Reviews for John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy

The average rating for John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-09-08 00:00:00 Michael Ho;owaty It's possible that John Hawkwood was illiterate or that he simply dictated all his correspondence. Considering the scarcity of first hand writing from the condottiero, Mr. Caferro does a fantastic job recreating the life and times of this English adventurer. We often think of the Italian princes and priors as conniving foxes, and there certainly were many brilliant men of the day, but it's very colorful and fascinating how John Hawkwood outwits and manipulates the warring politicians and city-states. He was a brilliant tactician with sharp intuition; a diligent soldier, studying the local terrain when other foreign condottiere were too lazy to do so. I had hoped that this book would present a picture of the day-to-day life of the mercenary free companies, go into details of the contracts and arrangements, and overall delve into the intrigue and chaos of the calamitous 14th century. I was not disappointed. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in 14th century Italian politics, warfare, or daily life. I'd put John Hawkwood in the ranks with David Livingstone, Captain Cook, the Duke of Marlborough, and the other British adventures and explorers that have such boldness and flare. Mr. Caferro's book does a wonderful job capturing this flavor and pulling together the details and historical context into a very readable and fascinating biography.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-11-27 00:00:00 Mary Twiggs A quite brilliant and exhaustively researched work on a man I had heard of but knew very little about. It's not easy going because of the detail required to tell it properly, but it's a fascinating and far-from-sugar-coated portrait of a man who was a bastard even by the standards of his time, but not just a bastard (as well as not the worst of his kind), instead there was a lot to him and this reads as a fair and unbiased portrait.