Hawkwood - Frances Stoner Saunders

Question: What's the similarity between Pablo Escobar and Sir John Hawkwood?
Answer: Both rose from obscurity to infamy by consummate nastiness.
Question 2: What's the difference between them?
Answer 2: In the 14th Century, everyone was being nasty.

And in a nutshell, that is the life story of Sir John Hawkwood, Condottierei.
Hawkwood was one of the thousands of British soldiers discharged at the end of the Hundred Years War between England and France, just one of the many who feared peace more than they feared war. War had been the making of him after all and yet now there was no need for warriors; if not for a richly equipped knight then certainly not for a lowly longbowman like John Hawkwood who owned only his bow and the clothes on his back. Unwilling to go home and unsure what to do in his brave new world, joining the eponymously titled Great Company and becoming a mercenary was the obvious career path. Enough so that he formed his own force, the famed White Company.
But where to go?

How about sunny Italy?

Italy of the early Renaissance was hardly a single entity - riven with faction fighting, dominated by city states such as Milan, Florence, Venice and Rome and growing rich on trade. As well as being temptingly rich targets for plunder, the city states were admirably (to Hawkwood's eyes) pragmatic: not many of their respective populations were much cop at this war malarkey and even fewer had the stomach for it; so why not hire these roving, hardened, experienced multi-national armies to do their fighting for them? And if the cities didn't do it then one of the Popes surely would, if only to try and give his rival a right good kicking. Perfect.
And so began a career that would see this humble archer rise to become one of the richest and skilled warriors in the whole of Europe - enough so that on his death no lesser person than the King of England himself demanded that his body be repatriated.

Saunders' account is a thing of beauty; there's as much politics and diplomacy as there is outright brawling and Hawkwood is shown to be effective at all 3 when the picture of a 14th Century mercenary (or at least the one I received in school) is generally of a frequently drunken maniac who delights in breaking things and picking fights with his own side. Apart from one glaring episode that gained him widespread notoriety (ironically enough when in the Pope's service) Hawkwood seems to have had a firmer grasp on the concepts of loyalty and honour than most of his higher-stationed contemporaries, again giving the lie to the thick-headed mercenary picture. When he was called on to draw his sword, however, he was almost chillingly effective and hardly ever beaten throughout his career.

This is a wonderful read - fast paced and atmospheric enough to grab your interest and keep it, yet subtle enough that by the end of it you get the feeling of learning something without actually doing much work. The Holy Grail of Military History if ever there was one.

7 out of 10