TIES OF POWER: A NETWORK ANALYSIS OF CONTRACTUAL AND KINSHIP RELATIONS BETWEEN MERCENARIES AND REGIONAL STATES IN THE WARFARE MARKET OF RENAISSANCE ITALY.

This dissertation examines contractual relations between mercenaries (condottieri ) and Italian regional states and kinship relations among mercenaries between the late 14th to the beginning of the 17th centuries. In line with Granovetter’s theory of embeddedness (1985), this research emphasises that mercenary contracts in Renaissance Italy were not simply market-driven transactions, but were deeply embedded in kinship networks and wider social structures that significantly influenced their nego tiation, implementation and evolution. Indeed, these enduring social ties - rather than a simple cost-benefit logic - served as a form of social capital that enabled mercenary families to become part of the ruling elite and led states to rehire mercenaries even after a breach of contract. The case of Italian Renaissance warfare adds an original context of study: the establishment of centralised armies and the modernisation of states. This process took place through a complex web of contracts between mercenaries and states, in a context of competition and cooperation involving families, elites and organisations whose boundaries were often blurred. This research contributes with an original dataset that includes time-stamped information on contractual relationships between states and mercenaries, and kinship ties among mercenaries. The creation of this dataset allows for the detailed tracking of both economic and kinship relationships in a longitudinal framework, allowing for the study of network dynamics over time. By examining the relationship between network centrality and mercenaries’ contract compliance behaviour, the study aims to test whether there is a positive association between a mercenary’s position within military networks (i.e. states’ ego-networks) and the likelihood of breaching a contract or being rehired by a previously betrayed state. It is hypothesised that mercenaries with higher centrality in the military networks of the states they served were better able to use these connections to be rehired by the same states despite past betrayals, due to their social capital and strategic influence. Logistic cross-classified multilevel models are used to assess how centrality measures affect the likelihood of betrayal and reinstatement. Furthermore, this research focuses on kinship formation and contractual relationships among condottieri in the Duchy of Milan. The aim is to determine whether mercenaries served the Duchy of Milan as a result of the social influence of affinal family ties - suggesting that once they joined a family already serving the Duchy, they were inclined to follow suit - or whether they actively selected their acquired family ties from those already serving the Duchy, reflecting social selection processes. A temporal analysis of the ego-networks of the mercenaries who served the Duchy was conducted, comparing the composition of the ego-networks before and after the date of the first contract with the Duchy, in order to verify which mechanism led to the establishment of affinal and contractual ties.