Condottieri: Hawkwood's White Company to Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Rich Italian city-states such as Florence, Venice and Genoa had money but little appetite for fighting, so they bought their wars by contract. The condotta was that contract, and a condottiere was literally a contractor. Catalan troops appear in Italy around 1303, and the Great Company of Germans and Hungarians stripped Tuscany, Umbria and the Romagna until Montreal d'Albarno imposed discipline and pay schedules. The Englishman John Hawkwood arrived in the 1360s during a lull in the Hundred Years' War and led the White Company through three decades of northern Italian warfare. In 1339 Lodrisio Visconti formed the first Italian-led company, the Company of St. George, only to see it destroyed that April by his own uncle, Luchino Visconti of Milan.

From 1377 Alberico da Barbiano turned the trade into a science, training captains such as Braccio da Montone and Muzio Attendolo Sforza. Treating trained men and horses as capital, the condottieri avoided pitched battles and winter campaigns and won by maneuver, then began taking states for themselves. Francesco Sforza switched sides against Milan repeatedly, married Bianca Maria Visconti, besieged the city when it tried to become a republic, and was recognized as Duke of Milan in 1450. Niccolò Machiavelli condemned the whole system, arguing that only citizen soldiers would fight to the end.

• The Visconti, Gonzaga, Orsini, Colonna and even the Borgia families all produced condottieri captains.
• Federico da Montefeltro made himself lord of Urbino and turned it into a center of the Renaissance.
• For a condottiere, a bloodless victory was the ideal outcome because it fulfilled the contract without losing paid soldiers.
• Bartolomeo Colleoni defeated the French at Bosco Marengo in 1447, and Bartolomeo d'Alviano fought at the Garigliano.
• By the 17th century the word had become an honorific, and Ambrogio Spinola is counted among the last of the tradition.