"Books on battles from the great Italian wars" Topic

looking for recommendations of books on battles from the great Italian wars – narrating the course of battles, maps, OOBs etc. Primarily in English.

Thanks in advance.

Pavia 1525 & Fornovo 1495- Osprey
The Art of War in the Middle Ages by Oman

GREAT ITALIAN WARS 1494-1544, THE:Wargamer's Guide brief but concise guide, b/w drawings/maps, troop types, details nine battles. great little book with great maps and OOB of all major battles…sold by On Military Matters
and The Art of War in Italy 1490-1520 also sold by OMM

More so Oman's the Art of War in the 16th Century
F.L. Taylor's The Art of War in Italy, 1494 – 1529.

(Accurate) Maps and (detailed) OOBs are very hard to come by for this era, so the wargamer's version is probably a good starting point for reasonable attempts to translate the somewhat scanty historical evidence into table top ready material.

There are several books on Pavia 1525, for instance Jean Giono "The Battle of Pavia" ( link )and Timothy Wilson, "The Battle of Pavia" ( link ) though the latter is also about the painting in the Ashmolean,

I second the recommendation by Jason, above, on the Wargamer's Guide to the Great Italian Wars. It is a handy little pamphlet-style book, that is packed with a lot of info, including orbats.

Of course, the individual Osprey books are quite good too.

I have the following books on my shelves, and if I can get hold of them you shouldn't have any difficulty finding them too:

link

I've usually included a few words on what I think of the book overall. Hope that helps.

BTW, I don't think the single book you are after is out there, at least I haven't found it. Most books only give general numbers for OOBs, if you are lucky the numbers are split into heavy cavalry and light cavalry. More rarely you get overall numbers for divisions. I was very surprised, when I got into the Italian Wars, just how little 'wargame friendly' information there was out there.

Most wargame OOBs I've seen are idle speculation or, at worst simply made up – and due to a lack of generally available precise information I'm guilty of this too, though I hope I'm more an idle speculator than a maker-upper. My OOB for Marignano being a case in point: link

James

I've just noticed that there are a few books on Italian Wars battles – in Spanish – in the Guerreros y Batallas series. The page at link includes Cerignola and Garigliano, there's also Pavia and Bicoca. (Amazon.co.uk list at least some of them.) However I haven't actually seen any of these, and the other G y B titles I have seen weren't that great.

Thanks for all the suggestions – plenty to put on the Birthday book list.