This is a very well-written study of the role of the English condottieri who were the Haliburton Gang of fourteenth century Italy. It focuses on the character of John Hawkwood, a minor English knight who rose to leadership among the mercenary armies that were cast loose on France and Italy, when the Hundred Years War entered a lull. Saunders’ prose is excellent, and evocative, her grasp of the evidence is strong, and she has a common-sense vision of the real life behind the documents.
Common action against these formidable fighting machines could never be achieved as long as local interest dominated Italian politics, as Matteo Villani understood. “Although both the tyrants and the popular governments of Italy hated the [companies],” he wrote, “so great was the division into factions and the rivalry between republics and tyrants that each preferred to spend money on hiring companies rather than fighting them.” The mere existence of a supply of mercenaries created a demand for their services. Governments employed them simply because they were there, and because, if they didn’t, rival governments would. It had become “a ruinously expensive game of see-saw,” in which the value of the companies was the purely negative one of maintaining the balance of military power between the cities. Again and again, as the freelance depredations became intolerable, plans for forming a league against the companies were put forward, but each time the ambition or fear of some city would ruin the attempt, and the scramble for soldiers would be repeated. As one historian writes, “The leagues became sources of intrigue and exclusion, cynical devices, serving only to deepen mutual antipathies.” In any case, it would have been necessary to hire more soldiers to drive them out, thus exacerbating the problem. And it was useless for the popes to cling to their resolution of inducing the adventurers to go on crusade as long as they remained one of their largest employers. (p.85–86)
We are talking about medieval Europe, here, but the process is inherent to any place where you have trained warriors detached from loyalties to home and hearth. This, in a nutshell, I would propose, describes the process by which the ancient world’s villages and early cities acquired kings and aristocracies. I suspect that, far from being the product of an internal “evolution into complexity”, the rule of aristocracies was essentially an external predation that early village and town societies were unable to fend off, for much the same reasons that condottieri were effective in this medieval context.
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