The Date and Purpose of Vegetius' ‘De re militari’

The treatise De re militari by Flavius Vegetius Renatus was the bible of warfare throughout the Middle Ages — the soldier's equivalent of the Rule of St. Benedict. The surviving manuscripts exceed 140; there were five separate translations into French within the century following 1284, many mor...

Full description

Saved in:  
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Goffart, Walter (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Check availability: HBZ Gateway
Journals Online & Print:
Drawer...
Fernleihe:Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste
Published: Cambridge University Press 1977
In: Traditio
Year: 1977, Volume: 33, Pages: 65-100
Online Access: Volltext (JSTOR)
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Description
Summary:The treatise De re militari by Flavius Vegetius Renatus was the bible of warfare throughout the Middle Ages — the soldier's equivalent of the Rule of St. Benedict. The surviving manuscripts exceed 140; there were five separate translations into French within the century following 1284, many more into other languages, and nine incunabula. In contrast to Byzantium, where a succession of authors since Urbicius (ca. 500) strove to keep military literature up to date, the Latin civilization of the West was content with a single book. Vegetius, who explicitly omitted cavalry from his exposition, became the philosopher-schoolmaster of Western chivalry. Hrabanus Maurus, John of Salisbury, and Egidius Colonna copied large extracts into works of their own, and so did Machiavelli. Vegetius is among the authors whose popularity in the Renaissance more than equalled their medieval fame. The testimonials continued to mount up through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an epoch that was perhaps the highest point of Vegetius‘ influence, and reached even to the Napoleonic age, when Marshall de Ligne (best remembered for a witticism about the Congress of Vienna) pronounced a memorable encomium: ‘A god, says Vegetius, inspired the legion, and I say that a god inspired Vegetius. It is he who by his seven orders of battle made us understand the warfare of the Ancients and taught the greatest generals of our time to imitate them.’ What other book without literary distinction was as prized in the Age of Enlightenment as it had been by Bede?
ISSN:2166-5508
Contains:Enthalten in: Traditio
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1017/S0362152900009077