The emergence of the idea of manning the armed forces of the state with the help of compulsory military service of citizens in Western Europe during the Renaissance
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Abstract. The purpose of the article is to analyze the main phenomena that led to the emergence of the idea of mandatory military service for citizens in Italian city-states during the Renaissance and also to consider an attempt to implement it in Florence at the beginning of the 16th century. Research methods. This article uses general scientific and historical methods. The author used methods that made it possible to make a historical reconstruction of the main trends in the evolution of the idea of compulsory military service for citizens of early modern Italian city-states. First, the historical-genetic method used in the article to trace the main trends in the development of the idea of military duty. A comparative-historical method was applied to identify the key features and consequences of the attempted application of universal conscription in the Florentine Republic and compare it with another common recruitment method. The scientific novelty of the obtained results lies in the delineation of the circumstances of the emergence of the ideas of compulsory military service and the citizen-soldier in early modern Europe.
The Conclusions. The idea of compulsory military service for citizens emerged in the Italian city-states during the Renaissance. The implementation of such an idea at that time in practice took place in Florence at the beginning of the 16th century as an attempt to reform the militia, but was unsuccessful. This attempt was a unique experiment in an era when other lords and states traditionally sought the services of private contractors, known in Italy as condottieri, to recruit mercenaries to wage their wars. The militia of the Florentine Republic eventually proved unable to compete with such mercenary armies. The main principle of manning the militia, which was based on ancient Roman republican ideals in the form of mandatory military service for citizens, turned out to be unsustainable in the conditions that existed in Italy at the beginning of the 16th century. The economic conditions, the political situation, and the structure of society in the Italian city-states were incompatible with the principle of manning the armed forces of these states exclusively through the forced conscription of their citizens.
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