hence these disparities of spirit must make for disorder … a horse is a feeling animal and recognizes the dangers and enters them unwillingly. And if you will consider which forces make it go forward and which keep it back, without doubt you will see that those which keep it back are greater than those which push it on. For the spur makes it go ahead, and, on the other side, either the sword or the pike keep it back … I say that if that horse begins to see from afar that it has to hit the points of the pikes, either it checks its course on its own, so that as it feels itself pricked it will stop entirely, or as it approaches them it will turn to the right or left. If you want to make an experiment of this, try to run a horse into a wall with whatever impetus you want: rarely will you find that it goes into it’.