er their troops movable and compact,
suppressed the infantry, and confined their attention to perfecting the
cavalry. Heavy-armed cavaliers, officered by professional captains,
fought the battles of Italy; while despots and republics schemed in
their castles, or debated in their council-chambers, concerning objects
of warfare about which the soldiers of fortune were indifferent. The pay
received by men-at-arms was more considerable than that of the most
skilled laborers in any peaceful trade. The perils of military service
in Italy, conducted on the most artificial principles, were but slight;
while the opportunities of self-indulgence--of pillage during war and of
pleasure in the brief intervals of peace--attracted all the hot blood of
the country to this service.[3] Therefore, in course of time, the
profession of Condottiere fascinated the needier nobility of Italy, and
the ranks of their men-at-arms were recruited by townsfolk and peasants,
who deliberately chose a life of adventure.

[1] VIII. 51.

[2] We may remember how the Spanish general Cardona, in 1325,
misused his captaincy of the Florentine forces to keep rich members
of the republican militia in unhealthy stations, extorting money
from them as the price of freedom from perilous or irksome service.

[3] Matarazzo, in his Chronicle of Perugia, gives a lively picture
of an Italian city, in which the nobles for generations followed the
trade of Condottieri, while the people enlisted in their bands--to
the utter ruin of the morals and the peace of the community.

At first the foreign troops of the despots were engaged as body-guards,
and were controlled by the authority of their employers. But the
captains soon rendered themselves independent, and entered into military
contracts on their own account. The first notable example of a roving
troop existing for the sake of pillage, and selling its services to any
bidder, was the so-called Great Company (1343), commanded by the German
Guarnieri, or Duke Werner who wrote upon his corselet: 'Enemy of God, of
Pity and of Mercy.' This band was employed in 1348 by the league of the
Montferrat, La Scala, Carrara, Este, and Gonzaga houses, formed to check
the Visconti.

'In the middle of the fourteenth century,' writes Sismondi,[1] 'all the
soldiers who served in Italy were foreigners: at the end of the same
century they were all, or nearly all, Italian.' This sentence indicates
a mos