11. The Medieval English Mercenary Who Roiled Italy
Sir John Hawkwood (1320 – 1394), Italian byname Giovani Acuto, meaning “John the Astute”, was an English soldier of fortune who plied his trade in Italy as a condottiero. As captain of a powerful mercenary band, Hawkwood played a significant role in fourteenth-century Italy’s wars and politics and switched sides on numerous occasions between the peninsula’s competing factions and states. He began his military career during the Hundred Years War in the armies of England’s King Edward III, who knighted Hawkwood for exceptional service.
When the Hundred Years War was temporarily interrupted by a peace treaty in 1360, Hawkwood found himself temporarily unemployed. That situation did not last for long, however: he gathered a group of mercenaries, and headed to Italy, where the demand for men willing to fight for money. Arriving in the Italian Peninsula, Hawkwood joined an English outfit is known as the White Company, and in 1364, he was its captain-general. He elevated the White Company’s reputation, and transformed it into an elite and highly sought-after mercenary unit by adopting the English longbow and tactics successfully used in France.