Saunders - Hawkwood : Diabolical Englishman

In the third bay of the north aisle of the Duomo of Florence is Paolo Uccellos fresco portrait of John Hawkwood. Painted in terra verde against a dark red background, it is barely visible at first in the penumbra (Michelangelo criticised the dimness of these badly lit cathedrals as places where nuns could be raped and criminals could hide). The figure of Hawkwood emerges only slowly out of the brooding greyness. We see him on horseback, carrying his baton of command, riding towards the high altar, beneath the vortex of Brunelleschis impossible dome. Under the huge, spherical flanks of his white ambler, a simple Latin inscription reads: Ioannes Acutus Eques Britannicus Dux Aetatis Suae Cautissimus Et Rei Militaris Peritissimus Habitus Est This is John Hawkwood, British knight, esteemed the most cautious and expert general of his time.

The frescos dimensions twenty-five feet from top to bottom its imperial gravitas, and its position opposite the doors leading out of the cathedral into its history haunted square, and thence towards the civic centre of Florence, all speak unambiguously to the importance of its subject. There can be few more assertive sites than this in the narrative of the Renaissance, that great efflorescence of political and artistic expression which we continue to celebrate as a highpoint of civilised life. And yet Uccellos memorial constitutes a statement of extraordinary paradox: Hawkwood was indeed a knight, but he was also a ruthless mercenary, a notorious military journeyman whose activities shocked an age accustomed to atrocity, and earned him a reputation as the Son of Belial.

How did a man who was said to have inspired the proverb Inglese italianato un diavolo incarnato An Englishman Italianised is a devil incarnate come to be adopted and celebrated as a son of Florence, birthplace of the Renaissance? What had happened between his arrival in Italy in 1361 and his death in 1394 to erase the memory of his perfidious and most wicked deeds? Was Hawkwood not responsible for one of the most infamous massacres of his time, an episode worthy of a Senecan tragedy? Did he not manage the business of war so well that there was little peace in Italy in his day?

Ungrateful Florence! exclaimed Byron, for failing to provide a memorial to the all-Etruscan three of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Florence, who denied Dante a resting place, erected a noble monument to a robber, complained the Victorian writer Ferdinand Gregorovius, who, pompous as his name, took the honour accorded to Hawkwood as a personal affront. But Gregorovius was surely right to question how an English mercenary was chosen above the Italian laureates to enter the pantheon of uomini illustri, great and famous men.

Hawkwoods story forces us to re-examine the true origins of the Renaissance, and the value systems on which it was based. It is a story that brings us uncomfortably close to a world without moral endings. Nothing is certain once this frontier has been crossed.