Are Mercenary Armies Evil? From Malatesta Baglioni to Evgeny Prighozyn:

 During the siege of Florence in 1530, Michelangelo Buonarroti was actively fighting with the Florentine army. When the city fell, someone hid him in a secret room under the Santo Spirito Church. It is not open to the public, but I had a chance to visit it a few years ago. It is impressive to see the trapdoor built nearly 500 years ago still perfectly functioning. And when you walk into the secret room, you can see Michelangelo's drawings on the walls; the sensation is that he had left just a few days before. If these drawings still exist, and also other masterpieces by Michelangelo, is a merit of the "Condottiere" Malatesta Baglioni, who avoided a bloodshed by forcing Florence to surrender.

During the War of the League of Cognac (1526-1530), the condottiere Malatesta Baglioni was hired by the Florentine Republic to defend the city against the Imperial Army. In 1530, he switched sides. He ordered to turn the cannons of his army against his employers and to open the doors of the city to the besiegers. It was a quick fall for the Florentine Republic that, from that moment, ceased to exist. 

It was a typical behavior of mercenary armies, one of the reasons why they have bad fame from the time of Machiavelli's "The Prince." (1517). Machiavelli didn't see the siege of Florence in 1530 (he died in 1527), but what he wrote was prophetic. 

"Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous, and any ruler who relies on them to defend his state will be insecure and in peril ... Why? Because they have no affection for you, and no reason to go to battle except the small wages you pay them, and those aren’t enough to make them willing to die for you! 

Correct, but wait one moment. Does that mean that mercenary armies are an evil to be stamped out from the surface of the Earth? If we look at the details, Malatesta Baglioni switching sides in 1530 was not so much a betrayal as a masterpiece of diplomacy. It came one week after the main army of the Florentine Republic was decisively defeated by the Imperials. At that point, the war was over, Florence had lost. And Baglioni acted in consequence. He avoided further bloodshed and, among other things, if you can still see the city of Florence in its full Renaissance glory, it is because the agreements that led to the surrender in 1530 were honored by all the parties involved. The city was not sacked, and the citizens' lives were spared. 

Not that mercenaries won't occasionally engage in sacking cities and massacring civilians (there are a few examples in history) but if you can pay them to fight, you can also pay them to stop fighting. That's unlike the behavior of soldiers of national armies, often motivated by propaganda to hate their enemies. They will often fight to the end, which is bad for them and for everyone. 

So, let's try to compare the actions of Malatesta Baglioni with those of a much more recent mercenary condottiere, Yevgeny Prighozyn, and his "Wagner" troops in Russia. There is a clear similarity between Baglioni turning his cannons against Florence and Prighozyn directing his tanks against Moscow. In both cases, we have a mercenary captain betraying his employers. 

Baglioni acted on the perception that the Florentine Republic was already defeated, and he was correct. The Florentines didn't attempt to resist, choosing instead the path of least damage. Prighozyn may have acted on the basis of a similar perception, but he was completely wrong. We may speculate that he was banking on promises that he would be helped by forces inside or outside Russia. Maybe he expected a major Ukraine offensive, or an uprising in Moscow, or he simply was handsomely paid to do what he did. We'll never know for sure who pushed Prighozyn to rebel but, whoever they were, they betrayed him and left him and his soldiers alone against a much more powerful enemy: the whole Russian army. 

The interesting part of this story is how the attempted uprising was relatively bloodless. Prighozyn's men found themselves facing annihilation a few hundred miles from Moscow. Even if their boss hadn't told them to turn tail, they would have surrendered. That must have been clear to the Moscow authorities, too, and they didn't try to annihilate the mercenary column. They have better uses for a few thousand trained soldiers than exterminating them. The whole story ended, if not satisfactorily, at least without bloodshed. 

This is the good thing about mercenary armies. They are, in a sense, a step in the direction of purely robotic armies which will be the only ones fighting in the future. Robots don't fight for glory or for "the country;" they fight because they are programmed to fight. And their programmers probably think and behave like the "condottieri" of mercenary armies: they care mostly for money. War is never a good thing, but if it can be a little less bloody, it is at least an improvement. 

The Decline of the West: Left or Right, It Doesn't Matter

The auditorium of Fiesole, near Florence, Italy. A monster of glass and concrete, it was announced almost 15 years ago but it was never completed and probably never will be. It can be seen as a metaphor of the decline of the West: if there are no more resources to produce or to distribute goods, the whole economy grinds to a halt. 

In a previous post, Miguel Martinez examined the retreat from Moscow of Napoleon's army as a metaphor for the decline of the Left in the West. Martinez notes how the Left has normally emphasized the redistribution of the goods produced by the economy but that, nowadays, the resource crisis makes it impossible to produce enough goods to distribute. It is just like when the soldiers of Napoleon's army found little or nothing to plunder after that they had conquered Moscow.

In practice, the plight of the Right is not different from that of the Left. Traditionally, the Right emphasized production rather than redistribution. But these are two sides of the same coin: the gradual depletion of resources and the increasing ecosystem disruption make it impossible to produce goods at the same low costs as it was easy to do decades ago. The attempt of Donald Trump to restart coal production in the US is similar to the plight of Napoleon's soldiers marching in the snow during their retreat from Moscow. The only choices available to them were either to plunder cities that they had no capability to conquer or to redistribute spoils that they had not been able to plunder. Right or Left, they were are going nowhere. It is the same for us.

I think these concepts can be illustrated by the story of a building in the city where I live, Fiesole, on a hill near Florence, in Italy. In 2003, the mayor  announced the plan of building a large auditorium which he described as an "absolute necessity for the town." There followed a debate where many local residents (including myself) noted that the city may have needed an auditorium but that the proposed one was way too large. 

As you may imagine, our protests were swamped in howls of disdain. We were accused of a "nimby" attitude and told that the new auditorium would bring jobs for the inhabitants of Fiesole, money for shop owners, and turn Fiesole into an internationally known cultural center. In any case, it would mean economic growth and how could anyone be against that? 

So, the auditorium was built. It was even enlarged with the progress of the construction until it was supposed to be able to seat 312 people.  The only problem: it was never completed. Today, only the outer walls and the roof stand (and they say that the roof leaks). The reason is said to be that the city ran out of money, which is probably true, but I also think that the builders themselves, at some point, looked at what they were doing and they gasped in awe. I can imagine them asking each other something like. "'what the hell are we doing here? This thing is too damn big." I can imagine the same moment of awe for the soldiers and the commanders of Napoleon's army in Moscow, "What the hell are we doing here? It is getting damn cold."

Just as Russia was too big for Napoleon to conquer, the auditorium of Fiesole is too big for the size of the city. Imagine building New York's Metropolitan Opera House in Mount Carroll, Illinois, and you get the right feeling. Fiesole is a small town on top of a hill and it doesn't have enough hotel rooms to host the kind of events that would need a hall with 300+ seats. Bringing people there from other locations is not a solution, either. There are wholly insufficient parking facilities nearby; using buses would be slow and expensive and, anyway, full size buses couldn't negotiate the sharp turns in the roads around the Auditorium. Given these conditions, who would ever need this auditorium when there are literally dozens more convenient ones in nearby Florence? If the auditorium of Fiesole were ever to be completed, what could be done with it? Maybe we could paint it in white and have people come to look at the elephant of the city zoo. 

Doesn't this story really feel like Napoleon's invasion of Russia? Yes, Napoleon was caught in a bubble scheme of his own making where he had to keep fighting and winning bigger and bigger battles in order to have more spoils to redistribute. Eventually, the bubble had to burst. The Western economic system has been caught in the same kind of bubble, although not based on military actions (not completely, at least). Rather, it is a bubble of construction and redistribution that's bursting right now. 

So, today, walking in front of the concrete and glass giant in a square of the small town of Fiesole, one is nearly overwhelmed by a thought: how could people make such an absurd error? Surely there was money involved but, for what I can say, it was mostly done in good faith by people who really believed that the city needed such a thing  (1) (and, if you care to know, the mayor who started the whole thing was a former member of the Communist party). But it didn't matter: the Right would have done exactly the same. It was just like for Napoleon's soldiers who took the road to Moscow, convinced that they were going toward glory and riches. Looking at the errors of the past we can always learn one thing: that we never learn from the errors of the past (2). 

1. There was a certain method in this madness. A parking lot was built downhill and it might have provided a sufficient number of parking spaces for the auditorium, even though it still remained off-limits to full size buses. But to get to the auditorium from that parking lot one needs to walk up a long flight of steep stairs. So, the idea was to build an escalator to take people uphill but, as you may imagine, it was a grand plan that turned out to be too expensive. Even grander and more expensive was the idea to build a cableway that would have taken people to Fiesole from the valley below, where new hotels would be built. That would have been coupled with a special train service from Florence's central train station. These ideas were more or less equivalent to think that Napoleon's armies could advance into Siberia after having taken Moscow, until they would conquer Vladivostok, on the other side of Eurasia.

2. Evidence that people haven't learned anything from past mistakes comes from the plans for a new airport in Florence. A new oversized project that aims at increasing the number of tourists coming to Florence, all in the name of Growth. Apparently, nine million tourists per year are not enough for Florence. Do we think this number will keep growing forever?