Mercenaries and their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy

Their concern was not to annihilate their rivals, but to achieve security and predominance within clearly defined spheres of influence. Their population resources were a good deal more limited than their wealth, and so their weapons were small professional mercenary armies, the activities of which were related to the needs and intentions of the sta

Exiles and disbanded mercenaries were the two most likely starting points for any company and it was probably a combination of the two.

But perhaps the most significant and powerful of the new officials was the collaterale who began to assume an overall responsibility for the administration of the army. He drew up and signed the contracts, supervised inspections and pay, detected deserters and controlled demobilisation, and oversaw all the support services. He enforced the series o

Andrea Toma-celli, who had used Boldrino to help him restore order in the Papal States, decided that he would anticipate Boldrino’s next desertion and win popularity with the local inhabitants by having him murdered at a dinner party in Macerata. Bold-rino’s company is said to have carried the body of their murdered leader with them for two years a

by the mid-fifteenth century, all Italian states were using another type of cavalry force known as the lanze spezzate. The name means broken lances and clearly the origins of such troops were individual cavalrymen who for various reasons had become detached from condottiere companies and their traditional lance formation, and had taken service dire

The Italian republics, Florence and Venice, were often loth to give sweeping powers to a soldier. It meant paying a high salary as well as running the risks of a military coup. There was a lingering belief that it was better to employ all the good condottieri available and hope that they would seek to excel each other, even if cooperation between t

Some of the earliest mercenary companies originated as the bodyguards of civic officials.

It has been argued with great cogency that the principal driving force in the growth of organised bureaucracy, of fiscal and credit institutions, and ultimately of centralised political power, was the rising cost of warfare, and nowhere was this more clear than in Italy.

Recent research into the Hundred Years War in Britain and France has emphasised that ‘war was the continuous exertion of military pressure, mainly on the civilian population’, but this is not the end of the interrelationship between war and society. Armies were not just the scourge of civilians, they were also the employees of civilians. They had t