When the people were groaning under heavy taxes, when all coin which Lorenzo could scrape together had to be poured out to pay the condottieri, or soldiers of fortune, by whom the battles of Florence were fought, there was of course but short commons for the humanists who had made Florence their home.

The Duke of Ferrara withdrew owing to some disagreement with the condottieri engaged by Lorenzo.

With the marvellous powers which Alcibiades possessed of ingratiating himself with men of every class and every nation, and his high military genius, he would have been as formidable a chief of an army of condottieri as Hannibal afterward was.]

A reader of Mrs. Radcliffe might suppose them a band of condottieri, under the command of some profligate desperado; and such perhaps they were.

They first of all took into their confidence one of the Papal Condottieri, a man of undoubted courage and abilityGiovanni Battista da Montesicco, a native of the Roman Campagnawho was under heavy obligation to Count Girolamo de' Riari.

After receiving his early training as a soldier in Rome, attached to the staff of one or other of the Condottieri, young Giovanni was appointed to a military command with the Papal army in Lombardy, when he was little more than out of his teens.

One meets occasionally with the ruins of old castles on some of the heights, and I was strongly reminded, at the sight of these antique edifices, of the mysteries of Udolpho and the times of the Condottieri.

At one time, his mind was fixed on Mexico,not with the licentious dreams that excited the ragged Condottieri who followed the fated footsteps of the "gray-eyed man of Destiny," in the wild hope of plunder and power,nor with the vague reverie in which fanatical theorists construct impossible Utopias on the absurd framework of Icarias or Phalansteries.

When we read of the wonderful success which at first attended the French army, we must remember how greatly superior it was to the troops which opposed it in Italy, which were mostly bands of adventurers collected by mercenary leaders, named Condottieri, who fought for gain rather than for glory, and had no special zeal or loyalty for the prince who employed them.

These transcripts from the courts of princes and camps of condottieri are invaluable as portraits of the lawless young men who filled Italy with the noise of their feuds and the violence of their adventures.

The feuds of these crowned condottieri harassed the cities more sorely than their own quarrels, and their arms could not even preserve the Hellenic heritage against external foes.

Burgundian barons, Catalan condottieri, and Florentine bankers snatched the Duchy of Athens from one another in bewildering succession, while the French princes of Achaia were at feud with their kindred vassals in the west of the Peloponnesos whenever they were not resisting the encroachments of Romaic despots in the south and east.

Rushing from the palace, she disguised herself in male attire and fled to the mountains, where she joined a company of Condottieri.

If classical learning and the graces of literature received but intermittent encouragement from the sovereign pontiffs, both the secular interests of their government and the vindication of the Church's dogmatic teaching afforded the most profitable exercise for talents which sceptical humanists sold, as readily as did the condottieri their swordsto the best paymaster, regardless of their personal convictions.