William Caferro's John Hawkwood is less than a biography but also much more. Little is known of the personal life of this mercenary, the most famous soldier of his age. Except for Paolo Ucello's fresco, executed over forty years after Hawkwood's death, no contemporary descriptions of his features, verbal or pictorial, survive, and other than his marriages, the births of children, legitimate and illegitimate, and his property transactions, no contemporary accounts allude to his private life. Instead, these matters derive from imaginary reconstructions of nineteenth-century romantics. Even few records survive for the first forty years of Hawkwood's public life, when he first emerged as a full-fledged captain of the White Company during the Pisan-Florentine war of 1363–64. We know that his training came in the Hundred Years' War, and it has been assumed that he fought in the famous battles of Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), but these are conjectures based on tactics Hawkwood later employed in Italian battles such as at the second battle of Cascina (1369) and Castagnaro (1387).
Instead, Caferro uses Hawkwood as the centerpiece to organize a well-crafted and prodigiously researched work on mercenaries and the impact of war on economy and society in fourteenth-century Italy. To follow Hawkwood from his Essex origins, his recruitment in France and movements up and down the Italian boot over thirty years until his death in 1394, Caferro has surveyed the archives and printed narrative sources in three countries and in numerous cities, discovering new letters of diplomatic correspondence, intrigue and dissimulation, along with details of Hawkwood's annual earnings and property transactions. As a result, Caferro has been able to remove Hawkwood from the previous Florentine-centric focus, falsely reconstructed by the Florentine propaganda machine after Hawkwood's death, and to challenge much of the Hawkwood myth about Italian mercenaries that has accrued over the centuries. For instance, contrary to his modern reputation first manufactured by his Florentine apotheosis, Hawkwood was a master of deceit and manipulation and as with mercenaries in general effectively extorted massive sums from city-states by brutality and terror. On at least two occasions, his cruelty reached catastrophic levels with the wholesale destruction and mass murder of innocents in two city-states, Faenza (1376) and Cesena (1377). However, against Garrett Mattingly's classic on Renaissance diplomacy, mercenaries such as Hawkwood were more than soldiers and often served as diplomats, negotiating major alliances and peace between city-states and monarchies.
The evidence shows that Hawkwood had no special reverence for or loyalty to Florence. His famed “pension” in 1375 was the product of bribery, and he had already cut similar deals with other city-states. His shift to work for Florence in 1377 similarly showed no affection for the Florentines other than for their florin, and in reality was more a shift to Milanese employment. If Hawkwood showed any attachment to any city-state, Lucca would make a better candidate, for he possessed citizenship there for a longer period than in Florence and used the Lucchese Guinigi as his bankers. Although Hawkwood ruthlessly played one city-state off another and used the factional rivalries of Italian city-states in search of his ultimate goal—money—he was not without his loyalties. These rested, however, outside Italy, with his home country, England, expressed by his devotion and service to the English crown. Hawkwood took on diplomatic missions for Richard II with the Milanese Visconti and, according to Caferro, may even have married Bernabò's illegitimate daughter, Donnina, to help cement English-Milanese ties. Through a detailed analysis of Hawkwood's property transactions, Caferro shows that Hawkwood siphoned off Italian revenues to build up his estates in and around his village of birth in Essex. It was his intent to return to England with his Italian family as other English mercenaries such as his comrade-in-arms, William Gold, had done. By 1392 Hawkwood had liquidated all his Florentine properties. One of Caferro's overarching themes is that mercenary warfare, in fact, stimulated new sentiments of national pride and loyalty, not only on the part of Hawkwood, but for other soldiers of English, German, and Hungarian descent.
By relying on a wide array of sources, Caferro reinterprets battles such as Hawkwood's last action in the field, his famous retreat from the forces of Giangaleazzo Visconti led by Jacopo dal Verme in 1391. The Florentine sources have celebrated Hawkwood's trickery, fooling dal Verme into attacking a camp that Hawkwood had abandoned during the night, giving the Florentines victory against the insurmountable odds of the supposedly much larger troops of the Milanese. Instead, the two armies were about the same size, and Hawkwood's retreat from Lombardy tilted the military advantage toward Milan for the next decade. Dal Verme, not Hawkwood, was the victor. In addition, Caferro shows that mercenary warfare was hardly bloodless, as those following in the footsteps of Niccolò Machiavelli often assume.
Caferro casts Hawkwood and the steep rise in mercenary activity in Italy after the Black Death in the larger contexts of cultural exchange and economic history. He paints fourteenth-century Italy as a melting pot of foreign fighters, where foes from different nations and traditions of fighting readily became allies from one battle to the next, exchanging fighting techniques, tactics, and lessons of dissimulation. Returning to his earlier book on Siena and mercenaries, Caferro shows the extraordinary sums captains such as Hawkwood could extort from employers and enemies alike. Despite claims of bankruptcy and poverty, Hawkwood's annual income regularly exceeded that of Italy's wealthiest merchant by five times and in good years such as 1377, it surpassed the revenue of major city-states such as Lucca. Caferro argues convincingly that these salaries, bribes, and profits from marauding were a major force in accelerating the changing political geography of Italy during the early Renaissance, its transformation from a myriad of city-states to the five principal territorial states.
On the negative side, larger than normal numbers of typographical errors mar this work. Several are more than minor irritations: the famous massacre of Cesena occurred in 1377, not 1376 (22 and 175); Robert of Geneva was the future antipope, Clement VII, not Innocent VII (24), and map 4 (52) invents a new town called “Arno” in the place of Pisa. Nonetheless, Caferro's work is a major accomplishment, a spirited reinterpretation of Hawkwood and the place of mercenary warfare in the formation of early Renaissance Italian politics and economy.
