ABSTRACT
Northumberland, as leader of a fighting force in Flanders, knew very well the extent to which time was money and cost lives, and he imparts good advice on this by way of a Latin motto; 'Dato hoste, exercitum dare minimum, qui ilium dato tempore vincaf1 Know your enemy, and conquer him by expending the minimum amount of effort in the least amount of time, using the smallest fighting force necessary. The motto appears in a section of his 'commonplace' notebook that deals with the kind of strategic knowledge a commander of a fighting army should possess. Northumberland has other good reasons besides its pithiness for quoting this motto to generals, for it identifies the major areas of debate on strategy in the 1590s manual literature. A successful military campaign is predicated upon knowledge of the enemy - its numbers, its geographical location, its stock of arms and amount of money in its purse; on who commands, who advises, who devises the strategic plans of campaign. What the motto most clearly expresses is that at a time when money, men and food were in stringently short supply, to enter into protracted siege warfare would be suicide to a nation. Implicit in the motto therefore is a critique of unnecessary battles of attrition, or any kind of action drawn out beyond its effectiveness. It is not saying that lengthy battles are bad strategy, for siege warfare (especially if you were in control of all the resources that a full coffer and natural geographical advantages could supply) was in the sixteenth century the preferred way of conquering peoples and accumulating territory. What the motto is saying is that any action that requires large sums of money to sustain an army in full fighting fitness must not be prolonged through inept or selfpromoting command or acquisitive greed for land. The motto is also telling a commander that he cannot rely upon ideal conditions in which the replacement of vast numbers of soldiers lost in battle could be guaranteed by unlimited conscription.
