Winner, 2008 Otto Gründler Book Prize, The Medieval Institute 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.

The First and Second Italian Wars describes the course of military operations and political machinations in Italy from 1494 to 1504. The narrative begins with the French conquest of much of Italy. But the French hold collapsed. The second French invasion gained Northern Italy. This time, the French allied with the Pope’s son, Cesare Borgia. Cesare managed to double deal too many people; his efforts ended in disaster. The French agreement with the Spanish allowed them to retake Naples only to be defeated at the Garigliano by the famous general, Gonzalo de Cordoba. These wars were not just another series of medieval fights. These battles were different from what had gone before: the French utilized a new method of artillery transport; the Spanish commander formulated a new system of military unit organization, and Cesare Borgia sought different systems of raising troops and forming states. And all the powers managed to spend vast amounts of money the likes of which no one had imagined before. This was the emergence of the so-called Military Revolution.

A detailed investigation into the origin, development and character of the Maltesta government and the causes of its overthrow.

Niccolò Machiavelli is the most prominent and notorious theorist of violence in the history of European political thought - prominent, because he is the first to candidly discuss the role of violence in politics; and notorious, because he treats violence as virtue rather than as vice. In this original interpretation, Yves Winter reconstructs Machiavelli's theory of violence and shows how it challenges moral and metaphysical ideas. Winter attributes two central theses to Machiavelli: first, violence is not a generic technology of government but a strategy that tends to correlate with inequality and class conflict; and second, violence is best understood not in terms of conventional notions of law enforcement, coercion, or the proverbial 'last resort', but as performance. Most political violence is effective not because it physically compels another agent who is thus coerced; rather, it produces political effects by appealing to an audience. As such, this book shows how in Machiavelli's world, violence is designed to be perceived, experienced, remembered, and narrated.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Villani's Chronicle" (Being Selections from the First Nine Books of the Croniche Fiorentine of Giovanni Villani) by Giovanni Villani. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

This book offers a comprehensive approach to the study of the political history of the Renaissance: its analysis of government is embedded in the context of geography and social conflict. Instead of the usual institutional history, it examines the Florentine state from the mountainous periphery - a periphery both of geography and class - where Florence met its most strenuous opposition to territorial incorporation. Yet, far from being acted upon, Florence's highlanders were instrumental in changing the attitudes of the Florentine ruling class: the city began to see its own self-interest as intertwined with that of its region and the welfare of its rural subjects at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Contemporaries either remained silent or purposely obscured the reasons for this change, which rested on widespread and successful peasant uprisings across the mountainous periphery of the Florentine state, hitherto unrecorded by historians.