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In the summer of 1436, the painter Paolo Uccello put the finishing touches to a vast image on the wall of Florence's cathedral, a fresco of a soldier, mounted and armoured, with an inscription underneath hailing him as a great military commander. This is one of the most famous paintings of the early Renaissance, but it does not depict one of the great Italian mercenary commanders, or condottieri, of late medieval Italy. Instead it honours John Hawkwood, the son of a tanner from Essex in England. How did he come to be immortalised on the walls of Florence's
famous cathedral? This is the story of Sir John Hawkwood, England's forgotten condottiere. The man known to history as Sir John Hawkwood was born around the year 1323 in the village of Sible Hedingham, in the county of Essex in south-eastern England. His family's unusual surname is rendered as Hawkwood in most modern studies, yet it could be spelled in many different ways in the medieval era, such as Hauvod or Auchevod. John tended to prefer Haukevvod, which came closer
to rendering 'wood' in the Old English form wudu from which the modern word derives. In Italy, he would later be known by several different names, among them Giovanni Acuto, Giovanni being the Italian variant of John, and Acuto meaning 'astute' or 'sharp', a reference to his perceived intelligence as both a commander and a political leader. John's father was Gilbert Hawkwood. Although legend later portrayed John as coming from a poor background and rising from nothing to riches in a faraway land, in reality his father was a comparatively affluent man in fourteenth-century England, a tanner by trade who had made enough money to acquire a sizeable amount of land. He was therefore among the wealthiest
commoners in this corner of Essex, and he left behind a substantial estate when he died in 1340. However, John was a younger son, which meant that he would not inherit much more than a small financial bequest when his father died and would have to make his fortune elsewhere in the world. As for John's mother, there is no concrete record of her identity and who she was is a question that has been raised repeatedly by historians. Based on the fact that John's father left a large number of small bequests to members of the Munne family in his will,
genealogical historians tend to favour the idea that John's mother's maiden name was Munne, but, on the other hand, she may have come from the Longwood family, as Gilbert Hawkwood acquired part of his wealth by inheriting a Longwood property during his lifetime. In the absence of accurate information about his mother's identity, a number of myths sprang up about her and John in late medieval times. The fourteenth-century Florentine chronicler, Filippo Villani, for instance, offered the highly colourful story that John's unusual surname was
derived from his mother's belief that she would give birth to a forest when pregnant with him. Owing to his background, we know little about the early life of John Hawkwood. He appears to have made the short trip from his home in Essex to London in his youth and was apprenticed to a clothworker in the city. This was a common enough path for a younger son in his position, as England's economy was highly reliant on the textile industry across Northern and Western Europe in late medieval and early modern times and the cloth trade was
a respectable one for a young man from an upwardly mobile family to enter into. Before long, though, events intervened to change his life path. In 1337, King Edward III of England went to war with France, at first aiming to recover some of the English royal family's lands that had been lost over 130 years earlier in places like Normandy by King John, though in 1340 he expanded his war aims to try to claim the French crown, portraying King Philip VI, the first Valois monarch of France, who had succeeded in 1328, as an upstart who had usurped Edward's own claim to rule France.
The Hundred Years' War would be fought intensely through the 1340s and 1350s in its first phase and provided the conduit for Hawkwood to change career and become a soldier. He is believed to have fought at the famous English victory at the Battle of Crécy on the 26th of August 1346, and again at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, during which the English destroyed a French army and captured King John II of France himself. Hawkwood would have learned his trade as a soldier in these years, perhaps first serving as a longbowman and then moving up the ranks.
One legend holds that he was knighted on the battlefield by King Edward III's heir, the Black Prince, but there is no tangible proof of this. Others argue that he was knighted after Crécy or Poitiers. All that is clear is that contemporaries and near contemporaries definitely believed Hawkwood was a knight and that he was one of thousands of Englishmen who was pulled out of civilian life and into the military world owing to the Hundred Years' War. The first phase of the war with the French came to an end in 1360 when England and France agreed to
the Peace of Brétigny, a victory for the English in which they acquired extensive territory, though not a decisive one, and the war would resume gradually in the late 1360s and early 1370s. A knock-on effect of the Peace of Brétigny was that tens of thousands of soldiers suddenly found themselves out of work in England and France. This soon resulted in the formation of so-called 'free companies', bands of roving mercenaries who lived in a quasi-lawless manner, offering their swords to the highest bidder in the many conflicts that characterised medieval Europe
in the aftermath of the Black Death. Hawkwood joined one of the largest of these free companies, the Great Company of English and Germans. The band gained a notorious reputation in 1360 when it marched on the city of Avignon in southern France, which since 1309 had been the seat of the Papacy rather than Rome. Eager to be rid of their presence, Pope Innocent VI encouraged them to head over the Alps and into Italy. Thus, in May 1361 the company arrived into the Plain of Lombardy led by their German commander, Albert Sterz, and with Hawkwood amongst their leading commanders. Here they soon became known as
the White Company, most likely owing to the white surcoats which they wore over their armour, though a rather romanticised later legend held that the name was derived from their polished steel armour flashing white in the sun. Whatever the truth of their name and its origin, the company soon gained a reputation for their efficacy on the battlefield, combining skilled English archers that fired from a distance with compact units of men wielding heavy lances at close quarters. Understanding Hawkwood's subsequent career in Italy and how he ended up being painted on the
wall of Florence Cathedral in 1436 requires an awareness of the political landscape into which he and his fellow mercenaries arrived in 1361. The Italian peninsula was deeply divided in the mid-fourteenth century. There were dozens of kingdoms, republics, dukedoms and smaller principalities here, from large ones such as the Papal State in central Italy, the Republic of Venice and the Lordship of Milan in the north, and the Kingdom of Naples in the south, to middling and smaller entities like the republics of Florence and Pisa in Tuscany.
These states were some of the wealthiest in Europe, as they controlled the trade between the rest of the continent and the lands in the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond in Asia, but the political atmosphere was also anarchic, with constant war between these states and internal conflicts as ambitious families vied for power in individual cities. These conflicts in turn created a demand for mercenary bands like the White Company. It was not long before the mercenary commanders, known in Italy as the condottiere, or 'contractors', began to seize power themselves in some of the Italian states. The most infamous of these condottiere
mercenary dynasties were the Visconti family, who had secured control over the Lordship of Milan. This tendency for Italian mercenary commanders to try to rise to rule over individual Italian city states themselves created a greater desire amongst the rulers of these polities to hire foreign mercenary bands, as they were perceived by the mid-fourteenth century as being more reliable as simple hired soldiers, though as Hawkwood's career was about to highlight, these foreign condottiere could just as easily become immersed in the politics of the peninsula.
For its first two years in Italy, the White Company acted in exactly the way that the rulers of the Italian city states wanted an ideal foreign mercenary band to behave. It was a broadly apolitical cadre of swords for hire in the wars of the north of the peninsula. Various powers hired them and unleashed them on their enemies. Thus, the company fought its way across the southern slopes of the Alps and across the Plain of Lombardy, storming towns and extracting ransom from the weaker states in order to leave their lands. They trapped one hostile
count in his own fortress and, on another occasion, even ransomed a captured bishop. The most striking moment in their involvement in Italy came on the 22nd of April 1363 when they clashed with another foreign mercenary company, the Great Company under Konrad von Landau, at the Battle at Canturino near Milan. Here the dismounted Englishmen shattered the opposing army and killed von Landau, a longstanding veteran of the wars in Italy, who had served various states such as Venice and the Marquis of Saluzzo going all the way back to the late 1330s.
Sterz, Hawkwood and the rest of the White Company fought at Canturino in the employ of the Marquis of Montferrat. Their victory, and the virtual destruction of the Great Company, which for decades had been a feature of the Italian military and political landscape, marked their ascent as a major player in the peninsula. In the aftermath of it, in the summer of 1363, the company acquired a wealthier and more powerful employer, the city of Pisa, a maritime republic which had long been locked in a bitter rivalry with its neighbour in Tuscany, the Florentine republic. Thus, the White Company marched south into Tuscany.
It was during the latest war between Pisa and Florence that the middle-aged commander from Essex would begin to cement his reputation as a military commander in Italy. In the winter of 1363 the Pisans, recognising his abilities, made him the captain of their combined forces, something which probably constituted his first independent command at around forty years of age. This coincided with Sterz's decision to leave the White Company and form a new mercenary outfit known as the Company of the Star that went to fight on the opposing side with the Florentines
after he fell out with the Pisans over a pay dispute. Sterz was also joining the stronger side and Hawkwood's first foray into independent command did not begin well. An offensive in early 1364, in one of the coldest seasons on record in fourteenth-century Italy, floundered in heavy snow and achieved nothing for Pisa. However, the Englishman then recovered well and led the Pisan army right up to the walls of Florence in the spring of 1364, burning the suburbs of the city and encamping there to taunt the Florentines within, although they soon departed, as they lacked the resources to capture the city itself.
Then Florence's superior financial resources began to turn the tide of the conflict as they hired the Company of the Star and the forces of another Italian condottiere, Galeotto Malatesta, to strike back at Hawkwood and the Pisans. Thus, in the late summer, at the Battle of Cascina near Pisa, Hawkwood was drawn into a pitched battle in which he misjudged the terrain and was defeated by Malatesta's forces. Hundreds of Hawkwood's men were captured and paraded through the streets of Florence in an act of humiliation, while Pisa concluded peace terms with the Florentines not long afterwards, in which they agreed to pay a heavy indemnity.
In theory, Hawkwood had lost his first war as commander and the White Company is viewed as disintegrating in the aftermath of the defeat at Cascina, but he had emerged as an independent mercenary commander in Italy after a long apprenticeship serving under others. The years after the Pisan-Florentine War of 1363 to 1364 saw Hawkwood living a precarious life as a roving captain, hiring out his small band of followers to whoever paid the most money. They fought extensively in Tuscany and beyond. There were mixed fortunes during this period.
In 1367, he won a substantial victory over the city state of Siena, but in 1369 he suffered a humiliation when he and his men were ambushed outside the city of Arezzo and he was taken prisoner. He was soon ransomed and back in the saddle, leading a band that called itself the Company of Saint George in Tuscany. Gradually, however, his sword was drawn into the service of the greatest power in northern Italy, the city of Milan, which was ruled by then by the Visconti family, condottiere themselves who were transitioning to become firm rulers over the northern city. The dominant figure within the family
was Bernabo Visconti, an unpredictable tyrant who was infamous for his enormous family of several dozen legitimate and illegitimate children and his long struggle against the Papacy to acquire lands along the border between the Lordship of Milan and the Papal State. Hawkwood soon became one of Visconti's most valued mercenary commanders. Fighting for Milan against the Pope, in the early 1370s he established himself as one of the most formidable soldiers in all of Italy. The war between Milan and the Papacy reached its height in June of 1372 when Hawkwood's forces and
the Milanese clashed with a Papal army near the small town of Rubiera in northern Italy. Though outnumbered, Hawkwood manoeuvred his men to outflank and surround the enemy, capturing most of their leading officers, winning his most impressive victory in several years and striking a substantial blow against the Papal cause in the war. This confirmed Hawkwood's standing as one of the finest generals on the peninsula, a reputational advance which spurred him to immediately change sides in the war. When his contract with Milan came up for renewal, he demanded higher pay and resources to hire more men. When Visconti refused, it drove Hawkwood into the employ of Pope Gregory XI, who had risen to
power in Avignon in 1370 and who was planning to try to restore the Papacy to power in Rome itself, with control of the Papal States that controlled most of central Italy. Thus, in an act which highlighted the perennially self-serving nature of the condottiere captains of late medieval Italy, Hawkwood joined the Papal cause that he had only recently been fighting against. Visconti's revenge from Milan was characteristically fierce. He imprisoned Hawkwood's mistress and children, who were living in Milanese territory, and held them hostage, offering to only release them once the English commander came back to his service.
Hawkwood refused, but he would soon find common cause again with Visconti. In 1375 a new and bigger war broke out, one that would come to define Hawkwood's career and shape the politics of Europe beyond Italy. This is known as the War of the Eight Saints. It involved the Papacy and Milan again, but the bigger issue lay between Florence and the Papacy. Gregory XI was determined to restore the Papacy to power in Rome and return from Avignon after more than 60 years of Papal exile in France. As a precondition he wished to expand the Papal State's temporal power in central Italy, a strategy which concerned the Florentines, as they perceived this
as a threat to their independence. Thus, they organised a league of several Italian states, including the Milanese, to wage war against the Papacy. They then placed the management of the war in the hands of a small committee of eight officials, known as the 'Eight of War'. It was from this body that the name of the conflict, the War of the Eight Saints, took its peculiar name, as many of the subsequent accounts of it were written from a pro-Florentine perspective. Hawkwood played a role in bringing the war about, though not in the way one might expect.
In the summer of 1375, having not been paid by the Pope, he led his company into Tuscany to simply plunder the region, however the suspicion at the time was that Hawkwood was unofficially acting on the Pope's orders and that Hawkwood's raid was a forerunner of what would happen to Tuscany if the Papacy was restored to Rome and tried to annex the independent Tuscan republics. This ultimately spurred the Florentines to form their alliance and commence the war. For the first two years of the War of the Eight Saints, Hawkwood fought for Pope Gregory against
the league that had been formed by Florence. This was purely for profit and there is no indication that he was ideologically aligned with the Papacy. Instead, he was pursuing a new strategy of accepting land in lieu of coins. The Pope, ensconced in Avignon still, was unable to pay Hawkwood and his men large amounts of money. Instead, Hawkwood accepted grants of land and castles in the Romagna region of central Italy, which formed part of the Papal State, slowly turning the English captain into a landed Italian lord just as Italian condottiere
like the Visconti had managed to do. In return he did Gregory's bidding, crushing risings in the towns of central Italy where the Florentines sought to try to undermine the strength of the Papal State, and campaigning against the states that had allied against the Pope. This was often thankless military brutalitytook the form of in a war of attrition, while in which it was difficult for Hawkwood to manage his men. After all, while he was receiving grants of land in lieu of steady pay, his men were often unpaid. In the spring of 1376 this led to his mercenaries
sacking the town of Faenza. In the process, black legends about Hawkwood's own cruelty as a military commander grew, though whether all of the stories which later attached themselves to Hawkwood should be believed or not is open to debate. However, in at least one instance, Hawkwood was at the centre of a notorious massacre during the War of the Eight Saints which there is little denying the accuracy. It happened in the town of Cesena in February 1377. What would become known as the Cesena Bloodbath had its origins in the actions of Robert of
Geneva, the Pope's governor of this region on the northern edge of the Papal States, south of Ravenna and northwest of Rimini. Robert, who as we will see later became the Antipope Clement VII, had brought in a force of Breton mercenaries to the region, the behaviour of whom angered the local people, leading to a revolt in Cesena. The cardinal called for Hawkwood to lead his men to his aid and when he arrived, stated that he wanted "blood and justice", according to one chronicle account. What followed was one of the most infamous atrocities of the
entire fourteenth century. On the cardinal's orders, and seemingly with Hawkwood's complicity, the soldiers fell upon the now-disarmed inhabitants and slaughtered men, women, children and the elderly in an indiscriminate manner. Estimates of the dead ranged from 2,000 to 8,000, while contemporaries wrote of brutal executions and people drowning to death in the moat of the town as they tried to flee. While Robert might have ordered it, there is no escaping that Hawkwood was partially to blame for the Cesena Bloodbath, although
some accounts did try to suggest that he tried to spare the lives of some of the women in the town. Nonetheless, the massacre at Cesena remains the biggest stain on his long career in Italy. Not long after the atrocity at Cesena, Hawkwood changed sides in the war, throwing in his lot in the late spring of 1377 with the league led by Florence and Milan. A generous interpretation of this might claim that he was so dismayed by what had transpired at Cesena that it caused him to switch sides. Whatever his motive, it was a diplomatic triumph for Milan,
and Hawkwood's return to ally with the Visconti was sealed with a direct personal alliance. Hawkwood married into the ruling family of Milan itself, taking as his wife a daughter of his old employer, Bernabo Visconti. Thus, this formerly landless soldier from Essex in England had now risen to become the son-in-law of one of the most powerful rulers in Italy. Meanwhile, the Florentines were pleased to have to no longer fight against the mercenary commander who they had come to call the English serpent. The wider War of the Eight Saints dragged on until a
peace was finally patched together in 1378. By then, Pope Gregory had left Avignon, arriving at Rome early in 1377 and ending the Avignon exile. As such, the war brought about the thing which the Florentines had feared, but the Papal State would remain broadly the size that it was and the Tuscan republics retained their independence into the late fourteenth century and beyond. Hawkwood came out of the war a much richer and more powerful man than he had entered it. Talk that he might finally abandon Italy and return home to England was no more than that, as he now had far too many vested interests in remaining in Southern Europe.
As is indicated by the imprisonment of his mistress and children by the Visconti when he changed sides to the Papacy in 1372, and his by marriage in the summer of 1377 to Donnina Visconti, an illegitimate daughter of Bernabo, in the summer of 1377, indicate, Hawkwood had started a family and married while all of these wars were being fought, Hawkwood had started a family and married. His union with Visconti also brought him a substantial parcel of lands near Milan as Donnina's dowry. She would bear him several children in the years thereafter, while he already had children from an earlier relationship,
including a daughter he married off to an Englishman from his native Essex. Most of his offspring were daughters, but late in his life a son and heir arrived. Hawkwood's new political and social prominence also made him useful in ways that had nothing to do with fighting. Most notably, in 1378, the government of the newly ascended King Richard II of England, the grandson of King Edward III, under whom Hawkwood had first gone to war in France nearly forty years earlier, began considering a marriage alliance with the powerful Visconti rulers of Milan.
As an Englishman and also the son-in-law of Bernabo Visconti, Hawkwood was an obvious diplomatic go-between for the English in Italy. The negotiations ultimately came to nothing, but the episode shows how far Hawkwood had risen. Where once he had been a soldier of fortune, now he was a landed lord in Italy and a trusted point of contact for the King of England south of the Alps. The entire episode also brought Hawkwood into contact with the famed late medieval English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer, who had been sent to Italy as part of an embassy to deliberate on
the proposed marriage, a meeting which has led to the theory that Chaucer was inspired by Hawkwood when writing the character of the knight in the prologue to The Canterbury Tales. For a brief few years around 1380, Hawkwood, who it must be remembered was now nearing sixty years of age, attempted the more settled life of a minor lord. He had acquired substantial estates and castles in Romagna over the years and he now set about developing these. For instance, he had salt and grain shipped along the rivers of his lands to sell at a profit,
employed a substantial staff, including a fellow Englishman as his estate manager, and rebuilt the fortresses in the region after the devastation of the War of the Eight Saints. He even began moving some of his Italian fortune back home to England, using the banking system that had been created in Italy, and which was being extended north of the Alps to important commercial centres like London, Bruges, Antwerp, Paris and Augsburg to transfer the money. This was then used to buy up some small manors in his native Essex in preparation for the
day when he might potentially return home. However, in the end, the life of a sedentary country lord did not suit Hawkwood. Rather his combative nature continued to be on display, as he became mired in a bitter and inconclusive feud with a neighbouring Italian landholder, Astorre Manfredi of Faenza, who was set on winning back territory which Hawkwood had acquired in the region. Worse still, he fell out with his own father-in-law. In 1379, Bernabo dismissed him from the service of Milan and confiscated the lands which had been given to him as Donnina's dowry.
The rift between them never fully healed, though Hawkwood would find new employers, above all the Republic of Florence. In the end, Hawkwood cut his losses, sold his lands in Romagna in 1381 to the city of Ferrara, and returned to making his living at the head of a mercenary band. With the Romagna lands sold, Hawkwood acquired a country residence near Florence, the formidable hilltop fortress of Montecchio near Arezzo, which he would keep for the rest of his life as his principal residence when not campaigning. for the rest of his life. Still,
these were years of tangled politics across Italy and he was frequently on the move. At the heart of this was a fresh problem within the church. Although Pope Gregory XI had returned to Rome at the start of 1377 and ended the 68-year-long exile of the Popes in France, his death not long afterwards in March 1378 had opened up an actual schism within the Catholic Church, as his successor in Rome, Pope Urban VI, was not supported by many of the cardinals of the church, who instead decided to support Robert of Geneva, the orchestrator of the Cesena Bloodbath,
to become a rival Pope at Avignon with the Papal title of Pope Clement VII. This Great Schism would last for nearly forty years until it was resolved in 1417. In its earliest stages it impacted on a war which was underway in southern Italy to claim control over the Kingdom of Naples, where rival claimants each backed a different Pope. England supported Pope Urban in Rome and sent letters to Hawkwood for him to act as an emissary to the Papal court in the Eternal City. Hence, he was now doubling as a diplomat for his homeland, while in 1383 he marched south
to campaign into the Kingdom of Naples in support of the claim of Charles of Durazzo, the claimant who had acknowledged Urban as the rightful Pope, against his rival, Louis of Anjou. Hawkwood did not win any major victories here to break the deadlock in the war, but he gained further riches and property after aligning with the Roman Pope. In 1385 the politics of Milan were transformed when Hawkwood's father-in-law and sometime enemy, Bernabo Visconti, was overthrown and imprisoned by his own nephew, Giangaleazzo, who now seized sole control of Milan. Bernabo died in prison a few months later, perhaps poisoned,
though he was into his sixties by then and his death was potentially coincidental. Giangaleazzo was arguably even more dangerous than his uncle, a calculating lord who was politically astute. He would transform the Lordship of Milan into a dukedom, becoming the first Visconti Duke of Milan in due course in 1395, and seeking to expand his dominions. In the process, he would become Hawkwood's greatest adversary in his final years. For the moment, though, Hawkwood was drawn back to northern Italy principally to fight on the side of the city of Padua after it went to war with Verona. His involvement in this conflict led
to one of his greatest victories in the spring of 1387 at the Battle of Castagnaro. Here, two armies faced each other across a flat plain divided by multiple irrigation ditches and a river. Hawkwood, who it should be remembered was now well into his sixties, old age by fourteenth-century standards, drew up his men behind the ditch and clandestinely had a stretch of it filled in order to fashion a way of crossing it once the fighting started. Then, as the battle commenced and his archers began raining down arrows onto the enemy, he led his best men across this newly created route and
attacked the exposed flank of the Veronese army. This broke the Veronese and Hawkwood captured many of their senior commanders, winning an almost total victory. Historians have compared the clash to the great English triumphs at Crécy and Poitiers thirty years before, which Hawkwood was potentially present at, while it was one of the crowning military victories of his entire career. After his triumph at Castagnaro, Hawkwood's last great campaign would pit him against Giangaleazzo Visconti of Milan, whose aggressive campaign to expand his territory had pushed its former ally
from the War of the Eight Saints, Florence, into war. In 1390 the wealthy Tuscan republic once again hired the old English commander, with whom its relationship had been so fraught over the years, to become captain-general of their forces. Then they sent him north to strike at the heart of Milanese power. The campaign became one of the most celebrated episodes of his career, not because Hawkwood won a major victory, but because of a successful retreat. After advancing deep into enemy country and with a lack of reinforcement, Hawkwood found
himself stranded and his supply lines severed by the enemy. Such was the desperation of his men that they were reduced to eating their own horses. But Hawkwood slipped out of the encirclement before he and his men were crushed. One night, after leaving their campfires burning and their banners tied up high in the trees to make the enemy believe that they were still lying in camp, he and his men began crossing through the countryside and over a nearby river to safety. The Milanese woke to find the camp empty and Hawkwood after escaping. It was a manoeuvre that captured
the imagination of future Florentine historians, and it sealed the old Englishman's reputation as a commander of genuine guile and intelligence. Afterwards, despite once being its enemy, the republican government of Florence granted Hawkwood full citizenship and a pension for the rest of his life. In 1392 a peace was signed with Milan, and with this, Sir John's long career as a commander began to draw to an inexorable conclusion roughly fifty years after it had started in France. In his final years Hawkwood's thoughts returned in a more sustained way to his homeland.
Despite his age, he appears to have made plans to return to England and retire in his native Essex. He married off several of his daughters to fellow soldiers rather than to Italian gentlemen and began selling some of his Italian properties, while he also sent a trusted representative back to England to perhaps make arrangements for his own return, though we cannot be fully sure that this was his ultimate intention, for he never made the trip. On the 17th of March 1394, Hawkwood died in Florence. Accounts suggest a stroke or a heart attack, though he was of an
advanced age as well, in his early seventies, and his death may have been relatively natural. The Tuscan city which he had waged war on several times earlier in his Italian adventures, and which he later served in several other conflicts, provided him with a funeral of remarkable splendour for an English-born mercenary commander. His body, for instance, was laid in cloth of gold in the city's great cathedral and the government of Florence voted to raise a marble monument in his honour, though the city authorities did not follow through on this idea. King Richard II of
England wrote to the Florentines to request that Hawkwood's body be returned home for burial, but, although the Florentines appear to have agreed initially, the corpse was never returned as disputes over his estate arose and created delays. As time dragged on, Hawkwood's remains were seemingly misplaced and where they ended up remains an enduring mystery. His widow Donnina eventually recovered her Milanese lands from her cousin, Giangaleazzo, while Sir John's only son and namesake headed for England to claim his father's estates there. John Jr. died childless,
bringing to an end the direct paternal line of this branch of the Hawkwood family. While the exact location of Hawkwood's remains is uncertain today, the foremost monument to him came 42 years after his death when, in 1436, the city of Florence, while it was still unwilling to pay for the marble tomb it had promised after his passing, commissioned the painter Paolo Uccello to create a fresco in his honour inside the great cathedral of the city. This was the image of Hawkwood on horseback which remains there to this day, painted in a kind of cold green to imitate a statue made of worn bronze or marble.
It bore a lengthy inscription underneath the horse that reads Ioannes Acutus eques brittanicus dux aetatis suae cautissimus et rei militaris peritissimus habitus est, meaning "John the Acute, British knight, most prudent leader of his age and most expert in the art of war". Further afield in Italy he became a legend, a paragon of the mercenary commander of the fourteenth century who had changed the peninsula's history for both good and bad, though in his own country, England, he was curiously all-but forgotten about for centuries thereafter,
remembered only via a monument of a carved hawk in his village church in Essex. It was not until a number of Victorian writers rediscovered his unusual story and began writing histories of his life that he was freshly remembered in the Anglophone world. Sir John Hawkwood was, by any measure, one of the most extraordinary figures from fourteenth-century England. This, it must be remembered, was an era in which kings, nobles and churchmen dictated political events and how countries were managed. Commoners did very occasionally rise to positions of power and wealth in society, but typically they did so at home in their native land. For an Englishman from Essex to end up
rising to such heights in Italy as the Renaissance was commencing there was a striking development. There was clearly an element of sheer happenstance in how it occurred. The world might never have heard of Sir John Hawkwood had Edward III not gone to war with France in 1337 and claimed the French crown in 1340. Twenty years of war in France formed Hawkwood's military apprenticeship before the temporary cessation of hostilities between the English and French in 1360 drove Hawkwood and hundreds of other English soldiers into mercenary bands who headed south
of the Alps to Italy. Hawkwood was the one amongst them who rose to become a famous commander. He lost as many wars and battles as he won over the next thirty years, yet his roles in conflicts like the War of the Eight Saints were significant enough that he gained infamy in Italy, often for the wrong reasons, such as his involvement in the massacre of the citizens of Cesena in 1377. His acquisition of extensive lands, in Romagna, the Plain of Lombardy and Tuscany meant that he became a minor lord himself over time, while his marriage to Donnina Visconti tied him closely to
the most notorious condottiere family of them all, a dynasty that eventually became Dukes of Milan. He was ultimately neither fully a hero nor a villain, as his life was far too self-serving and too bloody to cast him as such, yet there is no doubting that his life story is one of the most fascinating of any man from late medieval England. What do you think of Sir John Hawkwood? Was he a principled commander who fought for causes he believed in, or was he a ruthless opportunist who always offered his sword for hire to the highest bidder?
Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
