re: #208 wheat-dogghazi

One of the English language textbooks here has a short article about Hawkwood, believe it or not. It prompted me to look him up on Wikipedia. He sure was a wiley fellow. If some city council didn’t pay him, he’d turn his soldiers loose to loot and pillage the city, or go visit a rival city and offer his services (for a suitable fee) to loot and pillage the first city on the rival’s behalf. Despite all this, the Italians loved him.

Point of the story was that hiring mercenaries seemed a cheap short-term solution for most city-states, but in the end, it would have been cheaper to raise and maintain their own armies.