Sword of Justice

by Christian Cameron

  It was unplanned. Hawkwood went east, on the south bank of the Po, with my whole company and with most of his, and Sir Giannis and his stradiotes. We made a camp in the fields south of Carbonara, and ate noodles, and drank wine. The weather was beautiful, and we kept outposts all night – I checked them myself. The solution to any tension between me and Sir John was simply to accept his orders. My little company joined his, and in the process I learned that one of his many points of bitterness was that Bernabò had only hired him with forty lances, as if he was a captain of little account, whereas some of the German captains had five hundred lances, and yet would not risk leaving the bastide.

  But with the addition of my people, and the Savoyards, and Giannis, he had more than a hundred lances, enough power to risk activity in the open ground, especially on our side of the river. And let me add that while our lord Bernabò was very clever at finding pretty peasant girls and forcing their fathers to put them in his bed, he wasn’t much as a general. The man’s sexual appetite was incredible, and the day after I brought back Sir John’s people from Mantua, he interrupted a meeting of his officers to entertain himself with a girl – nor did he trouble to hide his activities from us. I’m no prude, but this is not the behaviour of a captain in the field. I’ve said before that whatever Sir John’s preferences, I never saw a woman in his tent, nor anyone else but his squires.

  I’ve left my road, as is so often true – in this case to say that Sir John led us east on his own account, as much to prove his worth like some young bachelor knight as for any great military matter. We made camp, as I have said – small fires, and pickets out all night. And before it was light enough to see, we were tacked up and moving east. We left all the older men, and anyone with a bad horse, at Carbonara, with Sam Bibbo in charge of the camp. He rounded up peasants and pressed them to build a little bastide. With our retreat secure, we raced down the south bank of the Po. I rode with William Boson, who in two days had changed from resentment to friendship. For my part, it was a joy to speak French like a good Englishman.

  Ah, you laugh, but in the summer of 1368, the lingua franca of the English Company was Norman French. Probably still is.

  Carbonara to Ficarolo is just six miles. We covered those miles in an hour or less; the sun hadn’t risen, and there were miasmas and mists rising off the river, and we couldn’t see the other side.

  Giannis swept the ground ahead of us, and Sir John sent a dozen of his archers to occupy a stand of woods. We were close to Ficarolo, and we hadn’t seen a banner, or even a pennon.

  I could smell wood smoke, though. And as I rode along the river, I realised that while there was river mist, there was also smoke – the smoke of a thousand cook fires, the mightiest army I had ever seen. It was so large that it took me a moment to accept the scale of the camp I was seeing. I had literally failed to see the forest for the trees.

  Our whole column slowed, and then stopped.

  Fifty thousand men take up a great deal of space. And don’t imagine tents. Rich knights may have a pavilion, but militia build huts, or force local peasants to build them, so that the pavilions of the knights were like flowers in a manure heap, and the huddle of richer, silk pavilions half a mile away, mere points of scarlet and green, were no doubt the Emperor and his household.

  We spread along the riverbank, looking for crossings, but there were none to be found and, after a few minutes, we retreated under Sir John’s orders to the wood that had already been cleared and declared safe by his archers. There we dismounted and ate our sausage. I was already enjoying being a corporal – no longer in command, and now merely making interesting decisions and routine orders. You might think that I missed command; you would be wrong.

  The mist was just starting to clear, and the birds were loud, especially the doves, when suddenly one of Giannis’s stradiotes came in. He talked to Sir John, who beckoned to me.

  ‘Cavalry crossing the river,’ he said.

  I took Gatelussi and l’Angars and all my men-at-arms and went south, staying well back from the bank. I made a dash for the next stand of poplars. We went into it, expecting an outpost, and found it empty, although there was a little fire pit and a whole loaf of bread. We ate the bread and watched the river.

  Five hundred men were crossing. They looked like more, as most of them had two horses, and they were swimming across. The river wasn’t too high – some men never had to swim – and they made good time, but the river was three hundred paces wide, and we had time to eat our chunks of bread and drink a little watered wine …

  The first line of swimmers made it across. They clambered up our bank, the horses shaking themselves, the droplets of water flying like jewels in the bright, sun-laced air, and then the first flight of arrows struck them.

  I doubt three men were hit in that volley, but some horses were hit.

  The men swimming were Turks.

  You’ll never credit it, but the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor had hired Turks. Why not? They were superb light cavalry. It was a scandal at the time, of course – the Pontiff hiring Turks to fight Christians.

  I was there. I think the Turks were cocky; they didn’t think the Italians were much of a threat, and they were overbold. Certainly, in Outremer, no one would have sent his whole command across a river without sending scouts. On the other hand, from one end of the Holy Land to the other, I never saw a river that you needed to swim.

  Most of the Turks turned south, away from the archery. That sent them right into our arms, and they didn’t flinch. We came at them from close. I’d fought Turks, and had no interest in trying their bows to see if their strings were dry. We came around our little woods and into them, and then it was a fight.

  My first opponent was a grinning villain on a big horse. He had his sabre out, and there was little art to our fight. We swaggered swords, and raced along, and he thought his stallion would outrun Gabriel. He was wrong. My fifth or sixth cut went into his turbaned steel cap; the peak held my edge, but the blow stunned him and he fell. His back-blow caught my arm – just the sort of thing Fiore tells you to guard against. We all do stupid things in a fight, but my vambrace held, although I had an almighty welt.

  We took a dozen of them, and Gatelussi got two more. Our archers stopped the men coming over the river, and Boson charged down the Turks who turned north. Most of them got away, but we had twenty prisoners, and they were doubly surprised: first, that we didn’t massacre them, as they had been told by the Pope; and second, that I spoke some Turkish, and told them to be at their ease. Mehmet Ali, their officer, was untroubled by capture. Turks are easy to like, and we chatted in my halting Turkish and his execrable Italian as we raced back to our camp.

  But it was Hawkwood who proposed that we offer them double their wages to change sides, and we sent Mehmet Ali back, ostensibly to arrange an exchange. Then we retreated, leaving a picket at Carbonara, which we convinced Bernabò to reinforce that night.

  Two nights later, the whole of the Turkish company came across the river, and joined us. Bernabò loved them; and suddenly he loved us. Hawkwood’s prestige soared, and I have heard that the Emperor’s confidence in his Papal ally plummeted. Listen: the enemy had ten times our numbers, but they hated each other – Pope and Emperor, Guelph and Ghibelline, an unholy ‘Holy Alliance’. And when we stung them right in front of their camp, we apparently gave them an utterly false idea of our numbers. They imagined us bold; they thought we were flooding the south bank, and the Emperor abandoned his notion of forcing the line of the Po at his camp, and elected instead to march along the north bank of the Po, all the way to Mantua, and try his luck against the bastide at Borgoforte. He may even have imagined that he was outmanoeuvring Bernabò, who had not, in fact, moved any further than to ride back and forth between Guastalla and Borgoforte, hunting animals and maidens. It took him a week to move thirty miles, and during that week we watched his every move. Gatelussi won the praise of the whole
army by crossing to the north bank, riding alone – without my permission – to the front of the Emperor’s army, and jousting with a dozen Germans, unhorsing four of them, and then riding back. It had no military value – it was a piece of youthful folly, but he was knighted by Bernabò for it, and God save us if this tale is only about me. He was a brilliant knight, as good in an ambush or a sortie as in a joust, and he will be a great lord.

  Aside from little follies, we did nothing to impede the Emperor’s progress. And so, on the last day of May, he had his camp set east of Mantua, taking up the whole plain, and eating every ounce of agricultural produce Mantua could provide. Bernabò was not entirely a fool; we were feeding our army off Mantua’s fields and granaries, and so was the Emperor, and this was a form of warfare with which we English are fully conversant.

  I had had a week, by then, of sitting in Bernabò’s pavilion, listening to his lickspittles laugh at his japes, and watching Antonio, his bastard son, alternate fawning civility and brusque revolt. Like Hawkwood, I very quickly developed a devotion to patrolling; it was preferable to watching his heavy-handed courting of men and women. To be fair, Bernabò’s lights-o-love were always provided for, which made him, if not good, at least less bad than some of the other lechers I knew. And compared to his tyranny, his lechery was not likely to be the sin that sent him to Hell, but it was nonetheless ugly to watch, and the worst of it was that he thought that it was some form of prowess.

  Regardless, the day that the Emperor decided to make his attempt on our bastide – which was, incidentally, two weeks higher and stronger than when I’d first pointed it out to Maestro Petrarca – that sunny morning, I was a mile east of the bastion, wearing a frowsy wool pull-over gown and a pair of boots so old that they hung together only by willpower. I was lying at the edge of an irrigation ditch, watching the Emperor’s knights and officers attempt to form his army. I’d already sent Gatelussi back with a message for Sir John; I was fascinated by the process. The Imperial army was not a whole: it was one hundred companies of five hundred men, some of whom were themselves merely accumulations of other groups. The enemy army spoke more languages than the Tower of Babel, and there seemed a definite stress between the German-speaking and Italian-speaking portions of the army.

  They had about forty thousand men, having left garrisons at various crossing points, and we had about fifteen thousand, and the mighty walls of the bastide. And the enemy had a better command structure: the Emperor was a hardened veteran, a knight with campaigns behind him, and his officers were used to him; the Pope’s captains were also trained men with vast experience.

  But that’s where the advantages ended – numbers, and command. Both vital, but not everything. Our army had good spirits; since the fighting between the English and Germans, the Visconti had made every effort to patch the quarrel, mostly with gold, which is usually a good patch. And we had all the English. That was not nothing; often, in those days, each side had an English Company. They’d sit opposite each other, doing little. But on the banks of the Po, because King Edward had asked us, in a public letter, to abjure the Pope and fight for Milan, we had perhaps two thousand Englishmen, knights, men-at-arms, archers and cooks.

  And then we had all the armour.

  Venice was neutral, although the Emperor Charles had, arguably, marched across Venetian lands. But Venice as a neutral party was very much inclined to favour Milan, and Venice had vast stores of munitions. And Milan was the centre of Europe’s arms and armour industry – so much so that every militiaman had more armour than Sir John required of a new man-at-arms. We had artillery, in the form of a vast trebuchet mounted in the middle of the bastide, which Bernabò, or possibly Petrarca, had nicknamed ‘Troy’. And the Milanese had gonnes: big ones that threw a ten-pound ball, and small ones that two militiamen could move and fire as a team. Hundreds, if not thousands, of their militia were armed with handgonnes. I’d never seen them in such numbers; I had my doubts.

  I knew Bernabò mistrusted his Germans, but since the company of Turks changed sides, the Germans had been much quieter. It’s odd, but in my life as a mercenary, I have seen this many times. Men desert to armies they think will treat them better; after a while, the desertions go only one way.

  At any rate, I lay at the edge of my ditch, chewed grass like a yokel, and listened to the officers attempt, in broad Southern German, to get Italians and Bretons and the Pope’s raw Romagnol levies to co-operate. I could see Malatesta; he was not in command of anything bigger than his own company, and I could see from his body language how angry he was. I watched him bicker with an Imperial officer – and, of course, the Guelph against Ghibelline divide was so old in Northern Italy that there was too much blood on the balance for the two armies to love each other.

  All things together, I didn’t think the odds were too bad.

  The Imperial army wasn’t formed until almost midday, by which time I’d slipped back to my horse, taken my scouts, and ridden all the way back to our camp, where I changed into my best. As Fiore said, ‘If I’m to die here, it will be in my best.’ This was, without a doubt, the largest battle any of us had ever seen.

  I had my new helmet and a mostly new harness; over it I wore a short silk cloak, just to keep the sun off. My helmet had a red and black silk turban, and I had a lance pennon to match, and an embroidered cover on my helmet’s aventail with my arms.

  And I had a shield. I loved that shield; I had carried it across half the world. It didn’t have my full arms, because the maker, in Cyprus, hadn’t really shared a language with me, but it did have my spur rondels in bars of sable and scarlet, each half against the contrasting colour. It was scarred, and knocked about, but the paintwork was radiant. The day before, a travelling illuminator had touched it up for me, and I’d given him dinner in return. He was a very learned man, much above shield painting – he decorated manuscripts and painted for churches – and he, too, was making his way through the war to Milan for the wedding. He worked for Cangrande, and his name was Altichiero. He and Fiore discussed drawing – have I not mentioned that Fiore could draw, beautifully? Sometimes, when you had a bad habit, he would draw you, and show the way your hip stuck out, or your hand turned. Anyway, he put my new Savoyard arms on my shield, with my distinctions from the count and the Order. Sword of Justice. Order of the Swan. Nothing for Spatharios, more’s the pity.

  Altichiero was even better at drawing men, and he made a drawing, just a few pen strokes, of Fiore thrusting at me with a longsword and me stretching to make my cover. I carried it for years but lost it retreating from the Paduans last summer, I’m sorry to say, because it was very fine. But I still have the shield.

  At any rate, I was very fine, and so was Fiore, and so, in fact, were all our men-at-arms and most of our archers and squires. The count was a good patron, and the Milanese had made every effort to perfect our equipment at Pavia. I rode to Sir John, who was in white armour without any decoration, but had a white wand in his hand like the captain he was, and a big hat. We English had a joke that we tried not to make among Italians, that the size of a man’s floppy hat showed how important he was – a joke that was also a truth. Bernabò’s hat was as big as Milan itself. Sir John’s was not small, and yet he didn’t appear ridiculous.

  Between our two contingents, we had about one hundred lances. We had more archers than men-at-arms, though not by much. Some of our squires were also men-at-arms, and a few pages. But English archers were thick on the ground that summer, as the Prince of Wales had closed his campaign in Spain and many good lads were out of work. Hundreds came to Italy, and at least two hundred signed on with Milan, or directly with Sir John or me, in the last week before the fight.

  And we had the Turks, or rather, I did. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t obey anyone else; merely that Giannis and I spoke more Turkish than anyone else in our army. That had some irony to it, but Mehmet Ali seemed happy enough with us and, in the end, that proved a deciding factor i
n Bernabò’s battle plan. He put us on the right – the place, in most arrays, of most honour – and in this case, well outside the safety of the bastide. On the other hand, we were well-mounted, and we would have open ground in front of us, and a nice wide ditch on our flank, or so we discovered when we deployed.

  The Imperial army had deployed too far away, a common enough mistake, and one I have made myself. Because we deployed from our camp, much closer, we had our array settled long before the Imperials were ready to try us. Our line, from the ditch to the camp of Borgoforte, was more than a mile long and, against all the advice of every war leader since Vegetius, we had gaps in it, left for the guns to fire through. The Imperials had a much longer line, but they had not reconnoitred well; the ditch that secured our flank went off to the north and east, wider where they were deploying and much narrower by our position, so that their army would have to narrow their frontage as they came forward. Our Turks slipped down the bank of the river and then popped up beyond the drainage ditch, with wide open fields in front of them, and then they hid themselves in the woods by the river.

  Looking off to my left, I could see the Veronese with their ladder banners, deployed in close order: pavisiers in full armour and carrying big shields and heavy spears and, behind them, crossbowmen. They had gaps in their array for wedges of Veronese knights, who were reckoned among the best in Italy. Beyond them was the German horse – about two thousand barbutes. And then …

  And then the earth walls of the bastide, upon which were the ranks of gonnes and gonne carts, and the massed handgonners. I was in full agreement with Bernabò that the place for militia was behind walls. I couldn’t imagine that the Emperor would attempt to storm them.