De Re Militari - Transmission and Influence

Transmission and Influence

Heavily used in its own time, De Re Militari became a popular manual on warfare in the Middle Ages, especially between 9th and 16th centuries, even if some of the information was unsuitable to later times and circumstances. N.P. Milner observes that it was "one of the most popular Latin technical works from Antiquity, rivalling the elder Pliny's Natural History in the number of surviving copies dating from before AD 1300."

The early English historian Bede cites Vergetius in his prose Life of St Cuthbert. The earliest extant manuscript from England to contain Vegetius' text is Cotton Cleopatra D.I (of the 11th, possibly late 10th century).

De Re Militari came to the forefront in the late Carolingian period through Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856), who used the text for his own manual De Procincta Romaniae Militiae, composed for Lothair II of Lotharingia (r. 855-869).

Vegetius' notes about siegecraft became especially obsolete when the technology advanced and gunpowder weapons such as cannon came into widespread use. Vegetius' suggestion of a soldier's religious oath to God and to the realm might have influenced knightly practices. Still, because of the lack of literacy, as a guide it was probably accessible only to aristocracy, clergy and royalty. Machiavelli very likely read Vegetius and incorporated many of his ideas into his own The Prince.

To the modern day, 226 Latin copies of the book have survived, not including translations to various other European languages. Many of them have a copious amount of personal notes on them, pointing at matters that have interested their contemporary owners.

The first printed editions are ascribed to Utrecht (1473), Cologne (1476), Paris (1478), Rome (in Veteres de re mil. scriptores, 1487), and Pisa (1488). A German translation by Ludwig Hohenwang appeared at Ulm in 1475. It was translated into English, French (by Jean de Meun and others), Italian (by the Florentine judge Bono Giamboni and others), Catalan, Spanish, Czech, and Yiddish before the invention of printing. An early English version (via French) was published by Caxton in 1489.

However, after the first printed editions, Vegetius' position as the premier military authority began to decline, as ancient historians such as Polybius became available. Niccolò Machiavelli attempted to address Vegetius's defects in his L'arte della Guerra (Florence, 1521), with heavy use of Polybius, Frontinus and Livy, but Justus Lipsius' accusation that he confused the institutions of diverse periods of the Roman Empire and G. Stewechius' opinion that the survival of Vegetius' work led to the loss of his named sources were more typical of the late Renaissance. While as late as the 18th century we find so eminent a soldier as Marshal Puysegur basing his own works on this acknowledged model, and the famous Prince de Ligne wrote "C'est un livre d'or". In Milner's words, Vegetius' work suffered "a long period of deepening neglect".