Military Archives of Renaissance Florence: Resolutions and Bookkeeping of the Dieci di Balìa and the Otto di Pratica
Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to contemporary historiography, the military offices of Renaissance Florence were backward and disorganized, unaware of the current Italian innovations, and suspicious of their own soldiers. This literature, however, seems to be based more on the Machiavellian prejudice against mercenary companies, than on thorough and systematic archival research. The aim of this article, hence, is an examination of the whole documentary production of the two military institutions of the Florentine Republic, the Dieci di Balìa and the Otto di Pratica, in order to try to re-evaluate the management of war, the relationships between rulers and captains, and the processes of enlistment, equipment, and inspection. The accounts, the resolutions, the daily registrations of treasurers, secretaries, and commissioners, then, illustrate the practices and the organization of both of these magistracies during the last quarter of the fifteenth century. The results of this study demonstrate that, long before the admission of Niccolò Machiavelli to its chancery, the Republic had the men, the knowledge, and the money for operating warfare efficiently and effectively.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".