John Hawkwood

John Hawkwood was an English mercenary who spent thirty years selling an army to Italian cities, carried out the massacre at Cesena, and is buried in Florence cathedral with a fresco over him. He was an Essex tanner's son who fought in France under Edward III and was probably knighted there; when the peace of Bretigny in 1360 put thousands of soldiers out of work, he went south with the free companies that were then extorting their way across Europe. From 1363 he led the White Company in Italy, and for the next three decades sold his services to Pisa, Milan, the papacy, Padua and finally Florence, sometimes switching sides mid-campaign and generally being paid by cities to go and be somewhere else. His military reputation rests on discipline and on tactics learned in France: dismounted men-at-arms fighting with longbowmen, which Italian communal armies had no answer to. In 1377, in papal service under the legate Robert of Geneva, his company entered Cesena under a promise of amnesty and killed several thousand of the inhabitants; Hawkwood is reported to have got some women out of the town, which is the most that can be said. He changed sides to Florence soon afterwards and served it until his death, becoming a citizen and marrying an illegitimate daughter of Bernabo Visconti. Florence gave him a state funeral in 1394 and commissioned Paolo Uccello to paint the equestrian monument in the Duomo in 1436, which is one of the landmarks of perspective painting. Richard II asked for his body back; the request appears to have gone unanswered. His name was italianised as Giovanni Acuto, which is what the fresco calls him. Conan Doyle used him as a model in The White Company. He left daughters who married into Italian families and a son who went back to England.

• Lived: 1323 CE – 1394 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: military