In the early part of the fifteenth century a Northern soldier, riding home through the sweet-smelling summer twilight, dreaming in all probability of some dusky-eyed maiden of the border States, stopped by the side of a field to look about him for a shelter for the night. That he would be welcome at any inn, he was sure, for he was returning from the wars to spend his not very hard-earned prize money, of which his saddle-bags were full. One can imagine him, pushing back his helmet and regarding the fair country-side with the appreciative eye of the professional marauder, smacking his dusty lips at the thought of the weeks of hilarious wickedness that his loot would buy for him. The picture is not overdrawn, I can assure the reader, for they were little more than wild beasts, those followers of the great Condottieri, brought under an iron discipline, the yoke of which they were willing to bear for a time, in return for the ample pay and the opportunities which their service afforded them of sacking unoffending towns and robbing and spearing harmless and unarmed citizens and ravishing their wives and daughters. Here and there, stray flowers in those acres of weeds, a fairly decent character appeared among them, but, from such accounts as can be found, these latter never seem to have stayed long in their ranks. As it has been said, the rival bands that infested Italy and Southern France in those merry days never made any serious attempt to injure each other, unless driven to such unpleasant measures by the sternest necessity—or, to be sure, unless some particularly rich bit of loot was between them. As a general thing, though, they do not seem to have displayed even the common courage of the wolf. The longer a campaign could be dragged out the better for all concerned was their motto, and they lived up to it, even to the point of punctiliously letting loose all the prisoners they took from each other after every engagement. A safer and more care-free life than theirs would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine. The people who hired them were, of course, utterly unable to cope with their enemies—with their enemies’ bravos, that is to say—by themselves, and were as completely helpless against their own servants; it was altogether an ideal state of things.