A feast of medieval Italian blood, the Battle of Castanello

In the 11th and 12th centuries, towns and cities arose in northern Italy, and political entities spontaneously formed everywhere, so that the masses stood side by side and did not belong to each other. This is similar to the Haojie at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, a chaotic war. By the mid-14th century, the division of the Italian states was largely stable. In addition to Venice, its special commercial atmosphere created a dictatorship under the guise of co-rule. The result of the race is that the military is entangled with politics and economy. The mercenary group thus stood out and bet on this side of the international chessboard. The Battle of Castagnaro, which took place on 11 March 1387, was the result of a long battle between many parties.

Verona's army broke through the Padua front

Sir John, the prestigious captain of the English mercenary corps, was one of the winners of the battle. Interestingly, his contemporaries believed that he could retreat from the Ada River in 1391, which showed his fame as a general. It is widely believed that the battle from ancient times to the present should be the main general of the two armies planning all the time to defeat the enemy, but the leaders of the 14th century did not think so. What they thought was how to avoid head-to-head confrontation with the enemy as much as possible, so that there was no risk of losing troops and losing prestige after the big war. After all, the soldiers were basically recruited by themselves, and no one thought about the days when the knife was licking blood every day, and saving strength was the king. The Battle of Castanyaro was fought by political, economic, and military actors, and It was only when Kanara of Padua was forced to act. And he was The Benefactor of Hawkwood.

The participants also played a lot of political tricks during the battle, although the outcome of the battle overshadowed it. From a decisive point of view, the Battle of Castanello lives up to its name. Within a year and a half of the battle, Verona and Padua both fell into Milan's hands. Although Padua quickly regained his freedom by stepping on Venice, the ultimate victor of the battle was undoubtedly Visconti, the lord of Milan. He used Padua to weaken Verona, and immediately after capturing Verona, he turned his face and reached an agreement with Venice to divide Padua, which was quite political. The 14th-century Italian lords did not need Machiavelli to know how to act according to the Monarch.

While many consider Italy's medieval wars to be lagging behind the rest of Europe, the opposite is true. Hawkwood's side-bread-copying tactics are similar to those that the Black Prince did at the Battle of Poitiers 30 years earlier, and are quite a good military approach.

And this battle also caused some confusion about the myth of the "English longbow". Why did this secret weapon of England fail to achieve the same effect as the French battlefield? The self-explanatory explanation is that Hawkwood's archers were too small to function.

All of the above obscures the military significance of the Battle of Castanaro. Although it deviates from the general view, this battle is indeed remarkable; Hawkwood's talent as a leader is also revealed in unexpected ways; Although it is not a weapon to kill the enemy, the longbow has also proved its effectiveness in this battle. Hawkwood actually used tactics to seize the fighter, relying on the coordination of his infantry and the assistance of the longbow to win in one fell swoop.

Famine, war and plague in the mid-to-late 14th century (1340–80)

Italy's thriving economy soon came to a severe test in the mid-14th century. The first was famine, and most of Italy experienced four major famines. And the outbreak of the great war has made the people even more unhappy. In the 13th century, the hard crossbow became popular, and its penetration of crossbow arrows greatly exceeded that of the bow and arrow. This forced the knight to wear heavier armor to resist its massive damage. As a result, the horses had to be stronger, and their demand gradually increased. The result, of course, was that the war became a gold-devouring beast, and the government had to embark on a professional reform of the army. It was also during this period that mercenaries quickly replaced the militia as the main force on the battlefield. By the 14th century, the Italian city-states had gathered larger armies and the mercenary profession was more standardized. Individuals do not have the opportunity to negotiate business with the government, usually the mercenary regimental commander signs terms with the city-state. The size of the mercenary corps can reach thousands of people in wartime, and such a mercenary group is a great help to both the city-state and the kingdom.

For reasons of political checks and balances, the military chiefs of italy were generally not employed, fearing that they would directly seize power by relying on their military power. From the 1630s onwards, it became customary to hire foreign mercenary groups. These mercenary groups are growing rapidly. By the 1650s, the "Legion of Excellence" created by Uslingen consisted of 10,000 mercenaries and 20,000 men. This mercenary group not only has its own government and consultative parliament, but also its bureaucracy and foreign policy are also very sound, like a mobile country. These "mobile states" dominated Italy's war and peace from the 1960s to the 1970s. Mercenary groups such as John Hawkwood of England and Aberriech Stetts of the Germans, Andhlekin Bougatten and others did their utmost to extort money from their employers in peacetime.

The expansion of government power is also the result of a change in the pattern of war. The weak and decentralized city-states of the 13th century had only fledgling administrative bodies and very low taxes, and by the 14th century they had largely disappeared. In its place were republics and aristocratic oligarchic regimes, which were firmly established and had a unique way of making money. The country's fiscal revenues are mainly derived from property taxes, transaction taxes and compulsory loans. These are all through a series of complex means to transform government debt into national debt to maintain its long-term financial deficit. In Florence, for example, bonds with an annual interest rate of 5% were issued in the open market from 1345 onwards, and their revenue increased from 130,000 florins in the 1920s to 400,000 national florins in the 1960s.

The common needs of food production, war, and taxation led to new inventions that greatly contributed to the expansion of the bureaucracy. However, at the same time, it also made the war bigger and bigger, so that countries continued to increase investment in war. Many aspects of the economy declined as a result of this in the 1640s. These 10 years coincided with the beginning of the Hundred Years' War between England and France, and the overextending of the Italian (especially Florence) banks could not be stopped. By 1343 the Peruz Company had collapsed, and in 45 years it became Achiaoli, and in 46 it was Barty's turn.

None of this was a disaster compared to the Black Death. A cargo ship that arrived in Messena in early October 1347 also brought death to Europe. By January of next year the plague had spread to Genoa and Pisa in the form of bubonic plague and pneumonia, and Venice had suffered in February. These important mediterranean trading ports have since become hotbeds for spreading the plague, spreading first throughout the Apennine Peninsula and then throughout Europe. The death toll is estimated to be 30 to 50 percent of Europe's population. Its effects were not limited to 1348, after which the plague seems to have taken root in Italy. Although its power had diminished, sporadic plagues broke out in the countryside and villages of the peninsula until the 18th century.