For a king to carry his sword on Christmas Day -150 groschen

To legitimatize illegitimate children – 60 groschen

For giving a converted Jew permission to visit his parents.- 40 groschen

To free 'a bishop from an archbishop – 30 groschen

To divide a dead man and put him in two graves 30 groschen

To permit a nun to have two maids-20 groschen

To obtain immunity from excommunication-6 groschen

To receive stolen goods to the value of 1000 groschen – 50 groschen

Avignon might have been a freebooter's dream of a-city to be sacked but it had the strongest fortifications in Europe. Pope Innocent contemplated the vast encampment across the river and decided to pay the mercenary armies to persuade them to go away, preferably to Italy. He included a plenary. indulgence for all of them, as part of the price, which wiped out a teeming population of sins.

Hawkwood's White Company, so named because they kept their armour shining, was hired by Pisa to defend it. Hawkwood invented the designation 'lance' as a system of accounting for troops in Italy. Lances fought on foot. With 2000 of them in the field, 1000 page boys called ragazzi held the horses at a safe distance in the rear. Two men held each lance, standing in units of twenty or thirty lances, balled together like porcupines. When these defence/attack units broke the enemy, the ragazzi would run forward with the horses so that the men within the lance unit could take up hot pursuit, hoping to take prisoners who could be held for ransom.

The murderous complement to the lances were the archers on their flanks. A First-class archer could loose six arrows a minute, have the sixth in the air before the first hit the target, and. kill at 200 yards. It was the secret weapon of the White Company because it was exclusively an English weapon which was irreplaceable in Italy.

The administration of the White Company was organized under, the prevalent military code, an observation which is relevant to Decima Manovale's story. Hawkwood's principal lieutenants in the field were Albert Sterz and an aristocratic Englishman, Andrew de Belmonte, whom the Italians called Dubramonte. The key figure after Hawkwood was the company treasurer, William Tureton, to whom the Hawkwood clients paid over the agreed costs for defence. Toreton, as the Italians called him, ran the money, the paperwork and the intelligence system, and, he needed a large Italian staff. He was also Hawkwood's lawyer, diplomat and banker. Manovale said he was a beefy man, very tall, with very red cheeks and an insatiable lust early in the morning. She said that, if she really wanted something from him, she was always careful to ask in the afternoon – or over she'd go. He liked very young women, between the ages of ten and fourteen. – After that, it was hard for a woman to hold his attention.

Toreton acquired Decima Manovale, tenth child of sixteen children, when she was twelve years old, from her father, for five florins and the agreement that he would teach her to read and write. She was a healthy, handsome girl, and when she was thirteen she had her first child, called Maria Giovanna Toreton then, late the same year, her second child, Maria Louise Sterz. Her third was Helene MaCloi (by Chevalier MaCloi, Chief of Staff to the Duke of Anjou), born when Decima was fourteen, and Rosa, fathered by Andrew de Belmonte, was born the following year. Decima learned to speak Latin and the languages of the four men who had fathered her children. English, German and French, which she taught to her children.

Children born out of wedlock were commonplace and accepted. Decima worked on at Toreton's headquarters while she took care of the children, learning how to run wars, conclude treaties, direct and collect intelligence, and to judge men. She developed an understanding of power and the necessity for ruthlessness when she was very young. Cossa didn't know the first things about power compared to Manovale but, as I have said, he was a passive type, a very Italian kind of a fatalist.

When Decima was seventeen, and Toreton never went near her for diddling even in the early morning but listened to her notions when it came to business, Hawkwood deserted Pisa, Decima's homeland, and sold, the company's services to Florence, Pisa's enemy. Decima took her children, five, four, three and two years old, to Rome. She knew Toreton would be glad to see her go. He had his eye on a nine-year- old girl whose father had been sending her into the camp with firewood.

Toreton was fond of Manovale and felt responsible for her (and her four children). He saw to it that each of the fathers of the children, including himself, contributed, 100 gold florins to the Manovale travelling fund and, in addition, he gave her seven cups of pure gold from the loot stores, three valuable tapestries and five good rugs. Manovale had enough capital to support her family well for the next four years.

Although she was beautiful and accomplished – and, I am telling you, when you,… if you think about spectacular, stately women, it would be nearly impossible to conceive of a woman who was more beautiful up to the moment I last saw her – and although there wasn't much else for her to work at to support her four small children, she refused to become a courtesan. She became a ruffiana instead. She deal in women, boys, potions, poisons, fortune telling and stolen goods, and she prospered.

Later, when they could understand, she told her children, `You were sired by great men. The strength of their characters and mine have joined to form your characters. Had I become a courtesan, it could have been said that we didn't know, who your fathers were, so varied are the seeds that are scattered over a courtesan's fields until it is nearly impossible to know whose seeds take root.' However, she trained and raised her daughters to be courtesans. The first two helped bet, to teach the others.

Such young women were called courtesans because they were the companions of the cortegiani, the courtiers at the courts of Italy. They had been raised from the street title of whores by an official government designation of meretrix honesta, or `honourable whore'. Courtesan was a title for the convenience of their patrons, usually men of station but always men of funds. Whore would have been a gratuitously rude label for the companions of such esteemed men.

Rosa, the youngest, became a courtesan when she was thirteen. Her youth and virginity, both endlessly extended by mama, were not her only attractions. Like her sisters she could read and write, sing, paint, think, wear clothes and jewels, and play musical instruments. Mama's central commandments to Rosa and her sisters were as the Words which had tumbled out of: the burning bush to Moses.

'A whore is not a woman,' Manovale taught them. 'She is a whore. It is what you make of the work and not the label which counts. We are the ants who hoard up the summers of our beauty and our art against the dread winter. Woe to the one who has no brains, for that is where the art lives. You must be able to burst into tears while a man is taking his pleasure from you – tears without reason – enough to make him stop what he is doing – that is the great test of the art – to make him beg of you why you weep. You answer with broken words and sobs. "I cannot make you love me!" you tell him or words to that effect… "That is my fate, a life without your love." Of course there are many variations, but the men swell, with pride that a woman is lovesick for them. Occasionally, you must weep when they arrive: so that they will believe you weep far joy at seeing them again. Love is not for us. Oh, as a caprice, yes – here today, gone this afternoon. Neither is lust for us. She who keeps drinking never feels thirsty., But all the best in this life can be yours if you dress yourself becomingly and are always ready and cheerful, hardly ever laughing outright, which shows teeth and gullet like a street whore, but cultivating a sweet and attractive smile because you are a woman of quality. As the men come to you, you will entertain them cleverly and never play dishonest tricks on them. You will never drink too much – men detest that in others – nor will you stuff yourself with food.