Case 4

‘Per peli e per segni’. Muster rolls, lists and notes: practical military records relating to the last Florentineordinanzeand militia, from Machiavelli to the fall of the Republic (1506-30)

“…18 Nonetheless, even Covini mostly refers to the internal chancery copies and only to 'a few surviving samples'. 19 It does not come as a surprise, then, that John Gagn e, in order to foster his argument in his recent article on 'counting dead soldiers' during the Italian Wars (1494-1559), provides French, Swiss and English samples of muster rolls, but almost none relating to the Italians troops who participated in the military campaigns. 20 Mallett and Shaw, however, were writing about gaps in the preservation of practical records relating to the fifteenth-and early sixteenth-century ordinanze (rather than to those specifically relating to the condottieri).…”