The Devil's Broker

by Saunders, Frances Stonor

• ISBN13: 9780060777302
• ISBN10: 0060777303
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-06-07
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

A vibrant history of Italy in the cataclysmic fourteenth century as seen through the life of a brilliant military strategist and bandit lord At the dawn of the Renaissance, hordes of mercenaries swooped down on the opulent city-states of Italy and commenced to drain them dry. The greatest of all the bandits was Sir John Hawkwood, an English expatriate and military genius who formed his own army, cleverly pitted ancient rivals against one another, held the Pope for ransom, and set blood running in the streets. In this gripping biography of the charismatic Hawkwood, Frances Stonor Saunders illuminates the fourteenth century as a time of plague, political schism, and religious mania offset by a gargantuan appetite for spectacle and luxury. Dazzling and addictively readable, The Devil's Broker is a riveting account of the fortunes gained and lost in a tumultuous time.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xiii
Maps	xiv
Acknowledgments	xvii
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY: Ways to Die	1	(338)
Ways to Live	10	(11)
Bad Company	21	(13)
Avignon, Whore of France	34	(7)
Sons of Belial	41	(13)
Italia Mia	54	(21)
Betrayal	75	(13)
Naked Force	88	(8)
Vipers of Milan	96	(9)
State of Decline	105	(10)
The Road to Rome	115	(11)
The First Estate	126	(16)
Overeating	142	(7)
Undereating	149	(12)
Virtue's Shame	161	(10)
How to Get to Heaven	171	(13)
Florence	184	(11)
Bloody Saints	195	(14)
Freedom Fighters	209	(17)
Anathema	226	(9)
Cardinal Vices	235	(10)
From Massacre to Marriage	245	(13)
The Other Woman	258	(11)
Schism	269	(6)
Stories from Troy	275	(10)
Neapolitan Question	285	(11)
Viper Swallows Viper	296	(6)
The Wheel of Fortune	302	(9)
The Last Campaign	311	(7)
Final Audit	318	(10)
The Greatest Glory	328	(4)
What Remains	332	(7)
Epilogue: Pale Horse, Pale Rider	339	(10)
Source Notes	349	(22)
Select Bibliography	371	(12)
Index	383

Excerpts

The Devil's Broker
Seeking Gold, God, and Glory in Fourteenth- Century Italy

Chapter One

Bad Company

I will make war my work.
I will become rich or die
Before I see my country again
Or my parents or my friends.
JOHN GOWER, Mirour de l'omme

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
T.S. ELIOT, The Waste Land

Thickset men who relished a noisy brawl in a tavern, a tussle over a whore, stole through the frozen nightscape with the lightness of ghosts. Their horses, and the clanking matériel of an army on the move, were held back. The guards posted along the town walls squinted into the blue-gray shadows, and saw nothing untoward. The water in bowls set out on the top of towers to detect vibrations did not ripple. By the time the scaling ladders had been assembled -- each section silently and quickly fitted into the next -- and placed against the foot of the walls, it was too late. The attackers poured up and over, and rushed through the dark streets. Members of the town's defense militia stumbled, half-dressed, from their houses, and attempted to drive back the assailants. But they were soon overwhelmed as more and more men hauled themselves over the walls. Everywhere, people emerged from their houses, clutching their children and their most important possessions, and ran, this way and that, frantic, barefoot. Some managed to follow the sound of the bells of the priory of Saint Pierre, ringing out the dreadful alarm, and lock themselves in the church there. Others simply stood in the streets, petrified, disoriented, inhabitants of pandemonium. The rest waited in their homes, knowing that escape was now impossible.

By sunrise on Tuesday, 29 December 1360, the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit, named for its bridge of twenty-five arches that spanned the Rhône, had been completely subdued. As its attackers dismantled their scaling ladders, they shouted greetings to their companions who, from their place of concealment in the outlying countryside, were now coming over the bridge, a noisy caravan of cavalry, infantry, engineers carrying spades and axes, carpenters, cooks, wagoners, farriers, pages, and drummer boys -- to all appearances, a regular army. Inside, nervous castellans surrendered to theircaptors the keys to the town's heavy gates, which were now swung open toallow the occupying army to pass. The traffic was one way: no citizen ofPont-Saint-Esprit was allowed to leave.

Almost eight months earlier, on 1 May 1360, commissionersappointed by the English king Edward III had met with their Frenchcounterparts to negotiate a truce in the war that had started twenty yearsbefore. Dozens of negotiators, plus scores of squires, notaries, servants,and messengers, squeezed into the little hamlet of Brétigny, not far from Chartres, and for seven days labored over the marbled rhetoric of thirtynine articles of legal and territorial details. On 8 May the two sides finally set their seals and signatures to the Treaty of Brétigny. As news of the truce spread, English soldiers walked barefoot into Chartres to give thanks to the Blessed Virgin in the cathedral dedicated to her.

The treaty marked a caesura in what history has termed the HundredYears' War (it actually lasted 115 years, but the shorthand is too useful toabandon). In 1328 Charles IV of France died leaving no direct heir. Inthe confusion that followed, his first cousin, Philip of Valois, assumed thecrown. In July 1340 Philip received a letter from Edward III stating, in thepolitest of language, that he, as Charles IV's nephew, was the rightful heirto the French throne, and that if this inheritance should be denied him, hewould be obliged to take it by force. Philip politely demurred, replying thathe was the lawful King of France. The formalities thus dispensed with, Edwardlaunched an invasion of France.

For its participants, of course, there was no sense in the spring of 1360that the conflict in which they were engaged would continue for anothernine decades, reaching into the lives of their children and their grandchildren.In the end, four generations were dragged into this, the first total war,before Joan of Arc began the turn in French fortunes, and Charles VIIcompleted the expulsion of the English from France (with the exception ofCalais) in 1453.

Edward's opponent Philip VI died in 1350, passing the crown to hisson, Jean. He inherited a military nightmare: all the gains in the war so farhad accrued to the English, who had crushed the French army at the Battleof Crécy in 1346 and repeated the humiliation at the Battle of Poitiers ten years later, in which King Jean himself was taken prisoner. By the earlyspring of 1360, Edward III had reached the gates of Paris, which he besieged.It was Passion Week, but the English king showed little interest inChristian mercy. He assaulted monasteries, and ordered that the suburbs ofParis burn "from sunrise till midday," as his men spread fire "everywherealong his route." But the blockade drained his resources, and on 13 Aprilhis tired and ill-provisioned army found itself under siege -- by the weather.Long remembered as Black Monday, it was "a foul day of mist" which developed into "such a tempest of thunder, lightning and hail that it seemedthe world should have ended." Freezing winds swept over Edward's army,pinning it down on the stony heaths beyond Chartres. Helpless in their breastplates and chain mail, many knights died, electrocuted, on theirhorses. Thousands of vehicles became stuck in the mud, and had to beabandoned. It was this storm, according to one chronicler, that caused theEnglish king to "turn toward the church of our Lady at Chartres and devoutlyvow to the Virgin that he would accept terms of peace."

The Devil's Broker
Seeking Gold, God, and Glory in Fourteenth- Century Italy. Copyright © by Frances Saunders. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from The Devil's Broker: Seeking Gold, God, and Glory in Fourteenth- Century Italy by Frances Stonor Saunders
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