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The working title was ‘Lust, Mayhem and Old Masters’. I became interested in the Italian military entrepreneurs (condottieri) of the late Middle Ages through art, specifically the murals in the Florence Duomo of Sir John Hawkwood (Giovanni Acuto) by Paolo Uccello and of Niccolò ‘da Tolentino’ Mauruzzi by Andrea del Castagno. I first saw them when I hitch-hiked down to Florence after the disastrous flood of 1966 to see what I could do to help. Our motley gang of volunteers ended up shovelling compacted sewage out of the cellars of the old city, and got plastered every night drinking the bottles we dug up – as the labels were washed off, it was quite an education. They put up a memorial to us, the ‘Angels of the Mud’ no less, next to the Arno.
Thirty-five years later I discovered Roberto Damiani’s superb www.condottieridiventura.it and, with his consent, decided to build a book around the feud between the Malatesti of Rimini and the Montefeltri of Urbino that weaves through the entire Age of the Condottieri. The more I dug into the subject, the more apparent it became that the condottieri were as much an integral part of the Renaissance as the arts, architecture and letters. Skill at arms – and the cunning (furbizia) that was the essential quality possessed by successful condottieri – was the most valued of all the specialist talents unleashed by the late medieval commercial and industrial revolutions. It was the emergence of the cash economy that represented the true watershed between the Renaissance and the centuries that went before, and by far the biggest investment made by late medieval rulers was not in palaces and art but in castles and armed mercenaries. |
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