# looking for information



## asher marquering (Sep 18, 2006)

looking for information on ronins and medieval mercenaries anyone know any websites i watched the movie yojimbo so far that gave me some information on the ronin (i think  ) but anyother information would help


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## Winters_Sorrow (Sep 18, 2006)

What is it you need to know about them?
How they lived/codes of conduct/names/organisational structure (where appropriate) or real life examples?

Mercenary companies where used extensively by the Italian city state wars of the (I think) 16th C
Ronin are a strictly japanese example of masterless samurai and were often more like bandits than the current modern "honorable" bad guys slant portrays.


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## SilentBob (Sep 19, 2006)

If i may i recomend a book: it's Barbara W. Tuchman's "A distant mirror". It holds a lot of informations about the mercenaries in the 14th century Europe.

If you wanna know more about the mercs in the ancient world i'd recomend Xenophon's _Annabasis_; also, scarce information can be found in Thucydides' writings (classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.html- apparently i can't post the URL just yet) and even in the _Illiad _ (but verry disimulated).

If you want to learn more about the ronin, i'd suggest that you look for books that focus on *the warring states period*. It's a period when many clans are defeated, resulting in a great number of masterless samurai


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## Fightin gobbo (Sep 23, 2006)

english free companies where extreemly common in medieval france
to my knowledge when they didnt have orders from the crown they used to hire them selves out to the french lords and barons and used to raid and bully small provances

also germany was crawling with mercaneries because alot of the time germany wasent a united land and then mercaneries where in large numbers and constant employment


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## asher marquering (Sep 25, 2006)

appearances and customs mostly for both mercenaries and ronins


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## The Ace (Nov 2, 2006)

For Romans, www.theantonineguard.org.uk


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