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 deta...

So you thought the 21st century was bad? Try living in Italy in the 14th century. Of course you had plague, famine, poverty, and bloodshed, but don't forget the social injustice, backwards medicine, poor hygiene, living in filth, and religious mania. Although this book paints quite the picture of life in Europe of the Middle Ages, the most incredible thing isn't how bad it really was, but that we managed to actually survive as a species through it all. But that's not really what the book is supp...

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...

Highly accessible history of late Medieval Italy. This is a superb read, one that is evocative of Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror.Like Tuchman, Saunders frames her book around the life and times of an individual - in this case, English mercenary John Hawkwood, who found himself in rather constant employ due to the various feuds and wars among the city-states of Italy.Through Hawkwood, we get a good look at several of the major players in the region during this time - Catherine of Siena, the V...

Hawkwood is one of those books that contains so much information, by the time you get to the end you’ve forgotten the beginning. It’s amazing how the author has discovered so many historical threads from over six hundred years ago. Of course, a quick look at the bibliography reveals a tremendous amount of research. John Hawkwood was one of the most successful mercenaries of his time and lived to the ripe old age of 74, apparently dying in his bed. He became the leader of great Companies of unemp...

Long before Italian organised crime had become...er organised; a bunch of 14th Century Essex boys were pillaging, extorting, kidnapping, raping, murdering and betraying their way through the Italian City States with a vengeance. The most successful or them was "Sir" John Hawkwood, son of an Essex Yeoman whose meteoric rise as a Mercenary in the labyrinthine world of Italian politics led him to wealth, castles, royal in-laws, a state funeral in Florence and a big assed fresco in the Duomo that ca...

Absolutey fascinating account, not only about the life of the man, but also his times. I liked the writing style as well as the myriad details of life in the fourteenth century. Did not want to put it down. It stripped the glamour from the popular tales of chivalry and painted a stark portrait of the impracticalities of riding into battle encased in heavy metal armour. No mere recitation of dry facts and dates. "Lying face down in the mud encased in seventy pounds of armour was a disadvantageous...

A fantastic book, completely engrossing. Using Hawkwood as her vehicle, the author invites you into the merciless world of 14th C. Italian politics, dealing the intrigues, personalities and scandals of the day with vivid storytelling. The book could easily have descended into a repetitive confusion (Hawkwood's life, as with his client states, was one of endless battling, extortion, ransoming, changes of allegiance, then more battling, more ransoming). Thankfully though, with her eye for the inte...

Interesting because the connection to Chaucer, but not really the biography it claims on the back cover. Also it seems to lose steam.

This book is tentatively about the life of the famous English condottiere John Hawkwood who made a life for himself and his White Company robbing, blackmailing, betraying and fighting all around Italy in the XIVth century. But since records in the XIVth century were pretty scarce there is not a huge amount of information out there about Hawkwood himself so in order to fill the voids the book deals with the political and military history of XIVth century Italy. And what a history it is! The wars

14th century Italy was a battleground torn apart and ravaged by foreign mercenaries. Unfortunately, the city-states of the time depended on the mercenaries for individual survival and instead of kicking them out, they made war more profitable by hiring them. I loved this book because it helps me to better understand the political climate that Leonardo da Vinci grew up in and why his 8-foot bronze horse was destroyed. What I love about the Devil's Broker is how outside of telling you the story of...

1300's Italy, what could go wrong at this time period. The Renaissance is beginning, millions in Gold Florins are being spent on private armies, Black Death, poor harvests and famine, and millions spent on art, books, literature is expanding, the Church is in crisis, Etc Etc. On this seen arrives Hawkwood and the White Company, makes millions and has millions in costs. A quick read on a time that I am not overly familiar with. Very informative if your a history buff. Maps are excellent. The styl...

John Hawkwood was born in Essex. He went to France with King Edward III. For whatever reason, Hawkwood did not return to England. He became a member of the 'routers' in France--pillaging the villages and country-side. Eventually, his group was hired by a pope to stop other 'routers' from pillaging.Thus began the career of John Hawkwood in Europe.Hawkwood eventually arrives in Italy where the Catholic Church wants to put down the 'liberty-loving' Italians. At times, Hawkwood works for the Church;...

Wow. This is an intense history of the English mercenary John Hawkwood, who pillaged his way up and down the Italian peninsula in the 14th century. The violence was frankly shocking at times - the massacre at Cesena was something I'd never heard about, and was dumbfounded by the gratuitous cruelty. The depiction of the sad state of the medieval church (before, during, and after the Schism) was also - well, depressing and fascinating in a sickening way, with definite echoes in the modern power el...

This is more a history of 14th century Italy built around the life of Hawkwood. I learned lots about the papacy, Northern Italian states and life i that time than I did about the ‘diabolical Englishman’. That’s probably because we just don’t have much in the way of primary sources related to Hawkwood. It’s clear thee are big gaps, and certain aspects of his relationships are pure speculation (like what is the deal with Catherine of Siena - lots is intimated with no facts). The history is interes...

just started this account of John Hawkwood, mercenary general and power broker in Italy for decades, a self-made millionaire and landowner, soldier, general, politician, power broker in the most turbulent and violent of times and places. Definately demonstrates the DANGERS OF CREATING ARMIES, USING THEM FOR YEARS, LEAVING THEM WITHOUT $ OR DIRECTION AT THE END OF THE WAR. WITHOUT WAR THEY HAD TO TURN THEIR ABILITIES TO THEFT AND EXTORTION ON A GRAND SCALE AND DID SO. After WW1 &WW2 the armies we...

Hawkwood is a larger than life character, who’s is a fiction writers dream. This book brings his life and the 1400s right up in front of the reader, you can smell the rotting corpses and hear the dying screaming. This is non fiction at its best,which tells the story of one mans pursuit of glory and gold in the tribal society that was Italy.Spanning more than 50 years of war, famine, plague, death and intrigue. .....

The Vatican, Avignon, and Italian city-states employ mercenary companies in petty wars with each other; leave it to an Englishman to profit of it for three decades.

If there had been proper footnotes, this would have been a better book. The book is more about late fourteenth century Italy than it is about Hawkwood and mercenaries. What's there is very interesting, but the diversions from Hawkwood's story make it hard to follow. It's also very easy to lose interest in some of the asides.

There is no doubt that John Hawkwood - later Sir John - was a significant figure in 14th Century France and, especially, Italy. His role was as the leader of an unlawful band of mercenaries, in variable numbers but often in thousands, who sold themselves to the highest bidder in a volatile country of warring Communes. Changes of side were frequent and cynical. The package came complete with all services: not just battles and sieges but pillage, rape and destruction. The sums paid were huge and m...

Thorough and very engaging bio of condottiere Sir John Hawkwood, the subject of Uccello's monumental Duomo painting and, if Terry Jones is right, the model for Chaucer's Knight. I read it to learn more about someone in whom I became interested while reading A Distant Mirror and, indeed, identical in form and contiguous in subject matter, the entire book is sort of an appendix to Tuchman's monumental popular history. Saunders isn't coy about acknowledging the debt. My interest in the 14th centur...

I feel that this book was far too focused on presenting the image of the Mercenary Captain John Hawkwood as one of the big players in Italian Politics in the third quarter of the 14th C, while the Italians themselves are presented as mere pawns of the mercenaries (though the author seems to want to gloss over most of them except Hawkwood). It tends to gloss over many other aspects of the political landscape and takes pains to emphasize tenuous political connections between parties (Catherine of

Wow; it's pretty grim living in the 15th Century, perhaps particularly in pre-unification Italy when every city-state is forming and then breaking alliances with every other city-state, and hiring mercenaries to do their slaughtering for them. That is, until the said mercenaries turn the tables on their employers and are hired by the enemy who is able to pay them a bit more than you do.. Meanwhile, each time, it is the civilian population who suffers the most as the way each little war begins is...

You think 13th century Italy: famine, the plague, nothing much going on, right? Wrong!! Try the birth of the mercenary. Havoc and pillage!This book is the story of John Hawkwood, an Englishman, who went to Europe to devestate, rape, and ravage . . . for pay. And, when one set of employers couldn't afford him any longer, their enemies hired him. This is also a fascinating look at the inability of the Italian city-states to pull together against a greater evil (in this case the mercenaries) becaus...

Interesting approach to the life of the legendary condottiero John Hawkwood, presenting him as a figure flitting in and out of the larger story of 14th Century Italy, with its myriad intrigues, wars and general miseries. The author writes with flair, deploying colourful metaphors to paint images of a horrible time in history.The book reminded me of Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. Saunders herself makes reference to it (and several other books, I think), to make sure the comparison escapes no...

When you tell people you've just read a history of Italy in the 14th century and it was fascinating, you can see from their face they find this difficult to believe. But Stonor has the all too rare ability and the research to make this period come alive vividly, as well as the skill to use Hawkwood as the narrative thread to hold it all together and not have the book just become a collection of information. Fascinating story of a period I hadn't known so much about, and illuminates a number of p...

Whilst I cant say I am warming to Mr Hawkswood, who was an Essex man gone to the devil, I think Historian Frances Stonor Saunders has written a remarkable book - one of those books where you learn not one but five ( or more!) new facts per page -and I read a lot of history books these days! For those who have visited Florence Cathedral there is a fresco painting by no less an artist that Paulo Uccello of this "Diabolical Englishman" - Ioannes Acutus - recognised in Florence for having laid waste...

Continuing my reading of the beginning of the renaissance, this book reports the changing allegiances of a so called crusader, really one of thousands mercenaries who had no war or living to pursue. His name was John Hawkwood. The time of his rampages in Italy coincide with the huge power of Milan, Joanna 1 of Naples, and great beginning art in Florence. The papacy started the policy of hired "guns", but was very week due to a split between Rome and Avignon, Italian and French control of the chu...

This book couldn't decide what it wanted to be (or I couldn't decide what it was trying to be). Is it a biography of mercenary Sir John Hawkwood? A history of the use of mercenaries by the Italian City-States? A political history of Italy before unification? Now, any one of these could have been the main topic and yet included the others. But instead the book seemed to veer around. If it is a biography of Hawkwood, why so much about St. Catherine of Siena? If it is a history of mercenaries durin...

A fascinating look at the little known side of early Renaissance Italy. The 14th Century was a bad one for the Italians with wars between the city-states, a corrupt papacy, and mercenary armies overshadowing all. The book centers on an especially prominant, successful and duplicitous mercenary general -- one John Hawksworth of Essex, England -- who at one time was on the payroll of every major faction and turned coat as fast as the money could be counted out. Saunders makes one misstep: painting...