Guest Author - Christine MacNeil Sweet
Unlike contracted soldiers to the Plantagenet kings, the condottieri existed in Italy during the Renaissance as purely paid mercenaries or soldiers of fortune for the city-states who hired them. They were professional soldiers and swore allegiance to no one king save the one who paid them to fight. The condottiere system worked rather well in Italy because there was no central ruler for the entire country therefore these mercenary soldiers could easily provide what a tiny local government could hardly afford in the way of numbers of trained soldiers, time to fight, and the funding to go to battle with. Frequency of war in these city-states made it unfeasible for the city government to call on all their men folk to fight – who would run the city if all the men were off at war? This was one of the main reasons that it was easier to contract out military duties to outsiders than it was to do it themselves. Another was that the soldiers, in most cases unrelated to anyone in the city-state that hired them, were unlikely to be part of rampant conspiracy theories or have conflicting loyalties to regimes other than those paying their bills.
During the Italian Renaissance, there were two major bronze works created to immortalize these condottieri: Erasmo di Narni or Gattamelata (aka the Honeyed Cat) and Bartolomeo Colleoni. To look upon them is to feel the power of the soldiers themselves. Modeled after the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, these two equestrian bronzes done by Donatello and Verrocchio respectively, embody the spirit of the condottieri in Renaissance Italy. My personal favorite is Gattamelata. I am a fan of Donatello’s works to begin with, but for some reason this one resonates with me more than the equestrian Colleoni.
To look at both works is to at first glance see two soldiers on horseback. But, they are very different the more you look. I have always found the facial expression of Colleoni to be a bit more terrifying and grotesque than the stately Gattamelata. Colleoni looks evil as though laser beams may shoot out of his eyes at any moment and melt you on the spot, where Gattamelata’s expression gives an impression of controlled strength, competence, and ability. In any event, I would not have wanted to face either one in battle. Sadly, Verrocchio died before the work was able to be cast and the work was finished by Alessandro Leopardi. If he had lived, who knows what other things might have been added to the work. Perhaps the face would not have been as grotesque.
There were many different companies of condottiere and they came from all walks of life and all nationalities. Not all were cast into bronze or woven into tapestries or painted in chapels or frescoed in ducal palaces. Their histories of their exploits read like a cloak and dagger novel. The Italian archives are loaded with correspondence that can plot timelines and movements of these soldiers of fortune with amazing accuracy. The infighting amongst families, conspiracies to seize power, poisonings, and murders make for fascinating reading even for someone who is uninterested in military battle stories.
One of the best books I’ve found so far on the condottiere is by Geoffrey Trease, the condottieri soldiers of fortune, (1971), Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York. It is out of print but should be available at many public libraries and of course on amazon.com.
