John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy by William Caferro (review)

REVIEWS 206 discipline at the First International Congress of Byzantine Studies in Bucharest in 1924. CRISTINA MITROVICI William Caferro, John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in FourteenthCentury Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2006) xv + 459 pp. William Caferro’s John Hawkwood has two basic purposes. The first is to show how an Englishman from modest roots rose to become the most feared and sought-after mercenary captain in late fourteenth-century Italy. In this task he succeeds. Through the mining of more than twenty archives in England and Italy, Caferro reconstructs the career of Hawkwood, providing an account firmly rooted in evidence, as opposed to the romanticized and often fictional versions of Hawkwood portrayed in previous scholarship. However, Caferro’s use of Hawkwood as a vehicle through which to explore the relationship between war and the political, social, and economic changes occurring in late fourteenth-century Italy, his second goal, is not given enough attention as it is largely neglected until the final chapter. In one sense, Hawkwood’s story, that of a foreign mercenary making the journey to Italy to both prey on and seek employment from cities great and small, was entirely common in fourteenth-century Italy. But what distinguishes Hawkwood, and thus makes him a worthy object of study, is the high degree of military success he achieved, making him a unique political and economic force in Italian society. Hawkwood’s military career appears to have begun in service to the English crown in the Hundred Years War, after which he joined the White Company, a famed mercenary band that crossed into Italy from France in 1361. After the group’s disbandment, a frequent occurrence during the period, Hawkwood joined other mercenary bands, until he was offered his first captainship by Pisa in 1363 at the age of nearly forty. From that point forward , his military prowess made bidding for his service among ambassadors representing the most important cities in Italy a constant source of competition and intrigue, aided in no small part by the continual nature of warfare in late fourteenth-century Italy. Given the short duration of mercenary contracts, the seasonal nature of campaigning, and changes in cities’ financial fortunes, and hence their ability to pay, it is perhaps not surprising that over the course of his career, Hawkwood was employed by almost all of the most powerful players in Italy, including Milan, multiple popes, Padua, and eventually Florence. Florence in fact granted him citizenship in 1391, an unusual procedure but emblematic of the increasing pressures war was placing on states to retain the services of the best mercenary captains. Indeed, in his later years Hawkwood commanded a salary greater than the income of many cities, in addition to the grants of land he was offered. The key to Hawkwood’s military success seems to have been his ability to use his long tenure in Italy and his extended contacts with major players bidding for his services to build a network of informants that gave him superior information about the troop movements and intentions of adversaries. He also successfully exploited his knowledge of local geography, which lead directly to his most significant victory, over Verona at Castagnaro in 1387. But his martial REVIEWS 207 prowess would not have translated into the degree of financial success he achieved absent his skill in bargaining, particularly in exploiting and manipulating cities’ uncertainties about his intentions. The fact that without a contract he was free to captain roving mercenary bands was a key element in bringing pressure to bear on cities when negotiating, and in fact Hawkwood sometimes made his dissatisfaction known by leading mercenary bands to extort bribes from cities which in the past had employed him. If in doing so Hawkwood comes off as an opportunist, it should be noted that cities were more than happy to use mercenaries to further foreign policy goals when it was desirable and possible to do so. They also frequently failed to meet pay despite contractual obligations, although Florence seems to be an exception, which is probably the main reason for Hawkwood’s consistent service to the city at the end of his career. Given the itinerant nature of Hawkwood’s...