United States or Pitcairn Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Cecil Rhodes possessed a curious shyness which gave to his character an appearance the more misleading in that it hid in reality a will of iron and a ruthlessness comparable to a Condottiere of the Middle Ages. The fact was that his soul was thirsting for power, and he was inordinately jealous of successes which anyone but himself had or could achieve in South Africa.

Anne now in the Royal Academy, and the "Vierge aux Rochers" in the Louvre, which was originally painted between 1490 and 1494 for a chapel in San Francesco of Milan, the church where the great Condottiere Roberto di Sanseverino was piously buried by his sons, after his death in the battle of Trent.

It was at this period that the old despotisms founded by Imperial Vicars and Captains of the People came to be supplanted or crossed by those of military adventurers, just as at a somewhat later time the Condottiere and the Pope's nominee were blent in Cesare Borgia.

A huge commerce in prisoners was transacted, and an enterprising Italian Condottiere would often recoup himself through the ransom of one single rich prisoner. The Prussians have continued those medieval methods until this day. Treitschke lays it down in hisPolitikthat war must be made to pay, and need not exhaust a Prussian Treasury.

This city was of immense importance at that moment, if it could be held against the might of the Emperor until the French army should be made up to its full strength and reach the frontier, where the Germans had arrived, commanded by two great captains, the Count of Nassau and the famous condottiere, Franz von Sickingen.

Bartley, to whom it fell, could not be said to have thrown his heart and soul into the work, but he threw all his energy, and he made it more than its friends could have hoped. He espoused the cause of Equity in the pending question with the zeal of a condottiere, and did service no less faithful because of the cynical quality latent in it.

Hafner and Ardea have laid bare two detestable souls, the one of an infamous usurer, half German, half Dutch; the other of a degraded nobleman, in whom is revived some ancient 'condottiere'. Gorka has been brave and mad, like entire Poland; his wife implacable and loyal, like all of England. Maitland continues to be positive, insensible, and wilful in the midst of it all, as all America.

He accepted as no more than his due the almost fabulous respect of the Italians for his political genius. In 1486 he boasted that the Pope Alexander was his chaplain, the Emperor Maximilian his Condottiere, Venice his chamberlain, and the King of France his courier, who must come and go at his bidding.

He had a single and concentrated kind of character. He knew precisely the work which Philip required, and felt himself to be precisely the workman that had so long been wanted. Cool, incisive, fearless, artful, he united the unscrupulous audacity of a condottiere with the wily patience of a Jesuit. He could coil unperceived through unsuspected paths, could strike suddenly, sting mortally.

"Hath one yet been named Condottiere for this frontier service?" questioned one of the older senators, among a group of the more important men who had detached themselves from the others and strolled out into the great loggia on the sea façade for a reviving breath of the morning air.