Astorre I Manfredi
Italian condottiero
Astorre Manfredi (c. 1345 – 28 November 1405) was an Italian condottiero. He was the son of Giovanni Manfredi, who had been lord of Faenza (today's Emilia-Romagna) and other castles in the area before the Papal reconquest. Astorre lived for a while in Pistoia after his father had lost his last possession in Romagna; three years after the latter's death, in 1375, he managed to recover Granarolo.
Military career
In 1377, he reconquered Faenza, then occupied by the Este, with the help of his brother Francesco and the Ordelaffis, Lords of Forlì. To obtain the money to keep his seignory, he formed a Compagnia di Ventura (mercenary band), called Compagnia della Stella (Company of the Star). Barnabò Visconti hired him to attack Genoa, but when that city paid him 13,000 florins, he moved back; when he tried again to assault the city, his troops were ambushed in the Bisagno valley and badly defeated. Astorre himself barely escaped being taken as a prisoner.
In the meantime, his brother Francesco has attempted to attain power in Faenza, and Astorre imprisoned him in the castle of Solarolo. Later, Astorre was at the service of Bologna in the war against Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan.
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This entry incorporates text from “Astorre I Manfredi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.