Condotierri Books in Order

The Condotierri books move into early fifteenth-century Italy, where city-states, church politics, and hired war bands are always close to open conflict. At the center is Flavio Sabatini, a man with too many past lives to fit comfortably anywhere. He has been pirate, routier, and condottiere, and when he returns to his home town of Corneto in The Cardinal's Sword, he brings all that history back with him.

Nothing in this world stays settled for long.

Flavio is the kind of hero who arrives already weathered. He knows violence, knows how power works, and knows that respectable men can be every bit as dangerous as open enemies. That matters in a setting shaped by the Western Schism, where rival loyalties run through cities, noble families, and the church itself. Corneto is home, but it is not safe. Saracen threats hang over the coast, old grudges travel with him, and the question is never only who wants him dead. It is also who wants to use him first.

The second book, The Fight for Florence, opens the map wider and makes the politics even sharper. Florence in 1402 is wealthy, proud, and in real danger as the Duke of Milan's armies press forward. Flavio is drawn into a struggle where every faction has its own plan for surviving the crisis, and betrayal inside the walls may prove as dangerous as the army outside them. The cast also widens, including family ties such as his younger sister Simona Corio, which gives the larger political story a more personal edge.

These are not polished court romances in fancy clothes. They are tougher adventure novels about men and women trying to stay alive in a fractured Italy. Mercenary service, civic loyalty, faith, ambition, and plain survival all rub against one another. Flavio keeps being forced to ask where he stands. Is he outside the law, serving himself, or is there still a cause worth choosing?

He is useful to powerful people, and that is rarely safe.

If you like historical fiction that leans into shifting alliances, street-level danger, and the messy politics of Italy before the full flowering of the Renaissance, this series has a strong hook. The swordplay matters, but the real pull comes from the tension between public crisis and private loyalty. Start with The Cardinal's Sword, then move straight into The Fight for Florence to see how Flavio Sabatini's world grows darker, larger, and more dangerous.