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73812 results in Boydell & Brewer

Page 1340 of 3691

  • 21 - Our Power to Act Now Grows: From Prisoner to Premier (1918)

  • Albert Earle Gurganus
  • Book:
    Kurt Eisner
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 August 2018
    Print publication:
    25 May 2018, pp 360-379

  • Summary

    ERNST TOLLER ELUDED ARREST until Monday, 4 February 1918, when the strike ended after repeated appeals from the Majority Socialist leadership. At noon he was taken from his room at gunpoint and held until trial at a military prison on Leonrodstraße. Upon reporting back to his garrison, Felix Fechenbach was interrogated at length by officers who had been apprised of his involvement with the strike. He was transferred to Passau on the Austrian border, where he was kept under close surveillance. Eisner was already resigned to a lengthy stay behind bars. On Tuesday he wrote to Else from Neudeck with detailed directives. His daughter Ilse was to bring him an array of a dozen prominent German, French, and Swiss newspapers every other day, taking care that no issue was skipped. In addition he asked for a number of books from his desk, including Marx and Engels's political works and correspondence, English and French dictionaries, and the manuscript of the play he had begun while incarcerated at Plötzensee in Berlin. Stationery, pens and ink, marking pencils, a soft shirt, vest, slippers, and teaspoon rounded out the list. He urged that she procure a ticket to the Court Theater's upcoming production of Beethoven's Fidelio, “the work for our days now.” The last directive signaled undiminished optimism. It must have been of no small consolation that Wilhelm Herzog had authorized payment of 250 marks a few days earlier for Eisner's work on Weltweg des Geistes, income that continued for the duration of his incarceration.

    In response to Eisner's urgent request Hugo Haase sent word on Wednesday from Berlin that he would join Dr. Bernheim as counsel. Representation was being arranged for Eisner's codefendants as well. A week later the court rejected motions for release on bail. In his cell Eisner immersed himself in writing. Else's appeal to send him the requested items was granted on the twelfth. The next day she wrote that she would bring additional archival materials on her next visit and confessed that she was concerned about his wretched appearance. For solace she intended to read in the New Testament of “the struggle for truth by one who refuses to keep it to himself but rather speaks out against the world's lies….

  • 2 - Aristocratize the Masses: From Berlin to Frankfurt to Marburg (1890–1893)

  • Albert Earle Gurganus
  • Book:
    Kurt Eisner
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 August 2018
    Print publication:
    25 May 2018, pp 19-33

  • Summary

    EISNER STARTED WORK AT THE HEROLD in January 1890. His duties were to gather news, file reports for dissemination to newspapers throughout Europe, and write lead stories. He covered sessions of the Reichstag, the powerless popular national assembly commonly characterized as a debating club, and the equally farcical Prussian Landtag. The issue of the day was Kaiser Wilhelm's new course, the defining component of which was Weltpolitik, described by Walther Rathenau as a “dilettante foreign policy.” Bismarck had never seen the need for Germany to look overseas for colonies when Poland lay so near, but Wilhelm, obsessed with national prestige and supported by wealthy interest groups such as the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband), the Navy League (Flottenverein), and the Colonial League (Kolonialverein), was determined to secure Germany's place in the sun. Years earlier in 1881 Bismarck had unwittingly drafted his own pink slip when he remarked that he had no interest in colonial expansion. Although he softened his stance in the mid-1880s to accommodate public opinion, his commitment was never more than halfhearted. Consequently, Wilhelm dismissed the septuagenarian icon, demanding, receiving, and accepting Bismarck's resignation between 17 and 20 March 1890.

    Eisner was assigned to cover the chancellor's departure from the capital on the twenty-ninth, one of a select group of journalists to ride with the old man as far as the Spandau station on his return to Friedrichsruh. The Herold's new retainer recalled the crowd that serenaded Bismarck at Berlin's main station, his banter with reporters who stood on the desolate platform at Spandau, the stern face of “the great misanthrope,” and the indifference of workers boarding the train to Berlin. Eisner was surprised to see two days later how his account had been sentimentalized in a major foreign paper: “Gone was the rigidity of injured pride, and the melancholy exile's two great tears streamed like silvery pearls.”

    Eisner and Lisbeth Hendrich became engaged in mid-autumn 1890. Much of his leisure time was spent in Berlin's libraries researching his articles and reading the yet obscure Friedrich Nietzsche. Struggling against the allure of Nietzsche's “anarchy of the elect,” Eisner began to cast a critique.

  • 23 - The Fantasies of a Visionary: Martyr of the Revolution (1918–1919)

  • Albert Earle Gurganus
  • Book:
    Kurt Eisner
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 August 2018
    Print publication:
    25 May 2018, pp 400-424

  • Summary

    ASSAILED BY LEFT AND RIGHT, Eisner struggled to maintain equilibrium. The Swiss press in particular regarded developments in Bavaria as ominous. “One watches with dismay,” the progressive National-Zeitung of Basel wrote, “as the hate campaign in the disheveled, so politically imprudent German nation turns on precisely the one man who thus far has demonstrated understanding of reality.” In Bern the democratic Freie Zeitung warned “if Eisner falls, the immensely polymorphous counterrevolution is victorious.” Amid the miasma of division and intrigue the Provisional National Council convened for its second session on Friday, 13 December 1918. Since 8 November the affairs of state had been conducted by Eisner and his cabinet ministers. Now that elections for the Bavarian National Assembly, the new Landtag, were set for 12 January 1919, the Provisional National Council—expanded to include 67 representatives from various professional organizations, 50 delegates from each branch of the Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Council, 29 members of the Social Democratic deputation from the old Landtag, 4 of their Liberal Union colleagues, and 6 from the Bavarian Peasants’ League—met four times over the course of six days.

    Faced with imminent dissolution once the new Landtag was seated, the caretaker lawmakers pursued cross purposes, some pressing for immediate reform while others exhorted conscientious deference to their successors. Wednesday, 18 December, Minister of Education Johannes Hoffmann began the fifth session with the announcement of one of the most significant reforms undertaken by the Eisner government. Two days earlier the cabinet had approved the secularization of public-school administration, curriculum, and instruction by proscribing dominant clerical oversight of local and regional school boards and church funding for school inspectors. The costs previously borne by the parishes would be assumed by the state. “The seventh of November and the sixteenth of December,” Hoffmann declared, “mark the end of the Church and Center State of Bavaria. It would be a shame for Bavarian Social Democracy, a shame for the liberal Bavarian middle class, and a shame for Bavarian schoolteachers if it were ever to return.” The hall resounded with acclaim. In absence of industry to socialize, society itself might be reshaped.

  • 17 - The Powerlessness of Reason: The World War Erupts (1914)

  • Albert Earle Gurganus
  • Book:
    Kurt Eisner
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 August 2018
    Print publication:
    25 May 2018, pp 303-316

  • Summary

    IN THE WAKE OF THE SAVERNE episode Eisner clarified the historical basis for the Prussian soldateska's absolute impunity. The secret cabinet order of 1820, issued by Friedrich Wilhelm III to enforce Metternich's Carlsbad Decrees against liberal student nationalism, authorized military commanders to declare a state of siege, impose martial law, and act on their own initiative to reestablish order if, in their judgment, civil authorities were slow to quell unrest. Wilhelm II reiterated the directive to his general staff in March 1899. This single dictate then was the covert constitution of Prussian Germany, preempting the “utter shambles of inchoate statutes” that ostensibly defined the rights of the citizenry. Thus it was that on German soil a “boy in a lieutenant's tunic” could terrorize a town's populace and prompt his colonel, a “fanatic born of military inbreeding,” to follow suit. The conflicted bourgeoisie was ill disposed toward lasting protest, “for in the end the liberal citizen is himself a reserve lieutenant, and his son perhaps even a cadet officer too!” It all boded ill for Europe's peace.

    On through the winter of 1914 Eisner's theater reviews for the Münchener Post were a mainstay of the paper's cultural offering. Constantly astute and incisive, the pieces stand out from those of his colleagues and roundly justify Hausenstein's judgment that “they were splendid.” Both the famous and the forgotten have here their monument. Karl Rößler's popular comedy Rösselsprung (Knight's Move), which the Munich Playhouse premiered on 17 January, Eisner panned as predictably formulaic, the vacuous fluff of “beautifully dressed ladies and elegant gentlemen in a loquacious state and decorative frame,” report of which struck him as more suited to the business page than the arts section. By contrast he commended the Royal Residence Theater's resurrection of Das vierte Gebot (The Fourth Commandment) by Ludwig Anzengruber, a profound work neglected in favor of box office successes that betrayed “the total wretchedness of the German theater, its direction, and its audience.” High praise was accorded the Chamber Players’ first German presentation of The Wolves by Romain Rolland, in Wilhelm Herzog's translation, on 4 March. Moved by public debate of the Dreyfus affair, Rolland had written the play in 1898 but set it in 1793 against the backdrop of the emergent Terror.

  • 1 - A Novel's Suffering Hero: A Youth in Berlin (1867–1889)

  • Albert Earle Gurganus
  • Book:
    Kurt Eisner
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 August 2018
    Print publication:
    25 May 2018, pp 7-18

  • Summary

    IN 1867 ALFRED NOBEL PATENTED DYNAMITE, Joseph Lister introduced his phenol antiseptic, Johann Strauß composed the Blue Danube Waltz, Ibsen published Peer Gynt, Henri Fantin-Latour painted Manet's portrait. Livingstone explored the Congo, Tsar Alexander II sold Alaska to the United States, Garibaldi launched his second campaign to wrest Rome from the French. Emperor Maximilian died before a republican firing squad in Mexico City. The Austrian ruler, Franz Josef I, ascended the throne of Hungary to establish the Dual Monarchy. The Southern rebellion quelled, the government of the United States turned its attention to subjugating the Plains Indians. In English exile Marx completed the first part of Capital. Having made war on Denmark for Schlweswig- Holstein and on Austria to consolidate Prussia's autonomy, Bismarck assumed the office of chancellor of the North German Confederation's twenty-two states, and his liege, King Wilhelm I, became their royal president. Under Bismarck's leadership Berlin stood at the ready to reclaim the prestige it enjoyed a century earlier when Friedrich II confounded the Continental powers to become “the Great.” The invasion of France was in the offing.

    An unlikely beneficiary of resurgent Prussia was a Jewish émigré who dealt by royal appointment in military regalia. Emanuel Eisner had been born forty years earlier in the Bohemian town Husinec, son of Hermann and Therese, née Gans. The family soon moved to Studenec in southern Moravia, where Hermann Eisner kept a tavern. Therese died in 1832, and upon his father's death young Emanuel learned the tanning trade before he and his brother Ignaz were taken in by relatives in Berlin and apprenticed in business. Together they opened shops in the early 1860s on Berlin's regal avenue Unter den Linden and in Danzig's bustling Kohlenmarkt, from which they supplied the Russian Imperial court with the insignia, buttons, braid, epaulets, ribbons, and medals that festooned the officers’ splendid uniforms. On 5 October 1863 thirty-six-year-old Emanuel, widowed with two sons, wed Hedwig Levenstein, daughter of the deceased Jewish merchant Levin Jontoff Levenstein. Two years later the brothers went their separate ways in business. Emanuel relocated his shop and residence to Friedrichstraße and added to his clientele the Prussian emperor and king, the duke of Braunschweig, and the prince of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt.

  • 16 - At Peace with Myself: Resettling into Family Life (1912–1913)

  • Albert Earle Gurganus
  • Book:
    Kurt Eisner
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 August 2018
    Print publication:
    25 May 2018, pp 289-302

  • Summary

    THE REICHSTAG CAMPAIGN OF 1912, Wilhelmine Germany's last national election, was hailed as a great victory for the Social Democratic Party and a resounding defeat for Weltpolitik. Winning four and a quarter million votes on the first ballot, over a third of the immense turnout, the party eventually claimed 110 of the 397 seats after runoffs, a gain of 67 from the 1907 debacle, 19 more than the second-place Center Party. For the first time since the founding of the Reich, Social Democrats were the dominant deputation, having won 27. percent of the mandates. In the days leading up to the first polling on Friday, 12 January, Eisner and fellow functionaries fanned out across South Bavaria to rally the rank and file. On the morning of the sixth he spoke in Prien, later the same afternoon in Endorf, and the following day in Kolbermoor. On the eve of the election the party's two candidates in Munich, Sebastian Witti and Georg von Vollmar, addressed crowds at beer halls in their respective districts. The banner of Saturday's edition of the Münchener Post, circulated late Friday afternoon, urged readers to the polls yet before the 19:00 close.

    In its combined Sunday/Monday issue the Post reported the heady results. Vollmar had been reelected in Munich's second district; Witti was in a runoff with Left Liberal Georg Kerschensteiner in the first. Nationally, Social Democratic candidates appeared to have won 67 districts outright and advanced to the second round in 120 others. In runoffs in which no Social Democrat remained on the ballot, the party's voters were poised to sway the outcome to best advantage. The lesson, Eisner wrote, was clear: “Whoever allies himself with Prussian Junker reaction is forever lost.” The Black-Blue Bloc of Center and Conservatives was smashed. Furious agitation preceded the second round of balloting. On the seventeenth Eisner targeted proponents of protective agricultural tariffs and low wages. On the twenty-third an editorial on the Reichstag's role in international affairs demanded the “democratization and parliamentarization of foreign policy” in the wake of Bethmann's near-disastrous Moroccan caper.

  • 8 - Never ... a Less Fruitful Scholastic Debate: Intramural Strife—Evolution vs. Revolution (1903–1905)

  • Albert Earle Gurganus
  • Book:
    Kurt Eisner
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 August 2018
    Print publication:
    25 May 2018, pp 138-159

  • Summary

    UNDETERRED BY BEBEL's HARANGUES at Dresden, Eisner resolved to maintain a centrist stance at Vorwärts befitting the national party's organ. Over the next two years his influence would rise to its prewar crest as he engaged in public debate with Kautsky on the nature and aims of Social Democracy, only to fall precipitately when he was driven from office in a purge orchestrated by Bebel, Kautsky, and Mehring. Never again would Vorwärts achieve the eminence or credibility it enjoyed under Eisner's direction.

    The task at hand upon Eisner's return to the capital was the campaign for the Prussian Landtag, the first in which the party had determined “to participate experimentally in order to gauge how much success working people can achieve in an electoral system that makes a mockery of right and fairness.” By the byzantine system prescribed by Bismarck in 1867 to preserve privilege, candidates divided into three categories by the taxes they paid were to be chosen as electors by their class-based constituencies. These electors then would choose the representation to the lower house of the Landtag, the House of Deputies. All voting was by public declaration rather than secret ballot, and votes counted more or less, depending on the class of the voter. As a result of these constraints and Social Democracy's historic boycott, Prussia's largest political party had not a single representative in the Landtag. This year, though, after the phenomenally successful Reichstag campaign, Social Democratic candidates were standing in every district where there was some prospect of a mandate.

    In his lead article of 4 October 1903 Eisner recapitulated the state of affairs in a feudal society surviving into the twentieth century and restated his critique of the “tragicomedy” of Prussia's liberal bourgeoisie. “Prussia has remained a barbarian state hostile to education, where the churches flourish and the schools wither; where the greatest part of the rural populace languishes in intellectual and material bondage; where the administration reposes in a small, narrow-minded caste of ruling families, the justice system completely alienated from popular sentiment; where the citizens are still denied the most basic rights and the state as chief employer embraces the basest practices of rapacious enterprise and exploitation; where even the freedom of thought and research is forbidden and artistic creativity is subject to the police saber.”

  • 24 - Now Dead, as It Stands: Outcomes and Legacy (1919–2017)

  • Albert Earle Gurganus
  • Book:
    Kurt Eisner
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 August 2018
    Print publication:
    25 May 2018, pp 425-442

  • Summary

    RECOVERING FROM INFLUENZA, art historian Julie Vogelstein departed Berlin by rail Friday morning, 21 February, for Munich, where she planned to visit a friend. The only other occupant of her compartment was a Prussian aristocrat, one Von der Schulenburg. They were conversing about forestry when he glanced down at his watch and casually remarked: “Eisner now has twenty minutes to live.” He handed her his calling card and suggested that she might show it to the director of the Fürstenhof Hotel in Nuremberg to obtain a room for the night. “The train will run only as far as Nuremberg,” he said. When they arrived there the platform was swarming with military guards; newspaper extras reported Eisner's assassination by Graf Arco. The track to the Bavarian capital was indeed closed.

    Moments after the gunfire on Promenadestraße ended, three soldiers with rifles and hand grenades rushed to Merkle and shouted: “Now to the Landtag where we'll clean house!” Pulling them over to Eisner's corpse, he pleaded with the infuriated trio to desist. “Could he but speak a few more words, he would tell you: Do not avenge me!” Merkle and Fechenbach had soldiers from the Foreign Ministry guard carry the two limp bodies to the Palais Montgelas. Eisner was laid out on a couch in the porter's room, his assailant dropped at the building's entrance. When Arco showed signs of life, enraged sailors had to be prevented from killing him on the spot. An angry crowd gathered. Merkle insisted that Arco be brought inside. Dr. Steudemann, police physician, officially pronounced Eisner dead.

    At the Landtag, where the deputies awaited the prime minister's entrance, word of the shootings arrived within minutes. Fechenbach strode into the hall, approached the ministers’ table, and spoke briefly with Auer and Roßhaupter. The two ministers turned deathly pale. A few moments later Sergeant Huber entered the journalists’ gallery, tearfully showed Eisner's bloodstained pince-nez, and brandishing his service revolver menacingly, declared that he had dispatched the assassin. At 10:10 Dr. Eugen Jäger of the Bavarian People's Party, president by seniority at age seventy-seven, opened the proceedings with a frightful statement: “Ladies and gentlemen, before we commence I must report rumor has it that Prime Minister Eisner was shot to death today.

  • Introduction

  • Translated by Jeffrey L. Forgeng
  • Book:
    Pietro Monte's Collectanea
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    03 July 2019
    Print publication:
    23 May 2018, pp 1-26

  • Summary

    For those who study the physical and material culture of chivalry, Pietro Monte's Collectanea is a resource without parallel. We can glean much about the material world of the knight from other written sources, whether in the technical instructions offered by combat treatises, in references embedded in theoretical writings like those of Ramón Llull and Christine de Pisan, or in the workaday details recorded in inventories and accountbooks. Medieval painting and sculpture are crucial sources as well, and of course there are the surviving artifacts, whether preserved in ancestral armories or excavated from the ground. But among all these windows on the physicality of the chivalric past, Monte's work stands out in a class by itself.

    Surviving copies of Monte's writings are rare, and for a long time the Collectanea was widely believed to be lost. It began to receive scholarly attention from Raimund Sobotka and others in the 1970s and 1980s, since when it has become an object of considerable international interest, and today it is readily available in digital format. Nonetheless the work has remained something of a closed book, largely owing to the linguistic challenges it poses. The Collectanea addresses a wide range of topics whose technical subject matter ranges well outside the mainstream of historical scholarship: Monte explores topics as diverse as biological heredity, the manufacture of life-preservers, and the best way to execute a long-jump, zeroing in on details as minute as the relative merits of rivets versus leathers in assembling components of armor. The highly specialized – not to say idiosyncratic – vocabulary Monte deploys to cover such wide-ranging topics, combined with the book's multiple linguistic layers, make it a singularly challenging work to interpret.

    Yet the fruits are well worth the labor. The information Monte offers about the vocabulary, construction and use of arms and armor is unique among surviving writings from the period when armor was in use. His material on martial arts overlaps with other writings of the period, but he takes the topic in directions well beyond the scope of comparable treatises. His detailed discussions of the rules and techniques of track-and-field sports are unparallelled until centuries later. And amidst it all, he offers a fascinating glimpse of the personal world of a military professional on the cusp between Middle Ages and Renaissance.

  • Book One

  • from Pietro Monte's Collectanea
  • Translated by Jeffrey L. Forgeng
  • Book:
    Pietro Monte's Collectanea
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    03 July 2019
    Print publication:
    23 May 2018, pp 33-96

  • Summary

    Chapter 1: Explanation of terms

    So that your lordship may more easily understand what follows, before we come to the exercises, I will explain some terms, some Latin, some vernacular, sometimes both together. In any case I will say much about the Spanish language, since that is the language in which I first wrote this treatise.

    In discussing the skills and tactics of wrestling, people often use words idiosyncratically, and I like others have devised some specialized terms in the vernacular based on how we maneuver our limbs. Likewise in armed play or combat there are many attacks that have no Latin names; therefore I will explain them in terms of their form. Also, we are constantly using diverse new arms of offense and defense: since we name them in the vernacular, it is appropriate for the Latin to imitate the vernacular.

    In various places I will explain selected terms for their better understanding, which I did not generally do in the vernacular version, except to explain how something might be done well or poorly. But I expect that everyone will understand about equestrian vaults, since they are not new, given that I have written about them in The Appraisal of Men. With each vault, or most of them, I said something about how the hand is positioned on the saddle or horse. Gonzalo Ayora, in translating the Appraisal, also offered many explanations, and I agree with them, so you can find explanations of the techniques there.

    I have written more extensively in Latin than in the vernacular version, for two reasons. First, the bodily exercises that call for great physical strength are commonly practiced among those unlearned in letters rather than among scholars; hence I should add explanatory definitions so that scholars may understand more easily. The second reason is because in the vernacular every exercise has established terms, or terms that could be regarded as established and are understood by everyone, but this is not true in Latin.

    When we wrestle, techniques of the feet and arms are called mañas in Spanish.

    We call it a torno when our foot intercepts the opponent's foot from the front, and our arms pull him toward us, so that he falls head-first where we were before. It is called a torno because we do not pull the opponent along a straight line, but twisting or turning.

  • [Book Three:] Pietro Monte's Book on the Military Art

  • from Pietro Monte's Collectanea
  • Translated by Jeffrey L. Forgeng
  • Book:
    Pietro Monte's Collectanea
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    03 July 2019
    Print publication:
    23 May 2018, pp 197-230

  • Summary

    Prologue

    So far I have written no chapters specifically on the military art – or at least none described as such, although in reality this entire treatise is about the practices of military men, as also where I discussed the complexions of men, and the order appropriate to each based on the nature of his complexion, and how we should conduct ourselves in exercises, and how children should be educated. But since I did not expand much there, here I will briefly explain some matters, and in particular I will explore two topics. The first will be the quality or nature of people who are suited for warfare; the second, what exercises are most suitable for them. All exercises are good if they foster physical robustness and strength, but some are more particularly appropriate for military practice or knighthood, and others less so. But here I will discuss a universal way that any man can apply wherever he will, although someone who knows how to adapt himself to various exercises will be more suited for knighthood, and particularly for command. For with a squire or private footsoldier, it is often enough to know how to fight with just one weapon, and have one kind of saddle or ride one horse, although it is always better to learn many and diverse things.

    Chapter 1: How understanding the principles and features of single combat can teach us what is suitable for small and large armies

    Elsewhere I have shown how we can extrapolate from one practice to the benefit of another, even if they seem disparate, since each embraces some skills that the intellect can exploit in other activities, whether by analogy or by the actual skill itself. There may seem to be a great difference between playing with a long spear and a sword, but if we know how to deliver two thrusts with the sword, one short and high, and the other long with the arm going a little downward, we can deliver a good attack with the long spear in the same manner.

    With other more disparate activities or arts we can at least make analogies between one art and another.

Pietro Monte's Collectanea
  • The Arms, Armour and Fighting Techniques of a Fifteenth-Century Soldier
  • Volume 6
  • Translated by Jeffrey L. Forgeng
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    03 July 2019
    Print publication:
    23 May 2018
  • First translation into English of a wide-ranging military treatise from the late middle ages.

  • Pietro Monte's Collectanea

  • Translated by Jeffrey L. Forgeng
  • Book:
    Pietro Monte's Collectanea
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    03 July 2019
    Print publication:
    23 May 2018, pp 31-32

  • Summary

    <aa1r>

    Pietro Monte's Collectanea of Exercises and the Military Art, divided into three books

    <aa2r–aa5r: Table of contents, not translated here; aa5v>

    Prologue to Pietro Monte's Books of Exercises and the Military Art, dedicated to Lord Galeazzo Sanseverino

    Having often reflected on the weakness and frailty of human memory, and how whatever we commit to it today, it soon allows to vanish, I decided to write this compendium, so that some part of the activities or exercises that have been practiced among us could be more easily committed to memory.

    This purpose readily accounts for the content and brevity of this text, and why I do not explain every particular in detail. If a person has some familiarity with these matters, it is enough for us to clear him a small path on his route: from there he can easily widen it to cover the entire subject. We should seek this kind of aid to memory from others when we lack it, and where we possess knowledge, we should put it in writing so that it should never be lost to posterity, guarding against the contingencies that often befall. Yet although the benefit may shine upon everyone, it is not distributed in equal measure, for a thing helps us more when we have more need of it.

    We should harmonize physical skills with the intellect, for then we can more easily show the general and specific means that are suitable for men who use their powers of body and intellect. With those who rule or triumph by chance, their rise is usually the prelude to their utter downfall. So to avoid such disgraces, I will write down in a few words some matters that can be extrapolated to teach many exercises, also showing something of the complexions of men.

    I will divide the exercises of this book into two parts.

  • • Book One will be a little more discursive and more general in keeping with that which is dealt with discursively.

  • • Book Two will be compendious, dealing with a great number of individual exercises, and some important topics are addressed toward the end. Yet it lays out in concise fashion the foundations for additional matters.

    • Between these two I will discuss the complexions, and how to conduct things when we are going to engage in some physical contest.

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