If there is one thing that in our time everyone knows concerning Niccolò Machiavelli, it is that he favoured the establishment of a citizen militia. Aristotle had made the case for a citizen army in his Politics. In his De militia, Leonardo Bruni had advocated the establishment of an order of civic knights composed of the leading citizens of Florence (although not, as some suppose, a civic militia, including a large body of infantry, of the sort that had existed in the thirteenth century). Machiavelli followed these predecessors. So at least we are told by luminaries such as Hans Baron, Cecil H. Clough, J. G. A. Pocock—who made ‘arms-bearing citizenship’ the mainstay of his argument concerning the so-called civic humanist tradition—and Quentin Skinner in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought; and on their authority, this claim has been bandied about ever since.

However, as I have noted in passing more than once, the claim does not survive close scrutiny. Machiavelli agreed with Aristotle and Bruni that mercenary soldiers are unreliable. He firmly favoured reliance on ‘populations armed’ (‘populationi armate’), but nowhere in any of his correspondence or works did he ever insist that those armed be drawn from the citizenry or that they be made citizens.

In Florence, when he was secretary of the Second Chancery, Machiavelli championed the institution of a popular militia, as is well known. He proposed and succeeded in securing the passage of what came to be known as the ordinanza. He personally oversaw the militia's establishment. He hired a mercenary captain to see to its training, he selected the officers, he managed this little conscript army throughout its existence, and he was justly proud when his ordinanza secured the surrender of Pisa and brought that city back into the Florentine territorial state.

Moreover, nine years after the Medici had been restored to power and his militia been partially disbanded, reconfigured, and reconstituted by the city's new masters, Machiavelli published his dialogue The Art of War, where he had his chief interlocutor, a distinguished mercenary captain named Fabrizio Colonna, defend the ordinanza and lay out his understanding of the manner in which a popular militia along such lines should be organized, trained, and deployed in battle. It would be fair to say that arming the population was for Machiavelli a persistent or even a central concern.