[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 most important change in the Condottiere system, which took place during the lifetime of Gian Galeazzo Visconti.  Alberico da Barbiano, a noble of Romagna, and the ancestor of the Milanese house of Belgiojoso, adopted the career of Condottiere, and formed a Company, called the Company of S. George, into which he admitted none but Italians.  The consequence of this rule was that he Italianized the profession of mercenary arms for the future.  All the great captains of the period were formed in his ranks, during the course of those wars which he conducted for the Duke of Milan.  Two rose to paramount importance—­Braccio da Montone, who varied his master’s system by substituting the tactics of detached bodies of cavalry for the solid phalanx in which Barbiano had moved his troops; and Sforza Attendolo, who adhered to the old method.  Sforza got his name from his great physical strength.  He was a peasant of the village of Cotignola, who, being invited to quit the mattock for a sword, threw his pickax into an oak, and cried, ’If it stays there, it is a sign that I shall make my fortune.’  The ax stuck in the tree, and Sforza went forth to found a line of dukes.[2] After the death of Barbiano in 1409, Sforza and Braccio separated and formed two distinct companies, known as the Sforzeschi and Bracceschi, who carried on between them, sometimes in combination, but usually in opposition, all the wars of Italy for the next twenty years.  These old comrades, who had parted in pursuit of their several advantage,