Carlos Pérez-Desoy
Diplomat
Leaving the Piazza San Marco behind us, walking north-east, we arrive after a few minutes at the campo santi Giovanni e Paolo, next to the church of the same name. In front of it is the famous monument to Bartolomeo Colleoni. He had fought for Venice against Milan; and sometimes also for Milan against Venice.But his promiscuity in matters of alliances was remarkable, so he also fought for France and others.One only has to look at the face of the military august made by Verrochio to realise that it does not exactly induce confidence.
The condottieri were the heads of the private military exercises which during the Renaissance were hired out to the highest bidder to fight for one of the many states into which Italy was divided, which was then, as Napoleon later defined it, “a mere geographical reference”.In Renaissance Culture in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt accurately describes the world of these condottieri, who ravaged the ill-fated Italian peninsula with their barbarism and savagery.It was not all violence. Federico da Montefeltro, who became Duke of Urbino thanks to his military successes, was a man of refinement.His studiolo in the ducal palace of Gubbio – now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York – held the then fabulous number of three dozen books (we are talking about codices, since movable type printing had not yet arrived), in one of the most important private libraries of the time. But his fierce gaze – he had his portrait painted by Piero della Francesca, and we can see it in the Uffizi in Florence – is not very different from Colleoni’s. The scourge of the condottiere, the scourge of the condotti, was a man of the condottiere.
The scourge of the condottieri was not the exclusive heritage of Italy, nor did it end with the Renaissance.In the 17th century, Albrecht von Wallenstein – immortalised in a famous engraving by Julius Schrader, where he sits listening attentively to the words of his astrologer – played an important role during the Thirty Years’ War, leading an army of lansquenets in multicoloured uniforms who, despite their bloodthirsty reputation, were unable to prevent the assassination of their leader, instigated by Emperor Ferdinand II of Habsburg, who was probably rightly suspicious of Wallenstein’s mercenary loyalty.
The creation of national armies put an end to the era of the condottieri. At least in Europe. But not elsewhere, such as China, where in the early 20th century, after the fall of the thousand-year-old empire, they went through the ominous time of chaos and misrule known as the Warlord period.
Misery and violence made the value of life negligible, to the extent that peasants offered to be executed in place of nobles condemned to death, in exchange for burial money, essential according to Buddhists to ensure reincarnation.The brutality of the era is portrayed in a memorable scene from Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea Of General Yen, where the aforementioned warlord rams his car into the coolie of the rickshaw of a philanthropic American missionary who, horrified, reproaches the general for the death of the innocent footman. Madam,” says the Chinese condottiero, undaunted, “if your servant is dead, he is a lucky man.Life, even in its most pleasant moments, is hardly bearable”. A few years ago we learned with astonishment that the condottieri were not, as we thought, a thing of the past (in fact we had already seen Blackwater operating in Iraq), but that, sponsored by the Kremlin, they were operating with impunity in Africa – which had already suffered the misfortune of mercenaries in the Congo, Biafra and elsewhere -, and that the dark hand of the Wagner group was behind all kinds of military operations, and even coups d’état.
After the invasion of Ukraine we discovered that private militias like Prigozhin’s Wagner Group and Kadyrov’s bloodthirsty Chechens were indispensable to make up for the operational shortcomings of the supposedly fearsome Russian army, which suddenly revealed itself to be a modern version of Mexico’s Pancho Villa’s mesnadas.A mise en scène of mercenaries more medieval than Renaissance, commanded by 21st century condottieri, with a prop of missiles and nuclear weapons, evoking the scenarios drawn by Alex Raymond in the Flash Gordon comics.
Was Putin unaware of all this? You don’t need to have seen Capra’s film, or read Burckhardt, to know how the Condottieri are at it.Characterised for years as a contemporary epigone of Machiavelli, we now discover that Putin had not even read him, and that he was unaware of his admonition, much repeated in recent days, warning that “the prince whose government rests on mercenaries will never have security or tranquillity, because they are disunited, because they are ambitious, disloyal, and boastful among friends, but cowardly in the face of the enemy”. In fact, it was enough to compare the patibulary looks of Prigozhin and Kadirov with those of the Condottiero Colleone or the Duke of Urbino, to perceive a common vis of brutality and vileness unsuitable for establishing a relationship of trust with them.
© Published in Diari de Girona / All rights reserved
