Condottieri

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Condottieri (singular condottiere (in English) or condottiero (in Italian)) were mercenary leaders employed by Italian city-states from the late Middle Ages until the mid-sixteenth century.

Leonardo da Vinci's Il Condottiero, 1480.
Leonardo da Vinci's Il Condottiero, 1480.

Contents

[edit] History

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Italian city-states were becoming enriched by their trade with the Orient. These cities, such as Venice, Florence, and Genoa, had woefully small armies and were increasingly becoming targets of attack by foreign powers as well as envious neighbours. The noblemen ruling the cities soon resorted to hiring companies of mercenaries known as condotta ("contract") to defend their territories. Each condotta was led by a condottiere, a term which soon became synonymous with "captain".

The very first of these bands (called in contemporary Italy masnada, plural masnade) appeared between the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of fourteenth centuries and were not of Italian origin. Soldiers came mainly from Germany, Brabant (brabanzoni), Aragon and Catalonia: the last, for example, had come to Italy following King Peter III of Aragon in the October 1282 and had remained there afterward searching for employers. Other mercenaries came in 1333 alongside John of Bohemia, and therefore served Perugia in his war against Arezzo with the name Compagnia della Colomba ("Dove Company"). Some of these masnade were merely a grouping of bandits and other desperate men.

A 17th century Condottiero , by Artemisia Gentileschi.
A 17th century Condottiero , by Artemisia Gentileschi.

Later these bands were joined by the first true organized Ventura Companies, those of Duke Werner of Urslingen and count Konrad von Landau. The Italian noble Lodrisio Visconti countered by creating the "Company of St. George". Werner's company differed from the previous ones by a code of laws which imposed a rigid discipline and an equal division of income. This company was increased until it turned into the fearsome "Great Company", which had up to 3,000 barbute, each barbuta including a knight and a sergeant.

The bands of condottieri became notorious for their caprice. They would often change sides to a higher paying rival before or even during battle. They soon realized that they held a monopoly on military power in Italy and began dictating terms to their ostensible employers. Many, such as Braccio da Montone and Muzio Sforza, became powerful political figures in the fourteenth century. The condottieri also became reluctant to place themselves or their men in harm's way and began fighting each other in grandiose but often pointless and nearly bloodless "battles". They still retained grand armored knights and medieval weapons and tactics long after the rest of Europe had converted to more modern armies composed of pikemen and musketeers.

Cola di Rienzo had Werner executed in Rome in 1347, and Landau took over the Great Company. Landau, betrayed by his Hungarian soldiers, was defeated in 1362 by Albert Sterz and John Hawkwood's "White Company", which used more advanced combat tactics and formations. The barbuta was replaced by the lancia comprising three men: a capo-lancia and groom, both mounting a battle horse, plus a boy using a lesser quality horse. Five lance formed a posta, five poste a bandiera ("flag"). Now as many the condottieri comprised as many Italian companies as foreign, creating soon a host of national companies: they included the Astorre Manfredi's Compagnia della Stella ("Star's company"), a new Company of St. George under Ambrogio Visconti, Niccolò da Montefeltro's Compagnia del Cappelletto ("Little Hat Company"), and Giovanni da Buscareto and Bartolomeo Gonzaga's Compagnia della Rosa, the last using a name of its own.

From the 15th century onward the companies' leaders were mainly Italian: they were nobles who for some reason had not been able to succeed in their lands and had therefore chosen the fighting life. In that century, the most famous condottiero was Giovanni dalle Bande Nere from Forlì, son of Caterina Sforza. He also known as "the last condottiero" (but that means "the last famous condottiero"). His son was Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.

Sometimes even princes fought for some periods as condottieri in order to increase their revenues: the most notable cases are Sigismondo Malatesta, lord of Rimini, and Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino. Incomes were high indeed, though it should be noted that inflation was high in Italy during the period:

The leaders of these new condottieri companies were not chosen by their men, but viceversa. The condotta become a consolidated form of contract. When the contract period (ferma) ceased, the company must wait another period called aspetto ("wait") in which the State kept the possibility of renewing it. If the contract ended in a definitive way, the condottiero could not declare war upon the other contracting party before two years had passed.

The condotta was also applied for sea mercenaries. This was called contratto d'assento, and assentisti were the captains and venturers hired in this way. These were mainly used by Genoa and the Papal States from the 14th century. Venice instead considered it a humiliating way to hire sailors and never used it, even in the most dangerous periods of her history.

The condottieri were masters of the battles fought in Italy for the whole 15th century. By the time of the wars in Lombardy, Niccolò Machiavelli observed, "None of the principal states were armed with their own proper forces":

“ Thus the arms of Italy were either in the hands of the lesser princes, or of men who possessed no state; for the minor princes did not adopt the practice of arms from any desire of glory, but for the acquisition of either property or safety. The others (those who possessed no state) being bred to arms from their infancy, were acquainted with no other art, and pursued war for emolument, or to confer honor upon themselves. ”
History I.vii.

As time passed, the financial interests and the increasing political role the captains were playing led to some serious drawbacks: often the condottieri behaved treacherously and tended to solve the clashes by bribing or asking for bribes themselves instead of combat. The condotta being such a lucrative activity, the contenders had little interest to risk their army in a bloody clash: if a pitched battle was unavoidable, they tended to avoid heavy losses and leave the field preserving as much as possible of the army.

The end of the condottieri age began in 1494 with the first great foreign invasion in more than a century: Charles VIII's national French army proved quite a match for the divided Italian states and smaller condottieri armies. Charles also introduced the massive use of artillery, which the condottieri could not withstand. Some of the most renowned condottieri chose therefore to fight for foreign powers: Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, for example, abandoned Milan for France, while Andrea Doria became admiral of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles.

The lavishly adorned but ineffective condottieri were increasingly powerless against the armies of the nations of Western Europe that flooded into Italy in the 16th century, during the Italian Wars. The condottieri were no more a match for the Swiss pikemen, German Landsknechts, English musketeers, French cavalry or Spanish tercios.

The condotta had disappeared by 1550. The term condottiero remained to indicate great Italian generals mainly fighting for foreign states. Figures like Marcantonio II Colonna and Raimondo Montecuccoli were prominent well into the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries.

[edit] Famous condottieri

Main article: List of condottieri
Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, lord of Rimini, by Piero della Francesca.
Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, lord of Rimini, by Piero della Francesca.

[edit] Main battles of condottieri

[edit] Sources

  • (1844-1845) Storia delle compagnie di ventura in Italia, 4 vols.. 
  • Mallett, Michael (1974). Mercenaries and their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy. Rowman and Littlefield. 
  • Rendina, Claudio (1992). I Capitani di ventura. Newton Compton. 
  • Machiavelli, Niccolò. History of Florence. (on-line text)

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../c/o/n/Condottieri.html"