Lehal Library

enormous prestige. Had he taken Pisa for them, you could hardly deny that the Florentines would have been right to hang on to him, because if he had gone over to the enemy, they wouldn’t have had a chance; but keeping him would have meant accepting him as their ruler. Turning to the Venetians, we find they fought confidently and successfully when they fought for themselves, at sea that is, where both nobles and armed commoners showed great courage. But when they began to fight on land, they left these strengths behind and, like other Italian states, hired mercenaries. In the early stages of their expansion on the mainland they had so little territory and so much prestige they hardly needed to worry about their mercenary com- manders; but when they pushed deeper into the peninsula, under the leadership of Carmagnola, they got a taste of the trouble mercenaries bring. They’d seen what a fine com- mander Carmagnola was and under his leadership they had defeated the Duke of Milan, so they soon noticed when he lost his enthusiasm for the war. They realized they couldn’t win anything else with him, because that wasn’t what he wanted, but they couldn’t fire him either for fear of losing what they had previously won; at which point the only safe thing to do was to kill him. Later they hired Bartolomeo da Bergamo, Ruberto da San Severino, Niccolò Orsini, Count of Pitigliano, and other such mercenary commanders who were always more likely to lose than win, and in fact at the battle of Vailà the Venetians eventually lost in a single day all the gains they had so determinedly accumulated over the past 800 years. The fact is that mercenaries bring only slow, belated, unconvincing victories, then sudden, bewildering defeats. Since these examples all have to do with Italy, which has been dominated by mercenaries for many years, I’d now like to get a broader view of the problem, because if we can trace its origin and developments it will be easier to find a solution. What we must remember is that over recent centuries, as