1. Introduction

It remains unclear when Europeans began to quantify war mortalities. Medieval Crusade histories occasionally enumerated fighters, but it was a self-consciously speculative endeavor. One twelfth-century chronicler remarked: “The truth regarding the number of dead or wounded in this or any other battle cannot be determined since large numbers can only be estimated.”Footnote ¹ Even if writers set down figures, they were, he thought, false; not because of malice, but rather because historians adulated victors and invented numbers to amplify their deeds. Biblical precedent also appeared to frown on enumeration as a practice. King David’s census of Israel — a survey revealing “a thousand thousand and a hundred thousand men bearing the sword”Footnote ² — provoked God’s ire against David, since it was no mortal man’s prerogative to quantify humanity. By the early sixteenth century, historian Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) echoed 400-year-old doubts when he claimed in his History of Italy that “nothing is more uncertain in battle than the number of dead.”Footnote ³ He went on, however, to offer a level of numerical specificity that Crusade historians would have envied. Clearly, sometime between 1100 and 1500, counting practices had grown more sophisticated.

Indeed, the late Middle Ages — and particularly the fourteenth century — was a watershed moment for European habits of quantification, manifest in the growth of paper-based documentation, state archives, and double-entry bookkeeping.Footnote ⁴ The last of these developments features centrally in Mary Poovey’s account of the invention of the modern fact; she argues that balanced accounting practices introduced a new methodology for correlating facts and numbers.Footnote ⁵ The pursuit of numbers was fundamental to the fourteenth-century information age, and concern over the social utility of numeracy came to the fore in two crises of the mid-fourteenth century: the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death. Both of these predicaments (that is, war and pandemic) threw up new challenges of enumeration. In the first instance, long-lasting international war pushed disputants to develop reliable methods for enumerating and paying soldiers. In the second, the depredations of mass death forced states to create means for enumerating human loss on a wide scale. Although these counting regimes for soldiers and for mortality developed separately over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they shared certain motivations. One of these was a growing concern for responsibly documenting state fiscalism, a concern this article addresses in tracing the histories of military contracts and mortality registers as measures of the value of numbers to bureaucratic states. A second shared motivation was commemorative. A strain of memorialization emerged from noble traditions of celebrating battle dead, and it found a champion in the military herald, a figure charged with the brief of remembrance. As a state agent, his role was particularly noteworthy because it coupled enumeration and memorialization.

This article begins in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a way of offering a prehistory for the cultural use of numbers in the discourse over mortality in the early sixteenth-century Italian Wars (1494–1559; here with a focus on the first twenty years). Since the wars involved a number of states, the point of excavating both Italian and Northern European habits before 1494 is to trace the ways that mortality’s varied histories nourished reactions to the wars once Europeans collided on Italian soil. These conflicts provoked Renaissance commentators like Machiavelli, Giovio, and Guicciardini to respond with language of unprecedented magnitude: they saw more battles, damages, and deaths than before.Footnote ⁶ Their responses have colored modern historiography as well, stimulating scholarship on the novelties of artillery technology, new levels of military violence after 1494, and attendant Italian complaints of French barbarism.Footnote ⁷ Much of this work on the Italian Wars interprets sixteenth-century reactions primarily as a corollary of the military and political realities of these conflicts.

This study does not dispute the claims or studies of newness, but instead points to additional reasons why such novelties seemed so shocking. Gradual structural shifts in information systems also played an important part in fashioning the understanding of death in the Italian Wars. Specifically, methods stimulated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (in mustering, memorial traditions, and mortality enumeration) shaped the values of quantification around 1500. If Europeans reacted with concern to the reports of mass mortality circulating by that date, what they did not realize was that those numbers were as much the product of institutional and social changes as they were of gory wars.

The informational frameworks supported by states and elites helped to launch broad discussions over war in the early sixteenth century that were newly equipped with numbers drawn from the counting methods of muster officers, tax assessors, military heralds, and state necrologies. These numbers circulated through word of mouth, written record, and a new medium whose impact contemporaries were still absorbing around 1500: print, and particularly the printed news bulletin. The affordable newssheet format extended the already active public demand for knowledge of current events, and the war years were some of the most politically and socially fractious in what has recently been called the era of “info lust.”Footnote ⁸ Print, of course, functioned in concert with other longer-lived media (speech, writing), and it features in this article less as a revolutionary medium than as a source through which to trace the saturation of numerical discourse into a wide public reckoning of war’s human tolls. As a medium, printed news advertised itself as truthful and accurate, making it appear ideally suited for publishing numbers correctly. But while news bulletins promised the potential for accuracy, they did not necessarily deliver it. In fact, people in the early sixteenth century found themselves facing an abundance of exact, but often conflicting, casualty numbers and had to confront the new challenge of assessing factuality in a world of growing numerical specificity. Curious about these numbers, observers from all social ranks recorded and responded to them as a way to process their meaning.

The meaning of numbers went beyond the instrumentality of quantification. Enumeration served a persuasive function as well: to register the scale of war’s consequences. Numerical rhetoric serves as a reminder that numbers had cultural meaning that came into acute relief during times of crisis in war and population. Accuracy was desirable but not the only objective. Numbers served other roles as well, including as carriers of commemorative freight in extending a cult of memory. One of the most eloquent testaments to the importance of numbers in this context is the war monument. By the end of these wars, traditional memorial chapels were joined by a new form of monument, one that featured both text and numbers.

This article devotes its first three parts to showing how late medieval states developed informational systems to process mortality. The first considers the enrollment of fighters (a process here called “bodies in”). These systems functioned in such a way as to make hired fighters’ deaths incidental; mortality was not a major concern in military accounting before standing armies. Eventually states installed agents and methods — like military heralds and public necrologies, examined in the two subsequent parts — to register the exit of soldiers and noncombatants alike (“bodies out”). The article’s final parts examine the legacies of these systems in the sixteenth century and attempt to answer why numbers mattered in the Italian Wars, taking for granted the strategic function numbers served in informing rulers and captains. Those numbers, more often than not, represented living men, the only ones of value in military planning; but the numbers of dead are of concern here. Why numbers were important, then, had to do with their place in memorial culture. Numbers helped observers comment upon the wars using a register of eloquence outside the verbal, and helped to enrich existing commemorations. The article concludes with an examination of the changing form of Renaissance war monuments as an index of the link between numbers and memory.

2. Bodies In: Military Contracts and Muster Rolls

Across late medieval Europe, military registers recorded thousands of soldier enlistments; deaths, however, almost never appeared. When contracting fighters, states had more reason to note soldiers’ intake into service than their quittance or death. Registration — that is, noting the matriculation of fighters in armed companies — developed out of a need to account for a financial relationship between these states and their soldiers. States were consequently invested in building a record of their dues so as to provide finance officers, and ultimately rulers, with knowledge of the cost of war. Although feudal warriors were often paid, monetary concerns became more complicated as wars through the late Middle Ages demanded greater numbers of fighters and required nonfeudal combatants to be hired.Footnote ⁹ By the fifteenth century many states had some kind of permanent force, even though in both Italy and France the existence of such troops worried critics because of the implications for taxation.Footnote ¹⁰ The financial burdens of extra wartime taxes were considerable for citizens; the size and frequency of military levies illustrate the building pressures of a slow turn toward hired warriors over (or, just as commonly, to supplement) feudal or civic ones. These hired troops either made up a permanent force that needed to be housed in garrisons and salaried (as in FranceFootnote ¹¹ ), or they were mercenary troops led and paid by a captain (as was common in Italy and widely practiced elsewhere). In general, captains gathered their own forces and states paid them a sum to which both parties had agreed in a contract; these agreements were the condotte, lettres de retenue, and indentures.Footnote ¹²

These types of contracts began to appear regularly in the late thirteenth century.Footnote ¹³ The following century saw the consolidation of offices to treat directly with these fighters. The contracts written up by war officers almost always indicate the number of men comprising the company; names are rarely inscribed.Footnote ¹⁴ This tendency toward counting over naming underlines that these records operated both as financial instruments and as confirmation for political bodies or agents of the actual number of men available for military service. A company, whether mercenary or not, was paid only upon proof of its existence and ability to fight, which required the men to present themselves before officials for accounting. This was the presentation: montre in France, mostra in Italy, muster in England and the German lands, all terms rooted in the Latin monstrare (to show).Footnote ¹⁵ It was these reviews that, at least in France and England, required the naming of specific individuals within companies, and therefore the production of a second document, following the contract: the muster roll. Upon review, officials recorded the names of all the present fighters in this roll, and treasurers used it to pay soldiers and control disbursements. At times, rolls listed the names of several hundred men under the charge of a captain; these documents were common for all types of companies, including those led by feudal warriors (fig. 1).

Figure 1. A typical muster roll of the early sixteenth century. This one names the gendarmes of Robert de la Marck, seigneur de Fleuranges, 1512. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Fr. 21508, fol. 873.

The muster system offered tangible evidence that the projected force was fit and available; its use grew in tandem with the need to hire fighters in the mid-fourteenth century, and above all it responded to the threat of fraud among the soldiery. This last function is probably why muster rolls continued to be useful in later centuries: they prevented soldiers from collecting payment twice or for some other man who may have died in battle.Footnote ¹⁶ This same registration strategy operated in the Swiss cantons — home to many mercenary companies in the fifteenth century — where early records give only the numbers in each company, but come to register proper names in the sixteenth century.Footnote ¹⁷ While generally effective, such efforts could not completely disable soldiers from attempting to claim the pay of others. In the Italian Wars, problems of what one might call identity theft continued, as Swiss fraud trials against mercenaries indicate.Footnote ¹⁸

Contracts (featuring numbers) and muster rolls (featuring names and sometimes numbers) both reveal that states’ military registration habits in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were concerned primarily with recording intake: strategy and finances hinged upon recording the initiation of a contractual relationship with soldiers. Those relationships were instrumental rather than institutional: as instruments of military problem solving and as contract employees, fighters were worth recording only insofar as they accomplished the military affair and were consequently paid. Because rank-and-file soldiers — particularly mercenaries — were not continuous members of state institutions (that is, they were not members of a standing army), there was little need to account for them after their duties were fulfilled, other than to obviate fraud. These relationships ended with the payment of a lump sum to the captain of the company. The death of any particular soldier in battle was of little import in this scheme of accounting.

This system of enumerating the forces sent into the field perhaps also explains the paucity of death tolls in narrative accounts of battles before the fourteenth century. Chronicle accounts before 1300 tend in narrating battles to offer more specific numbers for men sent to battle than for men killed.Footnote ¹⁹ One might account for this tendency by suggesting that the probable sources of these tallies were muster rolls or recruitment figures.Footnote ²⁰ Given that there were few state agents available to serve the specific function of counting dead warriors (particularly in Italy), and given that states were concerned more with the outcome of the battle than with the fate of their hired fighters, the official quantities most likely to reach the ears of chroniclers would have originated from the only people who were sure to keep numbers: muster officers, perhaps by way of tax assessors. In fourteenth-century Florence, for instance, these figures would have been a matter of public record since the size of the contracted military force impinged directly upon the value of forced loans.Footnote ²¹ Europeans had, to be sure, taken note of battle dead in earlier centuries, but the numbers they quoted were necessarily speculative since the mechanisms of exactly enumerating even the outgoing force had not come into regular use. Contracts and muster rolls quantified and identified participants in the state’s military employ but were disinvested in their deaths.

As sources for a history of mortality, these documents are both promising and problematic. They can promise, when read against the grain, to give clues about war deaths. The punctiliousness of financial officers who hoped to keep soldiers from taking advantage of the fisc led them to note when soldiers exited state service. One way to quit service was, obviously, to die in battle. Consequently, some muster rolls — particularly those used during campaigns as living documents to be updated — record when soldiers have died by striking names from the list.Footnote ²² Still, rolls were not always used in the same fashion and rarely represent a systematic effort to assess war damages, and this fact makes them problematic: for instance, a crossed-through name could equally suggest that a soldier appeared for presentation but was deemed unfit to fight. In such cases, stricken names have nothing to do with mortality.Footnote ²³ But the historian interested in asking about the registration of military deaths prior to standing armies finds in muster roles at least some ad hoc strategies in operation. Moreover, these records are probably the best source for Italian war casualties of the late Middle Ages: Italians did not use the feudal agents — heralds — for this task as Northern Europeans did.

3. Bodies Out: Northern European Heralds and Noble Traditions

If state documentation of soldiers emphasized enumeration based on intake (coming in), there were nonetheless coeval efforts to register mortality (going out), both in the military and the civic spheres. The mid-fourteenth century serves as a particularly useful moment to assess changes in mortality registration, since both the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) and the Black Death (1347–53) provoked new practices and attitudes. In particular, the demands for numerical accounting of large-scale death that arose in the fourteenth century pushed many parts of Europe to implement new methods for this purpose. For this reason, this section focuses on the battle of Crécy (1346) and the following section upon the first outbreak of plague (1347–48) as a three-year window in which to examine novelties in the institutions of mortality registration both on and off the battlefield.Footnote ²⁴

In the military sphere, prolonged conflict between France and England spurred innovation on two fronts: institutional and technological. Institutionally, the wars of the fourteenth century laid the groundwork for the erection of a permanent French standing army in the fifteenth century. Technologically, guns and artillery joined the arsenals of these warring kingdoms.Footnote ²⁵ However, most central to the topic here was the role of a relatively new officer, the herald of arms. The scope of his office expanded significantly in Northern Europe during the fourteenth century.Footnote ²⁶ Emerging from his early place in the ranks of minstrels and messengers, the herald came to be valued at court for his knowledge of coats of arms, a useful expertise in jousts and tournaments. In this capacity, the herald upheld protocol, celebrated noble families in verse and prose, and policed the symbolic hierarchies of court life. But he worked in times of war as a diplomat or functionary, circulating unmolested between opposing armies and using his trained eye to assess the tides of war.Footnote ²⁷ Jean Froissart explained in the prologue to his Chroniques that he cultivated the testimony of knights and grooms who fought in the Hundred Years’ War to write his chronicle, but he relied equally upon “some chief heralds and their marshals” for information, “both in France and England where I worked in their wake to find the truth of the subject, for by rights such men are fair investigators and reporters of things.”Footnote ²⁸

Indeed the herald acted at times as a chronicler of glorious noble deeds, a habit that helped to inform his courtly duties of celebration. But such work should not obscure his role in war: he arranged troops according to standards before battle, helped to distinguish friends from enemies on the field, and enumerated the dead and imprisoned when fighting had ended.Footnote ²⁹ Numbers were not his primary commission, but he and the treasurer were the only officers to reckon with the relationship between real bodies and numbers on paper. Froissart narrated the herald’s duty in describing the aftermath of the battle of Crécy in 1346 between English and French forces, a crushing defeat for France.Footnote ³⁰ Since the French king had fled the battle, the victor — King Edward III (r. 1327–77) — undertook to count the French dead and nominated the knight Reginald Cobham to “assemble some knights who recognized arms [along with] all the heralds and go among the dead, write down the names of all the knights he could identify, and gather together at one side [the bodies of] all the princes and great lords with their names written on them, by which to recognize them and their service according to their estate.” After working all day among the corpses, Cobham returned to Edward at dinnertime to report that they had found “eleven great princes, one of them a prelate, eighty knights banneret, about eleven hundred knights of one or two escutcheons, and easily fifteen or sixteen thousand others: squires, soldiers in mail, cityfolk, lancemen, Genoese, foot soldiers, all lying in the fields; and they had found only three dead English knights and about twenty archers.”Footnote ³¹

Even though Cobham and his crew offered an impressionistic number of the “other” dead, their mission was evidently to account for the noble casualties above all. Froissart confirmed the goal of such enterprises after another English victory (Auray, 1364), when heralds reconnoitered the battlefield “to pull the lords out from the others and to know which ones had died there.”Footnote ³² An early fifteenth-century manuscript of the Chroniques shows Edward III’s chief herald — the crowned king of arms — counting the dead at Crécy (fig. 2).Footnote ³³ Enumeration in this context belonged to a culture of chivalric honor as practiced by heralds, and Froissart’s numbers are typically followed by praise for the noblemen who had perished. If indeed Froissart relied upon heralds for much of his information, then it should be no surprise that he, aping their professional habits as praise writers, tuned his postbattle stocktaking to a similar celebratory mode.

Figure 2. King Edward III’s herald, the crowned king of arms, counts the dead at the battle of Crécy, 1346. Jean Froissart’s Chroniques. Illuminated by Virgil Master, ca. 1410. Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 72 A 25, fol. 144^r (detail).

Still, the work of the herald’s search party could also be destructive. In 1415, the French army fell at Agincourt and the victor, English King Henry V (r. 1413–22), just like his predecessor Edward III, determined who would have access to the field. Having denied the French contact with their own dead, Henry sent more than 500 armed men to remove coats of arms from the fallen, most likely as a first step in compiling the list of deceased.Footnote ³⁴ But these officers obliterated as much as they recorded, since they also mutilated the faces of the fallen, dead and living, French and English. By lacerating corpses and removing their escutcheons the English heralds disabled recognition of the bodies and assured that the power to account for casualties was in English control. In this regard the actions required to assemble the herald’s death register were as much about the politics of grief as they were about enumeration and commemoration.Footnote ³⁵ For the English to collect personal insignias and thereby deny their rivals the privilege of identifying bodies was a form of damnatio memoriae (condemnation of memory) for the vanquished.Footnote ³⁶

The debate between winners and losers at Agincourt over access to the dead confirms that constructing a record of the fighters who had sacrificed their lives for king and country was, in a manner quite distinct from the instrumental military contracts discussed earlier, a necessity in the codes of elite society. To catalog in order to commemorate was perhaps the longest tradition of military registration, far predating the herald’s official role as manager of arms: the ritual of numbering the noble corpses at Crécy, for instance, was one of many late medieval additions to a traditional aristocratic memory cult that celebrated individual noble fighters.Footnote ³⁷ The culture of warrior memorials rooted itself in classical and biblical typologies and can be traced from Beowulf to Roland to Tristan. The link between funerary traditions and commemorative practices accounts for much of the courtly lament literature and death ritual of the High Middle Ages, along with the sculpted commemorative effigies carved in churches throughout Europe and dedicated to the memory of the illustrious dead.Footnote ³⁸ The battlefield death, although bloody and swift, came to be depicted as a quiet reflective moment in this commemorative culture, a point at which the living venerated the dead, whether individually (fig. 3) or corporately (fig. 4).Footnote ³⁹ A ritual narrative governed the rescue of heroes from oblivion: individual bodies were separated from the pile of others, cleaned and reclothed for the sake of recognition, and then granted thanks and honor.Footnote ⁴⁰ These were moments of repersonalization that pushed back against the formless chaos of the battlefield, and against the mutilations described earlier.Footnote ⁴¹

Figure 3. A fifteenth-century vision of the death of Roland: the veneration of the fallen warrior hero. Grandes Chroniques de France. Illuminated by Jean Fouquet, 1455–60. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Fr. 6465, fol. 113^r (detail).

Figure 4. King Louis XII and his vassals venerate the dead at Agnadello, 1509. Raoul Bollart. On the Victory and Triumph of the French King Louis XII. Bibliothèque de Genève, MS Lat. 97, fol. 11^v (detail).

Funeral culture restored the fighter’s personhood posthumously. Lists of war dead were a central element for mourning and honoring them properly, which explains why lists of fallen nobles and prisoners circulated widely among observers: from at least the fourteenth century, they were transcribed in letters among elite observers and frequently found their way into chronicles, and they also probably traveled in circulars intended for public consumption.Footnote ⁴² If such news did not come directly from the sovereign or his commanders, the king’s heralds assumed the charge of broadcasting the news of a battle’s outcome, including the names of the fallen.Footnote ⁴³ Ultimately, these lists of heroes served more than just an informational role since they echoed artistic and literary genres (themselves in the form of lists) in which illustrious historical figures, frequently military ones, came to be celebrated for their virtues. The nine worthies (celebrated warriors from Hector to Godefroy de Bouillon), a major topos of valor in noble and civic culture in the late Middle Ages, figured abundantly in literature, public pageants, heraldry, and even tomb design.Footnote ⁴⁴ To add the names of modern fighters to such an illustrious catalogue of forebears just confirmed the list as a genre of honor.Footnote ⁴⁵ Likewise, fifteenth-century catalogues of illustrious men, the so-called uomini famosi, extolled, among others, the war captains of bygone ages. This tradition helps to explain why an Italian printer impressed a 1484 broadsheet commemorating the deaths of prominent mercenary captains and soldiers.Footnote ⁴⁶ Casualty lists, in the panegyric fashion that Froissart delivered them in his Chroniques, confirmed this economy of honor. Moreover, these litanies of fallen nobles probably also served to uphold legal convention as muster rolls did for foot soldiers: by recording and making public the death of a knight, state and society discouraged fraudulent succession in his estates, and such facts could be policed by public record and common knowledge.

South of the Alps, things worked differently. Italian heralds had some part in curating banners and crests in civic, military, and ecclesiastical contexts from at least the thirteenth century, but they spent much of their energy on poetry and protocol.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Florentine signoria first applied the name of herald to its officer of ceremonies in 1456 with the appointment of Francesco Filarete.Footnote ⁴⁸ Filarete, however, performed an exclusively ceremonial role: the Florentines uncoupled their herald’s peacetime duties from those his avatars had traditionally served in war. With this reformulation of the herald’s principal purpose, he was never called upon to cast himself into wartime dramas, nor do military records emerge from the Italian heraldic milieu.Footnote ⁴⁹ These changes were not unique to Italy, since in the same period the establishment of a standing French army (1445) began to alter the herald’s job in Northern Europe as well. Professional war commissioners and captains gradually assumed the herald’s battlefield duties, and his main charge returned to what it had been in the thirteenth century: the symbolics of nobility and precedence.Footnote ⁵⁰ Nonetheless, heralds returned occasionally to the field for wars in which French nobility participated in high numbers, as was certainly the case in the Italian Wars. King Louis XII’s official historiographer Jean d’Auton named several heralds (specifically the héraut d’armes) serving Sicilian, Spanish, English, and French lords in those conflicts, although largely in ceremonial rather than military roles.Footnote ⁵¹ Still, in a treatise on nobility first published in 1535, Symphorien Champier — himself often part of the king’s retinue in Italy — explained that one of the herald’s duties was to enumerate the dead upon the battlefield.Footnote ⁵²

4. Bodies Out: Plague, Death Registration, and Public Mortality

Just two years after scores of French nobles died at Crécy, the Black Death struck Europe. The plague pushed the post-1348 generation to reimagine the reach of sudden mass death. No longer isolated to the fields of war, death’s scythe swept over cities and kingdoms and confronted them with the battlefield’s confusions: how to recognize individuals in a pile of dead, and how to register their demise. Mid-fourteenth-century chroniclers were prolix in estimating the human toll of the disease; this crisis moment enlivened the cultural significance of what are now called demographic concerns, in regard to both state interest and public discourse.Footnote ⁵³ Whereas the herald had as his military brief the registration of noble dead, the state’s challenge after 1348, fiscal as much as anything, was to develop a system in which potentially every soul found its place in official records.Footnote ⁵⁴ These efforts moved in halting fashion, sometimes continuing earlier fourteenth-century projects, sometimes essaying ad hoc and discrete censuses that never persisted. But crucial to the history of the early sixteenth-century Italian panic over war mortality were the existing institutional and informational structures that facilitated a cultural discussion about mass death. Those structures had been, at least in Italy, in the making for over 150 years.

In Northern states, institutionalizing mortality registration was not a high priority.Footnote ⁵⁵ English coroners had kept registers of unnatural or suspicious deaths since the twelfth century, but these existed for judicial rather than accounting purposes, and were never intended to provide a holistic survey of mortality.Footnote ⁵⁶ In France as in England, collecting numbers of subjects had mostly to do with living rather than dead bodies: knowledge of the realm’s population, edifying in itself for a ruler, was paired with the specific goal of gaining a current platform for taxation. In 1328, the French king requested an accounting of the parishes and hearths of his kingdom, a survey unusual in its scope before the plague.Footnote ⁵⁷ Another census was undertaken in 1405 and it generated a figure that endured in the French imagination through the sixteenth century: 1,700,000 bell towers.Footnote ⁵⁸ Kings Charles VIII and Louis XII each ordered censuses (neither of which survives), possibly pushed by their Italian campaigns to inform and update strategies for royal revenue through levies.Footnote ⁵⁹ Mortality per se was not a part of these initiatives.

Hospitals, such as Paris’s Hôtel-Dieu, reliably catalogued death in French cities. This public charitable hospital, a major Parisian institution from at least the thirteenth century, kept records of patients who died in its care: in a 1368 affidavit, the prioress of the hospital mentioned having “buried 22,500 in the past three years,” suggesting the existence of a death register from the mid-fourteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁰ An early fifteenth-century inventory estimates average annual deaths at the hospital, and exact monthly mortality figures appear in the hospital’s account books in the same period.Footnote ⁶¹ In charitable institutions like the Hôtel-Dieu or affiliated confraternities, record keeping could serve memorial functions,Footnote ⁶² but, to judge by the 1368 affidavit, it more often simply guaranteed the hospital’s awareness of its expenditures on food and linens.

The case was different in Italy, where, in addition to hospitals, a tradition of state mortality registration begun in the early fourteenth century encouraged, by the late fifteenth, a peninsular commitment to state necrology registers. Rulers intended, in referencing the plague in their official decrees ordering the enumeration of deaths, to inform themselves holistically about the state of their population in the face of widespread demographic disturbance.Footnote ⁶³ Initiatives came equally from trade corporations within cities. In fourteenth-century Florence, for instance, two groups maintained separate death registers: the grain office and the guild of physicians and apothecaries. The former catalogued mortality to inform its oversight of grain storage and speculation, while the latter governed gravediggers.Footnote ⁶⁴ Chronicles suggest wide social awareness of these instruments of population measurement: Villani described how in 1338 Florentine priests used white and black beans to enumerate the baptisms of boys and girls, and Stefani noted that Florence was already habitually keeping necrological accounts in 1383.Footnote ⁶⁵ According to the Placentine chronicler Gabriele de’Mussis, one of the best-known narrators of the first wave of plague in the 1340s, the Mamluk sultan kept a necrology and collected a gold coin for each body buried during the epidemic.Footnote ⁶⁶ While there is good reason to doubt de’Mussis’s report, his mere suggestion of such a register testifies to shifts in registration practice. Nor was the kind of bookkeeping described by Stefani unique to Florence: similar death registers appear in Milan and Mantua in the fifteenth century, and in Venice in the sixteenth.Footnote ⁶⁷ With the erection of institutions to record mortality, Italian states entered a new phase of a process that Alexander Murray has called the emergence of “arithmetical sense” in Europe, a sensibility activated by the growing complexities of commerce and government in the late Middle Ages.Footnote ⁶⁸ That phase permitted numeracy to connect with specific ideas about population: its extent, certainly, but also how to interpret it and its threats (the trio of famine, pestilence, and war).Footnote ⁶⁹

When numerical sense entered social discourse, demographic numbers could be used not just instrumentally but rhetorically. This second usage appears frequently in chronicles from 1348 to 1500 and after, particularly when describing death in disasters or wars. Writers on the Black Death, for instance, universally lamented the magnitude of mortality through the rhetoric of numbers, or even through a figuration suggesting amplitude too great to enumerate. In 1348, 500 bodies were taken daily, a Carmelite friar wrote, to Paris’s Hôtel-Dieu for burial; 50,000 died in Paris, said the Grandes Chroniques de France; 62,000 were interred in Avignon; 100,000 Florentines suffered, Boccaccio wrote; and Gabriele de’Mussis remained “silent about Damascus … where the number of dead was infinite.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Likewise, the ravages of war came to be expressed in the mid-fourteenth century through recourse to numbers. Military contractors and heralds, as shown earlier, collected just such figures. In the age of arithmetical sense the demographic impulse facilitated their entry into wide social circulation — numbers had become simultaneously instrumental and rhetorical.Footnote ⁷¹ This multifunctionality in turn had a number of effects: one of the most relevant here is the regular appearance of death tallies in the annalistic writing of Froissart, Villani, and the scores of histories penned in subsequent decades. The difficulty for the modern historian — irresolvable in many cases — resides in the seam joining these descriptive modes: a given number may reflect accurate counting, or it may simply refract a general impression. Some scholars propose to solve this problem by comparing the instrumental (official documents) to the qualitative (chronicles and other narratives). They report variation wide enough to throw doubt on the factuality of the latter.Footnote ⁷²

However, numbers themselves can be debated endlessly, and variation is less a concern here than to press on the reasons for mobilizing rhetorical numbers at all. It might be asked what chroniclers, or other authors to be discussed shortly, hoped to convey through their use of numbers. In addition to relating information, perhaps they sought to elicit particular responses through their use of numbers. If numbers functioned rhetorically, then they could — in a register more limited than words but with equal power — draw emotion from an audience, as if in an epideictic mood. The latter parts of this article propose that one of the responses numbers provoked was emotional. The forms that such emotional responses could take will occupy the article presently; they must be seen, moreover, as continuous with the kind of commemorative traditions discussed earlier. If warrior culture always contained a vigorous cult of memory intended to inspire grief and honor, then the introduction of numbers to this system in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries served to enhance the eloquence of memory.

5. Communicating Death through Numerical Rhetoric

Central to an enlivened culture of memory by the time of the early sixteenth-century wars was a union between communication networks and the rhetoric of numbers. Discussion of war in the public forum — and in printed news bulletins, themselves an extension of that forum — highlighted the numbers of dead. These figures amplified laments over war damages, laments that extended a discussion of mortality during the Italian Wars.Footnote ⁷³ A French commonplace in these years complained that Italy had become France’s cemetery;Footnote ⁷⁴ a corollary of this concern involved specifying exactly how many bodies filled those graves. Everyone had a stake in this discussion: victors and vanquished, locals and foreigners, state and society. Interpreters could employ the same figures to different ends, and accounts of both victories and defeats framed the central fact (albeit a contentious one) of the numbers of fighters killed. Moreover, writers could contest or invent numbers to suit an argument. The form this rhetoric assumed occupies the first part of this section before consideration of how media facilitated its expression and posed an interpretive problem.

Numbers made the greatest impact through recourse to scale, as scale made an argument about magnitude and in this regard functioned as a rhetorical device.Footnote ⁷⁵ In creating a sensation of specificity, numbers partook in what has been called “the effect of the real.”Footnote ⁷⁶ In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the damage of plague and war could be expressed in two modes of scale: subtractive and additive. In the subtractive mode, small numbers of survivors emphasized loss, as in this fourteenth-century Burgundian couplet: “In thirteen-hundred forty-nine / of one hundred [people] survived only nine.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The rhyme pivots on the disappearance of most of the population, as did other subtractive arguments, such as the fifteenth-century petitions to the pope from French religious communities distressed by war with the English. Depopulation became their stock complaint, and petitioners complained that populations had plummeted due to war’s exactions, in one case from 10,000 to forty people.Footnote ⁷⁸ The additive mode accentuated extents of magnitude by means of calculation, summating diffuse data. Earlier this article demonstrated how observers mobilized this second mode in the wake of the Black Death, offering astounding and sometimes outlandish tallies of mortality. Both modes worked to convey the fact, or even the impression, of precipitous changes in population scale. Of the two modes, however, the additive was the one that state mortality registrars employed to gather and relay information and it was also the mode that society at large used most frequently by the 1490s to comment upon war damages. That coincidence supports a link, particularly in Italy, between the emergence of state necrologies and numbers as a popular rhetorical tool around 1500. Because mortality tabulation in Italy was becoming an officially sanctioned habit, counting bestowed credibility both through specificity of numbers and through recourse to state methods of registering mortality. To count the dead, in other words, was to assert credibility whether the numbers themselves were credible or not.

Making numerical assertions about mortality took on fresh importance during the Italian Wars because media, particularly printed newssheets, brought credibility and specificity to the fore of public discourse. Not only did the medium itself claim to offer those qualities, but details like battle numbers found in pamphlets a venue for regular expression. France’s invasion of Italy tested print’s capacity as a medium to convey such specificities, and the Italian marketplace avidly absorbed these bulletins announcing and interpreting current events. Bulletins as a genre were by no means new in the 1490s. During the Hundred Years’ War, news of battles and troop movements had traveled around Europe through networks of spies and manuscript letters. Independent cities and feudal lords both supported these webs of communication, suggesting wide commitment to collecting and sharing information in the fourteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁹ These and other means — including the testimony of sailors, soldiers, and merchants — continued to shape public discourse in the fifteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁰ In publicizing vast quantities of specific but differing casualty sums in the Italian Wars, printed news challenged publics to reckon with their value and facticity. Observers responded in a variety of ways.

Around 1494, letters both handwritten and printed perpetuated long-lived traditions. Some of the earliest French bulletins printed after Charles VIII traversed the Alps were nothing more than letters penned by captains on the progress of their campaign. Epistles like these frequently carried news of war mortality and they served as a central conduit in a web of news that informed elites and crowds alike. Following the battle of Ravenna in spring of 1512, Ferry Carondelet, Imperial legate to the papacy, wrote from Rome to his patron Margaret of Austria on the carnage, remarking that the combatants “fought more than five hours, so that on both sides more than 23,000 people fell there, and I send you in a sheet here attached the names of the most famous lords and captains.”Footnote ⁸¹ Carondelet’s appendix does not survive, although many similar lists do. Tübingen professor Michael Köchlin, traveling in the warzone in 1512, wrote a brief Latin history using the kind of information Carondelet sent, which was also finding an outlet in printed bulletins. Köchlin tallied Ravenna’s dead (12,000 men, specifying how many thousand belonged to each nation), and took pains to stress that he had done research and had collected several accounts; his mortality estimate is therefore self-consciously conservative (“slightly more than” 12,000, “even if many people claim a larger number perished”).Footnote ⁸² He followed his arithmetical assessment with a memorializing one: a lengthy list of captains and noblemen captured or killed.

The Venetian chronicler Marin Sanudo, ever punctilious, kept an archive of the kind of information that Carondelet and Köchlin created and consumed after the battle of Ravenna. On one hand, Sanudo copied ambassadorial letters with their death lists, and on the other he composed (or perhaps merely transcribed from reports) a series of charts of the forces and mortalities. Detail abounds, and one sees in such charts a link in a chain that connects ultimately to muster figures, which themselves were sometimes publicized in the age of print.Footnote ⁸³ In one chart, for instance, Sanudo presented the vanguard, main force, and rearguard separately, and listed under each heading the captains and the number of lances in their companies.Footnote ⁸⁴ And like muster officers who employed a language of symbols to annotate their lists of names, Sanudo glossed his own chart and offered a legend explaining, “the symbol O before a name means they are dead; G means captured; † means wounded; E means wounded and captured.”Footnote ⁸⁵ For another, his preface reads: “Here are some lists of dead Frenchmen in the battle at Ravenna, and likewise of Spaniards, that came to me by various means in April 1512; and those that are not true [i.e., falsely reported dead], I will mark an N before [their names].”Footnote ⁸⁶ Numerous estimates of Ravenna’s dead appear in Sanudo’s chronicle and hover around 18,000–20,000.Footnote ⁸⁷

The “various means” (“più vie”) Sanudo invokes suggests the many sources at the chronicler’s disposal: word of mouth, handwritten letters with lists appended on loose sheets, and printed bulletins. Because newssheets, governed by the conventions of the booklet format, could not have actual paper appendixes, the numbers of dead habitually attached to letters often migrated into the printed texts themselves, finding a home at the end of the account, especially in versified news. In several Italian newsletters in ottava rima, the final stanza devotes itself to numerical reckoning: “Twenty thousand of them died”; “Then began the consideration / of dead bodies discovered, / counted one by one, by rights / eighteen thousand and more, all despoiled”; or, “If perhaps, reader, you wish / to know how many Dead perished in this war / I will tell you for your pleasure / thirteen thousand, if my words do not fail, / were found lying on the earth.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Other authors hesitated to fix a figure, instead falling back upon the rhetoric of innumerability, frequently using it in reference to noncombatants.Footnote ⁸⁹ Still others provided a summary following the poem’s finis, meaning a reader or listener’s last impression of the news poem would be numerical (fig. 5).Footnote ⁹⁰

Figure 5. A death toll summary in print. “On both sides, number of dead 35,000.” Teodoro Barbiero. El fatto Darme Del Christianissimo re di Franza, 1515, sig. A iv^r. Reproduced in Guerre in Ottava Rima, 14.4, 536. By kind permission of Edizioni Panini.

As news of battle after battle spread during the 1510s, some observers clearly desired to summate the many deaths occasioned by seemingly incessant conflict. Between 1509 and 1515, invading French forces enjoyed victories at Agnadello over the Venetians (1509), at Ravenna over the Spanish-papal army (1512), and at Marignano against Milanese-Swiss forces (1515), not to mention the sack of Brescia (1512). This season of French victories amplified public discourse over mortality. Not only did death tolls continue to be a topic of discussion in correspondence,Footnote ⁹¹ but traces of this summative impulse exist in a few other contexts as well. One of these, as Marin Sanudo’s case showed earlier, was that of the collector-compiler or chronicler. A collection of Northern Italian political pamphlets — probably assembled in 1509–12, contemporaneous with Sanudo — illustrates this habit. Its anonymous collector annotated the fifty bulletins shortly after gathering them. His marginalia show persistent attention to numbers. On one pamphlet he scribbled, “in the capture and ransom of the keep [of Ferrara in 1510] 200 men died”; a bulletin on the French sack of Brescia inspired him to record the death of 8,000 people; and a manuscript note on the first page of a news item on Marignano announced, “In this battle 47 thousand people died.”Footnote ⁹² This last instance shows just how far this particular reader went in the pursuit of casualty numbers, since the figure 47,000 never appears in the verses (fig. 6). The poet mentions 12,000 here, 20,000 there, and 15,000 elsewhere. The reader took it upon himself to tabulate those numbers.

Figure 6. Marginal note tabulating casualties from news pamphlet. “In this battle 47 thousand people died.” Biblioteca Trivulziana, Inc. C 259/45. © Comune di Milano — tutti i diritti di legge riservati.

Ambrogio da Paullo, a Lombard chronicler of the 1510s, offers another case of the arithmetical response to mortality, one that connects emotion and numbers. A history of Milan and its hinterland during the French occupation at the turn of the century, Ambrogio’s chronicle has an eye for the quantitative, one trained by his work as a local bailiff. Fluctuating food prices serve as his chronicle’s commonest index of troublesome times. Ambrogio frequently employed these numbers as evidence of dearth and war. Because of this preoccupation, his chronicle often dwells on the abused farmers and unsuspecting village folk who suffered from the French occupation. Regret is this history’s mood, and Ambrogio also applied himself to copying popular complaint ballads and barzelette (songs) into his pages, much as Sanudo did. To remember the events of “this poor, miserable, and sad Italy” Ambrogio had first put pen to paper, and he registered this grief regularly.Footnote ⁹³

Given this chronicler’s use of numerical rhetoric, it comes as no surprise that he construed battle deaths as markers of Italy’s fate. Ambrogio’s most arresting statement of war mortality appears as an arithmetical equation on the chronicle’s first page. Listing the numbers of men killed in thirteen battles from 1496 to 1513, he arrived at a total number of 146,410 (fig. 7).Footnote ⁹⁴ His mathematics are almost accurate, although a couple of the figures differ from those the chronicler quotes within his narrative. Jarring numbers like these raise the question of their purpose for writers like Ambrogio, interpreters who sought to make sense of a chaotic era. This calculation could be an exercise in exactitude, in numerical rhetoric, or perhaps a mixture of the two. No Italian city in the 1510s housed nearly 150,000 people, though Ambrogio probably would not have known as much; it is nonetheless an enormous number of dead for the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁹⁵ That it tends toward the rhetorical can be inferred from the inclusion of collateral peasant deaths. The table’s final line is a sort of catchall, gathering men who had died “in various [battles], at Legnago, at Peschiera, and among the peasants: 40,000,” by far the largest single sum in the chart. In the chronicle itself, Ambrogio similarly noted that the battle of Olmo (1513) killed 800 men-at-arms, 4,000 infantrymen, and “an infinite number of peasants.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Although he relied on standard language of innumerability in his prose, Ambrogio’s chart deployed counting as a technique to express the damages of recent history: soldiers populated a military accounting system, but Ambrogio recognized that bystanders — an unknowable quantity of them, possibly as many as 40,000 — did not. To cement this fact, he wrote in the margin of his table: “Believe, reader, that there were more rather than fewer.”Footnote ⁹⁷

Figure 7. The first page of Ambrogio da Paullo’s chronicle, calculating 146,410 dead in the Italian Wars to date. “Note of the quantity of numbers killed in various parts of Italy from the arrival of King Charles of France in 1496 until 2 April 1512, which was the day of the paschal Resurrection.” Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milano, MS P 61 sup., fol. 1^r (detail). © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana — Milano / De Agostini Picture Library.

Similar concern over massive casualties during the Italian Wars expressed itself in the maxim of the Swiss chronicler Valerius Anselm: “Swiss flesh costs less than veal.”Footnote ⁹⁸ With the cantons supplying many of the wars’ mercenary pikemen, such gallows humor was apt. Swiss cities cocked their ears to news from Italy. Thousands of their youths had flocked to fight, sometimes responding to a call in triple the number expected.Footnote ⁹⁹ Like Ambrogio da Paullo, who bemoaned the plight of rural Italians during the wars, Swiss families lamented the human cost of the wars. Hans Frisching of Bern grieved the death of his fourteen-year-old son Ludwig in his family diary. The boy “died, struck by a pike through both thighs” at Marignano: “May God never forgive such a misdeed. And at the hour of his miserable death he was fourteen years, fifteen weeks, and one day old.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Observers like Ambrogio and Frisching voiced a cry rarely heard through the din of noble or humanist commentary: a civilian response to the wars that was both by and about the pawns on the Italian chessboard. They recognized the bodies littering the fields and sought ways to record and quantify their grief from 146,410 men to a single Swiss child. Commemoration was not isolated to warrior culture — the language of numbers seeped out into broad public use.

6. Victory and Memory: Battle Monuments from Chapel to Obelisk

Returning from the laments of regular observers to the opinions of military men, death’s significance bifurcated cleanly according to station. Reliable value inhered only in the death of the well born (in France, gens de bien).Footnote ¹⁰¹ While captains may have esteemed the foot soldiers under their standards, records of such sentiments are sparse. In fact, French warrior nobles strenuously denigrated common fighters and cared little for their fate. At the siege of Padua in 1509 the renowned knight Bayard balked at a suggestion that nobles and soldiers should breach the wall together, wondering “whether it is reasonable to put such nobles in danger alongside foot soldiers who are ropemakers, farriers, bakers, and mechanicals, who hold their honor in less esteem than gentlemen do.”Footnote ¹⁰² In the same spirit, noble writers like Bayard’s biographer enumerated only remarkable fighters and companies. He averred that at Padua the assembled Landsknecht foot soldiers “were innumerable, but one could estimate them to be more than fifty thousand.”Footnote ¹⁰³ To be without number, in the eyes of feudal warriors, was to be part of the mass whose worth could only be approximated. But when pressed to specify, the innumerable (as was also the case for the chronicler Ambrogio) tended to number around 40,000–50,000.

But decisive battles demanded different protocols of enumeration. One had, ideally, to quantify success or failure so as to imbue it with quality. Victories in particular demanded that the approximate become remarkable and, therefore, countable. At Agnadello in 1509 — when France crushed Venetian forces — numbers served purposes both celebratory and commemorative. Alessandro Nasi, a Florentine agent in the field, wrote, “As far as I can see and can gather from the men of account who speak of it dispassionately, I think the number of dead was three or four thousand, at most. While the king and the legate wanted steadfastly to convince me of thirteen or fourteen thousand, others stretched it to sixteen thousand. And the universal opinion of the masses was ten thousand. But in truth they are all deceived: many increase the number to exalt their own affair.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Paullo, the Lombard chronicler Ambrogio’s home village, was only a short distance from the battle site, and his account offers details unmentioned elsewhere. After the fighting, curious crowds assembled to see the carnage. So many came to view the bodies that a makeshift bridge rose over the Adda river to allow them easy passage.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As rain fell, the French victors began to despoil the bodies “numbering 14,600,” Ambrogio related, “as appears on the marble plaque sculpted atop Santa Maria della Vittoria, a church the king [Louis XII] had built on that site as a marker of the victory achieved that day.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Many observers attest to the existence of this battlefield chapel.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Nasi wrote to the Council of Ten that Louis “had ordered a chapel to be built on the site of the battle for remembrance, and he intends to endow it, requiring that every Monday (which was the day of the battle) mass be celebrated there for the redemption of the souls of those who died.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The chapel that Louis constructed fell into ruin by the end of the sixteenth century, and was subsequently replaced with various shrines, so the marble plaque Ambrogio described has vanished.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Commemorative (sometimes called expiatory) chapels like this one were not new. From at least the eleventh century, Europeans had memorialized the dead and expiated the sin of war between Christians with religious foundations.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In recent memory, Francesco Gonzaga had inaugurated a church to celebrate his valor against King Charles VIII at Fornovo in 1495 and invited Mantegna to paint its altarpiece.Footnote ¹¹¹ Yet the chapel constructed at Agnadello, following Ambrogio’s account, was unique for announcing in stone the number of men slaughtered. To judge from Nasi’s letter, the French had settled very soon after the battle on a total of 14,000–15,000 men — they had made it into a fact. That same figure circulated in French elite culture and reappeared often in chronicles and other venues.Footnote ¹¹² For instance, a drawing of Charles Duke of Bourbon (1490–1527) astride his steed in the armor he wore at Agnadello bears a captioned cartouche celebrating the “fourteen to fifteen thousand combatants” who fell at Agnadello (fig. 8).Footnote ¹¹³ The author of an illuminated French poem on the conflict evidently took the number seriously enough not only to celebrate it in his verses, but to pen a postscript tortuously justifying the numbers he used in his panegyric: he claimed that 15,000 Venetians entered the field but that a total of 20,000 of them had died, if one also counted the people slain in nearby cities.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Figure 8. Charles Duke of Bourbon as he appeared at Agnadello, 1509. The cartouche enumerates 15,000–16,000 dead in the battle. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Fr. 15534, fol. 97^r.

If in fact the chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria at Agnadello bore an inscription numbering 14,600 fallen men, it was a number both familiar and ambivalent. It was familiar because it had become a shibboleth of victory for French nobles, a referent of their military prowess, vigorously defended and inflated. It was a number, as the Florentine envoy had immediately realized, the French employed to “exalt their own affair.” But the chapel existed for remembrance and redemption of the dead, and that purpose interrupted a purely celebratory meaning. Carved in heavy marble, “14,600” explicitly counted the souls awaiting redemption through the victors’ expiation. Of course, few French gentlemen probably ever saw the finished chapel or recognized its penitential significance. But for Lombard locals like Ambrogio, it became a memorial site.Footnote ¹¹⁵

King François I, on his first Italian campaign in 1515, routed Swiss and Milanese forces at Marignano, winning back the duchy of Milan after a brief Sforza restoration. “Even if the number of dead were never uncertain in battle (as it almost always is, in all of them), in this one it was absolutely uncertain,” Guicciardini later claimed.Footnote ¹¹⁶ But in the king’s first letter to the Parlement after the dust settled, François seemed certain, quoting a now-ubiquitous figure: “On their side, fifteen to sixteen thousand were killed.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Commentators at the time agreed on an even-higher number. Most often they cited 22,500, in one case certifying the fact by tracing the number to gravediggers’ avowals.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Treading in his predecessor’s footsteps, François commissioned in late 1517 a religious foundation in the fields just outside Milan to mark his triumph. The king purchased land near Marignano and had erected there a Celestine monastery, Santa Maria della Vittoria, to house a community of monks and the interred entrails of fallen heroes.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Victory chapels thus assumed new currency as war monuments in the early Italian Wars. They introduced long-lived commemorative traditions to the numerical discourse of mortality. That discourse, authorized by ostensibly accurate technologies like print and by a suite of state practices like necrologies and military accounting, could be concretized into fact and stone. Monuments now remembered the dead in quantity as well as quality.

Nonetheless, many knew that accuracy was elusive. Nowhere was that fact more evident than at Ravenna, France’s pyrrhic victory over papal-Spanish forces on Easter Sunday, 1512; the French then sacked the ancient city. The battle had extinguished many of France’s most illustrious warriors. Moreover, it was not immediately apparent who had won or lost. Fleeing Spanish soldiers gave the impression that more Frenchmen had fallen than anyone else.Footnote ¹²⁰ An Imperial secretary at the scene wrote that only when French captains — not heralds — returned to the site the next day did they discover that bodies littered fields and paths for nine Lombard miles. They judged the toll to be 10,000. It was only then clear that a “very great massacre had occurred, greater than was thought at first.”Footnote ¹²¹ Because the battle was almost a draw, both sides reported heavy losses.Footnote ¹²² Earlier this article indicated (in the cases of Carondelet, Köchlin, and Sanudo) how much news this battle inspired and how high casualty estimates climbed in its immediate aftermath.

But unlike at Agnadello and Marignano, Ravenna’s dead had to wait decades for a stone monument. It did not rise until 1557, an entire generation later, within the final two years of the Italian Wars. In that year, François Duke of Guise (1519–63) led an army to Italy as part of a French alliance with Pope Paul IV. Italy put the duke at ill ease: more than half a century of French military misadventures now lay in the past, and Guise’s memoirs express his worry that he would suffer ruin like so many other captains had south of the Alps. In Italy, his entire expedition “felt, and was, persecuted.”Footnote ¹²³ The feelings, apparently, were mutual when Guise’s company, thick with noblemen, passed through the territory of Ravenna. The chronicler Girolamo Rossi described the encounter: “When this army reached Ravenna in early 1557, the city was made to welcome some of the nobles; so by order of Pier Donato Cesi, then bishop of Narni and governor of Romagna, many were welcomed albeit with some trepidation since on both sides memories of the French sack [in 1512] welled up. The houses of citizens where the French nobles stayed were protected at night by guards throughout the city. In the countryside, this army’s arrival brought worry and damage, but still much less than expected. Many of them — having brought with them writings indicating places where many things had been buried during the earlier sack of the city — set themselves to digging, and found them again.”Footnote ¹²⁴

What treasures had waited underfoot for nearly fifty years remains unknown, but the French were not the only ones digging up Ravenna in 1557. Pier Donato Cesi (1520/22–1586) had only governed for a year, but the city glittered freshly when he ordered a campaign of public works to cleanse the city’s moat and restore crumbling buildings.Footnote ¹²⁵ No documents record conversations between Cesi and Guise’s party, but evidently the French visit of 1557 inspired another of Cesi’s building projects, this one a memorial to the dead. At the site of the 1512 battle, just south of the city walls, Cesi erected something quite different from the chapels that had sprung up early in the century. Here on a quiet bank of the Ronco river rose a squat marble obelisk decorated with sober grotesques and topped with an ionic capital, looking as if a stout pilaster had freed itself from a wall. It was, in other words, an uncommon shape (fig. 9). This genre of monument, too, had its ancestors, more ancient still than the medieval victory chapels. A Roman like Cesi would certainly have seen ancient Roman war monuments like Trajan’s column, but as a member of a family that had included obsessive antiquarians and Egyptophiles since the fifteenth century, his eye could certainly have discerned even more particular references.Footnote ¹²⁶ Given his likely familiarity with ancient monuments, one wonders whether Cesi intended the column — now called the Colonna dei Francesi — to recall the elegant Egyptian obelisks in Rome. Perhaps he had read his Plutarch, who describes the Roman general Aemilius Paulus’s victory at Pydna in 168 BCE.Footnote ¹²⁷ After his success, the general discovered at Delphi “a tall square pillar composed of white stones, on which a golden statue of Perseus [of Macedonia] was intended to stand, and gave orders that his own statue should be set there, for it was meet that the conquered should make room for their conquerors.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Perhaps Cesi intended his own “tall square pillar” to recall such a venerable story of conquest. The hybrid shape of this column — half obelisk, half pillar — suggests less a mistake in knowing classical form than an effort to reinvent the war monument.

Figure 9. The war memorial (now called Colonna dei Francesi) erected by Pier Donato Cesi in 1557 to mark the 1512 Battle of Ravenna. Ravenna, Italy. Photograph by Francesco Borghesi.

The column’s lengthy inscription supports such an impression.Footnote ¹²⁹ Punning on Cesi’s name, the column declares: “Pier Donato Cesi, in memory of these things, honors with this stone the Spaniards and Frenchmen slain here.”Footnote ¹³⁰ The brief battle narrative carved upon it attests, perhaps in a manner similar to the lost plaque at Agnadello, that “from both sides nearly twenty thousand combatants died bitterly” at Ravenna. Cesi’s monument heralded a new age for the war memorial, one inspired less by the expiatory demands of victory chapels than by the appeal of memory. Retrospection — an attitude shared with the French noblemen unearthing their own ghosts in Ravenna’s soil in 1557 — propelled Cesi’s monument project.Footnote ¹³¹ Distance in time rather than votive exigencies guided its creator, and what had become crucial for this monument to recall was the enormousness of the mortality. The noble captain Gaston de Foix merited, as he would have in earlier centuries, special mention, but the column’s inscription gave arguably greater weight to the 20,000 dead whose number Cesi had taken as his charge to count. This figure, it should be recalled, doubled some of the most reliable casualty estimates in 1512. That tendency toward inflation suggests two conclusions. First, Guicciardini was right: no numbers are ever certain.Footnote ¹³² And second, mortality numbers had gained a new language of their own in the international discourse of war commemoration. More sometimes did mean more.

7. Epilogue: Ghosts

Specificity of battle numbers came by the sixteenth century to be contentious because accuracy remained uncertain. Accuracy and specificity sat in uneasy tension since some observers (like Ambrogio da Paullo) took them to be interchangeable, while others (Köchlin, Guicciardini, Nasi) protested by citing a range of conflicting accounts. Although accuracy was the goal of muster numbers and the estimation of forces, and was also the objective of state mortality counting, for casualties it remained chimerical. Instead, the value of counting the dead lay in the way that it extended commemorative culture’s ability to embrace nobility, foot soldiers, and occasionally noncombatants. This new attitude responded to the expansion of the foot soldiery — pikemen, mercenary fighters, and others — in international warfare over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Armies’ composition, and often size, was changing thanks to the incorporation of nonelite fighting companies.Footnote ¹³³ Unless these subordinates were erased through innumerability, numerical rhetoric was blind to social station. This blindness redirected memorial culture enough to free it from exclusive adherence to celebrated individuals. The latter still received praise, but now often in tandem with a number of fellow dead intended to contextualize acts of valor. Both elites and nonelites took up numerical reckoning as a way to celebrate — but just as often to deplore — the results of war, and the generation of the Italian Wars was among the first to contend with the rhetoric of numbers in an age that aimed explicitly at numerical accuracy.

The gloom of war death hung in the air in the early sixteenth century, and nowhere was that more evident than at Agnadello, where France had crushed Venetian forces in 1509. Locals noticed strange occurrences — flickering lights and noises — near the erstwhile battlefield from as early as 1511. In 1518, according to folktale, two spectral armies noisily clashed in the heavens over that site.Footnote ¹³⁴ The vision elicited worried speculations about what the spirit armies portended for a beleaguered Italy. Word and news of the ghostly apparition spread across Italy and around Europe. Even for these insubstantial shades, commentators found it necessary to offer substantial numbers: “from six to eight thousand,” or higher.Footnote ¹³⁵ While these figures embellished a folktale and were thus part of a tradition of imaginary numbers, they were also the product of a culture increasingly able and eager to discuss mortality in numerical detail. The ghost armies at Agnadello, filtered through folklore, participated in memorial culture by submitting, even in the ether, to enumeration.