Condottiere: A Knight's Tale
Page 26
Hawkwood sat across the desk from Boninsegna in the latter’s palazzo in Florence. Giancarlo was well into his eighties now, but still retained much of the vigour of his younger days. The Florentine handed over a final document for Hawkwood’s signature, then leaned back in his chair and contemplated the Englishman who had been his adversary and friend for over thirty years.
He said, ‘I wish you God’s speed on your journey to England. I trust you will find much to your liking there, but not too much, for I pray we shall soon meet again here in Florence.’
‘Never fear,’ said Hawkwood, gathering together the documents on the table before him. ‘I have matters to settle in England, but my future lies here in Florence.’
The two men stood and embraced.
When Hawkwood left the palazzo, the crisp light of an early spring day made him blink against the glare. The street was teeming with elegant Florentines going about their daily business. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a slight, shabbily dressed figure limping towards him – a beggar, no doubt. Hawkwood reached into his purse for a coin as the figure drew abreast of him. He saw an angular face and piercing eyes.
He had seen this man before.
Somewhere.
Not recently.
‘For Siena and for me!’
As the words hissed out, Hawkwood felt a sharp blow to his chest.
Gregorio Camporesi scuttled off as best he could, his deformed left leg dragging behind him on the cobblestones. Camporesi had not ridden in the Palio since that day in 1369 when he had been bested and crippled by a vile Englishman called Hawkwood.
Hawkwood looked down at the tiny speck of blood that had formed on his tunic. He had felt a short stab of pain, no more. He took a pace forward, stumbled and sank on one knee. Startled passers-by saw Giovanni Acuto fall forward on his face.
Giancarlo Boninsegna was summoned. He promptly ordered Hawkwood to be carried back into the palazzo and laid on a stone bench in the courtyard. A doctor was called, but it was too late.
At three minutes to the fourth hour on 17 March 1394, John Hawkwood opened his eyes one final time. He whispered one word – ‘Donnina’. And died.
Boninsegna was beside himself with grief, but his efficiency did not desert him. It would be to Florence’s eternal shame if the sordid truth about Hawkwood’s death became public knowledge. The doctor and those who had attended Hawkwood in the final moments of his life were sworn to secrecy.
The following day it was announced that Sir John Hawkwood, condottiere and erstwhile Supreme Commander of the Armies of the City State of Florence, had died of a stroke in the early hours of 18 March 1394.
An entire city mourned his passing. To a man, the Signoria assembled to pay their last respects, filing past the bier where Hawkwood’s body lay in state, his favourite sword resting upon his chest and the baton of command clasped in his right hand.
Donnina Hawkwood and her children fought back the tears as Hawkwood was laid to rest. At the last moment, Donnina moved forward and carefully placed atop the bier the small carved ivory box that Hawkwood had given her years before as a charm to ward off evil and ensure good fortune and good health.
She turned quickly away as the coffin was lowered into the ground.
Epilogue
He lived his life – what more is there to say?
On his death in 1394, the Republic of Florence accorded John Hawkwood – Giovanni Acuto – a public funeral of almost unprecedented magnificence. This was an honour that was not extended to Florence’s most famous son, Dante Alighieri, whose political leanings were not to the taste of the then powers-that-be in Florence.
The Signoria also announced plans for a marble monument to Hawkwood to be erected in the Duomo (reconsecrated in 1436 as the Cathedral of Santa Maria dei Fiore) in celebration of the life and exploits of one who was beyond question the most prominent and most respected foreign mercenary in Italy. The statue was never executed, but Paulo Uccello was subsequently commissioned to paint an equestrian portrait in terre verte for the inner façade of the building.
Donnina Hawkwood eventually reached an accommodation with Gian Galeazzo Visconti which included the restitution to her of an estate near Lodi, where she spent her final years. She never remarried. The exact date of her death is not on record.
Of Hawkwood’s four children by Donnina Visconti – John, Janet, Catherine and Anna – the eldest daughter, Janet, married Count Brezaglia di Porciglia, and his second daughter, Catherine, wed a young German condottiere named Conrad Prospergh. Anna Hawkwood married into the prominent Milanese family of della Torre. Hawkwood’s son John took English citizenship in or around 1406 and went on to live in Sible Hedingham, where he assumed responsibility for the management of Hawkwood Manor and the estate.
Sir William de Coggeshall, together with his wife, Hawkwood’s daughter Antiocha, returned to Sible Hedingham after a protracted period of distinguished diplomatic service abroad.
The body of Karl Eugen August Wilhelm von Strachwitz-Wettin was exhumed in 1402 and interred in the family crypt in Meissen.
Gennaro Altobardi languished in a Bordeaux prison until 1376 and died there of malnutrition. He was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.
Sir Wilfred Perry retired to his estates in England. He died in 1388 following a hunting accident.
Geraint Llewellyn returned to Wales after Hawkwood’s death and bought a small farm in the Vale of Glamorgan. He married for a second time in 1396 and went on to sire eleven children.
Giancarlo Boninsegna died in 1398 at the age of ninety-six. No detailed records of Hawkwood’s service to Florence were found among his private papers.
Pope Urban VI, whose election to the papal throne in 1378 sparked the division of the papacy – the Great Schism – died in 1389. His counterpart, the antipope Clement VII (formerly Robert de Genève, the ‘Butcher of Cesena’) died in Avignon in September 1394.
Gregorio Camporesi died in a poorhouse in Siena in 1397.
Caterina Benincasa was canonised in 1461 as St Catherine of Siena. She was declared a doctor of the church over five hundred years later, in 1970. She is the patron saint of Italy.
Gian Galeazzo Visconti is credited with bringing the dynasty of that name to the height of its power by unifying the Visconti dominions. Historians applaud him as an able administrator and a shrewd political tactician. After his annexation of Verona, Treviso, Pisa, Siena, Bologna, Perugia and other towns in Umbria, only Florence stood between him and absolute lordship of all northern Italy. He was assembling his forces to attack Florence in 1402 when he fell victim to the Black Death.
The intermittent war between England and France continued into the fifteenth century. Known as the Hundred Years War, it lasted in reality from 1337 to 1453. The war put paid to England’s taste for colonial expansion in Europe. By 1453, France had retaken all of Aquitaine, and only Calais remained in English hands. Calais itself was finally relinquished in 1558. French historians take issue with any suggestion that the Hundred Years War concluded with the much-vaunted English victory at Azincourt on 25 October 1415.
At the written request of King Richard II of England, the Signoria of Florence agreed in 1395 to return Hawkwood’s remains to England. It is not certain that his body was conveyed there, but traces of a monument to Hawkwood can still be seen in the parish church of St Peter in Sible Hedingham.
Apologia
Visitors to the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence may have noted and admired Paolo Uccello’s celebrated portrait of Sir John Hawkwood and perhaps asked themselves why such a comparatively obscure 14th century English adventurer was accorded an honour denied that city’s most famous son, Dante Alighieri.
Condottiere is written partly in a bid to answer that question, but principally out of a desire to entertain. Accordingly, while many of the dramatis personae are inevitably based directly on historical evidence, many others are composite characters – ‘constructs’, as it were, designed to underpin and
advance the narrative. By the same token, some of the events described have a solid and demonstrable basis in fact, whereas others are mere figments of the author’s imagination. For this, only token apology is offered, not least since the jury is still out on what made John Hawkwood tick.
There has, for example, been speculation that he may have been a – or even the - model for Chaucer’s ‘perfect gentle knight’ (in which event, Chaucer’s sense of irony must have been significantly more subtle than even he is given credit for). On the other hand, writing only a matter of decades after Hawkwood’s death, the chronicler Froissart dismissed Hawkwood as ‘a poor knight who saw no advantage in returning home’ – a view evidently shared by some later commentators, among them the venerable Sir Arthur Bryant, who wrote Hawkwood off as ‘the son of an Essex tanner who, after ravaging southern France, led his gang of desperadoes to Avignon to see (sic) the pope and cardinals.’
In Il Principe (‘The Prince’) Niccolò Machiavelli makes passing reference to Hawkwood, stressing – with some justification, it would seem – the mercenary Englishman’s apparent lack of ‘genuine political ambition’.
Can this then conceivably be the ‘hero’ portrayed by Uccello and venerated in the Santa Maria del Fiore?
An early effort to piece together the ‘real’ story came in 1889 with publication of Sir John Hawkwood: Story of a Condottiere, written by John Temple- Leader and Guiseppe Marconi. But it was not until 2004 and Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman by Frances Stonor Saunders that Hawkwood and his exploits were destined to come under closer academic scrutiny. That study is a well-crafted and impeccably researched evocation of the fourteenth century, yet – despite the wealth of indirect and ancillary evidence adduced – even Saunders is obliged to concede that her protagonist is and remains ‘an enigma’.
It is freely admitted that the present account differs from the historical record (or what there is of it) in a number of ways. Hawkwood was by no means wealthy before he embarked on his mercenary career, nor was he the original captain-general of the White Company (an honour that went to Albert Sterz). In all probability, Hawkwood and Donnina Visconti did not meet until much later than suggested here, and they wed not before but after the massacre at Cesena. Not least, Hawkwood did not ride in the Siena Palio, let alone win it …
To the extent that history is a priori immutable, any author foolhardy enough to try his hand at historical fiction finds himself time and again between the proverbial rock and hard place, between the exigencies of academic accuracy and the heady temptations of narrative licence.
Still, as Napoleon Bonaparte famously remarked: ‘What is history if not a fable agreed upon?’
*
Chapter-heading quotes are transposed into modern English and based on the Prologue and The Knight’s Tale of Geoffroy Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. A truncated list of bibliographical source material is shown in annex to the printed edition
The author owes a debt of gratitude to all those who helped nurture Condottiere, most notably Tony Glover, Nick Robinson, Maire O’Reilly, Michael Wightman and, not least, the late Harald Hotze. Thanks must also go to publisher Hugh Andrew and his team at Birlinn/Polygon who helped assemble the first edition of the work.
Credit is due to Sheila Taylor, whose loyalty and patience were stretched but never exhausted.
Table of Contents
Copyright
Prologue at Poitiers
Hawkwood
Points South
Exile
Free Company
Karl Eugen
Pisa
Florentia
Donnina
Bella Figura
Pisa Nuova
Alarms and Excursions
Cascina
Master of the GameN
Palio
Change of Heart
Habemus Papam
Family TiesRide
Volte-Face
Papal Fallibility
Cesena
Advise and ConsultO
A Farewell to Arms
Parthian Shots
Nemesis
Epilogue
Apologia