Winner, 2008 Otto Gründler Book Prize, The Medieval Institute

Notorious for his cleverness and daring, John Hawkwood was the most feared mercenary in early Renaissance Italy. Born in England, Hawkwood 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 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.

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 Britain and Italy, creating an authoritative portrait of Hawkwood as an extraordinary military leader, if not always an admirable human being.

Caferro's study offers a fundamental reassessment of the Italian military situation and of the mercenary system. Hawkwood's career is treated within the context of Italian society and offers a unique vantage point from which we can study the economic, social, and political impact of war.

"This is much more than a biography in the ordinary sense of the word . . . An excellent contribution to our understanding of both the mercenary phenomenon and the history of Italy in the late fourteenth century."--Speculum

William Caferro, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt professor of history at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena and Contesting the Renaissance and the coauthor of The Spinelli of Florence: Fortunes of a Renaissance Merchant Family.