The Polemological Perspective of Sixteenth Century Military Harangue

Abstract

In Antiquity, the great generals saw in the exhortation of the troops a powerful ally against the enemy, as evidenced by the military treaties of Onasander or Vegecy. Because of their impressive qualities, Greek-Roman historiographers inserted military harangue into their accounts, rhetorically reworking it, at a time when historiography approached rhetoric. In the midst of the Renaissance, a time marked by pyrobalism and the increasing professionalization of armies, military treaties continue to propose military commands to appeal to the exhortation and motivation of troops. If we point out this fact would be important, the truth is that the military polemological perspective of military harangue comes enriched with the contexts of pronunciation and the rhetoric topoi enshrined in the classical literary tradition. Thus, in this article and in a transversal way, we identify the rhetorical topics that the military treaties written by Machiavelli, Fernando Oliveira and Scarion de Pavia prescribe to the generals before or during a battle, inserting them in their rhetorical-historiographic affiliation. We will try to demonstrate that the military harangue in these treatises will be more committed to classical historiography than to the old treatise, in the topics and contexts of pronunciation. Originally from the military milieu, re-elaborated rhetorically in the silence of the historiographer’s office, it returns in the sixteenth century to its original environment, enriched and adapted to different war contexts. It is, in short, an unpublished study of the importance that military art of the sixteenth century still conferred on the pronunciation of a military harangue, as a way of galvanizing soldiers into war.