Carriera delle armi e spirito di corpo nell’esercito dello Stato della Chiesa. Una ricognizione nelle fonti

The main purpose of this paper is to set a general overview of a military officer’s career in service of the pope. It analyses what criteria the Army’s Commissar Cornelio Bentivoglio conceived in order to organize the officer corps after the participation of the Papal States in the War of the Spanish Succession. It also shows how the military bureaucracy defined the categories of merit and grace in the context of the increasing officers’ professionalism at the beginning of the eighteenth century.