Eugenio Faina
DPhil Student
eugenio.faina@wolfson.ox.ac.uk
Research Topic: Warfare and Governance in Renaissance Milan: Military and Political Institutions during the Italian Wars (1494-1559)
Supervisor: John Watts and Peter Wilson
My research activity in Late Medieval and Early Modern political history lies at the intersections of military, constitutional, administrative and diplomatic history of the European Renaissance.
I am currently working on the interrelation between military organisation and constitutional developments of the Duchy of Milan (late 15th-early 16th century), focusing on the influence of “warmaking” on “statemaking” within the historiographic framework of the Early Modern Military Revolution and the Bellicist Theory of state formation.
My methodology primarily involves the use of “descriptive” sources, such as chronicles, diplomatic reports, and diaries, and “prescriptive” sources, such as decrees, statutes, orders, and payrolls, to investigate the hiatus between the theoretical legal prescription and the practical functioning of bureaucracy and army as described by privileged observers (i.e. foreign diplomats, local officers, and court historians).
The first objective is to thoroughly scrutinise Milanese military and constitutional history during half a century of war marked by French occupation, Sforza restoration, and Imperial interference – a period relatively overlooked if compared to the Visconti-Sforza Golden Age it follows and the Spanish occupation it precedes.
The second objective is to analyse the ambiguous interrelation between warmaking and statemaking in this case study, to explore the hypothesis of a rather odd “inverse correlation” between growing military effort and state-building. In general, looking to ducal institutional developments through the lens of military history might contribute to a deeper understanding of the degree of militarisation which characterised Milan during the 15th and 16th centuries.
Background
Born and raised in Milan, Italy, after graduating with a Bachelor’s in Political Science and International Relations, I moved to Paris in 2019 to earn my Master’s in International Security, Diplomacy and European Studies at Sciences Po and to Brussels in 2020 to work as a research assistant and office coordinator at Carnegie Europe, an EU foreign and security policy think tank. Back in Milan in 2021, I spent a couple of years working as a cybersecurity consultant for the financial and public sectors, before returning to university to complete a Master’s in History from the University of Bologna.
