Ennoblement of the Military Engineer

According to Mario Biagioli, it was early modern warfare (ca. 1450–ca. 1600) which gave Italian mathematicians, among them the ‘traditional empirical military engineer …, the chance to ennoble themselves and their discipline by partaking in the high social status of the milites’, a term referring to the traditional feudal warrior aristocracy. Biagioli argued that ‘the cannon-syndrome and the introduction of the bastion forced the milites … to begin to rely less on their horses and more on Euclid for their survival as a distinct social group’. Biagioli identified two ‘disciplinary and professional types of mathematical practitioners’, who were ‘socially distinct’ and together generated the early modern military engineer, whose profession become so appealing for the noble. Not only were there ‘upperclass’ astrologer-physicians, but Biagioli also listed the socially inferior groups of the bookkeepers, land surveyors, engineer-masons, and the urban teachers of arithmetic and geometry in the abacus schools. These mathematicians often interacted with the local authorities because of their expertise as ‘empirical-engineers’. Biagioli focused on the cultural and social processes taking place especially between the time of the mathematician and engineer Niccolo Tartaglia (1499–1557) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), but he did not deal with the earlier interactions between these social classes of mathematicians. As Paolo Galluzzi lamented, the collaboration between these socially distinct groups, in the figures of the artists-engineers and the humanists, is a crucial problem that has not sufficiently been emphasized.