Condottieri

They were like those mercenary armies which marched about in Italy during the fourteenth century, under the generals called Condottieri, taking service sometimes with one city, sometimes with another.

The Two Great Retreats of History George Grote 1832

"Condottieri," the man muttered, "great robbers who saw and took!

Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories Robert Herrick 1903

By 1894, Baron Frederick Von Baur buried his fifth child and final heir after having to behead the young man-turned-vampire (having lost his other children in vendettas with the Condottieri Cosini in Venice and Club Thirteen in London).

The Codex Continual » The Von Baurs 2009

Historians have generally been kinder to Federico, the ultimate victor, portraying him as the 'virtuous and honourable exception to the Condottieri rule', while Sigismondo has been cast in the role of pantomime villain, a psychopath with a not entirely undeserved reputation for wild savagery.

Review of Vendetta: High Art and Low Cunning at the Birth of the Renaissance, by Hugh Bicheno 2008

In Vendetta Hugh Bicheno concentrates on the 200-year-old feud between two of the most prominent Condottieri clans, the Montefeltro and the Malatesta, promising a story of 'unbridled lust, treachery and murder' with 'an extraordinary cast of characters who fought, poisoned, betrayed and cheated their way from the late Middle Ages into the modern era'.

Review of Vendetta: High Art and Low Cunning at the Birth of the Renaissance, by Hugh Bicheno 2008

The period of 'highly creative destruction' that prepared the ground for the Renaissance in Italy is sometimes known as the Age of the Condottieri, after the rapacious soldiers of fortune who dominated Italian warfare from the 13th to the 15th centuries.

Review of Vendetta: High Art and Low Cunning at the Birth of the Renaissance, by Hugh Bicheno 2008

Yet the writing had been on the wall for the Condottieri since the Peace of Lodi in 1454 - which largely ended the endemic cycle of Italian warfare - and within a couple of generations even the Montefeltro had been eclipsed.

Review of Vendetta: High Art and Low Cunning at the Birth of the Renaissance, by Hugh Bicheno 2008

Condottieri; that is, of mercenaries belonging to no particular nation, but attached for the time to any prince by whom they were paid.

Ivanhoe 2004

_Condottieri_, powerful even to tyranny, in some isolated town; it has knelt at the feet of the foreign emperors who have passed the Alps or crossed the sea.

The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 Various

When we read of the wonderful success which at first attended the French army, we must remember how greatly superior it was to the troops which opposed it in Italy, which were mostly bands of adventurers collected by mercenary leaders, named Condottieri, who fought for gain rather than for glory, and had no special zeal or loyalty for the prince who employed them.

Bayard: the Good Knight Without Fear and Without Reproach Christopher Hare