The original Essex man

The boil and hiss of mediaeval Hell, as conceived by Dante, is hard for us to imagine. Yet the 1935 Hollywood melodrama, The Div- ine Comedy, contains a ten-minute reconstruction of Dante’s inferno inspired by Gustav Doré’s God-fearing illustrations. Spencer Tracey starred reluctantly in the film; the damned are wedged against each other in a stinking hell-pit. Mediaeval Florence, Dante’s birthplace, was riven by pestilience and famine, and indeed Dante had no equal as a singer of otherworldly horror. According to Frances Stonor Saunders, 14th-century Italy was a ‘bloody muck-heap of superstition and brutality’.

Sir John Hawkwood, the mediaeval mercenary, died in Florence in 1394. A taciturn Englishman, he made Italy his adored home and was paid handsomely (by the Florentine government) for his military services. He led Florence into battle against the city’s declared enemies of Siena and Perugia, and fought with a customary mediaeval brutality. (He is said to have inspired the Italian proverb, ‘An Englishman Italianised is a devil incarnate’.) Yet for all his cruelty and Machiavellian adroitness, Hawkwood was immortalised in a fresco portrait by Paolo Uccello in Florence’s cathedral. The Latin tag beneath the portrait proclaims, ‘This is John Hawkwood, British knight, esteemed the most cautious and expert general of his time.’ Hawkwood was really the incarnation of furbizia (cunning), a quality admired by some Italians. By artfully exploiting Italy’s warring factions and fiefdoms he was able to achieve his own financial ends.

In her account of the Hawkwood story, Frances Saunders submerges the narrative in a mass of scholarly detail regarding mediaeval weaponry, religious fasting, fashion and other foibles. Occasionally a mock-humorous tone intrudes (‘There isn’t much to laugh about in Dante’s Comedy’), and Saunders appears unwilling to leave out a fact painstakingly gathered or a minor character met along the way.