Bernabo Visconti was sending her help for 150,000 florins.[40] The English were on the way; already over the mountains, Hawkwood and his White Company were coming to save her; meantime she tried to strike for herself.  Pietro Farnese of the Florentines laid her low, taking one hundred and fifty prisoners and her general.  The English tarried, but a new ally was already by her side.  The Black Death which had brought down her pride, now fell upon the enemy, both in camp and in their city of the Lily:  and then—­the English were come.  On the 1st of February 1364, Hawkwood, with a thousand horse and two thousand foot, drove the Florentines through the Val di Nievole; he harried them above Vinci and chased them through Serravalle, crushed them at Castel di Montale, and scattered them in the valley of Arno.  They found their city at last, as foxes find their holes, and went to earth.  There Pisa halted.  Before the gates of Pisa the Florentines for years had struck money:  so the Pisans did before Florence.  Nor was this all.  Halting there three days, says the chronicle,[41] “they caused three palii to be run well-nigh to the gates of Florence.  One was on horseback, another was on foot, and the third was run by loose women (le feminine mundane); and they caused newly-made priests to sing Mass there, and they coined money of divers kinds of gold and of silver; and on one side thereof was Our Lady, with Her Son in Her arms; on the other side was the Eagle, with the Lion beneath its feet....  Thereafter for further dispite they set up a pair of gallows over against the gate of Florence, and hanged thereon three asses.”

Florence refused to submit.  Other Free Companies such as Hawkwood’s joined in the war.  The Florentines hired that of the Star.  But Hawkwood was not to be denied.  He marched up Arno, devastating the country, and at last deigned to return to Pisa by Cortona and Siena.

Then Florence did what might have been expected.  She bribed Baumgarten, who with his Germans had fought since the rout with Hawkwood.  They met at the Borgo di Cascina on 28th July.  Hawkwood was caught napping, and Pisa in her turn was humbled.  The Florentines returned with two thousand prisoners, having slain a thousand men.  They took with them “forty-two wagons full of prisoners, all packed together ‘like melons,’ with a dead eagle tied by the neck and dragging along the ground."[42] Such was war in Italy in the fourteenth century.

Then followed the Doge Agnello:  the greatness of Pisa was past.

It had ever been the plan of Milan to weaken Florence by aiding Pisa, and to weaken Pisa by this continual war, for it was the Visconti’s dream to carry their dominion into Tuscany.  Now at this time, amid all these disasters, the Pisan ambassador at Milan was a certain Giovanni dell’ Agnello, a merchant, ambitious but without honour.  This plebeian readily lent himself to the Visconti to betray the city, if thereby he might win power; and this Visconti promised him, for, said he, “if I win Pisa, you shall be my lieutenant, and all the world will take you even for my ally.”