Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena.

William Caferro. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. xx + 251 pp. $39.95. ISBN: 0-8018-5788-0.

War, plague, famine, and factionalism spelled doom for the city of Siena in the later part of the fourteenth century. In 1348 the city numbered about 50,000 people, by 1453 only 13,403. The Sienesi had experienced six plagues between 1348 and 1389, fourteen years of famine between 1348 and 1393, and 37 mercenary raids between 1342 and 1399. The raids caused great financial hardship. The Sienesi spent 291,379 florins between 1342 and 1399 in bribes to contain the mercenaries' threat. It was an enormous sum, enough to buy the cities of Avignon, Montpellier, and Lucca at the time. By 1399, Siena, drained by those huge expenses and her inability to foil the raids, gave up her freedom, becoming subject to a master who could protect her, the Duke of Milan, Giangaleazzo Visconti.

This is the dramatic story which William Caferro explores in his engaging book. It is his contention that the mercenary raids of the so-called Companies of Adventure or free companies were one of the most important reasons for Siena's decline. At the beginning of the century Siena had rivaled Florence in splendor and achievement, by the end of the Trecento she had been reduced to the status of a minor Tuscan power.

The origin of the problem was the proliferation of mercenary companies in the Italian peninsula during the fourteenth century. Siena's difficulties began with the arrival of Werner of Urslingen in 1342. From then on it was an inevitable and unstoppable series of raids, the worst offender being John Hawkwood, the English mercenary captain immortalized by Paolo Uccello's equestrian portrayal in Florence's Santa Maria del Fiore. Hawkwood was the leader of nine raids between 1365 and 1385.

Caferro argues that the offenders were not only non-Italians, as argued by historians in the past. From the beginning and increasingly after the 1370s, Siena's lands were also prey of Italian mercenary companies.

Siena was an attractive target because of her wealth, her rather large territory, quite difficult to defend strategically, and her location on the Via Francigena. the artery connecting two frequent employers of mercenaries, Florence and Rome. Siena was a logical target once the mercenaries had completed their duties for the two larger cities or were on the way of transit between the two. The Sienesi were particularly angry with the Florentines, "our brothers the dogs (fratelli cani)" as they called them, who, they suspected, unleashed their mercenaries against Siena once they had completed their round of duty for Florence.

The mercenaries' modus operandi was simple but direct. Arson, robbery, kidnapping, and consequent ransom were their goals, their target normally the Sienese countryside, not the city itself which was well defended by her walls. The city was forced to intervene because, especially after the failure of her great banks, the source of her wealth was based on the countryside. The options were basically two: either to meet the mercenary threat with a bribe or to defeat them on the battlefield. Bribe was the normal choice. It was cheaper, Caferro argues, more efficient, and sometimes the only solution because of mercenary connections to internal threats. Sienese aristocrats and commoners often joined the invaders.

Bribes were a solution that in the long run undermined the economic and political foundation of the state. Siena had to use a variety of means to meet the financial obligations - direct taxes; higher gabelle rates; highly inflated salt prices forcefully imposed on the citizenry; pawning of city lands; allowing of exiles and rebels to return in exchange for a payment; and forced loans from the Church and the Jews. In the end, nothing seemed to work except accepting the sovereignty of Giangaleazzo Visconti. It is rather ironic that salvation came from the man which the Florentine humanists identified as the destroyer of liberty.

Caferro's book does not dwell on the tactical or strategical aspects of mercenary warfare. As he explains, this is not his aim. His goal is to emphasize the economic and social impact of the raids. He fulfills his task cautiously and convincingly, although it seems to me that probably the most important reason for Siena's decline was the fractious nature of its citizenry and the rather cynical acceptance of the idea that bribes were cheaper than armed resistance. Yet his research is sound. The author reveals mastery of the often difficult sources of the Siena Archivio di Stato.

As Caferro shows in the concluding chapter, the story of Florence was quite different from Siena. Florence survived the mercenary raids and by the end of the Trecento became stronger and larger. But then this was the future of most states in Europe - consolidation and expansion, as Ruggero Romano argued long ago. Machiavelli rightly argued more than a century later that the health of every state was based on constant aggression. This was a choice that the Sienese fathers were unable to make because of factionalism, probably timidity, bur also because of their limited power basis.

University of Western Ontario