Speaker
Description
The employment of mercenaries by Italian states between the 15th and 16th century stands at the inception of a military transformation, away from the medieval organization of military power, feudalism, to the emergence of standing armies. The transition from a free to a mediated market of force is observable in the fact that contracts between mercenaries and states tend to stabilise over time, i.e. there are fewer betrayals and a longer period of service to the state. The content of the contracts underwent a change: for instance, the Republic of Venice included some family welfare benefits that made betrayal more costly.
The urge to resort to mercenary companies, the fluctuating patterns of rivalry and expedient partnerships, made contract breachings and sudden changes of sides relatively frequent.
Our hypothesis is that kinship ties played a major role on the dynamic of a contracts between mercenary family-based companies and states.
The dataset was built from the condottieridiventura.it database which collects more than 4000 biographical notes and contractual specifications of condottieri operating in Italy between 1330 and 1600. The dataset is time-stamped: for each mercenary, the dates on which he concluded the contract are indicated and any defections are reported. Direct and indirect family ties were entered for each mercenary. Ultimately, alliances between regional states were reconstructed with temporal dating.
We built a multiplex network composed by two layers. The first one consists of a one-mode network representing kinship ties among condottieri. The second layer consists of a two-mode network representing employment contracts between regional states and condottieri.
Preliminary results are expected to be shown as regards the role of kinship relationships among condottieri on the contract dynamic over time.
| Topics | • Network analysis in human past and history |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Multiplex network, Historical sociology, Kinship, Employment contracts, Market of force |
