Christopher Allmand ends his impressive book by taking issue with an opinion I once expressed in the pages of this very journal (Anglo Reference Anglo2002). I described Vegetius’s De Re Militari as a ‘mediocre’ collation of evidence from many periods of Roman military history which had serious defects for any reader hoping to find in it a military textbook explaining how to wage war. However, the book had other, more positive qualities and could serve very different purposes; and, as the great Spanish military bibliographer, José Almirante, observed in 1876, Vegetius was an ‘immense bridge uniting antiquity with modern times’. Allmand does not cite this metaphor, but he provides copious evidence to demonstrate how, for many centuries, Vegetius was regarded as crucial to understanding Roman military organisation and, indeed, to understanding the purpose of having armies at all.

The volume of the sources studied by Allmand is immense. He has examined more than 300 surviving manuscripts of the text in its original form and in translation, and his demonstration of the frequency with which Vegetius was cited and, indeed, plundered shows just how popular the De Re Militari remained throughout the Middle Ages. Allmand analyses this manuscript tradition in order to discover what medieval readers might have found in the work and to determine, as far as is possible, what they did in fact find there; and, going far beyond this, he considers the military, political and moral implications of their reading of Vegetius’s text. This is an enormously ambitious undertaking and has involved the author in searching libraries throughout the length and breadth of Europe in order to track down the relevant manuscripts and to examine their contents in detail. Yet, the method he has evolved to present his material is straightforward and easy for the reader to follow.

He begins with a general survey of the surviving manuscripts before proceeding with a reconstruction of original responses to the text – a difficult task but neatly accomplished by a scrupulous consideration of the ways in which early readers drew attention to certain passages by marking them or even by annotating them with marginal comments. As Allmand admits, this cannot be a scientific procedure. Yet, by doing this and by investigating the identity of owners, he has been able to demonstrate that readers were interested not only in what Vegetius had to say about purely military matters – recruitment, training, the importance of preparedness, the ability to grasp opportunities when they presented themselves, the significance of logistics and provisioning, the favouring of infantry over cavalry, the preference for defensive warfare rather than open battle, the stress on the superiority of an efficient small army over much larger but ill-trained forces and the emphasis on using native rather than mercenary troops – but also in the political and moral imperatives that all these themes implied. The rigours of a life devoted to military service on behalf of the state paralleled the asceticism of the monastic life so that Vegetius’s military idealism could appeal even to clerics. But more fundamental still was the way in which his emphasis on professional skills and the discipline of group action, as against individualistic but misdirected feats of courage, could potentially undermine chivalric attitudes and practices along with their associated values dependent on mere birth and social status.

Having explored the internal evidence of the manuscripts themselves, Allmand then goes on to examine the way in which they were transmitted to posterity through the work of commentators and adaptors – such as John of Salisbury, Aegidius Colonna and Machiavelli – and through various translations. Few of the vernacular versions enjoyed much popularity, but Allmand has some interesting observations on the problems posed by Vegetius’s text with regard to both vocabulary and ideas. A chapter discussing the illuminated letters in the Vegetian manuscripts is the least effective part of the book because the illustrations do not bear the weight of interpretation placed upon them. On the other hand, his survey of collected excerpts drawn from the De Re Militari is particularly illuminating with regard to modes of reading, habits of thought and the ideas which were deemed especially significant.

The last section of Allmand’s study is devoted to the legacy of Vegetius’s work in medieval military thought and practice, and here the study runs into two difficulties. In the first place the whole question of influence is inevitably speculative and, while most of what Allmand suggests is convincing, some of his examples cannot be proven and can only remain as assumptions. The second problem arises from the need to support these assumptions by constantly reiterating the principal Vegetian themes in order to demonstrate parallels or borrowings in other authors. This renders the final chapters of the book repetitious, although it must be admitted that what is thereby lost in vivacity is gained in clarity. Indeed, from start to finish Allmand’s style is unambiguous and wholly free of the jargon which encumbers much recent historical writing; and he eschews any reference to the pretentious ‘reception theory’ which has now become so modish.

Finally, while one should not criticise a book for not being a different one, I do slightly regret Allmand’s strict adherence to his self-limiting principle of not taking the enquiry beyond the early sixteenth century. It would have been worthwhile to have his views on Justus Lipsius’s hostility towards Vegetius’s authority and on the angry response this elicited from Jacob von Wallhausen. Wallhausen was, after all, a highly experienced military man who not only published his own translation of the De Re Militari in 1616 but was also, in the following year, appointed director of the newly established military academy at Siegen. He did not hold the post for long, but his zeal for Vegetius and the Roman system of recruitment and training is a striking illustration of the continuing practical impact of the De Re Militari and a remarkable vindication of the overall argument of Allmand’s meticulous and invaluable study.