In May 1409 an army personally commanded by Louis XII of France destroyed a Venetian army operating in the western reaches of the Venetian Terraferma. The shattering defeat precipitated the virtual disintegration of the Venetian army and considerable loss of territory. The panic-stricken republic momentarily seemed defenseless against the combined forces of the League of Cambrai. Yet within months this triumph of Valois arms proved illusory as reassembled Venetian forces retook and held Padua while Venetian diplomats undermined the enemy coalition. Though the Battle of Agnadel may now be vaguely recalled as the moment when the tide of Venetian expansion ebbed and its hegemonic aspirations commenced their decline, it is otherwise little remembered. Florence Alazard’s wonderful study of this battle explains why this decline into obscurity is due to far more than Agnadel’s having merely been eclipsed by the more celebrated events of Marignano and Pavia.

The book’s title suggesting a traditional military history belies the aim of this accomplished student of Renaissance literature and music. Indeed, her treatment of the battle itself verges on the cryptic as she evidently assumes more familiarity with the basic details than might be expected about an event that she herself characterizes as “forgotten.” Though informative and respectful regarding current literature on the military revolution and battle history, she makes it expressly clear that she has no intention of reevaluating the actual clash of armies. Instead, she offers a sort of anti-battle history as she resets this dramatic moment in a context centered on the clash of ideas and texts that accompanied the actual combat. Alazard mobilizes an astonishing array of materials, including descriptions of diplomatic formalities and public celebrations of victory, diaries, correspondence, ephemeral printed broadsides, iconographic representations, and formal literary productions of histories, poetry, and even eschatological prophecies. In so doing Alazard revitalizes our notion of propaganda as she imaginatively assesses a complex body of material with an extraordinary attention to detail, even juxtaposing to good effect vellum and paper impressions of the same printing plates.

Surveying the explosion of literary production in a virtual war of words preceding that of armies fighting, Alazard illustrates how a multifaceted propaganda labeled Venice as the common enemy of all the great powers. Thus briefly united, the League of Cambrai launched an ill-coordinated attack whose justice was to be manifested in such practices as formalized declarations of war. She proposes that this was the first war in which a literary campaign consciously preceded a military campaign and thereby created a new literary space. This includes new forms such as “orders of battle,” which were nominally descriptive but typically constructed for purposes of intimidation and inspiration before and celebration or expiation after battle. We are asked to appreciate the complexity of the contemporary narratives of the actual combat that demonstrate the malleability of its history despite the widespread agreement of all observers about the actual facts. Most important of all, we are shown how the fight for the political and ideological exploitation of the battle was as contested as the clash of arms itself. Both victors and vanquished had reasons to minimize the event as they reasserted the larger war aims that remained. Thus Louis XII’s propagandists played down his image as a warrior king to emphasize his sense of justice in search of a stable peace. Venetian analyses conversely focused on the longer history and noble destiny of the city. By the 1520s the defeat could function primarily as a rhetorical device revitalizing the myth of Venice as a republic resilient in the face of even the greatest of challenges.

The Italian Wars went on for five more decades and the memory of Agnadel inevitably became a smaller part of a greater story. If the battle made little difference in the long-run history of the wars, it was nonetheless consequential culturally. Alazard argues persuasively that this is when the value of propaganda in wartime was first fully appreciated, opening a new era in which information and communication were themselves weapons of war. Better at defining and creatively deploying the concept of propaganda, she has provided us with a stimulating and rewarding text of great value to students of the Renaissance, regardless of specialty.