Seigneurs et Condottières

Machiavelli may have complained vociferously about condottieri and their injurious impact on the martial spirit of Italy, but there is no escaping their importance in late medieval and Renaissance Italy. They not only constituted society’s military elite, but also, in recompense for their military successes, featured prominently among the peninsula’s land-holding aristocracy. A select few, such as the Sforza in Milan and the Gonzaga in Mantua, established prominent dynasties of their own. Some, perhaps most famously Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino, distinguished themselves as leading patrons of Renaissance culture. Condottieri and their agents were also a highly visible presence in Italian court life. This broadly-based prominence has not been matched by recent interest among historians, making Pierre Savy’s detailed and meticulously researched study of one of Italy’s foremost families of condottieri in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Dal Verme, particularly welcome. The Dal Vermes’ fame as military captains notwithstanding, this is not a military history. There is comparatively little here on military practice and organisation. Savy takes the Dal Verme as representative of their age, as a tool with which to analyse many of the social, political and cultural developments concerning fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian elites. He is deeply interested in the Dal Verme as political actors, tracing the political interactions of the Dal Verme in two different, but interrelated, directions: with local sovereign powers such as the Republic of Venice and the Duchy of Milan; and with their feudal subjects within their own lands. He also considers at length the family’s ties to religious institutions, especially the Augustinian hermits. Savy suggests that patronage of church foundations was of particular importance for condottieri, who were in the business of killing and thus put their souls in danger

Ancient history · Aristocracy (class · Art · Duchy · Elite · Feudalism · Fifteenth · Humanities · Middle Ages · Nobility · Political science · Politics · Classics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies