One thing is for sure: war is about money. Always has been and always will be. John Hawkwood was merely an excellent and unashamed practitioner of war as a revenue-generating activity. 1360, a treaty is signed and the Hundred Years War pauses, but people keep fighting, mostly English soldiers who stay in France to kill and burn and pillage because it beats going home and doing an honest day's work or dying of the plague. The soldiers coalesce into large companies who style themselves mercenaries, though instead of being paid to fight, they mostly just fight until they're paid to go away. Amongst the hordes laying waste to much of France is unassuming Essex man, John Hawkwood. They range far and wide until they finally threaten the pope, living in luxurious exile in Avignon. In sheer self-defence, the pope hires Hawkwood and tells him to go to Italy, and that's where Hawkwood goes, bringing an exciting new era of death and destruction with him.
Northern Italy is full of strong, prosperous city states like Milan, Florence and Siena, all of whom hate each other, a situation which Hawkwood coolly and calmly and ruthlessly exploits. Soon he and his men are killing peasants, raping women, burning crops, ransoming nobles and even defeating the odd army here and there, collecting vast sums from various signoria to go away and bother the other guy. Then the pope returns to Rome and tries to take charge and more people die and Hawkwood keeps raking it in.
Hawkwood, oddly enough, remains a cipher. We only know him through his actions, his clever maneuverings, his carefully controlled slaughtering and kidnapping and, oh yeah, that one really big massacre at Cesena. He left no writings behind to provide any sort of insight into his character or personality, and mostly he just kept soldiering and ransoming and robbing and threatening and killing because that's what he was good at. Instead we have walk-on parts by the likes of Chaucer, Boccaccio, Petrarch and Catherine of Siena to bring the age to life and illuminate the minds and souls of the players and the landscape they moved through: wealth, poverty, famine, plague, war, not to mention the obscene iniquity of holy mother church, outdoing all others in the atrocity stakes as it gropes for secular power, while its cardinals and prelates are ardent practitioners of the seven deadly sins.
This is a deeply interesting book, written with a cool, clear detachment that occasionally turns acerbic. It is an edifying and sobering piece of history, and if Hawkwood remains an enigma, it may be because we don't yet understand how much of history is carved out by cool, ruthless bastards doing whatever the hell they wanted.

An ok account of 14th century English mercenary captain and his campaigns in Italy. More interesting by merit of the subject matter than the presentation, which is wracked with filler. For all the amazing preservation of pay stubs and letters, the source material is fairly standard and the analysis does little to give us a true understanding of the man or reasons for his success.

A fascinating look at pre-Renaissance Italy. The narrative did tend to get bogged down at certain points, but over all this was a highly enjoyable and insightful read. Well worth the time.

This book is why I read history. A book ostensibly about the greatest Condittiere (mercenary) of the late middle ages and Englishman John Hawkwood in reality its an engaging book about the city states and papal wars of that time period. If you think life is bad reading this book makes you realize how good and peaceful the world has become. The casual depravity and slaughter mentioned in this book is stunning the horror and betrayals, politics and vendettas amazing. A read that will give you perspective. It will also give you a thorough understanding of John Hawkwoods life. Well worth the read.

Always a fascinating period to me, "the calamitous century" as historian Barbara Tuchman called it. Even more so the various mercenaries who sold their services to would ever pay them for the practice of arms, "the condottieri." Of them all, and there were many, the subject of this book stands out, Sir John Hawkwood. Finding himself out of work at one of the many pauses of the Hundred Years War, Hawkwood and his followers traveled to Italy and sold themselves to whomever could pay. And sometimes, much of the cash was lacking come payday! No matter Pope, Visconti, Cardinal, city-state or merchant someone was always coming up short. Not the thing to do when you have tired, hungry and horny mercenary soldiers on your doorstep.
Hawkwood to his credit earned a reputation that enabled him to fight in Italy for almost 30 years. And lived to tell about it. He was held in such reverence at the time of his death in 1394, that Florence commissioned a fresco of the captain in the Duomo cathedral, Santa Maria di Fiori.
The book is interesting but tedious in places. Author goes to great lengths to depict life in 14th Century Italy which the reader will find interesting. Of particular interest might be the machinations of the Papacy and the various schisms.

The Devil's Broker is a fascinating popular account of the life of infamous knight and mercenary commander John Hawkwood. One of the minor English warriors who participated in the 100 Years War under Edward III, after a truce he quit formal service and joined a mercenary company. The difference between royal service and mercenary work was rather theoretical. The English chevauchee was pure economic warfare, wide-ranging looting of the countryside that paid for itself. Mercenary work was much the same.

Hawkwood's company, the White Company, crossed into Italy, and there Hawkwood found his calling. His career was complex, to say the least, with Hawkwood fighting for Milan, Florence, and the Papacy at various points, although contrary to popular beliefs about mercenaries, Hawkwood did not suddenly switch sides on the eve of battle, or avoid battle entirely. Along with sacks and sudden assaults by storm and stealth, he was a master of the feigned retreat, luring his foes into vulnerable positions for a counter-charge. He participated in the brutal Massacre at Cesena while working for the papacy, and then switched to secular service.

Saunders makes the case for Hawkwood as an influential figure of the age. Aside from someone who executed the bloody intrigues of Italian politics, he also served as model for the protagonist of Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale" (the two met several times), and advanced English foreign policy in Italy, a vital market for English wool, and a strategic theater for apply leverage against the French from a second front.

Despite his long career and evident success in battle, Hawkwood died essentially broke, leaving his wife and children to make their own way in the world rather than establishing a major line. Dying in bed at the age of 71 or 72 is more than a lot of his contemporaries could say.

A Distant Mirror, this book, Mercenaries and Their Masters and t
The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior would make a solid survey of the era.

Fascinating account of an English mercernary who fought for the Pope and then for wealthy merchants when the Pope could no longer ante up. Some interesting insights into Medieval Italy and the Papacy as well as the nascent stages of what would become the English empire.

You can tell a book is good when you want to go off and visit all the places mentioned in it, retrace the steps of the man.

I had never heard of Sir John Hawkwood before, nor this book. I came upon both by good fortune, £3 secondhand in an Oxfam shop!

I wasn’t looking forward to reading it, although set in my favourite period, fourteenth to early fifteenth century, it was the subject matter that was a little worrying. I knew, or rather expected the content to be bursting at the gunwales with mindless violence and destruction; I was right, but there is so much more.

Frances uses Hawkwood as an instrument to reveal many aspects of late medieval life in rich detail, most of which, but not all, full of the darker sides of humanity. I’m not a historian, so I can’t pass profound judgment upon how well the content was researched; however, in my ignorance, it looks like she has researched not only Hawkwood’s story but many other related topics well enough to paint a vivid picture of life in northern Italy at that time.

The text is engaging, flowing so very well, starting at what seems like a frantic pace, slowing towards the end of the book; perhaps, because by now Hawkwood was in his mid-sixties, his life itself slowing somewhat. Frances’ language is eloquent throughout, except for dates, when she resorts to pidgin English: 20 March, instead of the 20th of March! It’s as if the main body of text is written by an educated person fluent in English, while the dates have been inserted by someone learning English as a third or forth language, having not yet learnt the basics of grammar.

Highly recommended reading!

A foray into how the turbulent war periods of Italian city-states created a vacuum into which one man was able to rise from general obscurity as a waylaid English veteran to one of the most powerful middlemen in Italian pre-Renaissance politics. Saunders wanders through generally exposing readers to life during the period and the conditions that led to the rise of mercenary companies to investigating how individual personalities interacted in ways that created conflict while at the same time finishing it. I recommend someone read this book if they are into Renaissance history, want to learn more about the often-less-covered stories of people who lived through it, or want a writer who can craft spicy metaphors in the smaller details of their sentences.

All books about medieval European individuals are bold - unless they are about St.Augustine, who alone felt the need to share his memories of his thoughts and feelings at length with posterity, for everyone else the best that can be achieved is a life and time flavoured with conjecture.

Hawkwood was an Englishman from Essex who led the White Company, a band of mercenaries, that operated in northern Italy during the fourteenth century. I found the book a disappointing read since I wanted more detail on how the mercenary company operated. It seems that the source material only dealt indirectly with Hawkwood and his activities and there didn't seem much of an attempt to look at comparable, but better documented contemporary military undertakings as a way of understanding how Hawkwood and Co went about their business. Nor was there any attempt to put Hawkwood in a wider context of how wars were conducted in the period.

On the other hand it is a reasonably written book for a general audience about a topic that is fairly obscure (the activities of an English mercenary company in medieval Italy) as well as inaccessible for most English readers and for that it deserves full credit.

I love it, I love condottieri and the Italian Renaissance and the mindset of mercenaries, who lived in an age where religion was a given. Saunders gives a very readable narrative thread in this, weaving facts about Hawkwood with the history and feel of the time so it never feels stagnant.

I very rarely read non-fiction, but this is truly a good book to get into if you like the subject. It never becomes too dry, which I feel is hard to do sometimes with such fact-heavy historical non-fiction.