Political Entanglements. A Network Study on Contracts, Power, and Defection in Renaissance Italy’s Warfare Market.

Margherita Criveller, University of Milan
Federico Bianchi, University of Milan
Raffaele Vacca, University of Milan
Flaminio Squazzoni, University of Milan

This study explores the interplay of contracts, power and betrayal in the warfare market of Renaissance Italy (1375-1615). It examines why, in a politically fragmented landscape, states sometimes rehired condottieri despite their previous breaches of contract. Drawing on Granovetter's (1985) concept of embeddedness, it argues that these contractual exchanges were not isolated economic transactions, but were deeply embedded in complex kinship and political networks. This approach offers valuable insights into the balance between structure and agency in historical processes. Our study shifts the analytical focus from state actors (principals) to mercenaries and their relatives (agents), demonstrating that mercenary families evolved into a distinct political elite within the states they served. While some scholars attribute the emergence of standing armies to the unreliability of mercenaries, others emphasise the organisational challenges faced by states with weak administrative structures that nevertheless required rapid and flexible military responses. However, such explanations do not fully resolve the puzzle of why states persist in hiring condottieri with a history of breach of contract. We hypothesise that there is a positive correlation between the probability of states rehiring treacherous condottieri and the centrality of these mercenaries in the ego networks of the states they served. The analysis is based on a novel dataset of 6,991 contracts, 1,385 kinship ties between 1,735 mercenaries, and 223 Italian polities. Using an ego-network approach and cross-classified multilevel logistic models, we demonstrated that higher centrality - measured as both degree and betweenness - in states' ego-networks is associated with increased odds of both contract violation and subsequent reinstatement. This is a first step in understanding the transition from decentralised warfare markets to the emergence of state monopolies of military power in the modern era, with the overall aim of exploring the historical interplay of political and social processes in shaping market dynamics.

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 Presented in Session 158. Renaissance and Early Modern Europe