John Hawkwood
An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy
By William Caferro
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Published by John Hopkins University
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Click Here to Read the Introduction (PDF)
John Hawkwood was
fourteenth-century Italy's most notorious and successful soldier. A man
known for cleverness and daring, he was the most feared mercenary in
Renaissance Italy. Born in England, Hawkood began his career in France
during the Hundred Years' War and crossed into Italy with the famed White
Company in 1361. From that time until his death in 1394, Hawkwood fought
throughout the peninsula as a captain of armies in times of war and as a
commander of marauding bands during times of peace. He achieved
international fame, and his acquaintances included such prominent people as
Geoffrey Chaucer, Catherine of Siena, Jean Froissart, and Francis Petrarch.
City-states constantly tried to outbid each other for his services, for
which he received money, land, and in the case of Florence, citizenship—a
most unusual honor for an Englishman. When Hawkwood died, the Florentines
buried him with great ceremony in their cathedral, an honor denied their
greatest poet, Dante. His final resting place, however, is disputed.
Historian William Caferro's ambitious account of Hawkwood is both a
biography and a study of warfare and statecraft. Caferro has mined more than
twenty archives in England and Italy, creating an authoritative portrait of
Hawkwood as an extraordinary military leader, if not always an admirable
human being. Caferro's Hawkwood possessed a talent for dissimulation and
craft both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, and, ironically,
managed to gain a reputation for "honesty" while beating his Italian hosts
at their own game of duplicity and manipulation.
In addition to a thorough account of Hawkwood's life and career, Caferro's
study offers a fundamental reassessment of the Italian military situation
and of the mercenary system. Hawkwood's career is treated not in isolation
but firmly within the context of Italian society, against the backdrop of
unfolding crises: famine, plague, popular unrest, and religious schism.
Indeed, Hawkwood's life and career offer a unique vantage point from which
we can study the economic, social, and political impacts of war.
William Caferro is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). His article, Italy and the Company of Adventure in the Fourteenth Century, is available on our website
We thank John Hopkins University Press for their permission to republish the Introduction of this book.