David Parrott - The Business of War - Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe (2012, Cambridge University Press)

The Business of War
This is a major new approach to the military revolution and the relation-
ship between warfare and the power of the state in early modern Europe.
Whereas previous accounts have emphasized the growth of state-run
armies during this period, David Parrott argues instead that the delega-
tion of military responsibility to sophisticated and extensive networks of
private enterprise reached unprecedented levels. This included not only
the hiring of troops but the provision of equipment, the supply of food
and munitions, and the financing of their operations. The book reveals
the extraordinary prevalence and capability of private networks of
commanders, suppliers, merchants and financiers who managed the
conduct of war on land and at sea, challenging the traditional assumption
that reliance on mercenaries and the private sector results in corrupt and
inefficient military force. In so doing, the book provides essential histor-
ical context to contemporary debates about the role of the private sector
in warfare.
david parrott is a fellow and lecturer at New College, University of

Oxford. His previous books include Richelieu’s Army. War, Government
and Society in France 1624–1642 (Cambridge, 2001).
The Business of War
Military Enterprise and Military Revolution
in Early Modern Europe
David Parrott
cambridge university press
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press,

New York
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521735582
© David Parrott 2012
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2012
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Parrott, David.
The business of war : military enterprise and military revolution in early modern
Europe / David Parrott.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-521-51483-5 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-521-73558-2 (paperback)
1. Europe – History, Military – 1492–1648 – Economic aspects. 2. Mercenary
troops – Europe – History. 3. Europe – Commerce – History.
4. War – Economic aspects – Europe – History. I. Title.
D214.P39 2012
355.00940 09031–dc23
2011031556
ISBN 978-0-521-51483-5 Hardback

ISBN 978-0-521-73558-2 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to
in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
To Robert Oresko,
2 January 1947–15 February 2010
Contents
List of figures page viii

List of maps xii
Acknowledgements xiii
List of abbreviations xvi
Currencies xvii
Introduction 1
Part I Foundations and expansion 25

1 Military resources for hire, 1450–1560 27
2 The expansion of military enterprise, 1560–1620 71
3 Diversity and adaptation: military enterprise during
the Thirty Years War 101
Part II Operations and structures 137

4 The military contractor at war 139
5 The business of war 196
6 Continuity, transformation and rhetoric in European
warfare after 1650 260
7 Conclusion 307
Notes 328
Bibliography 393
Index 419
vii
Figures
1.1 A pirate sloop operating in coastal waters. ‘Brigantin

donnant chasse a une felouque.’ Claude Randon, engraving
and etching. Published Marseilles 1700. George Clarke
Collection, Volume LIX: 36. Courtesy of the Provost
and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford. page 34
1.2 A contemporary visualization of Swiss and German
pike-squares clashing outside the walls of a city. BM
1867,0713.157 ‘Battle Outside the Gates of a City’, Illustration
to Leonhart Fronsperger, Kriegsrechte, Frankfurt am Main,
1567. Etching, Jost Amman, 1564. Courtesy of the
©Trustees of the British Museum. 56
1.3 a. The Rottmeister; ‘Der Rottmeister’, Leonard
Fronsperger, Kriegssbuch, erster (dritter) Theil. Jetzt von
neuwem vbersehen. Franckfurt, 1596 [T 7.6 Jur, LXIII verso].
©Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; b. The Hurenwaibel;
‘Der Hurenwaibel’, Leonard Fronsperger, Kriegssbuch, erster
(dritter) Theil. Jetzt von neuwem vbersehen. Franckfurt, 1596
[T7.6 Jur, LXV recto]. ©Bodleian Library, University of Oxford;
c. the Brandmeister; ‘Der Brandmeister’, Leonard Fronsperger,
Kriegssbuch, erster (dritter) Theil. Jetzt von neuwem vbersehen.
Franckfurt, 1596 [T 7.6 Jur, LI verso]. ©Bodleian Library,
University of Oxford. 63
1.4 Landsknecht dress, an attractive subject for artists
and engravers through the sixteenth century. BM 1845,
0809.1709. Landsknechte Playing Dice. Woodcut: block cut by
Jost de Negker; print by Jorg Breu, published, c.1580–5.
Courtesy of the ©Trustees of the British Museum. 68
2.1 Andrea Doria. BM O, 2.210 Portrait of Admiral
Andrea Doria (1466–1560), etching and engraving,
Crispijin de Passe the Elder c.1590–1637. Courtesy of the
viii
List of figures ix
2.2 Merchant ship from Furtenbach – Dutch merchant/

warship.‘Von dem Schiffgebäw auf dem Meer und Seekusten
Zugebrauchen’, Joseph Furtenbach, Architectura Navalis, Ulm,
1629 [fol. THETA 681, Plate 10]. ©Bodleian Library,
University of Oxford. 84
3.1 Johan Banér. Portrait of Johan Banér (1596–1641).
Artist unknown, c.1800–38. Courtesy of Militärhögskolan
Karlberg. 132
4.1 Gottfried Heinrich von Pappenheim. BM R, 1a.240
Portrait of Gottfried Heinrich, Count of Pappenheim (1594–1632),
Engraving, Cornelis Galle II after Van Dyck, c.1630–50.
4.2 Jacques Colaert. Musée des Beaux Arts, Dunkerque,
BA. P. 224 Portrait of Admiral Jacques Colaërt. Unknown
Flemish painter, seventeenth-century, oil painting on canvas.
Courtesy of the Direction des Musées de Dunkerque, MBA
(photo: Jacques Quecq d’Henriprêt). 144
4.3 A typical small-scale cavalry engagement of the type
which dominated much fighting in the Thirty Years War. BM V,
9.60 Cavalry engagement, print from a series of eight entitled
‘Scènes Militaires’, Etching, Giacomo Cortese, c.1635–60.
4.4 The surprise and defeat of the French Army of
Germany at Tuttlingen, 24 November 1643. Ambush at
Tuttlingen (November 1643), Theatrum Europaeum (21 vol.),
Vol. V, Franckfurt am Main, 1643–1738 [fol. Delta 330–350,
p. 191]. ©Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 155
4.5 Ordinary soldiers of the Thirty Years War in a sketch
by Stefano della Bella. BM 1871, 0513.409 Ordinary soldiers of
the seventeenth century, print from a series entitled ‘Receuil de
diverses pieces nessessaire a la fortification’, Etching, Stefano
della Bella, c.1641. Courtesy of the ©Trustees of the British
Museum. 166
4.6 Banér as master of operational flexibility: the Swedish
retreat from Bohemia at Preßnitz, March 1641. Retreat of the
Swedish Army at Preßnitz (March, 1641) from Theatrum
Europeaeum (21 vol.), IV, Franckfurt au Main, 1643–1738
[fol. Delta 330–350, p. 620]. ©Bodleian Library, University
of Oxford. 185
4.7 The small cavalry-dominated army of the later Thirty
Years War: the battle of Mergentheim, 5 May 1645. Battle at
Mergentheim (5 May 1645), from Theatrum Europaeum (21 vol.),
x List of figures
V, Franckfurt au Main, 1643–1738 [fol. Delta 330–350,

p. 768]. ©Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 186
5.1 The diversity of military production: seventeenth-
century artillery, munitions and supporting equipment. BM
1893, 0331.75 Detail from ‘Les elemens de l’art militaire’,
etching, Claude Roussel, c.1683–1735. Courtesy of the
5.2 Female sutler and companion. BM 1850, 0612.478,
Sutler and her Assistant, etching and engraving, Virgil Solis,
c.1530–1555. Courtesy of the ©Trustees of the
British Museum. 205
5.3 Supplying war: the mercantile interconnections
between key production centres and traders – copied with
permission from J. Zunckel, Rüstungsgeschäfte im
Dreißigjährigen Krieg, p. 76 215
5.4 Louis de Geer. BM 0, 6.126 Portrait of Louis de Geer
(1587–1652), Engraving, Jeremias Falck after David Beck,
1649. Courtesy of the ©Trustees of the British Museum. 235
5.5 Cannon foundry at Julitha Bruk. Detail from the
painting ‘Hendrick Trip’s Cannon Foundry at Julitha Bruk,
Södermanland, Sweden’, Allart Van Everdingen c.1646–1675,
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Inventory No. SK – A – 1510.
Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum. 238
5.6 Equestrian portrait of Karl Gustaf Wrangel (1613–76),
by David K. Ehrenstrahl, 1652. Courtesy
of Skokloster Slott, Sweden. 242
5.7 Tomb of Melchior von Hatzfeld (1593–1658),
Church of St Jacob, Prusice, Lower Silesia, Poland,
c.1659–63. Courtesy of ©Marcin Mazurkiewicz. 255
5.8 Engraving of Wrangel’s newly built palace at
Skokloster. ‘Arx Skogloster Illustriss. Et. Excellmi. Dni.
Comtis Caroli Gustavi Wrangelii’, Print from Sveica Antiqua
et Hodierna, 1723, engraving after a drawing by Erik Dahlberg,
George Clarke Collection, Vol. LI: 108. Courtesy of
the Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford. 256
5.9 Jan de Werth in retirement as a country nobleman.
Portrait of Jan de Werth, Anonymous, mid-seventeenth century.
Inventory No. RBA 214 285. Courtesy of the Rheinishes
Bildarchiv, Cologne. 257
5.10 The painted ceiling of the main salon of the Trip
House, Amsterdam. Panel from the Ceiling of the Great Room,
Trippenhuis, Amsterdam, Nicolaas de Heldt Stockade, c.1662.
List of figures xi
Courtesy of Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van

Wetenschappen. 258
6.1 Johann Friedrich von Braunschweig-Lüneburg.
Portrait of Johann Friedrich (1625–79), duke of Brunswick-
Lüneburg, after Jean Michelin, 1670. Courtesy of Historisches
Museum, Hanover. 282
6.2 A custom-built third-rate warship; contrast this with
Figure 2.2. Engraving of third-rate warship, from Paul Hoste,
L’art des armées navales, ou Traité des évolutions navales . . .
(Lyon, 1727). New College Library NB. 108.14. Courtesy
of Warden and Fellows of New College. 292
7.1 Dutch East India Company magazine and dockyard.
BM 1870, 0514.2129, T’t Oostindische Magazyn en
Scheeps Timmer-Werf, etching, Joseph Mulder, c.1680.
Acknowledgements
This book originates from an invitation by the Master and Fellows of

Trinity College Cambridge to give the Lees Knowles lectures in autumn
2004. The lecture series, founded by Sir Lees Knowles in 1912, was
intended for the promotion of ‘military science’. Seeking a topic that
might be wide-ranging enough to appeal to a broad audience of military,
political and social historians, and could also meet the Founder’s inten-
tion to provide historical lectures with relevance to the practice of war, I
chose to develop my interest in early modern military outsourcing and the
organization of war through private enterprise. Having given me the
motive to explore this subject, the Master and Fellows of Trinity provided
me with generous hospitality during the weeks while I was producing and
delivering the Lees Knowles lectures. I am extremely grateful not just for
this generosity, but for the support and friendship that was offered while I
was giving the lectures, in particular by my ever-considerate host at
Trinity, Boyd Hilton, and through numerous engaging and helpful con-
versations with Peter Sarris, William St Clair and many others amongst
the Fellowship.
Other debts have been amassed in the course of turning the lectures into
the present book. I particularly wish to thank the Arts and Humanities
Research Council for their generous three-month award under the
Research Leave Scheme from January to March 2009, which provided
me with an extra research term in addition to the one granted to me by
New College/Oxford University. Together they gave me the opportunity
in 2008/9 to draw together my reading and thinking on military enterprise
into the present book. This AHRC funding was invaluable in permitting
me a lengthy and untrammelled opportunity to achieve this complete
draft. Thanks are also due to the Warden and Fellows of New College,
who granted me an initial research term, and in particular to my col-
leagues Ruth Harris and Christopher Tyerman, who filled in for many of
my normal duties, and provided much support, discussion and encour-
agement. I should also thank these particular colleagues, the wider
Governing Body of New College and the Oxford History Faculty, for
xiii
xiv Acknowledgements
having supported a previous term of leave when I was giving the lectures
themselves.
A further and particular debt is owed to a benefactor of New College,
Eugene Ludwig, whose support for the Humanities within the College has
been marked both by extraordinary generosity and by his personal interest
and encouragement for our various research projects. I and all my col-
leagues in the Humanities disciplines are immensely grateful for his sup-
port. In the present case, I thank the Ludwig Fund for providing generous
coverage for the costs of researching images and acquiring reproduction
rights for the illustrations in the present volume.
In a project of this nature and scope, I have necessarily acquired many
intellectual debts to colleagues in the UK and abroad who have provided
vital advice, feedback and criticism. Amongst so many who have offered
their assistance in the course of this project, I should like to single out
Geoffrey Parker, who spent a term in Oxford as Distinguished Visiting
Professor in Trinity 2004, and whose enthusiasm and deft and knowl-
edgeable engagement with the project were invaluable at this early stage,
and have been no less valued in his later communications and discussions.
I would also single out Hamish Scott, to whom I am obliged beyond
measure for unstinting help and advice throughout the gestation and
completion of the project. Michael Howard, whose chapter ‘The Wars
of the Merchants’ in his War in European History first encouraged my
interest in military contracting, has been a source of encouragement and
inspiration throughout this project, as he has with all my previous writing
on military history.
Many others have contributed to my understanding of the parameters
and problems of the subject, and to the final shape of the present work,
and to all of them I owe my warmest thanks. In Oxford I am especially
grateful to Robin Briggs, Cliff Davies, Robert Evans, Steven Gunn, Clive
Holmes, Sarah Percy, Nicholas Rodger, Lyndal Roper, Hew Strachan,
Penry Williams amongst numerous other colleagues, while in the wider
academic world, especially Sydney Anglo, Rainer Babel, Joseph Bergin,
Jeremy Black, Tim Blanning, Olivier Chaline, Luc Duerloo, Jack Dunn,
Robert Frost, Lothar Höbelt, Bernhard Kroener, Jan Lindegren, Davide
Maffi, Simon Pepper, Guy Rowlands, Frank Tallett, Tony Thompson,
David Trim and Phillip Williams.
In the composition of the book I must thank particularly my picture
researcher, Julie Farguson, for all of her own suggestions and input in
assembling lists of images, for tireless reminders about obtaining permis-
sions, and for her willingness to go to extraordinary lengths to obtain some
of the illustrations in the volume. I am most grateful to my father, Fred
Parrott, for his time and expertise in reading through and removing many
Acknowledgements xv
errors of substance and style from the manuscript, and to my editor,

Michael Watson, for all of his encouragement, help and patience in seeing
the project through to publication.
Roger Clark and William Massey have provided me with their support
and companionship throughout the years of work on this project, and I
thank both of them most warmly for their encouragement, intelligent
questioning and tolerance throughout the years of its research and writing.
In the course of writing this book I have lost two friends whose untimely
deaths have left historical scholarship much poorer. Jan Glete, whose own
work paralleled many of the preoccupations and topics discussed here,
was a source of the most generous encouragement, advice and feedback
over a decade of correspondence and meetings. I owe my greatest debt of
all to Robert Oresko, my partner for more than twenty-two years, who
encouraged me to look beyond French history, taught me the importance
of acquiring a broad range of languages and persuaded me, like many
others, to think about socio-political elites in their own terms and to see
the fundamental importance of concepts such as dynasticism, informal
networks of power and the political significance of material culture. The
present book deals with subjects that were not especially close to Robert’s
own historical interests, but is dedicated to him with love and respect.
Abbreviations
DBB Documenta Bohemica Bellum Tricennale

Illustrantia, eds. G. Cechová, J. Janácek,
J. Kocí and J. Polišenský (7 vols., Prague,
1971–81).
Gindely, Waldstein I/II A. Gindely, Waldstein während seines ersten
Generalats, im Lichte der gleichzeitigen Quellen,
1625–1630 (2 vols., Prague and Leipzig,
1886).
Krebs, Hatzfeld I J. Krebs, Aus dem Leben des kaiserlichen
Feldmarschalls Grafen Melzior von Hatzfeld,
1593–1631 (Breslau, 1910).
Krebs, Hatzfeld II J. Krebs, Aus dem Leben des kaiserlichen
Feldmarschalls Grafen Melchior von Hatzfeld,
1632–36. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des
Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Breslau, 1926).
Redlich, I/II F. Redlich, The German Military Enterpriser
and his Work Force, 14th to 18th Centuries.
Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und
Wirtschaftsgeschichte 47 and 48 (2 vols.,
Wiesbaden, 1964).
xvi
Currencies
The principal currencies used in the book are Imperial talers and florins
(Rhenish), Swedish and Danish riksdalers, Dutch florins, Spanish
ducats and escudos, and French livres and écus.
Rough conversion rates in the first half of the seventeenth century:
1 Imperial taler = 1.5 German (Rhenish) florins
1 Rhenish florin = 1.7 Dutch florins
2.5 Dutch florins = 1 Imperial taler
1 Spanish escudo = 1.1 Spanish ducats
1.5 Rhenish florins = 1 Spanish escudo
3 French livres = 1 French écu
1 Rhenish florin = 2 French livres (from later 1630s)
3 French livres = 1 Spanish escudo
1 riksdaler (Swedish/Danish) = between 0.7 and 1 Imperial taler
xvii
Introduction
The aim of this book is to examine the rise, success and transformations of
military enterprise – warfare organized and waged by private contractors –
in early modern Europe (c.1500–1700). Military enterprise as it is dis-
cussed here amounts to a lot more than hiring mercenaries to serve in the
ranks of a state-run army or using privateers to supplement or stand in for
the state’s navy. Enterprise includes a more extensive delegation of
responsibility and authority to include the supply of food, clothes and
equipment to troops, and the manufacturing and distribution of muni-
tions and weapons. Warship and fortress building were outsourced, as
were entire naval operations. Garrisoning and siege-works were put out to
contract. A large part of this process did involve the hiring and mainte-
nance of soldiers or sailors, but the terms of many of the recruitment
contracts drawn up with the field and unit commanders reveal significant
differences from those before or after this period. Moreover the way in
which these commanders interpreted their authority and autonomy in
waging war on behalf of their employers was significantly changed. They
acted through their own creditors to raise the funds required for recruit-
ment and military operations, and they drew on networks of private
manufacturers, merchants and transport operatives to ensure that their
troops were fed and equipped. Some fundamental aspects of the financing
of war were placed in the hands of private military contractors or their
agents, who also ensured that their credit and costs were recovered, by
force if necessary, even when the army was on the territory of its notional
employer.
To anyone familiar with the historical debate about early modern
military change, it will be significant that the key decades of this ‘military
devolution’ lie between c.1560 and 1660, the same period identified by
Michael Roberts in his seminal article for the chronology of an early
modern European ‘military revolution’.1 From its inception in the mid-
1950s, this thesis that military change could be linked to wider processes
of political and social transformation has been the key organizing principle
for analysis and discussion of early modern war and society.2 Although
1
2 The Business of War
mercenaries, military enterprise and private contracting are mentioned in

many discussions of early modern military revolution, their significance
seems rarely to have been fully accepted or appreciated. Whatever its scale
and however central it may have been to early modern military activity,
privatization remains in most of these accounts a peripheral issue or a
historical dead-end. A central aim of the present study is to present a
much more extensive and forceful case for the significance of military
privatization, and to subject the concept of military revolution, indeed the
whole case for early modern military discontinuity and change, to scrutiny
from a different perspective. How does the ‘business of war’ fit with
arguments that have explicitly or implicitly assumed that war should be
the business of the state?
Underpinning the argument of this book is a simple proposition: the
maintenance of wholly state-recruited and state-administered military
force is an anomalous development over the broader course of
European history. An explicit drive to establish fully state-controlled
armies and navies, and the maintenance of a closely controlled monopoly
of force, is a particular preoccupation of European states from roughly
1760 to 1960. It emerged as a result of a distinctive set of political and
industrial developments which altered both the character and scale of
warfare, and demanded a level of military participation and economic
commitment which could no longer be met through adjusting and devel-
oping the traditional mechanisms of organizing and waging war. A con-
tentious account of this development might suggest that it began with the
early writings of Jacques de Guibert, wrestling with the implications of the
radically increased killing power of mid-eighteenth-century warfare for
traditional, long-service, highly drilled ancien régime armies.3 Its ending
was marked in western states with the recognition during the 1950s and
1960s that nuclear weapons had profoundly changed the patterns of
future warfare, and that the creation of mass, conscripted armies via
national service was militarily redundant – even if political imperatives
led to its retention in many states for a few decades longer.
The characteristic pattern of European warfare from the world of the
Greek city-states to the ancien régime of the eighteenth century, and once
again during the past half-century down to the present day, is military
organization on the basis of contracts with private suppliers, whether these
are for the recruitment and maintenance of fighting soldiers, for the
provision of military hardware and munitions, or for military support
systems. This rarely means total military devolution, more often what
could be described as varying forms of public–private partnership, in
which often very substantial elements of private contracting, finance
and administration are present. Most European (and very many
Introduction 3
non-European) military organizations have been built on, or were at least

substantially underpinned by, arrangements which delegated or trans-
ferred military responsibilities from the aegis of the state into the hands
of private individuals, groups or organizations, some of whom were sub-
jects of the state, some outsiders.
On a bare overview of the evidence, this contention is hardly contro-
versial. From Xenophon and the ten thousand Greek mercenaries who
entered Persian service in 401 BC,4 through to the auxiliaries who domi-
nated the military system of the later Roman Empire,5 to the ‘great
companies’ who shaped the military and political environment of the
later fourteenth century,6 through to Executive Outcomes, Kellogg,
Brown & Root, and Blackwater,7 the ubiquity of contracted, privately
organized military force and support services is not in doubt. In most
societies and states the deployment and maintenance of military force
occupies a large space, a part of which can be filled by private military
contracting.
At issue though, and fundamental to the concerns of this study, is the
way in which this military reality has been perceived, both by contempo-
rary commentators in these societies and by historians, and in particular
by historians of early modern Europe. For the most part, the western
military tradition has been interpreted in ways which downplay or deny
this basic reality. Ever-increasing state control of military force, building
towards a ‘monopoly of violence’, is treated as the essential long-term
historical process; the use of private military initiatives, organization and
finance – for the most part lumped together as war fought by ‘mercena-
ries’ – is treated as a historical dead-end.8 A narrative is established in
which, if the existence, and sometimes even the expansion, of a private
role in military organization is conceded, this is nonetheless seen as
marginal, largely irrelevant to an understanding of the real path of
military-political relations in early modern and modern Europe. It is
noteworthy that in contrast to the vast literature generated by historians
and social scientists on military force and the rise of the state, the only
general and chronologically wide-ranging studies of privatized warfare are
intended for a broad, popular readership.9
It was easy to maintain such an emphasis when the final outcome of the
historical process appeared so visibly to be the establishment of national
armed forces, fully and comprehensively controlled by the state. Up to the
mid-twentieth century it was possible – focusing always on the western
military tradition, of course – to postulate an ‘end of military history’ in
which the defining characteristic of modern military force was its struc-
tural integration with the state’s administration, a process that seemed
both complete and irreversible. However, military developments over the
past few decades have called this seemingly inexorable process into ques-
tion. The relationship between military force and the demands and aspira-
tions of states and their governments no longer seems so one-directional.
Awareness that the outsourcing of military functions, and dependence on
private companies to fulfil vital ancillary and support services, is an increas-
ing part of most western military organizations has taken a while to grow
among non-specialists.10 More attention was focused on the resurgence of
private military companies and their operations on the fringes of the military
system, whether this was the comprehensive small armies fielded by com-
panies like Executive Outcomes and Sandline in south-central Africa in the
1980s and early 1990s, or the growth from the 1990s of private security
companies in zones of crisis, whose activities may well extend to proactive
behaviour replicating or replacing the work of state-run armed forces.11
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have provided further evidence of the
growing activities of private security companies whose remit to provide
military support services can on occasions shade into de facto combat
roles: during the past decade Blackwater has become a virtual household
name thanks to its massive presence in Iraq and the involvement of its
operatives in combat zones.12 The scale and the media profile of military
outsourcing in these last two wars has finally brought home to a wider
public how radical the transformation has been over the past few decades.
While in the West, what could be defined as the ‘core activities’ of the
armed forces have so far remained directly under state control, this is not
the case elsewhere in the world, and it is certainly arguable that in the West
the ability to perform these core activities has already become dependent
upon support services which are in large part put out to contract.13
So thinking about the organization of military force in the early twenty-
first century and beyond renders more controversial the notion that there
was a single historical path leading to the creation of a monopoly of
military force in the hands of the state (indeed, that the historical process
had reached that point by the late nineteenth century in even the most
backward of western nations). But it was never the case that this paradigm
for the understanding of European military history rested purely and
simply on an assumption of historical inevitability. Other no less problem-
atic assumptions play their part in shaping views of the development of
military force in early modern Europe.
If historians of early modern Europe have interpreted changing patterns
of warfare from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century in terms of the
growth and elaboration of state control, a significant element of this is
based on what is taken to be the axiomatic inferiority of private military
organization. Two sets of interlocking negative assumptions are at work
here. The first of these is a generalized, but well-established, moral and
Introduction 5
legal preoccupation with the use of soldiers whose activities seem to have
no justification other than the pursuit of personal gain. In some cases this
is made evident because the soldiers or sailors had taken service with a
foreign state, and had no obvious interest or engagement in the quarrels of
the contracting power. Against the obvious argument that many native
soldiers have a demonstrably limited commitment to the causes for which
they are fighting, the counter-argument is made that these native soldiers
were at least recruited within a societal context in which this cause was
considered an appropriate justification for war. Mercenaries, on the other
hand, choose their military service entirely freely and individually, and for
their own motives; they were neither conscripted by the state to service in a
cause judged appropriate, nor were they responding collectively to a wider
perception of that cause. Underlying these rather clumsy definitional
arguments is a widely shared assumption about the fundamental wrong-
ness of ‘killing for hire’: mercenaries have less plausible justifications for
their activities than a national army. Even where one side in a dispute
might reasonably assert that they possessed a just cause in defending their
interests through war, that cause would be demeaned by relying on hired
mercenaries to wage a struggle on their behalf since these would be unable
to provide a plausible justification for their own part in any consequent
violence. The free and inappropriate choice of soldiering for profit will
consistently trump any evidence that the mercenary, as individual, may
sympathize with the ideals, beliefs or cause of the party for whom he is
fighting and that this may in part have motivated the decision to offer his
services.14
In the West from the early nineteenth century this moral sense of the
wrongness of fighting for profit has combined on occasions with a political
interest in the containment of private force, to produce a legal framework
for restrictions on hiring ‘mercenaries’ and enforceable international
agreements to stamp out piracy or to restrict privateering.15 But such
attempted legal restraints, highly problematic in terms of definitions and
possibilities of enforcement, are a recent development. Sarah Percy in her
latest book points to the less substantial but more pervasive notion of a
shared, historical ‘norm’ against mercenary use. Starting with the reac-
tions to the unconstrained looting and violence of the private mercenary
companies of the fourteenth century, and enduring concern about vio-
lence outside the legitimate control of constituted authorities, she traces a
developing consensus, established well before an eighteenth-century
Enlightenment, that the hiring of military forces was inappropriate to a
civilized society.16 Whether seen through the eyes of theorists who wor-
ried about the moral impact of depriving the citizenry of the need to serve
in their own defence, or through the eyes of political and social elites,
concerned at the potential disorders that would result from allowing adult
males to seek their living by fighting for hire outside their own homeland, a
shared thread of hostility to and constraint in the use of mercenaries is a
persistent characteristic of western societies down to the present day. Both
humanist and Enlightenment discourses lay stress on the importance of
citizen participation in military service, and identify this as a mark of civility
and progress. Abandoning reliance on mercenaries (which, of course, can
easily encompass the whole structure of privatized warfare) is part of a
civilizing process; the state-controlled army reflects the achievement of
moral and political maturity.
Of course, the practical problem of who constitutes a mercenary
remains: the graveyard of most anti-mercenary legislation has been the
difficulty of finding any kind of workable definition; neither being non-
native in the country of employment nor offering military service exclu-
sively for financial reward proves very effective. Private forces standing
totally outside the control of the state identify only a minuscule subset of
activity which might broadly be considered mercenary. In this context, the
advantage of understanding the hostility to mercenary use as a ‘norm’
rather than an evolving body of international legislation is precisely that it
bypasses these issues and argues for a much longer-term, collective aver-
sion at a political and cultural level. Indeed Percy argues that it is the very
strength of the anti-mercenary norm which makes it virtually impossible
to legislate effectively against mercenarism.17 But this legislative failure
does not weaken a widely shared set of beliefs and assumptions, generat-
ing a consensus that in practice leads to restrictions on the hiring of
military force, or which reinforces moral hostility to its use.
The obvious point about the anti-mercenary norm is that it is enduring
and pervasive, but not susceptible to objective cost-benefit analysis: the
hiring of mercenaries is always wrong and undesirable, even when the
military alternatives will prove less effective in saving the state from
external defeat or internal fragmentation.18 States seeking to use the
services of external military forces betray their own organizational weak-
ness by such use, and by challenging the norm will reinforce an external
perception of their lack of civility, and the low level of their political and
social organization.
If this moral disapproval of the use of mercenaries forms one part of the
picture, it is reinforced by an equally powerful but pragmatic conviction
that the contracting-out of warfare is militarily self-defeating. The appli-
cation of military force should only be entrusted to those whose loyalty can
be ensured by shared national identity and allegiance. The ‘citizen army’
idealized by Machiavelli and cohorts of humanist and then nationalist
thinkers is contrasted with its apparent obverse, the mercenary soldier
Introduction 7
who serves only for money and outside territorial and ideological affili-
ations. The national soldier, fighting for country and family, has every-
thing to lose by showing limited military commitment; the mercenary has
only a service contract, on which he can renege with no more than
financial consequences. As such, it is assumed he must be unreliable in
his allegiance and half-hearted in his motivation. If a better financial offer
were to be made by the enemy, the logical behaviour for the mercenary
would be to accept it; the adoption of a decisive strategy involving hard-
fought battles with heavy casualties would be entirely contrary to the
interests of mercenary soldiers and their captains, whose own interests
would dictate drawn-out, expensive but indecisive conflict which would
keep them in employment for as long as possible. Both explicitly and
implicitly much writing about warfare picks up on these assumptions;
even if it is granted that mercenaries may, through length of service or
organizational expertise, have acquired particular military strengths and
skills, these will be counterbalanced by the deliberately limited nature of
their service and commitment. When mercenaries are hired en masse, it is
no less axiomatic that their captains, who have entered into military
activity for profit rather than for honour or duty, will seek to hire at the
lowest cost compatible with keeping the unit in being. In some medieval
and early modern cases of poor, resource-limited territories like
Switzerland or Scotland this pressure for cheapness may matter less: the
soldiers will still be raised on the basis of landed ties and other local
connections which may give them a high level of cohesion. But elsewhere
mercenary recruitment could easily mean acquiring soldiers or sailors
who were the social detritus of urban and rural life, lacking in resilience
as well as group identity, and unmotivated by any military objective except
plunder.
No amount of contrary evidence about the fighting commitment and
effectiveness of mercenaries in particular military circumstances will
change what seems, from one perspective, a set of logical assumptions
about their limitations as military operators. This in turn reinforces a view
of mercenaries as a worst option, to be adopted only by states for which no
better alternative exists, whether because of fiscal or administrative inca-
pacity, or through the weakness and corruption of a central regime. No
rational state or its ruler would choose such an ineffectual and unreliable
military system if other options were available.
The elision of these two negative arguments against private military
force makes a powerful rhetorical case. Indeed the combination of moral
repugnance with a ‘common-sense’ conviction that mercenaries make
bad and disloyal troops has been repeated so frequently that the counter-
productiveness of relying on private contractors can appear self-evident: a
genuine discussion about the merits and demerits of relying on private

sources of military force goes by default. And although the original asser-
tions were about the hiring and use of mercenary soldiers, the same
strictures can be projected on to areas like maritime privateering, and
ancillary services such as the contracted provision of weaponry, munitions
and food supplies to military forces.
However, a negative assessment of the morality and practice of military
privatization is not the sole nor the most important reason for the marginal
role that it is allocated in accounts of war and society in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.
Various positive modes of thinking seem no less incompatible with the
idea that states might consistently and deliberately have relied upon or
even expanded the outsourcing of military functions into the hands of
private enterprisers. The most important of these is the extended body of
writing on state-formation and the building of the modern state, and the
various ways in which this is linked to warfare and the pressures of war. It
is fundamental to the argument of the present book that there is no
necessary incompatibility between the growth of the power of the state
and the development of a substantial sphere of private military activity;
indeed, the latter made possible a robustness and organizational ‘reach’
that would otherwise have been unattainable to government authorities.
This argument will be developed in the ensuing chapters. But it is no less
important to note that public and private authority have frequently been
seen as directly opposed, and to have existed in a zero-sum game where a
gain to one must represent an equivalent loss to the other.19 If one of the
defining characteristics of the modern state is the possession of a monop-
oly of legitimate violence over all those subjects residing under its author-
ity, it is easily assumed that the monopoly can only be exercised directly
through the state’s agents, duly organized and sustained by resources
controlled by the state. The origins of this definition of state-formation
as achieving a narrowly defined monopoly of force, rather than, say, the
successful co-option of both internal and outside resources and skills to
create a multi-faceted system of authority, is deeply entrenched in a series
of implicit assumptions about state competition and the growth of state
power.20 These assumptions date back to the nineteenth century, but
continue to cast a long shadow over many areas of early modern political
and institutional history, and ensure that the use of military force raised
outside the direct control of the state is treated as marginal, and essentially
irrelevant to the account of the rise of the state.
The link between military power, the growth of the state and the
establishment of national identity was one of the great themes of
nineteenth-century history. It was above all characteristic of an entire
Introduction 9
school of nationalist German historians, for whom the history of the rise of
Brandenburg-Prussia was axiomatically the history of Germany, and,
from the 1860s, no less axiomatically the history of Europe. For a historian
like Johann Gustav Droysen, the Prussian experience demonstrated that
war was both the test and the catalyst of the growth of the state and the
achievement of nationhood: Brandenburg-Prussia had risen from being a
minor power and military victim during the Thirty Years War, to a state
which was to become the arbiter of German and European politics. It had
done so, although a small and under-resourced group of territories, by
systematically building up military force over a century from the 1640s to
1740s. Unwilling to submit to the political humiliations and economic
depredations that would stem from renewed military dependence on the
major powers, a sequence of Electors, then kings, in Prussia, focused their
attentions and the resources of their territories on creating a permanent
military force of a size and capability comparable with European powers
who possessed hugely superior resources. The story of the rise of Prussia
could be turned into the account of how, by eschewing the courtly and
cultural indulgence of other German rulers and by squeezing every fiscal
resource through unprecedented administrative efficiency, a permanent
army of 80,000 troops could be created by 1740, and could in turn be
expanded in a succession of mid-eighteenth-century wars which firmly
established Prussia as a great power in its own right.21 The centrality of the
army as the purpose and justification for every aspect of governmental
policy and every administrative initiative was undisputed: the very struc-
ture of society was organized around the militarization of the landowning
nobility and the organization of a large proportion of the male labouring
population in an annual cycle which alternated agricultural and military
service. In fact a permanent army on this scale was only viable on the basis
of hiring at least some of its troops from outside Prussian borders:
Frederick the Great sardonically referred to his grandfather, Frederick I,
as the ‘mercenary king’ for his willingness both to contract foreign troops
and then to hire them out to the Emperor. But for the historians of the
Prussian state, this was a necessary evil, justified, as it was at the time,
since it protected the economic capacity of the native population.22
Moreover such mercenary units were tamed and fully integrated by the
Prussian military model of drill, discipline and control, easily reduced to
component parts in the clockwork of a smoothly running military organ-
ization. They did nothing to detract from the military model which saw an
ideal synthesis of state, administration and army, so that even the desire to
spare some subjects from military service was, paradoxically, simply to
harness better the resources needed to sustain the army.
Prussian historians who saw the rise of the state and the rise of the state-
controlled army as synonymous were especially strident: relating military
prowess and the mobilization of military resources to survival and national
success in war produced a crude – modernization or extinction – mantra
which fitted well with the triumphalist assumptions of a post-1870
Germany. Its emulators, amongst whom were historians of other
German states, and, for example, nineteenth-century French administra-
tive historians, were no less prepared to see in military force the rationale
for the growth of the state. If historians of seventeenth-century France did
not present Cardinal Richelieu or Louis XIV as single-mindedly obsessed
with the building of a powerful, effective army, this nonetheless figures
extensively in most accounts of the ‘rise of absolutism’ via which the
history of French state-building was cast.23 Moreover the Revolutionary
and Napoleonic wars saw the French citizen army not merely as the
product of a second stage of state-formation, but as a triumphant embodi-
ment of the nation in arms.24
Much of this celebration of armies and state-building might seem overly
specific, above all, shaped by the particular case of Brandenburg-Prussia,
and the circumstances of the creation of the Second Reich in 1871. But
crucially for its enduring success, this relationship between military power
and the rise of the state was analysed from early on through more com-
prehensive and nuanced studies, which crossed the borders between
history and the social sciences. Max Weber’s analysis of the rise of
bureaucracy as a stage in state-formation devoted much attention to the
Prussian experience of a militarized administration in which the bureau-
cratic model could be developed within a disciplined context of contig-
uous civil and military hierarchies. Military necessity – the requirements
of creating and sustaining military force – is the strongest factor in the
evolution of bureaucratic process and the development of state power
through rational administration.25 Even more than Weber, Otto Hintze’s
essays, again in many cases concerned with the history of Brandenburg-
Prussia, examine much wider conceptual questions relating to European
political and constitutional change from the seventeenth into the eight-
eenth century.26 For Hintze, the requirement to create and maintain a
permanent army was the key to determining the construction and char-
acter of the state, providing a detailed explanation of its structure and
functioning.27 The political identity of the state developed under external
military pressure, pressure which forced the hands of governments and
their administrators in ways which would challenge existing political
structures and consensus. Where Hintze moved the discussion beyond
the Prussian school was in refusing to see this process in terms of historical
specificities – the particular geopolitics of Brandenburg; the ambitions or
Introduction 11
prescience of the Great Elector; Louis XIV’s disposition towards ‘abso-

lutism’. Instead Hintze offered a structural model of the evolution of state
power under the simultaneous pressures of external military threat and
the need to establish military force adequate to ensure defence, which has
retained much of its conceptual potency ever since.28
The basic assumptions of this state-building thesis are straightforward and
familiar to most early modern historians. Medieval rulers rarely managed to
mobilize adequate financial or material resources, manpower or military
technology because they were constrained by the weakness and underdevel-
opment of central authority, and their lack of administrative reach into out-
lying territories. Practical authority was fragmented into the hands of
multiple provincial and local power-brokers; rulers confronted an array of
powerful and wealthy institutions, some of which acknowledged their pri-
mary accountability to external authorities; politics was negotiated within an
entrenched patchwork of provincial, local and individual privileges and
autonomy. Some medieval rulers were more powerful and more capable of
extracting resources from this sort of system than others, but they achieved
this through personality and short-term, personal expedients rather than the
structural transformation of their states. Huge constraints stood in the way of
eliminating such systems of decentralized power, not least the absence of any
independent force that a ruler who might have wanted to enhance his direct
authority could mobilize against the vested interests of his subjects. But in
fact few rulers sought to change systems which were validated by tradition
and a part of their own mental world, and were characterized by practical
working arrangements with subjects that, however conditional, offered some
form of practical authority at provincial and local level.29
The changing character and scale of war was the one force capable of
forcing rulers and their administrations out of this acquiescence in exist-
ing political arrangements, confronting them with the realities of a strug-
gle for military survival. When waged for sufficiently high stakes, war
could break down the conservative consensus – in both practical and
psychological terms – and open the way to change in specific areas of
government which were vital to achieving military success. And cumula-
tively these changes could contribute to reshaping the entire structure of
power in European states in the direction of centralized monarchies
underpinned by effective coercive power and run by professional admin-
istrators. War was the primary force creating the modern state, sweeping
away decentralized administration, local and institutional autonomy and
privilege, and replacing them with powerful, centralized institutions with a
strong reach into the provinces, the potential to apply coercion through
independent force, and a fundamental transformation – via bureaucracy –
of the relationship between rulers and subjects.
All of this seems familiar, not least because it has been reiterated in so
many subsequent historical and social-science accounts of the construc-
tion of the modern state: warfare and its demands and burdens exercise
the direct pressure without which rulers and their administrations would
continue to acquiesce in systems of government which could provide a
barely adequate level of central control, a modest share of the resources of
their subjects, and a respectful relationship with socio-political elites with
whom rulers generally shared a world view.30 In practice, much of their
response to these new problems and challenges can better be character-
ized as desperate expedients to fund or organize a hand-to-mouth military
struggle, rather than as a carefully planned strategy to extend the power of
central government, but the long-term effect is no less considerable in
shifting political authority in favour of the ruler and his administration.
War is not seen as the only force at work in this process of concentrating
and institutionalizing power and administrative competence. Attention
has been given to the impact of religious reformations and the consequent
drive of rulers to impose norms of behaviour and belief on their popula-
tions. Another plausible factor in this drive towards early modern state-
building has been identified as the great economic shift in early modern
Europe – population rise, inflationary pressures, economic polarization –
generating intense social conflict and a strong preoccupation with social
discipline and authority amongst elites. Yet another would identify the
self-interest of an administration itself, passing a critical threshold of scale,
competence and professional identity, and linking its own collective and
individual goals to the extension of government and the elimination of
alternative focuses of power and authority.31
Yet the primacy of the ‘military’ explanation for the growth of the
European state, and indeed for a competition between states in which
survival, expansion and the remodelling of the international system
towards powerful, autonomous nation-states will be achieved by those
who best organize and deploy their military resources, remains integral to
most interpretations of the period.32 The empirical evidence for the
pressure of war seems persuasive. Tables showing the increase in the
size of armies and navies indicate that the scale of military activity
increases dramatically. If France could maintain armies of approximately
30,000 in 1515 which had risen to 340,000 troops by 1692, while
England’s naval tonnage increased from around 30,000–40,000 tonnes
in 1588 to 196,000 tonnes in 1700, it would seem logical that the admin-
istrative burdens of financing, administration, control and deployment of
these armed forces should have increased proportionately. The military
history of early modern Europe can be presented as a sustained arms-race
in which new military technology, geographical scale and numbers of
Introduction 13
those engaged in war impose a remorseless, upward pressure on the

resources of state and society.33 That these were pressures which could
only be met through the direct intervention of the ruler and his admin-
istration in the organization and deployment of military force is more
often assumed than discussed explicitly, but the typical thrust of such
discussion is strongly evident, and no alternatives are considered.
Yet successive interpretations and revisions of the relationship between
early modern war and political change have drawn attention to a diversity
of political outcomes. The simple equation that military pressure will, if
the state survives, generate a powerful, centralized Machtstaat governed
by the authoritarian will of a ruler backed by a quasi-bureaucratic admin-
istration can be shown to be just one of a number of possible results. In
contrast, there has been considerable interest in exploring north-west
European exceptionalism, differences in the state-systems of eastern
Europe, and the various ways in which the pre-existing powers of repre-
sentative institutions or other power-sharing bodies may shape the ulti-
mate result of these tensions.34 The political trajectory of the Electorate of
Saxony in the later seventeenth and the eighteenth century looks very
different from that of Brandenburg-Prussia, but it would be hard to deny
that the rulers of Saxony were insulated from major military challenges in
this period, or did not have to face similar dilemmas of sustaining military
force on a base of limited resources. But considerably less attention in
these studies has been devoted to the mechanisms by which the state
might seek to create and maintain those military forces which are the
raison d’être of political and administrative change. This is partly a pro-
blem of semantic assumptions: state-building implicitly presupposes that
the state is raising and controlling its own troops, and that the multiple
burdens of this lead, in turn, to the greater elaboration and development
of the centralizing and bureaucratic state. Yet, given that ‘the pressure of
war’ in most traditional discussions of the rise of the state is simply
presented in terms of an increase in the scale and expense of military
operations and forces, this assumption could reasonably be challenged.
The state’s answer to the pressure of external warfare might be a resort to
massive levels of military decentralization, placing military responsibility
into the hands of some of its powerful subjects. Or it might involve raising
unprecedented armies by resort to an international mercenary market (as
was indeed the case in the first half of the sixteenth century). Both would
still require the state to raise immense resources, to confront consequent
opposition, and to extend the remit and functions of aspects of its admin-
istration; in some cases it might involve drawing upon these military
resources, however raised, to provide coercion or support. There is noth-
ing inherently fanciful about such ideas of state support for largely private
military force, especially if the most likely response were to be a typical

mixture of some state-raised and organized troops supplemented by large
bodies of hired forces raised by contractors. Outside Europe it is not seen
as strange, for example, that the Mughal emperors established their mili-
tary power on the basis of their control of a vast north Indian mercenary
market, dwarfing any independent military force that was ever available to
European rulers.35 Yet the classic work on military enterprise, Fritz
Redlich’s German Military Enterpriser and his Work Force, which provides
an unsurpassed range of illustrative detail on the costs, mechanisms and
hazards of hiring troops, and about the daily life of those involved in the
‘soldier trade’, is an illuminating instance of traditional thinking in this
respect. For all the detail, the picture is of a long-running military expe-
dient which is inevitably subsumed within the much larger and more
important historical process, the rise and growth of the state army as
part of the political and constitutional formation of the European
nation-state.
Why then is the implicit assumption behind almost all state-building
theory and analysis that the political objective was not just the raising and
maintenance of unprecedented military forces, but doing so within a frame-
work of direct state control of those armed forces? A crucial element in this
structure of assumptions was provided in the 1950s and early 1960s via two
articles and an important section of the major biography of Gustavus
Adolphus, king of Sweden from 1611 to 1632, all written by Michael
Roberts, which launched a protracted debate about the reality, timing and
significance of a ‘military revolution’ in early modern Europe.36
The ‘military revolution’ thesis was the child of ‘war and state-
formation’ arguments developed from Hintze onwards. Where Roberts’
own thesis considerably sharpened this argument was in providing an
interpretation of the military factors that underpinned the intensification
of warfare and the growth in armies. Neither Hintze nor earlier political
historians, still less the social scientists, had shown much interest in the
fine detail of military change, simply identifying the general shift from
feudal host to a large standing army as a catalyst of political transforma-
tion. They had not asked why warfare had forced the pace of political
change more dramatically in the seventeenth century compared, say, with
the fifteenth. The detailed interpretation of military change that was
offered by Roberts was in fact an equally familiar, but hitherto uninte-
grated, account of the tactical transformation of European armies based
on the battlefield reforms of the Orange-Nassau Stadholders of the Dutch
Republic and Gustavus Adolphus.
Printed works about the military implications of infantry firearms,
artillery, cavalry roles and tactics, and the new science of fortification,
Introduction 15
had been popular throughout the sixteenth century, many of them seem-
ingly intended to provide practical guidance for officers in subjects like
ballistics, troop deployment and the military duties of different grades of
officer. Many such works, and notoriously Machiavelli’s Arte della guerra,
cast their discussion in terms of parallels between the ancient and modern
styles of warfare, frequently using an idealized conception of the military
customs and organization of Antiquity, and especially the armies of
Republican Rome, as a stick with which to beat the supposed failures
and deficiencies of modern armies, the most egregious of which, for
Machiavelli and many of his contemporaries, was of course the reliance
on morally objectionable and militarily deficient mercenaries.37
The case for a radical ‘transformation’ of modern warfare grew out of
this fertile soil of theoretical tracts and ancient–modern comparisons, and
represents its logical evolution. For instead of joining the general chorus
lamenting the extent to which modern warfare fell short of the standards
of organization, discipline and training of the Romans, the novelty of the
Orange-Nassau theorists of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth
century, notably Maurice (Stadholder from 1587/9 to 1625) and his
nephew Johann von Nassau-Dillemberg, was to argue that the successful
adoption of classical Roman discipline and tactical deployment was the
secret of their own armies’ military success.38 The recently established
United Provinces had every reason to wish to present its military capa-
bilities in the best possible light. A new republic, struggling for recognition
and legitimacy in a world of monarchies for which inheritance and dynas-
tic rights were the currency of international relations and territorial legiti-
macy, saved from extinction at the hands of Alexander Farnese’s Army of
Flanders only by a shift in Philip II’s international priorities in the 1580s:
all of this would make it an uphill struggle to persuade other European
states, even Protestant powers, that the fledgling republic was worth the
risk of recognizing and supporting. The ability to persuade other powers
that the United Provinces had both the will and the capability to defend
itself against Spanish reconquest and other potential aggressors would be
an important element in winning support. Hence the widely publicized,
and widely believed, assertions that the army of the States General had
been transformed by a rigorous and systematic adoption of the military
prescriptions of Aelian, Vegetius and various other classical military writ-
ers, so that it transcended the typical indiscipline, poorly articulated
command and control, and crude tactics of contemporary armies to
become ‘perhaps the most efficient and certainly the most widely imitated
force of its age’.39 Above all, typical, loosely focused fighting prowess had
been transformed through the development and imposition of formalized
drill into collective, mechanical order and obedience.40
The problem with the reformed Dutch army, as many contemporaries

noted, was that its main campaigning activity lay in siege warfare, whether
the capture of a sequence of Spanish fortresses in the 1590s, or the
protracted defence of their own fortified cities in the 1600s.41 It was
certainly not evident from the one pitched battle, Nieuwpoort in 1600,
which constituted an indubitable Dutch victory, that the nature of war had
been permanently transformed. If the tactical advantage was held by the
Dutch – though contemporary accounts appear to regard the Dutch
cavalry as having played as important a role as the disciplined volley-fire
of the infantry – its strategic consequences were negligible and, if any-
thing, positively damaging for the Dutch in terms of military overexten-
sion and the opening of deep rifts between the military commanders and
their political masters.42 There is little evidence here that warfare had been
transformed in a way that would force the pace on every other major
military power, even if their military authorities had paid more than
token attention to the rhetoric of Kriegskunst-manuals and short-lived
military academies.43 The one obvious lesson to be derived from the
Dutch style of warfare was the traditional one that troops engaged in
siege warfare required adequate logistical support, and were a great deal
more likely than troops on campaign to fail if they did not receive supplies
and pay.
Roberts’ achievement was to shift the focus of attention to phase two of a
‘military revolution’, the application of these ideas about the imposition of
regular drill and discipline, the deployment of troops in more flexible units
with better systems of command and control, to the battle-hardened army
of Gustavus Adolphus as it fought its way through Lithuania and into Polish
Prussia, and thence on to the battlefields of the Thirty Years War. Roberts
argued that Gustavus achieved a judicious combination of the tactical
innovations of the Dutch reformers and the advantages of weight and
cohesion offered by the traditional Spanish-style formations. The success
of his forces in battle against traditionally organized armies would appear
convincing proof of a military transformation, a new battle-winning for-
mula. Subsequent historians’ scepticism about some of these claims for a
military transformation will be considered later (see pp. 145–9). As they
stand, however, they allowed Roberts to associate this transformation of
battlefield tactics and organization with the larger process of war and state-
formation as a single, cohesive ‘revolution’. Tactical and organizational
transformation on the battlefield opened the possibility, long lost in
European warfare, of pursuing a strategy of annihilation, subjecting ene-
mies to a sequence of defeats so devastating that they would have no choice
but to sue for peace on the victor’s terms. But to make this strategy effective
required vastly larger armies, capable of underpinning a whole new
Introduction 17
dimension of strategic thinking. Moreover the risk of such crushing defeats

would itself stimulate states to raise many more troops in order to avoid the
consequences of heavy losses in battles now fought with better combina-
tions of weaponry and new tactics. So from a historically specific set of
military changes and developments, Roberts’ argument returns to the
traditional path. The early modern state, faced with the imperative of
establishing ever-larger armies (and navies), is thus forced to demand
more of the resources of its subjects to pay for these, to organize more
effective administrative mechanisms to raise and control the newly
enlarged military, and to regulate the consequences of the heavy-handed
imposition of taxes and military burdens. The logic of military demands
would lead ultimately to the ‘well-ordered police state’ in which codified
and ubiquitous regulation of all aspects of civil society through an ever-
more elaborated bureaucracy would transform the relationship of the
individual to authority. Roberts’ aim was to explain how the military
revolution had generated the ‘great divide separating medieval society
from the modern world’.44
Contested, redefined and subject to outright challenge, the military
revolution thesis has nonetheless exercised a pervasive impact on the
understanding of early modern history. It revived and reshaped the argu-
ments about war and state-building, and generated a host of books and
articles which specifically address the relationship between the military
revolution and the growth of the modern state.45 Especially significant for
the marginalization of military enterprise from this debate is the starting
point of the revolution thesis, the anti-mercenary rhetoric of early modern
military reformers, who claimed to have transformed the art of war and to
have borrowed and adapted the military practices of Republican Rome to
make good the failure of contemporary armies. The Orange-Nassau
reforms, and those of their emulators, required a clean sweep of the
corrupt practices, individualism and military feebleness which had appa-
rently characterized war since the advent of the hired Italian mercenaries,
the condottiere. The establishment of true discipline, obedience and mili-
tary order could only develop from a different kind of soldier, ideally one
who would internalize the moral ideals of this new style of collective
discipline.46
This change in fighting style to emphasize collective discipline, the
systematic drilling of the individual soldier and the more sophisticated
articulation of tactical units within the army is treated as incompatible
with military organization established on the basis of mercenaries serving
for individual gain, and raised under private contracts by officers who
owned these units as property. At one level this is a strange opinion. The
Dutch army of the early seventeenth century, as is well known but little
studied, was a force at least 50 per cent composed of hired foreign

mercenaries.47 The Swedish army serving under Gustavus Adolphus in
Germany peaked at around 90 per cent mercenaries – predominantly
Germans and Scots – in 1632. Mercenaries might, at a shift, be improved
by these new practices of drill and exact discipline; Gustavus held up the
Scottish mercenaries in his army as more apt than any other nation to
absorb and practise his new tactical and organizational instructions.48 But
intrinsic to the rhetorical underpinnings of these reformist ideas was the
notion that effective discipline, the achievement of the well-ordered mili-
tary machine, required a long-term permanent army, uniformly placed
under a single source of authority and control. For those looking at the
military revolution from a longer-term national as well as state-building
perspective, the case seems even stronger: the ideal ‘national’ army was
one based on either volunteers or conscripts upon whom military service
and its demands would deliberately seek to impose a strong sense of
collective identity, not just within units but across the entire army. If the
army is seen as representing the values of the nation, then the notion that it
can be recruited and maintained through the investment of private enter-
prisers seems even more inappropriate.
Even without the argument for transformation via a military revolution,
the private organization and provision of military force was seen as anom-
alous and marginal to the process of state-formation. Military revolution
would seem to render it even more redundant by its central preoccupation
with tactical and organizational change, which was deliberately envisaged
as the antithesis of what is characterized as a mercenary tradition of loosely
integrated, undisciplined fighting potential, incapable of achieving deci-
sive military results and dominated by the short-term pursuit of self-
interest. The conclusion seems obvious: the ‘business of war’ has to be
cleared off the historical stage before the real work of military revolution
and political transformation can begin. In the words of one writer, the
military enterpriser Albrecht Wallenstein was simply ‘an anachronism . . .
merely one of a long line of German military enterprisers whose art . . . was
rapidly being outmoded by permanent military establishments under state
administration’.49 The ‘great divide’ which separates the medieval from
the modern military world would leave privatized military force firmly on
the medieval side.
The present book attempts to offer an overview of early modern military
contracting. It does so in terms which seek to understand contracting in its
own terms, both as a set of multi-faceted and evolving structures for the
organization and deployment of military force, and as a phenomenon
which was far from marginal to the military and political processes at
work in early modern European states. Reliance on private organization
Introduction 19
and capital in raising and maintaining armies and navies was neither
synonymous with military ineffectiveness, nor an obscure historical cul-
de-sac, a system which had no future amongst the rulers and administra-
tors of early modern states. This is a short book on a very large subject, and
as such it focuses attention on western and central Europe. Military
enterprise and contracting are a significant presence in eastern and
south-eastern European states, but would require a considerably more
extensive range of linguistic expertise to treat with any sophistication, and
such elements play a less clear-cut role in an existing historiographical
debate about war, military organization and state-formation. Nor does the
book examine in more than cursory fashion what was perhaps the greatest
of all European military enterprises, the creation of joint-stock trading
companies and their colonial military activities. Once again, the excuse for
this omission is both space and the basic recognition that the activities of
the companies are shaped by military developments and possibilities
within Europe and not vice versa. The book is divided into two parts.
The first, ‘Foundations and Expansion’, examines the emergence and
elaboration of systems of military enterprise through the sixteenth century
down to the end of the Thirty Years War. The second part, ‘Operations
and Structures’, shows how contracting worked from military and organ-
izational perspectives, and examines changes in emphasis and role in the
century after 1660.
Within Part I, Chapter 1 looks at various types of private military force
and organization available to European states in the period before the mid-
sixteenth century. It focuses attention on the Swiss, and the German
Landsknecht infantry, not just as substantial contributors to the market in
hired soldiers, but because understanding the reasons for the effectiveness
of these two military systems has lasting implications for a wider grasp of the
qualities and strengths of early modern armies. The second chapter begins
with an account of the mid-sixteenth-century crisis faced by states which
had relied heavily for their military forces on a traditional market in interna-
tional mercenaries. It suggests that the primary reason for this crisis was the
unfolding of conflict over much longer periods of continuous campaigning,
a process which was to culminate in the Thirty Years War, but had begun in
the 1550s. This challenge of sustaining military force over long sequences
of campaigns pushed existing mechanisms of state-controlled war finance
to breaking point, but also offered the opportunity systematically to deploy
the credit of military contractors: the role and character of private military
organization was to be transformed by the rise of the enterpriser, offering his
credit as well as organization and military skills in raising troops for the
state. The high-point of this development was reached in the Thirty Years
War, but this conflict was characterized by the flourishing and development
of a wide variety of different systems of what could broadly be termed

‘public–private partnerships’ in the deployment of military force. As
Chapter 3 shows, these could range from the almost entirely traditional,
state-dominated models, in which mercenaries were hired and deployed
under contracts from which they received substantial up-front funding to
cover recruitment and initial costs, right through to a few examples of full
armies being raised entirely at the cost and risk of the military enterprisers
themselves. It was the middle ground of contractors investing in their units
and the infrastructure of the army, but doing so under the aegis of some
element of agreed state provision or state-sanctioned funding, and often in
conjunction with some central administrative oversight of the military
system, which was most common and would prove most resilient.
Opening the discussion in Part II, Chapter 4 presents a detailed chal-
lenge to the assertions that enterprise was an ineffective, wasteful and
destructive means to wage war: it draws on the earlier discussion of
Landsknecht fighting traditions, and emphasizes the adaptability and
operational effectiveness of forces maintained by commanders who were
themselves proprietors of military units and worked closely with their
colonel-proprietors to combine military effectiveness with the sustainabil-
ity of their investment in troops and matériel. The most crucial aspect of
maintaining strike-power and the capacity to sustain forces in ambitious
and extended campaigning was ensuring adequate supplies of arms,
equipment, food and munitions to the troops. Chapter 5 discusses the
wide range of options for the provisioning and equipping of armies under
contract, and the practical benefits of tying these into international pro-
duction, mercantile and financial networks that were considerably more
sophisticated and extensive than anything available to an individual state
administration seeking to provide for the logistical needs of its armies and
navies. When military contractors themselves established close working
links with financial and mercantile agents who had direct access to resour-
ces, technical expertise and a wide range of contacts, it proved possible to
overcome many of the apparently insuperable logistical barriers to military
effectiveness. The second half of the chapter examines the rewards of
military enterprise. Some of these rewards were straightforwardly finan-
cial, but war fought by contractors did not diminish the possibilities of
acquiring social and cultural prestige from military service, and the sec-
tion shows that this incentive could further explain the levels of sustained
commitment shown by many of those whose motives might be dismissed
as simply pursuing the business of war.
Military contracting during the Thirty Years War was not a self-
evidently destructive failure, and unsurprisingly many of the structures
established as part of ‘private–public partnerships’ for organizing and
Introduction 21
deploying military force were retained in the second half of the seven-
teenth century and beyond. There was no dramatic break, no abandon-
ment of a discredited past associated with ‘medieval’ decentralization and
devolved power. The language of military authority changed to emphasize
the direct control of the ruler over his armed forces and to counteract any
implication of authority mediated through military proprietorship. In
many cases rulers used the experience of war taxes imposed during the
Thirty Years War as a bargaining counter to obtain permanent tax grants
from their subjects that would allow them to establish small permanent
armies. But the wartime enlargement of these armies, and often a signifi-
cant part of the running costs of maintaining even small numbers of
permanent troops, depended upon retaining or creating mechanisms to
co-opt the financial resources of the officers. Whether this came through
the marketing of officerships via official or unofficial venality, or through
the maintenance of regimental or company proprietorship, the aim was
entirely traditional: to maintain a strong financial interest amongst the
officers in the operational effectiveness of their units. Beyond the units
themselves, the entire structure of logistical support, equipping and arm-
ing of the troops was almost without exception put out to contract in the
hands of private enterprisers. Even the building of warships and the
establishment of dockyards, often seen as a preserve of state administra-
tion and direct funding after 1650, still depended in large part on out-
sourcing to private contractors.
Instead of assuming that the Thirty Years War tested to destruction a
fundamentally flawed mechanism for the raising and maintenance of
military force, and then treating the subsequent period as the decisive
move towards the achievement of a state-controlled ‘monopoly of vio-
lence’, there is much to be said for stressing the strong elements of
continuity in state/military relations, and the deliberate maintenance of
systems that drew heavily on private capital, expertise and organization.
Rulers now asserted explicitly and directly their claim to the command of
armed forces within their jurisdiction and to all decisions about their use.
One consequence of this was that the subtle means–ends balance that
had characterized the deployment of military force during the later
Thirty Years War was broken; armies and navies grew inexorably larger
and more expensive under the aegis of rulers who saw them as an exten-
sion of their dynastic self-perception and ambitions. Paradoxically, of
course, this made the role of private capital and private organizational
input into recruiting, equipping and mobilizing troops all the more vital.
Historical thinking about war and the state in the later seventeenth and
eighteenth century needs to accommodate itself to a different set of
assumptions where, writing of the eighteenth-century French army, Jean
Chagniot could assert that it was the War of the Spanish Succession
(1702–13) which saw the apogee of military enterprise in France.50
Nomenclature
Some of the terminology used in discussing early modern military organ-
ization and military enterprise can be confusing. Throughout the book I
employ the useful concept, derived from Fritz Redlich, of the ‘warlord’ as
the party contracting with the military enterpriser for the raising of troops.
Warlords will tend to be territorial rulers, but this would not exclude the
town council of a wealthy city raising troops for their own defence, or
potentially an aristocrat raising troops on his own account. Although
contemporary titles for the commander of a regiment-sized unit vary
from state to state – maestre de campo in Spain, maître de camp in France,
for example – I use ‘colonel’ consistently to designate the commander of
such units, the typical building-blocks of armies raised by enterprisers. In
the case of infantry this unit itself could vary from a theoretical strength of
1,200–1,500 men up to the 4,000 of a full Landsknecht regiment. Cavalry
regiments were smaller, largely because the costs of equipping them and
providing the horses were so considerable. In both cases theoretical full
strength could be substantially larger than the real, operational strength.
The earlier Swiss equivalent of a regiment, the Haufe, or Gevierthaufe,
could be of varying size, and was usually made up of a number of excep-
tionally large ‘companies’ whose main characteristic was that the men
would be drawn from a particular canton. But Swiss troops serving under
‘free’ commanders – troops provided for a warlord without cantonal
authority – would also be divided into companies under a captain-
proprietor (Hauptmann). By the seventeenth century the Swiss would be
hired out to warlords in more typical regiment-sized units. Where appro-
priate I use the Spanish term tercio rather than regiment, especially as the
Spanish army would include tercios of Castilian troops and also contracted
regiments of Landsknechte or Walloons. Regiments are in all cases sub-
divided into companies, and the commanders of these companies, the
captains, may be the clients or appointees of the colonel-proprietor, serv-
ing at his expense, or may be subcontractors, who have themselves com-
mitted funds to raising troops. Free companies are no less an important
part of this military world, in which the captain levies and maintains a free-
standing company, perhaps as the basis of a garrison.
I use the term ‘mercenary’ sparingly, and reserve it for a unit
commander who raised troops under a traditional contract in which the
costs of recruitment and a substantial advance of wages are paid up front,
and as a precondition of the contract taking effect. In contrast to the
Introduction 23
mercenary captain or colonel, the ‘military enterpriser’ provided the

organization and the military skill, but also advanced his financial credit
to the warlord. Colonels, but also more senior commanders, and captains
of free companies, can all be military enterprisers, as can all of their
equivalents at sea. I refer to those senior officers who command an army
made up of enterpriser-colonels, which may well include themselves as
owner of one or more regiments, simply as commanders – or sometimes as
generals. The concept of the ‘general contractor’, though frequently used,
is a slippery term. Strictly, it should refer to a commander who has raised
an entire army on his own account and risk, or has shared that risk with his
subcontracting colonels, and offers the army to the service of potential
warlords. On this basis Ernst von Mansfeld in the early 1620s would be a
general contractor, but Wallenstein, whose army was always dependent
on resources made available by the Emperor, never enjoyed this status.
Moreover, even Mansfeld and others like Bernard von Saxe-Weimar
could be regarded as moving in and out of being general contractors
depending on the terms they had negotiated with a particular warlord.
With stylistic rather than contemporary justification, I use the concept of
the ‘colonel-proprietor’ more for the period after 1650, and to describe
the holder of a regiment in an established, permanent army. As a term for
a colonel who possesses a property in his regiment through his own
investment there is in fact no reason for not using it in the earlier period.
Part 1
Foundations and expansion

1 Military resources for hire, 1450–1560
This battle of Anghiari (1440) lasted two hours, during which first
Niccolò [Piccinino] and then the Florentine troops were masters of the
bridge . . . Niccolò’s troops won the bridge many times, and always they
were repelled by the fresh troops of their adversaries. But when the bridge
was won by the Florentines, so that their troops gained the road, Niccolò
did not have time, because of the fury of those who came and the
inconvenience of the site, to relieve his men . . . the whole army was
compelled to turn round and everyone fled toward Borgo without any
hesitation. The Florentine soldiers attended to the spoil, which was very
great in prisoners, harnesses and horses . . .
Nor were there ever times when war waged in these countries or others
was less dangerous for whoever waged it than these. In such a defeat . . .
only one man died, and he not from wounds or any virtuous blow, but
falling off his horse, he was trampled on and expired.1
On 31 August 1515 the recently crowned king of France, François I, at the

head of an army which had just crossed down into Italy, halted at Bufalora,
50 kilometres south of Milan. Standing between the king and his objective
was the ruler of the Duchy, Massimiliano Sforza, and an army whose core
was made up of 12,000–15,000 Swiss infantry. François had not neglected
diplomatic efforts to gain Milan, and his agents had been in negotiations
with the leaders of the Swiss since late August. Already 5,000 Swiss from
Fribourg and Berne had accepted French terms and marched out of the
Milanese.2 On 9 September a treaty was agreed by which the rest of the
Swiss troops would accept 1 million écus to abandon the territories they
occupied in the Milanese and their military contract with Sforza.
Expecting merely to settle the details of the treaty, François and his
army of around 30,000 men, together with the best artillery in Europe,
moved to Marignano, where they established a well-fortified encamp-
ment. While this was going on, the Swiss debated what to do next. Half
those present voted to accept the French offer and return home, but others
27
from the eastern cantons argued that they were bound to honour their
contract with Sforza. The arrival of a further 10,000 Swiss helped to tip the
balance in favour of maintaining loyalty to the duke and upholding their
contract. On 13 September around 21,000 Swiss infantry moved out of
Milan in three great blocks, intent on a direct confrontation with the
French. The French superiority in numbers and firepower was over-
whelming, and the troops had used the opportunity to construct gun
emplacements and maximize the advantages of the terrain.3 The Swiss
had no illusions about the fact that they were fighting in almost impossible
conditions and would suffer terrible casualties. Signifying this awareness,
the captain of the Zug contingent enacted a short, moving ritual before the
assault commenced: picking up three clods of earth in front of the first
square of infantry, he threw them over the heads of the troops with the
words: ‘in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, this will be our
churchyard, my good, faithful compatriots’.4
The battle was fought over two days, brought the Swiss close to victory
at crucial moments, but was ultimately won by the endurance of the
French forces – some 23,000 of whom were German mercenary
Landsknechte – and the arrival of 9,000–10,000 Venetian troops on the
morning of the second day. The remaining Swiss troops withdrew in good
order, but the available sources suggest that some 8,000–9,000 were killed
on the battlefield or died subsequently of their wounds in Milan.5
These two accounts illustrate diametrically opposed views of private
enterprise warfare. Machiavelli’s account of Anghiari is fictitious: it was
far from being a bloodless struggle, and the battle and the campaign of
1440 were crucial to the survival of Florentine independence.6 Yet
Machiavelli’s animus was real even if his facts were not, and points to a
debate about the use of mercenary companies that has dominated dis-
cussion of the military history of Renaissance Italy. In Machiavelli’s eyes,
the real crime of mercenaries was not just that they were feeble combat
troops, but that they commercialized war: they turned it from a crucible
for forging republican virtù amongst citizen-soldiers into a cost–benefit
calculation in which service, fighting, flight and booty were simply nego-
tiable commodities.
On the other side, the account of Marignano illustrates the hybrid
character of the mercenary system and the perils either of romanticizing
the events, given the large number of contingents bought off before the
battle, or of dismissing such troops in general as motivated only by pay and
plunder – which cannot explain the behaviour of the rest in a situation
where the odds on victory were slight, the certainty of massive slaughter
overwhelming. Historians’ accounts of Marignano frequently betray an
exasperation with the Swiss troops: an already anachronistic system,
Military resources for hire, 1450–1560 29
dependent on pikes, blood and guts, being irrationally deployed in a battle

which was as much to do with honour as strategy. Most accounts of
Marignano assert that the vulnerability of the Swiss pike-square to
French cannon and cavalry inaugurated five centuries of Swiss neutrality,
and drastically curtailed the hiring out of mercenaries by the cantons. It is
often, incorrectly, assumed that the Swiss were subsequently drawn into
an exclusive treaty to provide troops for the French. Few of these histories
indicate that, far from denting their reputation, Marignano ensured that
Swiss troops were more sought after than ever, reinforcing their central
role in European armies for more than a century.
What both these accounts point to is the centrality of mercenaries both
in early modern armies and in debate about the nature of warfare. But who
exactly was a mercenary in early modern armies or navies? Who was a
‘hired’ soldier and who was ‘serving’ a military master? Contemporary
critics of mercenaries rarely had difficulty defining their target: for them, a
mercenary was straightforwardly a foreign soldier brought into service by
a ruler and serving for pay.7 The obvious problem is that service for pay no
more defined a mercenary in the sixteenth or seventeenth century than it
does in the twenty-first. Any army which is more than a local defence
force, mustered at need and usually for a fixed number of days, will
require payment in some form and from some source. No amount of
humanist-inspired enthusiasm for an idealized republic in which a prop-
ertied class of citizens express their civic virtue through unpaid military
service would turn this into a military reality in early modern Europe. A
slightly more realistic approach distinguishes the soldier, simply provided
with subsistence while serving a higher ideological or collective motive,
from the mercenary, whose entire concern was the maximization of per-
sonal gain. But such distinctions inevitably crumble under scrutiny. Is the
career soldier in the sixteenth or the twenty-first century, whose progress
in service will be accompanied by increases in pay, a mercenary? Most
early modern soldiers were paid wages which frequently fell to the level of
basic subsistence – food rations, munitions and occasional clothing. Does
this imply that they cease to be mercenaries, although their commanding
officers, who continued to benefit to some extent from the ‘business of the
regiment’, presumably still fall into the category?
Defining the mercenary as a foreigner, lacking any identity with the
state which has hired him, is no less problematic. The states and territories
of early modern Europe were as much defined by the dynastic claims of
their rulers as any shared geographical, linguistic or cultural identity. If
military service to the ruler of your own state removed the charge of being
a mercenary, then it could reasonably be argued that Charles V, ruler of
the Habsburg dynastic conglomerate, and Holy Roman Emperor of the
German lands and of Reichsitalien, never hired a mercenary during his

reign; or certainly he never knowingly did so, since he had more than
sufficient military potential amongst his diverse subjects. Even for rulers
whose dynastic claims extended less widely, such a definition of ‘for-
eigner’, though congenial to the republican-minded citizen of an Italian
city-state, would not do much to identify a discrete class of early modern
soldier. Some mercenaries – Scots in Danish service, for example – were
clearly foreign; but were regiments raised in the north German territories
of the king of Denmark also foreign when serving on Danish territory? Or
Finnish regiments of conscripts serving in garrisons on Swedish territory?
The concept of a mercenary as it is usually understood, and as it was
used by its detractors in early modern Europe, is both an overly specific
and in many cases irrelevant means to define the character of much
military organization. Behind it of course is the moralizing potential for
identifying troops whose service is justified as crudely monetary – literally
mercenary – and unredeemed by any higher loyalty to country, home or
natural ruler. Yet if French contracts to hire Swiss troops in the sixteenth
century and later might come close to such a definition of ‘mercenary’, the
great bulk of European military activity would fall wide of this target. It is
no less clear, however, that this other military activity cannot be described
as state-controlled, or as direct ‘service to the state’.
‘Standing’ forces, which are traditionally seen as the creation of abso-
lute monarchs in the later seventeenth century and are easily linked to the
development of the nation-state and its ‘monopoly of violence’, had
existed, as a small proportion of the ruler’s potential armed strength,
throughout the middle ages. With rare exceptions, these forces remained
comparatively small – from a few hundred men, scarcely more than a
bodyguard, to a few thousand. The permanent forces of the king of France
from the mid-fifteenth century numbered around 6,000 men,8 but no
European ruler possessed the financial resources of an Ottoman sultan or
Mughal emperor, and none could hope to maintain a permanent, full-
sized campaign army of even 10,000–20,000 men from ordinary income.
In some cases these small, standing forces did offer the possibility of
establishing what might be identified as a state-controlled military estab-
lishment: soldiers recruited through state administration, officered by the
ruler’s direct appointments and supervised by his agents.9 But just as often
these forces were hired from territories outside the ruler’s jurisdiction,
notably, for example, the use of units of Swiss troops serving in many
rulers’ households by the sixteenth century. And some of the ruler’s own
subject troops in these forces might serve under contracts made with
colonels and captains, who would themselves provide the junior officers,
soldiers, and sometimes the equipment.10
Irregulars and privateers 31
The practice of contracting-out was equally typical when much larger

armies and navies needed to be created. The usual form of early modern
military force was provided by soldiers and sailors whose recruitment and
terms of service were not directly controlled by the public military admin-
istration of the state. The ruler, or one of his agents, would have issued a
commission devolving responsibility to an individual commander for
raising the troops, probably for equipping and arming them, and taking
control of their mustering and rendezvous with the army at a stipulated
time and place. Though the unit’s service after this time might be under
the direct control of the military authorities, the strong element of private
organization and input, the direct recruitment of junior officers and
NCOs, and the continuing proprietary interest of the commanding officer
who conducted the levy, all defined the terms of engagement. This would
be the same with naval forces: a contract granting the rights to construct,
crew and equip a warship (or to convert a merchant ship in this way)
involved a level of private involvement in the raising of a navy which would
remain even if the warships were subsequently to serve under direct state
control and pay.
Many of these troops serving a ruler under contract in this way would
not be regarded as ‘mercenaries’ in the narrow, pejorative sense used by
their critics. The terms ‘non-state violence’ and ‘non-state actors’ would
be one way of broadening the frames of reference, but given that much of
the discussion in the present book seeks to blur the lines between military
activity which is clearly of the ‘state’ and that which is ‘private’, this seems
overly prescriptive.11 Yet from the very outset of the early modern period,
the variety of military forces serving under contract raises important and
wide-ranging issues about the nature of military organization and the
relationship between rulers, states and the availability and use of military
resources. The rest of this chapter will examine some of the different
forms in which military force was available under contract to rulers at
the beginning of the early modern period. Chapters 2 and 3 will then
examine the way in which the nature of these contracts started to evolve
towards fully fledged military enterprise by the first half of the seventeenth
century.
Irregulars and privateers

One of the oldest and most traditional means to supplement the military
resources of a state was simply to form a loose association of political
interests with groups, whether these were subjects or independent peoples,
who shared common enemies or faced a common threat. Unsurprisingly
these associations were most common in frontier regions and borderlands,
or areas where control of the seas was under dispute. The ability of the
Cossack communities in Ukraine, for example, to provide defence in
depth against the Ottomans, albeit on their own terms, made recognition
and association with the Cossacks attractive at different times to both
Polish and the Muscovite rulers.12 But the problem posed by the security
of borders is perhaps epitomized by the extended frontier stretching from
the Adriatic and along the line which separated the Habsburg and
Ottoman parts of Hungary after the Ottoman victory at Mohacs in
1526. This was a long, sinuous and contested frontier, stretching through
open and underpopulated territory which even in settled circumstances
would have possessed limited agricultural potential to maintain large
garrisons, let alone field armies. For the Habsburgs, struggling with multi-
ple European commitments and continuous demands on their financial
resources, a solution needed to be found for the Ottoman frontier which
would provide some level of security at sustainable expense. The key
element of the defence system was based upon a few imposing fortresses
supplemented by lesser garrisons and local defence works, requiring a
permanent military force of around 15,000–20,000 men.13 Part of the
costs of the troops and the fortifications was covered by taxes levied within
the Holy Roman Empire, and part was funded from Habsburg resources.
But this was inadequate as a means to secure a frontier which stretched
from Croatia to Transylvania. Elsewhere, the solution was dependence on
local communities, either already in existence or established as colonies in
or just behind the frontier zone.14 These groups would supplement a basic
living from agriculture with banditry and raiding carried out across the
frontiers, and a willingness to defend their own territories against incur-
sions by equivalent cross-frontier communities, or against larger-scale
military activity. For the Habsburg central state and notional ruler of
such territories, they provided a vital buffer: they prevented enemy
forces or enemy communities encroaching into Habsburg territory and
potentially threatening more important bases and centres; they unsettled
civilian and garrison life on the other side of the frontiers by their raids
and attacks; they may have lacked regular military organization, but they
were able to harass and slow the advance of regular forces, giving the
Habsburg armies time to concentrate and confront the danger posed by
the invasion.
A classic case on this frontier of such an alliance by loose association
was the Hapsburg reliance on the Uskok communities in Croatia, based
round the strategic seaport of Senj.15 The Habsburgs guaranteed the local
political and commercial privileges of the Uskok communities in return
for their willingness to defend the city of Senj itself and to act as a military
force in the region.16 The garrison duties were shared with a small force of
Irregulars and privateers 33
contracted German soldiers. Both the Germans and the majority of

Uskoks in the garrison were paid wages that were almost inevitably in
arrears, even when the payment had been commuted to grain deliveries –
in theory to be allocated as local taxes in kind.17 The combination of a
proportion of the male Uskok population performing virtually unpaid
service in garrison, and the rest of the community dependent on land
with limited agricultural potential, turned banditry and piracy from activ-
ities connected with the defence of the frontier into a modus vivendi, with
its own economic and social dynamics. The Uskoks engaged in both
cross-border raiding on land, with bands financed and assembled by
local nobles, and a form of seaborne, coastal piracy. This latter was
characteristic of a large part of pirate activity in the early modern period:
small ships, part-oared, part-sails, and more likely to prey on vessels which
had put into the coast or into a small harbour, than trying to take prizes on
the open sea. The typical Uskok shipborne pirate force would be of ten to
thirty men, with wages and the costs of the ship paid by a leader whose
claim to the status was essentially that of having the money or the credit to
finance a piracy expedition.18
The political limitations in deploying these ‘associated’ forces were very
apparent; in times of war with the Ottoman Empire, Vienna found the
low-cost land and naval activities of the Uskoks a useful element in the
system of frontier defence. But periods of truce or deliberately scaled-
down conflict would not necessarily be accompanied by any comparable
scaling-down on the part of the Uskoks, for whom raiding and piracy
were not a military strategy but an economic necessity. Moreover Uskok
piracy not only targeted Ottoman shipping in the Adriatic, but preyed
fairly indiscriminately on Venetian ships and any others they could lay
hands on. Habsburg sponsorship of Uskok communities, which the
Venetians saw as grave threats to their own mercantile activity, ultimately
led to an expensive and unsuccessful war in 1616–17 between Archduke
Ferdinand of Styria, the future Emperor Ferdinand II, and the Venetians.
But long before this dénouement the relationship had provoked numerous
unwanted diplomatic incidents and military clashes.19 Only by paying
the Uskok communities regularly for their military services could the
Austrian Habsburgs have exercised control over their military activities,
turning indiscriminate piracy into controlled and directed privateering.
But as the main purpose of forming these loose military associations was
to avoid paying anything approaching the full military costs of their
activities, it was no less necessary to live with the consequences of a
force that was undoubtedly useful when war with the Ottomans was
going through one of its hot phases, but a diplomatic embarrassment at
other times.20
Fig. 1.1 A pirate sloop operating in coastal waters
Hiring private naval forces 35
The Uskoks raise a larger question about entirely private military activ-
ity. They were a refugee population drawn to this part of the Adriatic coast
by the possibility of taking part in profitable military operations, and
would seem to have been remarkably well placed to combine raiding
and piracy from their bases. The economy of Senj revolved round the
purchase and disposal of captured booty, but the beneficiaries of this were
in general prosperous middlemen, who advanced the funds to purchase
ships, hire crews or fund and provision land operations, and would expect
to reclaim a high proportion of all the profits of the expedition.21
Moreover, as in so many other centres of pirate activity, goods often
needed to be sold at knock-down prices if they were perishable, or in
less than perfect markets if they were rare and valuable. An obvious
question throughout the early modern period is whether freelance military
operations, even on the relatively small scale of Uskok raiding parties and
pirate sloops with crews of ten or twenty men, were financially and
organizationally viable?
Hiring private naval forces

Private naval activity operated at a number of levels.22 At the lowest level it
could be seen in the individual warship, financed and often captained by
an individual with some capital or access to credit, pursuing piracy as a
high-risk, high-reward alternative to mercantile activity. In some cases,
the obvious examples being colonial piracy, a number of these independ-
ently established and financed ships might associate themselves together
informally, or even as a formal chartered company, in order to pursue a
larger objective. The ruler of the state where these ships were raised could
offer two important supports to this type of activity, which might also co-
opt it under his political and military control. He, or in the best-known
English cases, she, could become involved as a shareholder-investor in the
expedition: either fitting out entire ships, or investing capital in those
already being brought together.23 Most importantly, it was the ruler’s
sovereignty which legitimized such activities. Criminal acts of piracy,
once the ships were formally incorporated into the military activities of
the ruler in his pursuit of war against another power, could be turned into
legitimate acts of privateering. Even in cases where formal war had not
been declared, rulers could still offer the sanction of ‘letters of marque’,
agreeing that acts of violence or pillage had been committed against one of
their own seafaring subjects, that formal redress had not been received,
and authorizing them to seek compensation against the offending
power.24 The advantages of legitimate status as privateers could prove
legally and financially important to those involved in the activity in
numerous ways, especially when dealing with third-party seafaring

powers. The ruler’s sanction over the activities of the privateers may still
seem weak, and in many cases the advantage of using such forces to
pursue low-level warfare remained the potential to deny responsibility
for their actions at a diplomatic level.25 But as Walter Raleigh discovered
in 1618, there were occasions when this association with the ruler and his
policies had implications which went further than simply a coincidence of
commercial and political interests.
At the next level of private seapower, loose associations of privately
owned vessels might group themselves together in certain ports, or
cooperate regularly to achieve shared objectives such as intercepting
merchant convoys. From the 1560s French Protestant shipowners along
the western coasts of France turned to piracy in large numbers, and
combined together both to pursue immediate gain, and to reinforce the
Protestants’ political position in France and abroad by intercepting
Spanish ships en route for the Netherlands and disrupting communica-
tions and supplies that might serve the Catholic policies of the crown.26
Spanish privateers in the following century pursued a similar, part-
independent and part-collective campaign against Dutch, then French
ships during the Thirty Years War.27 In these and numerous other cases
the military associations between the ships were informal, but at the same
time a regular feature of their activities.28 The fact that these ships also
operated out of a limited number of ports, and that they shared the dock
facilities and the markets for disposal of plunder and prizes, and may well
have collaborated in the distribution of money from joint captures, all
served to bring them into a closer association and collective identity than
the small-scale privateering expedition, in which one or a handful of ships
undertakes a single, limited assignment.29
Controlling the activities of these seagoing collectives and co-opting
them into a particular military role required rulers to recognize that the
bottom line for the participants and the backers was gaining sufficient
prizes and booty to make the operations self-financing and profitable.30 In
the case of the Protestant pirates, the French monarchy of course had no
control over their activities at all, while the extent to which the Protestant
leadership could hope to coordinate their activities with the land-based
operations of Protestant armies was limited: the leadership was in no
position to contribute funds or to dictate policies which would involve
direct loss to the shipowners. Their obvious appeal was to a shared sense
of Protestant solidarity and the common fight for survival.31 In the case of
the large-scale Spanish privateering operations, the Spanish crown had
some control over operations, given that the essential requirement for
privateering was free access to secure and well-defended ports. The
defences at La Coruña, Vigo and San Sebastián, and the similarly well-
maintained fortifications at Dunkirk for the Flanders privateers, were
essential to the viability of their operations: the safe havens behind
which the ships could be repaired and provisioned, and prizes and booty
could be secured and ultimately auctioned.32 Given that the privateers
were dependent on state-maintained, fortified bases, they were obliged to
work within the framework of crown military policy or face expulsion and
a hazardous existence as truly independent pirates. In the case of the
Dunkirk privateers, the Spanish crown took the integration of private
and state-coordinated military activity a great deal further. The activities
of the sixty to seventy privateering ships operating out of Dunkirk in the
1620s and 1630s were supplemented by a squadron of directly controlled
and funded royal frigates. Larger, custom-built and better-armed than the
ordinary privateering ships, they could take the initiative in launching
privateering operations, attack far larger and better-armed ships or con-
voys, and facilitate policies that were both more profitable and served the
interests of the Spanish crown better than would have been possible via
forces of entirely independent privateers.33 The frigates provided the
cutting edge to naval operations in which the privateers were the numer-
ous auxiliaries, submitting to campaign plans and leadership from which
they would expect to make larger profits than their own smaller-scale
guerre de course could achieve.
Above the level of individual and collective privateering could be placed
more formal associations of ships, still privately owned and financed, but
more effectively and permanently coordinated within a formal hierarchy
of leadership. The line here can be difficult to establish, but the Barbary
corsairs, for at least the first half of the sixteenth century, were subordi-
nated and expected to participate in larger military projects directed by the
Ottoman government from Constantinople, albeit that these policies
involved capturing prizes, looting and plundering Christian coasts and
generating income for the individual shipowners.34 The Knights of
St John could be placed at the next level: a tighter structure and organ-
ization than the corsairs, and though the Order as an institution was self-
financing through landed endowments and through the capture and sale
of prizes, the role of the individual galley commander was much less
prominent.35 The Knights and their half-dozen galleys were outnum-
bered in Malta by privateers, many of whom were ex-members of the
Order who had taken up private operations after ‘retiring’.36 As Malta was
a fief of the Spanish monarchy, and Charles V had granted the Order the
right to establish themselves there when they were driven from Rhodes in
1522, the extent that they could escape becoming an adjunct to the
Spanish galley fleet was limited.37 They were expected to sail in support
of Spanish naval campaigns against Ottoman forces, and to act more

generally as adjuncts to Spanish naval strategy.
Other fleets enjoyed a similar position of organizational semi-
autonomy. If the Order of Santo Stefano was created by the initiative of
Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, the organization and constitution of
what was an institution to raise and manage a squadron of galleys was kept
formally independent of the official naval forces of the Grand Duke.38 The
Order was intended to be self-financing through successful, large-scale
privateering against the Moors and the enemies of Tuscany. Over the
period 1562–87 it owned and operated ten full-sized war galleys, ensuring
that self-financing military operations based on prize-taking would need
to enjoy considerable success to cover costs.39 In practice the Order’s
financial viability depended on becoming an adjunct to the Tuscan galley
squadron, or being entered into the service of the Spanish Mediterranean
fleet.40
A similar, even closer relationship between the establishment of a fleet
of first-rank war galleys and the assumption that their costs would be
recovered through leasing them to the major powers can be seen in the
case of Genoa. A weak Republican government was dominated by a group
of powerful families, who owned not simply the great bulk of Genoese
financial resources but the great majority of the military resources as well.
Aware that operating fully crewed galleys was a costly financial venture,
and that the risk of failing to cover their costs through prize-taking was
high, Genoese galley-owning families like the Spinola and the Centurión
established links with the French and Spanish governments, assuming
that the principal source of funding for the squadrons and profit for the
investors would be these contracts.41 (See pp. 80–3.)
Outside the control of any particular state, Charles de Gonzague-
Nevers, a minor sovereign prince most of whose territories were in
France, managed to establish a short-lived but entirely private navy.
Obsessed with his Gonzaga family lineage linking him to the Byzantine
Paleologus dynasty, Charles travelled the courts of Europe in the 1610s
and early 1620s, trying to sell the idea of a crusade in the Morea to the
Catholic powers. As a result of various pensions and contributions,
Charles was able to commission five galleons from Amsterdam shipbuild-
ers in 1619 on behalf of his own, newly founded, crusading order of the
‘Christian Militia’.42 To be built at the cost of 147,000 livres, additional
provisions of artillery, sailors, 6,000 soldiers and gunners, equipment,
provisions and wages for six months would raise the costs to 1.3 million
livres.43 Unfortunately the creation of his fleet coincided with the political
uncertainty and military build-up at the start of the Thirty Years War. The
galleons were an obvious target. Impounded first by the king of France
and subject to compulsory purchase, the ships were then seized at Port
Louis by the duc de Soubise at the beginning of the French Protestant
rebellion of 1625.44 Nevers’ crusading fleet became the core of a
Protestant naval squadron maintained at La Rochelle until the end of
the revolt.45
Early modern societies could sustain a considerable diversity of private
naval activity from individual privateering vessels, small-scale privateering
fleets, up to first-rank galley and galleon squadrons. If a ruler wished to
make direct use of these resources there were a variety of means at his
disposal from co-option based on legitimization of activities and control of
facilities, through to the outright hiring under contract of individual ships
or entire naval squadrons.
At the same time, the owners of such private naval force were aware of
their limitations: privateers’ remuneration depended upon the unpredict-
able capture of prizes or plunder; the financial risks of this made any
Emden
Waterford
Wexford Amsterdam
Middelberg
Ostende Flushing
Kinsale Bristol
Poole Nieuwpoort
Plymouth Dunkirk
Falmouth Calais
Channel Islands
St Malo
Nantes
San Sebastián La Rochelle Venice

Bayonne Genoa Senj
Marseilles Zara
Piombino
Vigo La Coruña Guetaria Toulon Ragusa
Orbetello
Tarragona Ponza Gaeta Durazzo
Naples
Minorca
Calliari
Mallorca Ustica Smyrna
Cartagena Messina
Cartagena Bizerta
Cadiz
Tunis
Tunis Candia
Cadiz
Algiers Bougie Famagusta
Oran
Oran Malta
Djerba
Tripoli
Map 1.1 Major privateering bases in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

Europe
military operation other than straightforward attacks on enemy merchant

shipping potentially unattractive; disputes about the allocation of prizes
and booty could discourage collective activity among privateers.46 The
running expenses of ships were relatively inflexible. It was difficult and
expensive simply to lay up a ship so that it was serviceable at a later date;
maintaining seaworthiness anyway required expensive repairs, replace-
ment of timber and careening, and skilled crews were not easily reas-
sembled once dispersed. One option for a privateer captain was to divide
an operational career between occasional military ventures and frequent,
more-or-less legitimate, trading activities. It is certainly arguable that a
majority of privateers would have preferred the more secure, if lower,
profits of conventional mercantile activity.47 We shall see in later chapters
how the financial viability of private naval activity in association with the
needs of the state may have changed over this period.
Defining a contract: the Italian condottieri

How did this experience compare with that of land forces? Although the
raising and hire of mercenaries long preceded their use in the Renaissance
Italian states, issues about the nature of mercenary activity and the various
ways in which it could be co-opted or incorporated into the military power
of the state are clearly demonstrated in this Italian context.48
The most notorious operations of mercenaries in fourteenth-century
Italy exemplify familiar issues about the sustainability and viability of
independent military force discussed in a naval context. The great com-
panies from the late 1330s onwards were the creation of a series of
capable, discharged mercenary captains, who were reluctant to abandon
the opportunities for profit that military service offered, and sought inde-
pendent means to maintain their units of effective and experienced troops.
The early internationalization of the mercenary market had already meant
that German, French and English troops had been serving in Italy, and
Italians in France and the Empire. A captain like Werner von Urslingen
could assemble a large international force of mercenaries in 1342 from
companies and individual troops disbanded from the war between
Florence and Pisa. The straightforward aim of the companies – essentially
loose associations with little hierarchy or structure – like that of Urslingen,
and later Fra Moriale, was profit through pillage.49 They were not offering
themselves as a military force for hire to a territorial ruler, and any
alliances were short-term and usually more akin to the provision of ‘pro-
tection’. The leaders of the companies had simply grasped that in the
politically fragmented, small-state context of central Italy, a cohesive force
of a few thousand mercenaries could extort and plunder enough to ensure
Defining a contract: the Italian condottieri 41
their provisions, pay and, ideally, substantial booty.50 Until the largest
company, led by Fra Moriale, passed to Conrad of Landau in 1354, these
companies rarely enjoyed any permanent existence: having achieved the
purpose of enriching the participants, they would dissolve, to be created
anew a few years later when the ending of another war threw large
numbers of experienced veterans out of service.
Yet by the later 1350s the familiar patterns of extortion and localized
conquest were encountering stiffer resistance; the great company under
Landau was defeated in battle by Florence in both 1358 and 1359, and the
search for softer targets was also starting to yield more meagre results. A
loose association of self-seeking mercenaries was intensely vulnerable to
military setbacks: these would encourage wider resistance to their
demands, while the cohesion and logistical support of the company
depended on a regular supply of extorted money and goods. Despite
operating within some of the most sophisticated economies in Europe,
there was no easy access to credit for forces which were international,
transient and lacked leaders who could present themselves as a good
financial risk. Without this, an apparently terrifying force of thousands
of battle-hardened mercenaries could simply melt away in a few weeks.
The next generation of captains were more aware of this vulnerability,
and had a longer-term perspective on the raising and deployment of the
forces under their command.51 The best known of this new generation,
John Hawkwood, seems early on to have envisaged his primary role as a
contractor in the service of territorial powers. It certainly helped that the
force that Hawkwood took command over, the famous White Company
made up of soldiers who had fought in France down to the Peace of
Bretigny in 1360, could offer local rulers an attractive combination of
skilled military manpower and new technology/tactics. Drawing on
English fighting methods in France, the company made use of both the
dismounted man-at-arms and the longbow, and supplemented this new
style of fighting with powerful group cohesion and high levels of military
experience. Italian rulers were hiring not merely veteran soldiers, but a
proven and effective weapon system which still held the tactical edge over
any comparable-sized force serving in Italy.52 Over a thirty-year career,
Hawkwood and the White Company served Pisa, Milan and the Papacy,
finally settling into Florentine service from 1377 to 1394.53 The foreign
mercenary company was a particular phenomenon associated most obvi-
ously with a few decades in the mid-fourteenth century. The resumption
of conflict in France, the military demands of the transalpine powers for
experienced troops, and the readiness of Italian captains to offer a variety
of sizes and combinations of military forces under contract, all started to
change the pattern of military service in the Italian states.
Despite a burgeoning humanist rhetoric of civic obligation and all the

assumed benefits of creating a conscript militia, the rulers of cities and
states continued to favour the hiring of military professionals under con-
tract. Although for Machiavelli and others the failure to develop militias
was testimony to the prevailing moral corruption of rulers and citizens, the
reasons were actually more practical. Italian states had little choice but to
adopt what was the proven fourteenth- to fifteenth-century style of war-
fare, dominated by heavy cavalry deployed in ‘lances’ in which the man-
at-arms would be supported by mounted archers and squires. The art of
war depended on an elite of highly trained warriors whose skills could only
be achieved through intensive, specialized training and heavy capital
investment.54 Military effectiveness of this sort could not be created at
short notice through some intermittently trained citizen militia, or the
casual qualities of horsemanship and command provided by a local nobil-
ity. Of course there was a need for infantry to act as garrison troops and for
urban defence, and even to play an auxiliary role on the battlefield. These
provisionati could be hired cheaply by the larger Italian states and then
paid a provisione, or regular wage, from the treasury.55 But for fighting and
winning offensive wars, the brutal choice was between creating a perma-
nent, specialized military force directly under the authority of the ruler, or
hiring mercenary companies. For most medium-rank Italian states it
posed an obvious dilemma: the expense of a permanent military force
dominated by three- to six-man ‘lances’ of heavy cavalry was so great that
the affordable force would prove too small to be militarily effective against
rivals who chose another method of raising troops. For the other method
was to hire large forces of mercenaries on short-term contracts to meet an
immediate military challenge with overwhelming force. The unit costs of
hiring the mercenaries would almost certainly be higher, but a contract for
a campaign of six months, if it finished the war successfully, would be far
more sustainable than a permanent military establishment of specialized
troops.56
The financial logic of relying on hired condottieri seems obvious, but the
military and political reality was rather different. Experienced, veteran
troops with a strong esprit de corps gained from serving under a particular
captain for many campaigns were a finite commodity. The Italian states of
the fifteenth century would not be the only example of warlords who
would face this dilemma in early modern Europe, but the frequency
and, crucially, the shortness of most wars in Italy intensified the problem.
If the advantage of mercenaries was that they could apparently be hired
for a single campaign, or even a few months, the difficulty was ensuring
that they were available at the moment required, could be brought into
service quickly and with a full complement of troops, and that captains
who had served well on the basis of past contracts could be hired again
when required.
Part of the relationship between warlords and condottieri was about
trying to come to terms with this issue of demand and supply, and indeed
goes to the heart of what in these circumstances is entailed by a condotta, or
contract. The starting point was that there was no single, generic condot-
tiere company. The highest-profile figures in the mid-fourteenth century
had been the foreign military veterans, who had initially simply sought to
establish short-term protection rackets, but had come to see the benefits of
offering longer-term military service to established rulers. But from the
outset and throughout this period, there had been far larger numbers of
Italian condottieri.57 By the later century the field had become dominated
by Italians: the Malatesta, Gattamelata, Attendoli/Sforza families proved a
far more prominent and lasting presence than Hawkwood, Albrecht Sterz,
Hannekin Bongarten and the other foreign captains. But in this field
dominated by Italian captains, there was an almost infinite variety of
military organization, from companies of several thousand armoured
cavalry, commanded by captains with a princely title in their own right,
down to the smallest independent contractors, offering the service of a few
dozen soldiers.58 The style and terms of contracts varied considerably in
relation to the status, scale and reputation of the condottiere.
Early on, however, the condotte were evolving to recognize the respective
strengths and weaknesses of the positions of the condottiere and the war-
lord. The key clauses concerned the length of service and the immediate
payment to the captain. The typical fifteenth-century condotta would be
for six months – in an earlier period they had been for two to three months
only – and usually included a clause for an optional additional period – di
rispetto – of the same length. This additional period would be at the
discretion of the warlord, but he would be obliged to provide notice
some weeks ahead of the expiry of the first half of the contract.59 If this
discretion seemed to serve the interests of the contracting warlord, the
financial arrangements emphatically reflected the ‘seller’s market’ in
which many troops would be hired. All condotte stipulated an advance,
the prestanza, which was to be paid immediately to the condottieri to allow
them to recruit their companies up to strength, provide equipment and
move the troops to the agreed rendezvous. The sum amounted to between
a third and a half of the total sum agreed for the contract. Payment of this
was in theory non-negotiable: receipt of the cash activated the condotta.60
The advance was the vital element in the financing of the military system,
and went some way to ensuring that the condottiere had the resources to
raise the specified numbers of troops, and to provide some safeguards
were the warlord to seek to dissolve the unit early on grounds of
disobedience, insufficient strength, or simply a rapid resolution to the

military situation.
However, the basic question remained: in the immediate circumstances
of a military crisis, would it be possible to obtain the military assistance of
established condottieri, and would they, even in receipt of a full prestanza,
be able to raise troops of requisite quality in the time available?61 The
problem was of course compounded, in that it was the most sought-after
condottieri with the best reputations amongst potential soldiers who would
find it easiest to recruit troops. One solution to this problem, which fell
short of keeping condottieri in permanent military service, was to make use
of a condotta in aspetto, an agreement to pay a modest proportion of the full
costs of military service to a condottiere as a retainer, in return for which he
would agree to hold his troops in readiness and, obviously, not commit to
military service with any other warlord.62 The difficulty with these
arrangements was twofold. In the first place they were the response of
rulers in circumstances where it looked as though military action might be
required in the near future. They were not a permanent retainer, which
the condottiere could count on as a regular source of income. Moreover,
even if the condotta in aspetto had been a permanent payment, for most
ordinary condottiere it would be insufficient to meet the costs of maintain-
ing his full, specified military forces, while for these forces the reduced
pay would be no substitute for seeking fully paid employment elsewhere.
At best the aspetto could be seen as an early warning that the condottiere
might be asked to raise his unit to full strength and a formal contract in a
matter of months, though of course there was no guarantee that this would
be the case.
This practical challenge of having the resources at short notice either to
raise or to retain troops to meet the full terms of a contract with a warlord
had the inevitable effect in much of Italy of pushing the business of a
condottiere up the social scale. The individuals most able to ensure a supply
of experienced soldiers on demand were major noble landholders, or
princely rulers in their own right, whose experienced soldiers were sub-
jects, or at least tenants, and could shift their activities between war and
acting as tenant farmers or household servants. The condottiere who simply
offered his military skills would find it increasingly difficult to sustain
himself for any length of time in this military market, whereas a figure
like Musio Attendolo Sforza was able to act both as a ruler of a state
deploying military force on his own behalf, and as a condottiere on a large
scale, prepared to lend military force to other powers. Venetian enthusi-
asm in the 1530s for contracting and retaining Francesco Maria della
Rovere, duke of Urbino, was underpinned by knowledge that he had
access to a supply of his own subjects as soldiers.63 It was also the case
that a princely condottiere, or one with substantial landholdings, was more

likely to be able to tap into the massive networks of financial credit
available in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, giving him some poten-
tial flexibility while waiting for money paid under the terms of his condotte.
In 1443 an earlier ruler of Urbino, Federigo de Montefeltro, could make
use of his creditworthiness with bankers in Viterbo to finance the arming
and equipping of his troops.64
On the other side, the states themselves grew more accustomed to
financing mercenaries over the longer term. The Republic of Venice,
engaged in intermittent conflicts with other Italian states but also fighting
a permanent defensive war on land and sea against the advancing forces of
the Ottoman Empire, was the first Italian state to move towards a perma-
nent force of garrison troops provided by mercenary companies, going
considerably beyond the condotte in aspetto to a formalized system of
regular, renewable contracts. This required good management, and in
particular the appointment of a senior condottiere commander to coordi-
nate a potentially factious group of company commanders brought
together under separate contracts.65 However, if Venice was driven
along a sharp learning curve in developing and coordinating contracts
with the condottiere, and balancing the need to maintain professional
armed force with the initial desire to avoid a permanent and inflexible
military establishment, other Italian states were not far behind. The Sforza
duchy of Milan stood at the cutting edge of attempts to stiffen local militia
forces with a substantial body of mercenaries either permanently in
service or integrated into the larger structure of the Sforza armies.66
Florence, frequently used as the foil for an apparently more realistic
and long-term attitude to permanent mercenary contracts demonstrated
by Venice, was in fact not far behind in recognizing the need to compete
for good quality, experienced mercenaries and their commanders.67
This would require taking at least some mercenary companies into
permanent, fully paid service, although this might seem to negate one
of the primary justifications for drawing on their services.68 All of this
served to institutionalize the role of the condottiere as armed force within
the larger Italian states.
At the same time the opportunities for a condottiere captain to keep his
company in permanent employment were hugely enhanced by the regular
and substantial intervention of the major European powers in the
peninsula from the 1490s onwards. The benefits of such military service
were not merely financial. In the case of dynasties fragmented by gener-
ations of partible inheritance, personal military service supported by ready
access to experienced troops from their own territories could be the key
to substantial political advancement. Members of both the Sabbioneta
and Guastalla cadet branches of the Gonzaga of Mantua made hugely

successful careers in the military and political service of the Emperor and
the Spanish monarchy in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century by
starting out as princely condottiere, reliable sources of local troops in the
face of military threats. In the case of Vespasiano Gonzaga, prince of
Sabbioneta, military service to Philip II brought a ducal title, the vice-
royalty of Valencia and a sequence of important military commands.69
However, the beginnings of his career, like those of so many other cadet
lines of the Gonzaga, had been based on condottiere contracts with the
Habsburgs. Nor were these Gonzaga arrangements to provide troops
made invariably with the Habsburgs. The younger brother of Duke
Guglielmo of Mantua, Ludovico Gonzaga, built his early career at the
French court on his ability to raise and command Italian troops for the
service of Henri II.70
The ‘mercenary market’ of the sixteenth century might appear to be
dominated by the Swiss and the Landsknechte discussed below, but Italian
cavalry and infantry raised under contract continued throughout the
period to provide a high proportion of the mercenaries in European
service. For those members of minor princely or cadet families, or for
lesser captains with accumulated military experience and the ability to
raise and maintain a company, the opportunities for service in French,
Imperial or Spanish armies transformed earlier military possibilities.
The Swiss infantry

A very different path led to the emergence of the Swiss as a major
contributor to the mercenary market, and offered other models and
lessons for the later emergence of military enterprise. Under pressure
from predatory outsiders, three of the central Swiss cantons joined
together in a military alliance in 1291. Enjoying its first great success
against Austrian Habsburg ambitions at Morgarten in 1315, the
Eidgenossenschaft continued to evolve militarily through to the shattering
defeat of another Habsburg army by the cantons’ infantry at Sempach in
1386. By the time of the latter battle the Swiss had turned improvised local
resistance under the direction of some experienced military leadership
into a formidable battle-winning military system based on mobilizing the
adult male population into the Gevierthaufen, units of 4,000–8,000 men
that were to be the hallmark of Swiss tactics for the next hundred and fifty
years.71 Moreover the original group of central cantons composing the
first Eidgenossenschaft had been joined in the course of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries by numbers of additional cantons and by the powerful
Drei Bünde bordering the Tyrol.72
The Swiss infantry 47
Between Sempach and the spectacular victories of 1476–7 at Grandson,

Murten and Nancy, which led to the destruction of the kingdom of
Burgundy, the Swiss military reputation grew impressively.73 After the
defeat of the Burgundian armies, despite their state-of-the-art armoured
cavalry, good-quality infantry and substantial, modern artillery, the rep-
utation of the Swiss shifted: from being regarded as useful force-
enhancers added to other European armies, they were seen as an entire
weapons system in their own right.74
In practice, and as early as the battles against the duke of Burgundy it
was clear that an army based purely on Swiss infantry had significant
limitations. While the Swiss squares, with their fringe of pikemen and
deep central block of soldiers with halberds and other hacking weapons,
could sweep aside forces of armoured cavalry or less cohesive infantry with
ease, they had limited capacity to follow up the defeat of an enemy on the
battlefield. Without cavalry to harass and drive retreating troops into a
disorderly rout, the enemy forces, though mauled by the Swiss, would
probably live to fight another day – as the Burgundians managed after
their first encounter at Grandson.75 More significantly for the future,
Swiss confidence in the invulnerability of their infantry led them to neglect
artillery. In the early fifteenth century they had field artillery that was equal
to that of their enemies in numbers and quality, but by the early sixteenth
century they had fallen substantially behind in terms of both technology
and tactical thinking about the uses of firepower.76
Ultimately even the superiority of the Swiss infantry on the battlefield
was to be brought into question. If one response to the crushing defeats of
the Burgundian armies was to try to hire the Swiss en masse, another was
to try to forge similar infantry units from local material. Earliest and most
successful in imitating the style of the Swiss infantry were the German
Landsknechte, who had developed a military tradition as formidable as the
Swiss by the 1520s.77 A further challenge to the Swiss was to be posed by
the Spanish creation of their own elite infantry, the tercios, who combined
the cohesion and offensive mass of a Swiss square with tactical flexibility,
and a more coherent role for infantry firearms in combat.78
In the long term the Swiss would lose their position to rivals who both
imitated their military methods and gradually improved upon them, but
the Swiss system of raising and deploying soldiers offers some important
pointers towards the evolution of more elaborate systems of military
enterprise. In comparison with the condottiere and their straightforward
marketing of specialized military resources, the paradox of the Swiss
system was that local citizen defence, based on the general obligation to
military service and organized by the cantons, became an efficient mech-
anism for hiring out soldiers to foreign powers. The oft-made point about
the propensity of agriculturally poor, mountainous regions in Europe to

export a proportion of their men to make a living as soldiers certainly holds
good for the cantons, as it did for the Tyrol, Croatia or Scotland. But the
process was not without its conflicting pressures, as the authorities sought
to balance what they considered to be the fundamental defensive needs of
the Confederation and its constituent cantons, with the temptations and
opportunities to send able-bodied men for service abroad.
The attraction of such military service for the soldiers was straightfor-
ward: contracts for service abroad paid wages of 4½ gulden per month.
This was the pay of a skilled craftsman in the early sixteenth century, and
at least twice that of an agricultural labourer. Those who were nominated
as double-pay soldiers received substantial increments, while company
captains would be paid up to ten times the ordinary wage.79 Moreover
duties involving unusual danger – fighting pitched battles and storming
fortifications, for example – were considered to merit additional payments
from the warlord, while there was hope of making much larger sums from
looting, booty and ransoming prisoners.80 The cantonal authorities
sought to regulate this service, frequently asserting that they were the
only legitimate channel through which foreign powers could negotiate.81
This of course allowed the authorities themselves to make substantial
profits on the contracts, and also to benefit from the pensions which
major military recruiters such as France and the Emperor paid to ensure
goodwill and cooperation in meeting requests for the hire of soldiers.82
Cantonal control had some public benefits as well: given the fragmentary
nature of Swiss society, local control of military service could prevent
price-lowering inter-cantonal competition, and avoided the political – and
military – difficulties of either finding that Swiss troops were contracted to
fight against each other in opposing foreign armies, or running the risk of
antagonizing powerful allies by an inability to prevent Swiss soldiers
entering service with their enemies.83 Moreover, the cantonal authorities
would occasionally come together to agree on military policy at the level of
the Confederation, with decisions to raise a large part of the available
fighting force – potentially up to 70,000 men by the time of the
Burgundian Wars84 – for common defence or the pursuit of shared
military interests.
The authority to decide on when and for whom the Swiss soldiers
should be raised was combined with direct involvement of the cantons
in the process of recruiting and organizing the troops for war. A decision
by a canton to raise troops on its own behalf, or to levy a specified number
in accordance with a collective decision of the Confederation, would be
followed by a mass summons for all the able-bodied males between
sixteen and sixty to assemble so that the local officials could make a
selection to achieve the agreed total of the levy. All those eligible for
service were obliged to provide their own weapons and appropriate
armour: breastplates and iron helms for the pikemen, in some cases partial
armour for the halberdiers. Those called for service, but unable to afford
weapons and armour, would be helped either from the town armoury or
by loans of equipment from neighbours who were not summoned for
military duty.85 Much of the support system for the troops – food supplies
to be purchased at least while the troops were passing through the
Confederation, transport for artillery, baggage and potentially for cap-
tured booty – was provided by the authorities.86 Though elements of the
local elites, especially wealthy merchants, could buy exemption from
military service via provision of arms, equipment and the hiring of sub-
stitutes, it would still be true that a higher proportion of the Swiss popu-
lation took an active part in military activity than in other contemporary
states.87 But if this appeared to some contemporaries and in subsequent
accounts as an apparently utopian model of collective, democratic civil
defence,88 the reality was rather different.
What made the Swiss military system work so effectively? Conscripting
and equipping the troops might be a collective exercise, but the tactical
effectiveness of the great Swiss infantry squares depended on military
professionalism and experience at two levels. The forces needed to be
led by men who knew how to deploy their troops effectively in very
different conditions and against different types of enemy – from French
and Burgundian heavy cavalry to Landsknechte who mirrored Swiss battle
tactics. This kind of tactical and operational skill had to be combined
with distinct leadership qualities. The cooperation of leaders of cantonal
contingents needed to be won by consultation and active involvement in
decision-making, while the ordinary soldiers had a strong sense of their
fighting identity and needed to be handled with respect and restraint.89
While such leaders were part of the cantonal elites and were involved in
decision-making in that context, they were also marked out by their
lengthy military service and experience.90 In general they came from a
tight-knit group of noble families with an extensive tradition of military
leadership, who looked on military command as a career rather than an
occasional act of patriotic duty.91 A noble family like the Stockalper from
Brig held a succession of military commands from the fifteenth to the
seventeenth century, with a representative figure like Peter von Stockalper
leading a large contingent of the Swiss troops in the French army at Pavia
in 1525.92 Another noble family, the Courten von Siders, dominated
recruitment and led troops from the Wallis through the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, combining this with a succession of influential
cantonal offices.93 Service abroad was the obvious means to acquire and
develop military experience, while it also provided the opportunity not

available at home to make a career and acquire wealth.94
The nobles and other military professionals composing the high com-
mand were not the only element pushing for more extensive and flexible
military service. While the military effectiveness of the Gevierthaufen
appears in much earlier Swiss history as a spontaneous expression of
the military spirit of the nation, in reality the striking-power and cohe-
siveness of the great squares depended on the elite of pikemen, the
‘double-pay men’, who occupied the front ranks of each side of the
square. It was their steadfastness and experience in combat that was
vital to harness the crude violence and energy of the mass of the soldiers:
keeping the square tight, but not dangerously over-compressed, by their
own positioning and sticking-power, while moving it forward to a colli-
sion with enemy defenders where the survival chances of these front
ranks would depend on their skill with the pike and confidence that
they would break the enemy. Serving in this ‘double-pay’ role demanded
extraordinary qualities, not least physical strength and training to wield
and then manoeuvre an unwieldy, iron-tipped 5½ metre pike, while
wearing heavy breast and back armour.95 Absolutely crucial to the
cohesion of the unit, it demanded a level of self-discipline and small-
group identity which set them apart from the mass of less-experienced
ordinary soldiers in the unit. As with the senior officers, the double-pay
men were a group who were committed to military service and prepared
to regard it, if not as a life-time career, certainly as a choice for a
significant period of their early/middle life. The effectiveness of the
Swiss military system depended on groups of men who could not easily
be reabsorbed into civilian life and for whom military professionalism
was both a choice and a necessity. Originally it represented a choice: the
Mats were a combination of young and middle-aged unmarried men
from within local communities, who would be the obvious group called
up in any recruitment. Many of them enjoyed this role, volunteering for
successive mercenary units being raised by local commanders, and were
reluctant to return to the stable peasant community of their elder,
married brothers where they would probably occupy a marginal role. 96
In many cases this service abroad would eventually detach them from
any sense of identity with their original community, and they would
become Kriegsgurgeln, unsettled and rootless ex-veterans, habituated to
risk-taking violence and casual opportunities for military service, never
properly reintegrated into civilian life after the end of campaigns.97 For
them, and for those who wanted to control their disruptive impact on
settled civil society, military service was now a necessity, the only alter-
native to begging or crime. They formed a large group outside the
normal cantonal recruitment system, but a natural pool of recruits for

officers assembling units to take up mercenary contracts.
From 1476 until 1515 the Confederation’s military reputation stood at
its height, and so, briefly, did its own territorial ambitions. The foreign
invasions of Italy from 1494 opened up a new period of threat from
potentially powerful neighbours in Lombardy, but also provided oppor-
tunities to extend Swiss influence and power southwards, most notably
and ultimately disastrously in the decision to sell their services and sup-
port to Massimiliano Sforza, duke of Milan, against France from 1512 to
1515. The Confederation also sought to assert itself politically and terri-
torially against the Empire and the Habsburg Tyrol, fighting the Swabian
War in 1499, a struggle of which the legacy was a hardening of the hatred
between Swiss and Landsknechte into what became a merciless vendetta
through the next century.98 But as this period came to an end, as the
Confederation stepped back from heavy – and profoundly divisive – com-
mitments outside its own territory, space opened for larger and more
diverse contracts with foreign powers. So long as the Confederation had
been pursuing its own political interests via the deployment of military
force, the growing desire of the warring great powers to hire Swiss troops
en masse had been hard to satisfy.99 The figure of 6,000 troops recurs
regularly in contract negotiations throughout this period, implying the
upper limit of the forces that the authorities were prepared to see commit-
ted abroad while their own military needs were still potentially in play.100
With changing priorities the financial, and on occasions political, ben-
efits of responding to these requests for Swiss soldiers became more
tempting to the cantonal authorities.101 In 1511 those seemingly perpet-
ual enemies, the Confederation and the House of Habsburg, negotiated a
‘hereditary treaty’, offering mutual support in case of attack by a third
party, and for the Habsburgs the right to hire Swiss troops to assist their
own military defence.102 The Swiss defeat at Marignano in 1515 was
followed by an agreement to a ‘perpetual peace’ with France, though it
was not until 1521 that the French king managed to negotiate an agree-
ment for the levy of Swiss troops. The hesitation of the cantons in agreeing
to these levies was unsurprising, given that any such agreement would
stand in direct contravention of the agreements with the Habsburgs.103
The open and multi-theatred conflict between Habsburg and Valois down
to 1559 conflicted with clauses in both sets of treaties which stipulated that
the Swiss were to be hired only for defensive warfare, and made a mockery
of the apparently exclusive nature of the agreements, but at the same time
also strengthened the cantons’ hands in a ‘bidding war’ for their services.
When in 1553 Henri II wanted to increase the number of troops to be
raised from the previously agreed 10,000 to 16,000, the terms included a
substantial reduction in rights of French supervision over the recruitment

and selection process and over the subsequent autonomy of the regi-
ments, and formalized the agreement that in addition to recruitment
and transportation money the Swiss soldiers would receive a full, non-
refundable three months’ worth of wages at the time of the levy.104
In reality these incompatible agreements with different warlords should
be seen not so much as a product of greed and duplicity, but as a symptom
of the acutely divided and fragmentary nature of federal authority. Any
agreement between the various cantons on common policy or action was
never more than temporary and contingent, and the individual cantons
were themselves often strongly divided about the profits and potential
hazards of military policy. The 1521 treaty with François I to provide
soldiers for France’s defensive needs was not signed by Zurich, and as the
reformation spread to other cantons, notably Berne, so they also started to
hedge their commitment and refused to provide troops for France.105
Protestant cantons’ reluctance to support a common line when it came to
requests for troops from Catholic powers was paralleled by the refusal of
the eastern territories – the Drei Bünde – to accept limitations on their
provision of troops for Habsburg service, making a particular treaty in
1518 to renew their formal military agreements with the Austrian
lands.106 A few decades later in 1567, it was the Catholic cantons who
broke ranks, agreeing against the wishes of the Protestants to send 6,000
troops to support Charles IX against the Huguenots, troops placed under
the command of the militantly Catholic Ludwig Pfyffer von Altishofen.107
Even as the cantons were divided about which of the major, and possibly
which of the second-rank, powers should have their requests to hire troops
met, an additional factor came into play. The military experience of the
senior officers might express itself in service to the Confederation or its
chosen foreign warlords, but it was also attractive for them to offer military
service at the head of a ‘free’ company of soldiers.108 The right to offer
service to external powers as opportunity and reputation permitted – the
principle of Reislaufen – was strongly asserted by its advocates, and not just
for the obvious personal advantages of lucrative private contracts with
foreign powers.109 It was argued that such service ensured that the
range and level of military expertise was maintained amongst those who
might later be called to serve under the authority of the canton or the
Confederation; moreover the cantons’ own policies with regard to
hiring and not hiring soldiers to external warlords were anything but
coherent, and ‘informal’ service could prove a useful means to satisfy
demands unofficially.110 Above all, military service via these informal
channels served the obvious economic and social function of drawing
more effectively on both the marginal, militarized population – the
Kriegsgurgeln – and the Mats who were still part of the community but were
under pressure as younger sons or unmarried relatives to draw their
subsistence from outside that local community. The numbers prepared
to volunteer for military service, either when authorized by the canton or
simply organized by officers for foreign service, were impressive: of the
30,000 men raised by the Confederation to attack Dijon in 1513, some
14,000 had come forward as simple volunteers, offering their military
experience in the hope of gain from pay and plunder.111
In a striking prefiguration of the activities of later military enterprisers, it
was thus possible for some of these ‘free’ commanders to raise large
numbers of troops, drawing simply on their ability to raise Swiss volun-
teers without recourse to any cantonal conscription or selection. The
precise number is not given, but in 1486–7 the eldest son of Count Jörg
von Werdenberg-Sargans was able to attract ‘around fifty companies’ of
volunteer soldiers for a war against Milan, against the explicit wishes of the
authorities in the Drei Bünde.112 The capacity of these private captains to
raise large numbers of troops was recognized by foreign warlords: in 1499
the French sought to recruit 12,000 Swiss soldiers on the basis that
they would negotiate with forty independent captains, prepared to raise
soldiers outside of cantonal organization.113
Moreover, as Swiss troops after 1515 again started to be hired less often
as a free-standing, battle-winning force, and more as a powerful addition
to a mixture of other units raised by a warlord, so the range of opportu-
nities for independent captains grew. There were large numbers of expe-
rienced captains who, in return for financial advances on their contract,
could raise one or several infantry companies of 100–300 men each, and
even a regiment at its later sixteenth-century strength of 1,000–3,000
men. The captains would receive funds from the warlord, and would
then use their reputation, local influence or social position to seek out
volunteers, who would arrive for service equipped and armed at their own
expense. Without the involvement of the cantonal officials, there was no
official mechanism to loan arms and armour to those selected for service
who lacked money to buy them. Instead there is some evidence of small-
scale financial investment in the individual soldier: money being lent him
for the purchase of halberd or breastplate against hopes of a good return
on a successful campaign.114 Some of this may have been more system-
atic: the captains who raised 6,000 troops for Ludovico Sforza’s service in
1500, Wilhelm von Diesbach, Jean Matter, Gutmann Zoller, George de
Riva and Antoine Wider, all contributed some of their own funds for
raising and equipping their companies.115
Where real differences opened up between captains offering ‘free’
military service to foreign warlords and those acting as the agents of a
system administered via cantonal authorities was in areas of financial

expertise and logistical organization.116 Especially in the latter case, the
‘free’ captains were well aware that moving recruits through the territory
of the Confederation without ensuring good order and adequate supplies
of food would produce a ferocious reaction from the authorities. The
contracts were negotiated with warlords to provide adequate sums of
Laufgeld to cover the costs of such troop movements, but much still
depended on good planning and reliable support.117 By the sixteenth
century most commanders of a group of contracted companies would
recruit a regimental staff to manage the finances and to try to ensure that
provisions were purchased and stockpiled and that violent incidents with
local populations (within the cantons) were avoided as far as possible.
Even outside the frontiers of the Confederation it might be the case that
the companies could live in part from requisitioning, robbery and plun-
der, but when food, money and saleable loot were not to hand, it fell to the
unit commanders to try to organize provisioning for their men in camp,
garrison or on the march, again requiring skills in making contacts with
suppliers, organizing transport and advancing money for purchases that
could later be recouped from the soldiers’ wages.118 These financial and
organizational skills cultivated by the military families of the sixteenth
century were to remain strongly in evidence amongst the Swiss military
enterprisers of the Thirty Years War such as Hans Ludwig von Erlach or
François-Pierre Koenig.
The Landsknechte
The other group of mercenaries whose contribution to the eventual
emergence and flourishing of military enterprise is of central importance
are the Landsknechte, to whom might be added the other substantial group
of German mercenaries hired by foreign warlords from the 1530s
onwards, the pistol-armed cavalry, or Reiter. The Landsknechte appear to
have been recruited from the time of Maximilian I, specifically as a
response to the Swiss Haufen, with the Germans employing the same
weapons, formations and tactics. Maximilian threw his own weight and
reputation behind the levying and organization of the Landsknechte, seek-
ing to overcome German noble disdain for infantry service by carrying a
pike himself and rewarding successful Landsknecht commanders with
honours and titles.119 Rather more rapidly than the Swiss, the
Landsknecht regiments started to substitute arquebuses and the heavier
muskets for halberds and other short-handled weapons. By 1570 each
company (Fähnlein) contained 200 infantry with firearms against the
remainder (somewhere between 100 and 200) armed with pikes.120 Like
The Landsknechte 55
the Swiss Haufen and the Spanish tercios, the size of the combat unit
gradually declined: a Landsknecht infantry regiment would be recruited
at 4,000 men in the 1560s, but the numbers of effectives would usually be
lower than that, with a company of 300 on paper being closer to 220 in
practice.121 As with most other European infantry the numbers within a
regiment or its equivalents were drifting down towards a typical 1,500–
3,000 troops by the end of the sixteenth century. The system of recruiting
and operating the Landsknechte differed from that of the Swiss in the
absence of any equivalent of the cantonal structure and authorities to
authorize, control, and in many cases administer the levy and deployment
of troops.
The Landsknechte were raised throughout the constituent territories and
jurisdictions which formed the Holy Roman Empire. The initiative to
raise infantry on a scale and in formations large enough to match the
Swiss on the battlefield probably came from Emperor Maximilian. But
Imperial authority was not capable of coercing or demanding a military
contribution from the innumerable rulers over whom the Emperor pos-
sessed ultimate juridical authority but little practical power. Any equiv-
alent of the cantons’ universal military service was a pipe dream of
theorists like the writer, soldier and Imperial councillor Lazarus von
Schwendi.122 In the face of a generally perceived common threat, the
territories of the Empire might agree to provide financial contributions
to the Emperor as defender of the common interest through the regional
assemblies of the Reichskreise, the ‘Circles’ or regions of the Empire. The
one threat in the sixteenth century which was likely to command some
consensus was Ottoman pressure on the Habsburg lands and on south-
central Germany; for this a military tax, the Römermonate, was collected in
accordance with the agreement made with Charles V at Worms (Wormser
Matrikel) in 1521. A single Römermonat involved the collective levy of
15,371 infantry from the Empire, with a monthly pay and upkeep cost
added to this of 88,500 gulden. Depending on the nature of the military
emergency, the Diet could vote multiple tax grants which would maintain
an Imperial army for an agreed period.123 The Emperor could draw upon
the tax revenues to finance the campaign, and the territories within the
Circles would undertake or contract the levy of the specified numbers of
troops. Römermonate from the Circles might occasionally be available for
the pursuit of Habsburg dynastic interests in Italy, or directly against
France, but in general this would be funded by direct and indirect tax
resources, extraordinary lay and clerical subsidies from the Habsburg
lands.124
The actual levy of troops was a local matter, in which the smaller
German territorial princes and the subject nobility of medium and larger
Fig. 1.2 A contemporary visualization of Swiss and German pike-squares clashing outside the walls of a city
The Landsknechte 57
states might play a role as military contractors. But above all it was the
activity of the independent (Reichsunmittelbar) Imperial knights
(Reichsritter). These latter figure largely in the contracts for the hire of
Landsknechte, and include many of the names most closely associated with
the military history of the period: Berlichingen, Ems zu der Hohenems,
Sickingen, Schertlin von Burtenbach, Fürstenberg, Truchseß von
Waldburg. In most cases they were noble landowners for whom the addi-
tional financial attractions of successful military service were consider-
able, and who were unconstrained by the juridical complications of being
princely subjects. The extent that this became the knightly métier can be
seen from its continuation into the Thirty Years War, with no less reso-
nant military names like Pappenheim and Hatzfeld emerging from this
class. Though rather like the social rise of the condottiere in the fifteenth
century, the later, larger-scale and more complex military enterprise of the
seventeenth-century Empire became the province of the younger sons and
brothers of princely families. In contrast, sixteenth-century mercenary
activity in the Empire was dominated by the Reichsritter. There were a
few exceptions: the most famous of all Landsknecht commanders, Georg
von Frundsberg, was from a noble family who were subjects of the
Habsburg archdukes of the Tyrol.125 Martin Schwarz, notorious from
British history as the captain of 2,000 Landsknechte led against Henry VII
at the battle of Stoke in 1487, seems to have been a cobbler before he
progressed through the military ranks in the 1470s.126 At the other end of
the scale, some of the German princes, like their Italian counterparts, did
become directly involved in raising and hiring out bodies of soldiers:
Albrecht Alkibiades of Brandenburg provided a notorious example in
1552 when he hired out his army corps to the French for an invasion of
the Habsburg Netherlands.127 But the German soldier trade remained
dominated by the Imperial knights at least until the second half of the
sixteenth century, and their claim to make contracts with any warlord they
wished – the principle of Reislaufen – had direct consequences for the
capacity to satisfy external requests for the service of Landsknechte or
Reiter. The strongest opponent of this claim was the Emperor himself, to
whom all of these otherwise Reichsunmittelbar knightly captains owed
allegiance. Under Emperor Charles V, contracting to serve the French
king meant, more often than not, direct military opposition to the
Emperor, so the debate about ‘foreign’ service intensified. The one victim
of judicial proceedings to assert this principle was Colonel Sebastian
Vogelsberger. Brought to trial for having served François I in the 1530s
and having offered to recruit troops for Henri II at the time of the
Schmalkaldic War, he was executed in 1548. But Vogelsberger, though
enjoying wealth and office from his military service, had been born the son
of a small farmer and schoolmaster in the Rheinpfalz; he had none of the

political immunities of the Reichsritter, and his example had no real impact
on subsequent willingness to continue contracting abroad.128
If in practice most German mercenary colonels could negotiate con-
tracts without any fear of restraint or prosecution, it was also the case that
the military resources of the Empire were incomparably greater than those
available to their Swiss counterparts. As contemporaries pointed out, it
was not difficult to recruit large numbers of soldiers to serve as
Landsknechte and recruiters could in many cases be selective, taking only
those who came with their own weapons and armour, and looking for
those with previous military experience or good health and physical
strength.129 Recruitment in 1555 by Colonel Georg von Holle around
Wildeshausen easily generated 5,000–6,000 potential recruits at the
assembly point although funding was only sufficient for the contracted
3,000.130 Given the concern of the Swiss authorities to control the overall
numbers of Swiss in foreign service, it was largely German Landsknechte
who were raised to soak up the extra demand.
Moreover a completely new gap in the market was filled by the German
Reiters with their pistolier tactics. Recognizing that lancers and cavalry
armed with sabres would stand no chance of breaking a well-formed, pike-
ringed square of Swiss or Landsknechte, ordinary armoured and light
cavalry were deployed on the flanks and in reserve to take advantage of
weaknesses or breakdown in the infantry centre of an opposing army. But
the Reiter, deploying the pistol tactic of the caracole in large, cohesive units,
offered the prospect of a more direct role for elite, well-drilled cavalry.
Though the caracole has frequently been dismissed as little more than
ineffectual choreography, the technique by which successive ranks of a
cavalry column rode up to within yards of an enemy formation, discharged
their heavy, armour-piercing pistols and wheeled away to allow the next
rank to fire, could prove effective – psychologically as much as in terms of
casualties inflicted. Pistols repeatedly fired at five to ten paces into a static
infantry formation whose own firearms had already been discharged,
mostly ineffectively and at greater range, could be highly intimidating,
as the collapse of the infantry of the Protestant princes demonstrated at
Mühlberg in 1547.131 More consistently decisive was the impact of pistol-
armed Reiter on traditional heavy cavalry armed with lances; it was the use
of cavalry pistoliers, rather than the infantry pike-square, which ended
the battlefield role of fully armoured heavy cavalry.132 The main reason why
the caracole and similar cavalry tactics were talked down by many contem-
poraries was that such tactics would only work in the hands of experienced,
disciplined and well-trained units of cavalry.133 Just like the pike-square,
the caracole would prove a disaster if deployed by inexperienced troops with
The Landsknechte 59
no sense of unit identity or cohesion.134 Hiring German units of Reiter

who had this practical experience of providing disciplined pistol fire on
horseback was the obvious, ready-made means to acquire this military
capacity, despite the cost of 12 ducats per month for an ordinary
cavalryman.135
The German soldier trade of the sixteenth century was thus able to meet
considerable external demand.136 If the first and greatest contracting
warlord was the Emperor, as early as 1515 the army of François I which
opposed the Swiss at Marignano contained 23,000 Landsknechte.137 By
the mid-1530s the French campaigning forces included 6,000
Landsknechte raised by Wilhelm von Fürstenberg and a further 7,000
raised through other colonels.138 In the early 1550s Henri II was regularly
campaigning with between 10,000 and 13,500 Landsknechte, while at the
well-documented review of Henri’s army conducted at Pierrepont in
1558, as many as 19,000 German infantry were supplemented by 8,200
Reiter (in an army totalling 40,500).139 France was not alone: in 1544
Henry VIII sought to raise 2,000 Landsknechte under Maximilian
d’Ysselstein, count of Buren, together with seven independent companies
of German cavalry totalling some 1,500 horse.140 He would certainly have
raised more, but the difficulties that he encountered were an indication
that the contracting activity of both the Emperor and the king of France
had come close to draining even the large pool of high-quality German
soldiers available for hire.141 The kings of Denmark hired both regiments
of Landsknaegtene raised by their own nobility, and contracted German
units to supplement these throughout the sixteenth century.142 As early as
1502 German Landsknechte were sent by the margrave of Brandenburg to
serve under contracts drawn up by King Hans of Denmark.143
What could turn these Germans with varied and diverse geographical
and social backgrounds into units of soldiers whose military reputation
was sufficiently impressive that rulers would compete at great expense to
hire them in preference to their native soldiers? The Landsknechte could
not in general draw upon the obvious strength of the Swiss Haufen, close-
knit and homogenous peasant communities which could reinforce group
solidarity and cohesion. There was far less sense of community and no
distinctive ‘geography of recruitment’ either for the Landsknechte in gen-
eral, or for the individual units.144 The social and economic backgrounds
also varied widely, with townsmen as likely as peasants to volunteer, and
with a wide social spectrum of recruits, from lesser nobles enlisting as
‘double-pay men’ down to the urban unemployed.145 If there was no
strong regional or social solidarity, neither was there any powerful sense
of emergent ‘German-ness’ that could create bonds. Georg von
Frundsberg might try to stir up anger amongst his own followers against
the 5,000 Landsknechte in French service at the battle of Pavia, but there
was little real sense of cultural identity that could be used to stimulate
cohesion.146 Appeals to Imperial service and common duty as the
Emperor’s vassals cut little ice when pay was in arrears, as Frundsberg
himself discovered in Verona in 1510 and again in 1527 at San Giovanni
near Bologna.147 And unlike the Swiss, the German soldiers, infantry and
cavalry, had few reservations about fighting each other as hired soldiers of
opposing powers, partly of course because recruitment across large and
diverse German territories outweighed any strong sense of a common
culture. The captain of the Zug contingent who told the soldiers of the
leading Swiss Haufe at Marignano that the battlefield would be their
churchyard, then appealed to them to ‘be courageous and think of their
home’. It is difficult to see that this shared concept of ‘home’ could have
an obvious collective German equivalent.148
Nor could religious identity be easily pressed into service by the military
authorities. Despite the distinctive piety and popular beliefs of the
Landsknechte – similar to those of the Swiss – on the eve of battle or after
military successes, soldiers and their officers were remarkably resistant to
the currents of evangelical reform unleashed from the 1530s and
1540s.149 Attempts to foster a strong, confessional identity amongst the
Landsknechte failed, as did most attempts to demonize enemies in terms of
their heterodox religious beliefs. Recent work continues to maintain the
judgement of Anton Schindling that armies in the Empire were confes-
sional ‘free states’ in the early modern period, in which religious piety and
practice was certainly evident, but strong confessional divisions and
antipathies much less so.150 That this was not necessarily the case with
all early modern soldiers can be seen through the example of the Spanish
soldiers of the tercios, whose behaviour and group indentity was strongly
shaped by a powerful, militant Catholicism.151
It is easy to depict the sixteenth-century mercenary as driven straight-
forwardly by greed or need; whether they were seeking to exploit their
military role to extort money from society, or whether they were victims
of that society, forced to become soldiers by a harshening economic
environment, their motivation was crudely material.152 When his own
Landsknechte surrounded Frundsberg at San Giovanni, threatening him
with violence over their arrears of pay, shouting ‘Money, Money’, and
then declaring that they would undertake no further military action until
their arrears were paid, it might seem perverse to question this bottom line
of their motivation for service.153 Like the Swiss, the Landsknechte
received decent wages: at four Rhenish gulden a month, this was typically
half a gulden less than the Swiss, but still double the pay of a farm labourer
and more than a skilled journeyman.154 With the appropriate, privately
The Landsknechte 61
purchased equipment of pike and half-armour, and especially if drawn

from a higher social rank, the recruit might qualify as a double-pay soldier
(around 10–20 per cent of the company), with what would then be a
substantial wage.155 It certainly was not the case that the majority of
those volunteering and enlisting as ordinary soldiers were from the lowest
economic groups in society. Many were the sons and brothers of middling
or prosperous peasant families, others were from urban artisan and jour-
neyman backgrounds, while some were from the urban patrician class
seeking adventure or experience.156 In any case, and a point so often
missed when discussing these privately raised troops, while financial
gain might have explained their enlistment, it would not explain the
military qualities of either Swiss or Germans.
At the heart of the success of the Landsknechte lay a distinctive, complex
and to some extent paradoxical sense of corporate identity. This was also
present with the Swiss, though shaped in their case by the demand for
military service, so that the military organization – at least when organized
cantonally – was a closer reflection of the wider community. For many
Landsknecht, and more like the Swiss ‘free companies’, military service
was a professional choice for the individual. At the same time Landsknecht
professionalism contrasted with that of the Italian condottieri companies,
who were separated from their surrounding society, indeed had often
been hired in order to ensure that this society had little to do with the
practicalities of military activity. It was the concept of the collective
‘Regiment of the Landsknechte’ which systematized a strong sense of
corporate identity that was about both belonging and social distance.157
What service as a Landsknecht offered was a defined and collective social
status which ranked the soldier amongst the respectable and honourable
elements of society. This status was measured not primarily in terms of
good wages and other economic benefits – which were decent on paper
but in reality frequently failed to come up to expectations – but in terms of
honour and ‘freedom’. Military service as a Landsknecht was an honour-
able career, freely chosen and with a status which was measured by rights
and privileges akin to those of members of other corporations in early
modern society. Understanding the status of the sixteenth-century
Landsknecht requires forgetting entirely the eighteenth-century perception
of ordinary soldiers as social detritus, separated as much as possible from
direct contact with respectable ranks of society by close confinement to
barracks and the drill square.158
One obvious manifestation of the status of the sixteenth-century
Landsknechte was simply outward respect. The soldiers were members of
a corporation which provided military service, itself a highly regarded
activity. The terms in which they were addressed reflected this. Emperor
Maximilian consistently referred to his ‘Liebe Landsknechte’, or his

‘fromme Teutsche’ or ‘ehrliche Kriegsleut’.159 Taking the example from
the top, and even more aware of sensibilities in this respect, an effective
commander like Frundsberg referred to his ‘lieben Söhn und Brüder’,
while respectful adjectives like fromm, tapfer and ehrlich were regularly
used in collective address.160 Civil society took its cue to some extent
from this respectful tone within the corporation: ambiguities in attitudes
to the soldiery did not challenge the idea that the profession was honour-
able and accepted its evaluation of itself. The fascination with the
Landsknechte in contemporary painting, copperplate engraving and wood-
cuts bears powerful witness to an attitude which was certainly not free of
moralizing disapproval, but was also accepting of the soldiers’ claim to a
distinctive status and role in society.161
A more substantial factor in determining the German and Swiss sol-
diers’ sense of self-worth was an element of democracy and self-
determination in the military organization. Each company in a unit of
Landsknechte had a complement of ‘Gemeinämter’, officers who were
directly elected by the collectivity (Gemein) of the soldiers to represent
their interests, namely a Führer, two Waibel (Gemeinwaibel) and a Fourrier
per company.162 These officers shared between them the administrative
oversight of troop movements and lodgings, divided up the allocations of
supplies and munitions, allocated watches and other responsibilities, and
represented the interests of the soldiers to the captain in all areas of duties,
discipline and rights. To these duties the Führer added the all-important
function of acting as advocate and adviser for the common soldiers in
matters of justice. The existence of the Gemeinämter was a reflection of the
rights of the ordinary Landsknecht or Swiss soldier,163 but so was the
manner of their election. The entire company would assemble in a large
circle and the names of candidates for these posts would be shouted by
soldiers to the scribe, who would note them down in preparation for
voting by simple majority. Moreover the company drawn up in their circle
was a crucial element in other areas of decision-making: the forum for
negotiation with the senior officers, the mechanism for taking collective
decisions, and the context in which the trial and punishment of members
of the company took place.
Beneath this structure of company and regimental office-holders, all the
men in a German or Swiss mercenary company were divided into small,
self-selected groups of eight to ten ordinary soldiers, or six double-pay men,
the Rotte. This was militarily important in its own right, a classic example of
those small-group dynamics which twentieth-century military theorists
have regarded as the key to understanding the military effectiveness of
larger bodies of soldiers.164 Its significance was certainly understood by
The Landsknechte 63
Fig. 1.3 Three images of particular ranks of Landsknechte: a. the

Rottmeister, the elected representative of a small group of eight to ten
soldiers; b. the Hurenwaibel, the officer with overall authority for the
regulation of the baggage train and its accompanying non-combatants,
especially the whores; c. the Brandmeister, the officer charged with
collecting money and food from local populations under threat of
military enforcement.
contemporaries, being readily adopted by the Spanish tercios, with their

divisions of the companies into small groups of camaradas.165 Each Rotte
informally elected one of its number as the Rottmeister, who would distrib-
ute food and munitions, allocate accommodation within the Rotte, fix
watches, resolve disputes and generally act as group leader.166
Representation was important, and so were its practical implications.
Above all the Landsknechte and their Swiss contemporaries served under
Fig. 1.3 (cont.) b. The Hurenwaibel.
systems of justice which emphasized collective responsibility for hearing

cases and deciding verdicts and punishments. Though the regimental
colonel possessed supreme judicial authority and had the right to overrule
the collective will of the soldiers, such direct confrontation would nor-
mally be avoided. In general the regimental judicial officers, headed by the
Schultheiß, would initiate legal proceedings against offending soldiers, and
the case itself would be heard within the circle of the assembled soldiers,
the defendant having the right to call upon his Rottmeister, the Führer or
one of the Waibel, or any other of the soldiers to speak for him in the public
context of the trial.167 While a trial would follow formal procedures and
the verdict would be reached by a panel or ‘jury’ which was dominated by
officers appointed by the colonel, the rest of the soldiers were present and
The Landsknechte 65
Fig. 1.3 (cont.) c. The Brandmeister.
could either act as a legitimizing force for the verdict and sentence, or
might register their disapproval or dissatisfaction with proceedings.168 In
some cases of crimes against fellow soldiers, the company would also act
as collective executioner, forcing the condemned to pass along two lines of
spear-armed soldiers who would beat and stab him to death.169 This again
was a recognition of the condemned soldier’s status; he would not be
humiliated by being handed over to the ‘dishonourable’ charge of a
regimental executioner.170
The obvious result of this popular participation in regimental justice
was to weaken the disciplinary sanctions of the senior officers over their
troops. It was difficult and sometimes dangerous to seek to prosecute
soldiers who were considered by their fellows to have behaved within

acceptable norms, and on some occasions even when they had acted
well beyond them.171 Rather than formal codifications imposed through
a military hierarchy, discipline appears more as a collective consensus
which might vary markedly in different contexts, for example between the
battlefield, the army on the march or in quarters. A capital sentence for
insubordination on the battlefield would probably command general
approval from the soldiers, while a similar sentence imposed on soldiers
who had fallen out of a march might provoke a riot.172
The consensual model was more widely reflected in the relationship of
officers to men: while the contracting colonel would appoint his officers,
they would then be ‘acclaimed’ by the assembled circle of soldiers; this
was ostensibly so that they would be recognizable in a military community
where there were no external marks of rank, but of course also carried
some implications of popular election. Moreover, officers led from the
front and by example, which often meant in the front ranks of the Haufen;
their authority was demonstrative and repeatedly affirmed by active lead-
ership, rather than established and hierarchical.173 Unable to deter their
Swiss soldiers from a frustrated collective decision to storm the well-
defended fortress of Morbegno in northern Italy in 1531, the command-
ing officers unhesitatingly placed themselves in the front ranks, so that
both Dietegen von Salis and Hans von Marmels were killed in the first
assault.174
As this example also shows, it was not always the case, and especially
when pay was in arrears, that the commanding officers would take all
military decisions. If the Landsknechte by the sixteenth century had largely
abandoned the Swiss model of decision-making by the collective body of
the senior officers – the Kriegsrat – both the decisions and orders of Swiss
and German commanders could be swept aside on occasions by popular
pressure or resistance from their men.175 All of this would appear to
challenge most ideas of what constitutes military command and func-
tional discipline in modern armies, though it is easily recognizable from
earlier European and non-European societies, where military forces main-
tained an edge over neighbouring powers through the combination of their
soldiers’ high self-esteem and their cohesiveness and fighting power based
on each individual’s sense of participation and responsibility.176
Such organizational traits, even if they challenge conventional ideas of
military hierarchy, could foster military results that certainly impressed
contemporaries. Some other aspects of this strong collective identity
excited less favourable reactions. There was a profound ambiguity at the
heart of Landsknecht self-identity in society. They wished to be a respect-
able and honoured part of that society, but at the same time their
The Landsknechte 67
extremely strong group bonding and the nature of military life gave them a
sense of assertive separateness, of being outside the norms of a settled,
‘respectable’ society.177 If a powerful motivation for enlistment and serv-
ice was a heightening of social status through the rights and freedoms
enjoyed as members of a prestigious corporation, an equally powerful
force was the cohesiveness gained from standing as a close-knit group
outside of, or hostile to, society. This latter tendency is characteristic of
many armies and navies, but it has rarely been carried to such conspicuous
extremes as by the Landsknechte, and certainly explains much of the
particular antagonism towards this style of mercenary warfare expressed
by many of the moralizing writers of the sixteenth century.
Much has been written on Swiss and Landsknecht dress and appearance,
and depictions of individuals and groups, whether from life or as carica-
tures, fascinated contemporary artists, supplying what was evidently a
large market for engravings.178 It is easy to imagine the impact of a
group of Landsknechte arriving in some small town or community in
central Germany, with their extraordinary, multi-coloured and extrava-
gant costumes, highly individualized, flamboyant in their use of slashing
(to reveal other, expensive fabrics beneath the top layer), elaborate stitch-
ing and ruffles, feathers, plumes and other decorations, in many cases
inspired by lively and colourful Italian styles of dress. Landsknecht cos-
tume was about conspicuous consumption: the soldiers had access to cash
paid as a monthly sum, intended to cover costs of food, lodging and
upkeep, but readily spent on gambling, drinking and the purchase of
provocatively expensive clothing. The dress was also unmistakeably
about assertive masculinity and sexuality: brightly coloured fabrics and
deliberately conspicuous codpieces, puffed and padded jackets which
emphasized shoulders and chest, tight leggings, fabric slashing to reveal
bare skin on legs, arms and chest. In a communal culture where the
disruptive effects of unconstrained sexuality were a strong source of
anxiety to religious and civil authorities, the dress and swaggering, aggres-
sively masculine behaviour of the Swiss or the Landsknecht were an open
provocation, an incitement to fornication, adultery, and illegitimate chil-
dren.179 That they would readily impress non-military young males and
encourage them to try to imitate clothing and behaviour, even if they did
not seek to enlist, was a further reason for concern.180 ‘I likewise require
modestie in apparell’, thundered the predictably puritanical Justus
Lipsius, in a comment that might otherwise appear a low priority in a
work on military discipline.181
Dress though was only one part of a more systematic rejection of the
norms of civil society in the social and cultural behaviour of the Landsknechte
and their Swiss counterparts. Their detachment from the settled life of town
Fig. 1.4 Landsknecht dress, an attractive subject for artists and engravers through the sixteenth century
.
The Landsknechte 69
and country was also embodied in the Troß, a great extended and mobile
camp of wagons, carts, porters, draught and pack animals, food and
merchandise vendors, servants, women, children and animals that
accompanied the regiments of troops to provide a combination of support
services, shops and social environment. The Troß was where the soldier
stored his possessions and might establish his wife, children or servants,
where he bought his food and drink, sold his booty, and could buy the
services of tailors, cobblers, barbers, surgeons, notaries and whores.182
This last service provided by the Troß was notorious amongst moralists
and critics of this military system. While they might grudgingly have
accepted the practical, physical necessity for the presence of whores with
the army – ‘no whores, no war’ was a popular saying from this period183 –
the openness with which the trade was plied and the lack of censoriousness
from the senior ranks of the unit presented a sharp contrast with the often
tortuous hypocrisy of settled civil society.
The open tolerance of the presence and role of whores within the army
camp was embodied in the office of the Hurenwaibel. Although this man
in fact had a wider responsibility for the general good order of all of the
services, marketing and other activities within the camp, he was specif-
ically identified for his role as the overseer and supervisor of the prosti-
tutes, a post which involved resolving disputes, preventing violence
and ensuring that the women were kept in the camp and were separated
from the troops when they were directly engaged in military activities.
Far from being a modest, low-key position, the Hurenwaibel in a large
army enjoyed a status equivalent to a company captain and had a team
of assistants.184 The frequent subject of engravings and descriptions of
the various ranks and duties of military officers, the Hurenwaibel was the
public face of an army organization which was increasingly at odds with
those urgent attempts at moral reformation and discipline that were
being launched by spiritual and civil authorities through the sixteenth
century.
If the enforcement of discipline amongst the Landsknechte may have
reflected collective consensus as much as top-down enforcement of
formal regulation, there is little doubt that the consensus was least
likely to support the punishment of soldiers who pillaged, stole or
perpetrated violence against civil populations, even those within the
territory of the warlord who had hired the soldiers. Though many of
the senior officers did recognize both a prudential and a moral duty to
try to protect civilians from their soldiers, the cultural and social
assumptions of the soldiers themselves did little to restrain lawless
behaviour against those who were outside the bounds of internal loyalty
and recognition.185
The roles of both Swiss troops and Landsknechte illustrate the ambiguity
of a widespread acceptance of the military qualities of the professional
soldiers of the sixteenth century, and yet an unease about the extent to
which they were able to define their own relationship to surrounding
society. This ambiguity forms one of the most important contexts in
which the developing role of military enterprise in the later sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries should be seen.
2 The expansion of military enterprise,
1560–1620
As troops across western Europe dispersed into winter quarters, ports and
garrisons in late 1555, the fifth continuous campaign fought between the
Emperor Charles V and his rival, Henri II of France, came to an incon-
clusive end. Both rulers and their governments were well aware of the
fiscal stresses that this uninterrupted warfare was generating. In 1553
French military expenses, not including fortification works, were conser-
vatively estimated at 13.2 million livres, and with similar expenditure in
prospect for each successive year of war, it was impossible to meet military
expenses without a dramatic increase in borrowing.1 In 1555 the French
crown sought to reorganize its financial dealing through what became
known as the Grand Parti, based on a consortium of Lyon-based bankers
who raised the ever-larger sums required by the crown via the interna-
tional financial community which transacted business at the three-
monthly Lyon money fairs.2 Charles V and his son Philip were no less
aware of the fiscal pressures of warfare. In February 1555 it was estimated
that more than a million ducats would be required simply to maintain
Spain’s defensive positions on the frontiers of the Milanese, while a
serious offensive would cost vastly more.3 The situation in the
Netherlands was even worse, with a state debt of 7 million florins by the
end of 1555, and an annual deficit of 3 million ducats.4
The traditional instinct of rulers in this situation was to look for a peace
settlement that would preserve reputation but would allow for the drastic
curtailment of borrowing and some consolidation of existing debts. This
had been the case after the last round of the Habsburg–Valois struggle,
fought from 1542 down to the 1544 Peace of Crépy.5 The negotiation of
the truce of Vaucelles in February 1556 came as no great surprise there-
fore; but its collapse later in the year, as the new Carafa pope, Paul IV,
provoked a conflict with the Spanish over control of Naples and drew the
French back into Italy to provide military support, was an alarming new
development.6 War broke out again in northern France and was to reach
its climax in August 1557 with the crushing French defeat at St Quentin.
French attempts to redress the military balance led to a last series of
71
72 The expansion of military enterprise, 1560–1620
campaigns in 1558, including a double invasion of Flanders and the duke

of Guise’s early success in taking Calais from the English, whose queen,
Mary Tudor, was now married to Charles’ son and successor, Philip II.
The financial consequences of this renewed round of warfare were
catastrophic. The French government ministers, already under acute
fiscal pressure, negotiated new and much larger loans on Lyon’s Grand
Parti in 1556 and 1557.7 Finally the system collapsed with massive
defaults on interest payments and what became an undeclared crown
bankruptcy in 1558–9, destroying the crown’s credit and ruining many
of the merchant bankers involved in the Parti.8 The destruction of the
institutional structure for Henri II’s borrowing hugely worsened the
financial crisis of the monarchy, and forced the crown far more urgently
towards a peace in 1559 than had been the case in 1556.9 The Habsburg
monarchia, now divided between Philip II and Charles’ brother
Ferdinand, was in no better shape as a result of these additional cam-
paigns. By 1556 all Spanish revenues (including anticipated silver ship-
ments from the New World) had been mortgaged in advance up to 1560
in order to service the debt. It was estimated that the costs of war in 1557
would require an additional 4.5 million ducats, and the financial situation
of the other Habsburg territories was, if anything, more precarious than
that of Castile. Even the most optimistic government estimates left a
yawning gap between potential resources and the costs of war, and the
result was, as predictably as for the French monarchy, a drastic resched-
uling of debt – a state ‘bankruptcy’ – which was declared in July 1557.10
Although the consequences of this rescheduling were mitigated for a
number of powerful interests, notably the Genoese financier community,
the disruptive impact on the ability of Spain to continue financing the war
was clear to the king and his advisers.11
It would be easy to dismiss these problems as just another financial
crisis, one of so many in early modern Europe. The immediate result was a
settlement – Cateau-Cambrésis – in 1559 which maintained peace
between France and Spain for nearly three decades, but more as a result
of France’s collapse into civil war than a real shift in the structure of
international relations. Yet the significance of the crisis for military-state
relations should not be underestimated. The protracted and uninterrup-
ted conflict from 1551 placed vast pressures on fiscal systems that in their
borrowing potential, credit-worthiness, capacity for tax extraction and
ability to mobilize extraordinary revenues were poorly adapted to cope
with heavy and long-term fiscal demands of this order.12 These pressures
moreover were a direct consequence of the way in which the patterns of
European warfare had been developing and changing since the early
sixteenth century.
The expansion of military enterprise, 1560–1620 73
From a modern perspective, to suggest that waging war will become ever-
more costly is such a truism that it is easy to forget long periods of history
when either the scale of warfare and the levels of military technology
remained stable, or the costs of technological progress – improvements in
the quality of armour or the breeding of superior warhorses, for example –
were largely borne by individual warriors. But from the end of the fifteenth
century, European states moved into a period when both the scale and
expense of waging war increased exponentially, and, equally importantly,
when the possibility that this warfare would last for a series of continuous
campaigns also became far greater.
The decades from 1500 to 1550 saw the largest percentage increase in
the military establishments of European states before the second half of
the seventeenth century.13 It is tempting to offer a structural explanation
for this military expansion, pointing to the widespread and rapid
European population growth from the later fifteenth century as the
means by which larger numbers of troops could be recruited at lower
cost. However, if surplus population might facilitate the raising of larger
armies or navies, the second stage of this determinist argument, that the
greater economic activity that accompanied population growth provided
states and their rulers with larger revenues to pay for these additional
troops, looks less convincing. Seemingly substantial increases in state
revenues need to be offset against the underlying rates of sixteenth-
century price inflation.14 The absolute increase in revenues was in most
cases modest; at best, what rulers gained was greater access to forms of
credit which they lacked the fiscal organization or the solid and assured
revenues and other resources to consolidate into stable, long-term debt.15
The ability to realize substantial, permanent increases in taxation reve-
nues was generally limited by a combination of constitutional and pru-
dential restraints on rulers.16
In fact the key precipitant of military growth in these decades was a series
of contingent political developments. From the 1520s the Ottoman Empire
brought unprecedented armies and navies to bear on central Europe and
the Mediterranean. The major role in resisting Ottoman expansion fell to
the Habsburg ruler Charles V, whose stupendous dynastic inheritance and
elective title of Holy Roman Emperor provided a resource base not seen in
the West since the fall of the Roman Empire. This unanticipated windfall of
inheritances gave him the ability to call upon resources and troops from well
over half the states of western and central Europe, mobilizing military forces
both to confront Ottoman expansion and, more immediately, to rebuff
France, whose Valois monarchs deployed the resources of the most pop-
ulous state in Christendom to wage a series of wars with the aim of
fragmenting and undermining the Habsburg monarchia. The result of
Table 2.1 Growth in army size in the first half of the sixteenth century: France,
the Habsburg lands and England
1494 1525 1543–4 1552 1558 1574
France 20,000– 32,000 33,100– 34,000– 52,000 46,000

28,000 45,000 38,000
Emperor Charles V 28,000 35,000 50,000
Spain of Philip II 45,000 85,000
England 14,000 30,000 48,000 6,500
(1492) (1513)
Sources: Figures from Lot, Recherches; J. R. Hale, War and Society, pp. 62–3; J. J. Scarisbrick,
Henry VIII (London, 1968); C. S. L. Davies, ‘England and the French War, 1557–9’, in
J. Loach and R. Tittler (eds.), The Mid-Tudor Polity, c.1450–1560 (London, 1980), pp. 159–85.
these political developments was a decisive ratcheting-up of European

armies and the scale of warfare. Both France and the Habsburgs sought
to create a military establishment sufficient to wage war in two, sometimes
three, separate campaign theatres – including war at sea – from the 1530s.
Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in 1494 with around 20,000–28,000
troops, and French effectives in the 1525 Italian campaign probably num-
bered around 32,000. By the wars of the mid-1550s France and the
Habsburg monarchia both appear to have maintained 50,000–55,000 troops
as the basis of their campaign armies.17 This military inflation was no less
marked in Mediterranean warfare, where the size and especially the num-
bers of galleys climbed progressively, and with them the extremely large
numbers of soldiers, sailors and oarsmen. The battle of Lepanto in 1571
brought together more combatants, some 140,000 in total, than any battle
before the later reign of Louis XIV. Second-rank states were caught up in
the slipstream of inflationary war. Venice had successfully dominated the
Levantine trade routes through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with a
galley fleet that could vary between fifteen and thirty operational war
galleys. In 1525 the ‘reserve’ of galleys available for military operations
was increased to fifty, and in 1545 to a hundred.18 Likewise, Henry VIII
of England invaded French territory in alliance with Charles V at the head
of a campaign army of 48,000 troops in 1544.19
Political factors may have been the primary motor in transforming the
scale of warfare, but technological changes also played a role. The evolu-
tion of new styles of artillery-resistant fortification had an immense impact
on the cost, duration and character of military campaigning in these
decades. Traditional, high medieval castle walls were replaced by
low-lying, massively thick walls surrounded by a wide glacis of ditches,
The expansion of military enterprise, 1560–1620 75
open land and outworks. The walls were themselves defended against
direct assault or mining by large, projecting bastions, able to provide
stable platforms for the defenders’ artillery and allowing them to rake
the exposed approaches to the fortifications with gunshot. This develop-
ment, the so-called trace italienne, was gradually to transform the military
landscape of whole areas of west-central Europe, and in the cases of
powers with colonial interests and territories, their overseas holdings as
well.20 Building such fortifications was expensive, and a relatively slow
and labour-intensive process; it was not possible to wait for an imminent
threat before embarking on such defensive programmes. Between 1529
and 1572 some 43 kilometres of trace italienne were constructed in the
Southern Netherlands at a cost of around 10 million florins.21
While European navies and naval warfare did not reach a similar crisis-
point in the 1550s, a sixteenth-century pattern of substantial growth in
numbers of ships, their size and cost is also evident. Shipboard artillery
was developed along a number of divergent lines as designers and builders
of high-sided sailing ships sought to come to terms with the new threat
posed by extremely heavy guns mounted in the prows of galleys.22 The
problems of matching the low-mounted, forward-firing guns of the galleys
ultimately produced the solution of a new generation of ships, the ‘race-
built’ galleon design, with lower forecastles into which heavy forward-
firing artillery could be set. In this context broadside guns mounted more
deeply in the ships were initially a secondary development, but became
increasingly important as it was recognized that a broadside battery could
follow on from the fire of the ‘ship-smashing’ heavy guns in bow and stern.
This overall concern to maximize the heavy firepower of sailing ships was
itself a catalyst for subsequent changes in shipbuilding and tactics, and the
tonnage of newly built warships steadily increased in the last decades of
the sixteenth century, matched by a growing complement of heavy artil-
lery.23 Until cast-iron cannon became more widespread and available, this
hugely increased the costs of fitting out a warship, or an armed merchant-
man, with an appropriate armament. Moreover, sailing ships were built to
progressively higher specifications in order to survive direct hits from
cannon shot, to absorb the recoil shock of their own cannon fire, and to
stand up to sea and weather conditions.24 Although it was not until the
1650s and the development of the line of battle that the purpose-built
warship all but eliminated the traditional use of armed merchantmen as a
major element of battle fleets, there had been a steady increase in the
numbers of ships built and crewed primarily as naval vessels during the
preceding century. A bigger proportion of navies was being made up of
large, specialized warships which were unsuited to playing a dual role as
merchantmen, and the costs of which, even if maintained under contract,
fell heavily on the resources of the state.25 This, for the Mediterranean
powers, would be coupled with the continued need to maintain fleets of
heavier, better-armed and larger-crewed galleys, further increasing the
costs of the state’s seaborne strategies.26
So to an unprecedented, politically driven increase in the size of armed
forces could be added the implications of some new military technology,
notably the trace italienne and the heavy-gunned warship. All contributed
to making military growth harder to reverse, and to ensuring that the
financial costs of such expansion, measured in terms not just of soldiers
hired, but of cubic metres of earth shifted and bronze cannon expensively
purchased, consistently outpaced states’ revenues. When, from the mid-
dle decades of the sixteenth century, one final factor was added, the entire
edifice became unsustainable.
Though the costs of war were steadily increasing through the earlier part
of the century, the worst fiscal and organizational effects of this pressure
were mitigated by the shortness – one or two continuous campaigns, for
the most part – of the periods of large-scale conflict. The significance of
the war that in the 1550s finally broke the bounds of this characteristic
stop-start rhythm of European warfare is central to our understanding of
both the particular crisis of the mid-century and later military develop-
ments – above all, the shift towards a privatization of war.
There is no reason to think that either Charles V and Philip II or Henri
II of France consciously planned to extend the war of the 1550s beyond
any previous period of large-scale continuous conflict. Both parties had
been anxious to secure the Peace of Vaucelles in early 1556 before another
year of campaigning had to be funded from their already dangerously
overextended credit networks. But the failure to bring the various inter-
locking conflicts of the 1550s to an end had the potential to change the
terms of warfare. A readiness to keep on fighting could be adopted as a
deliberate act of military policy. Much more than technological or tactical
developments, it is arguable that the lengthening of periods of continuous
warfare – a process which started in the 1550s, progressed through the
later sixteenth century and culminated in the Thirty Years War – was the
key early modern ‘revolution in military affairs’, the single transformative
factor which had a major impact on the entire conduct of warfare.
For it was now clear that one way of achieving direct strategic and
military advantage became simply to wage war over multiple, continuous
campaigns to the point of exhausting an enemy whose resources were
smaller or less well organized. The bankruptcy of an enemy state, or the
desertion of its unpaid and unfed soldiers and sailors, was as effective a
way of forcing that state to terms as winning battles or conquering cities.
The ‘revolution in military affairs’ was essentially about the rise of
Towards military enterprise 77
attritional war, in which sustainability and robust military effectiveness

counted for more than pinning hopes on a decisive battle or the outcome
of a single campaign. The pressure exerted by the ability to sustain armies
year after year could break the will and capacity of the enemy more surely
than the chance of battle or siege.
Towards military enterprise

All of these challenges faced by the mid-sixteenth-century state in financ-
ing and sustaining war were compounded by the steady growth in the
number and scale of contracts for raising mercenaries.27 The principal
attraction of mercenaries reflected an understanding of their tactical role:
they were seen as a battle-winning weapon; their use was based on the
assumption that war would be short and decisive. The specialized merce-
naries who had achieved a military result could quickly be demobilized,
and recruited again only when required for another military confronta-
tion. But the reality of warfare was now likely to be different and if, for
example, the campaign turned out to be focused on a major siege, then the
financial and organizational logic of deploying mercenaries made less
sense. There were certainly dangerous and specialist activities involved
in conducting siege warfare, but they did not require the group cohesion
and particular fighting skills of an expensive Landsknecht pike-square.28 In
practice, mercenaries continued to be raised even when the campaign
turned into a series of sieges or an extended campaign of manoeuvre; this
type of resource dilemma could not easily be predicted, and rulers and
their state administrations simply lacked the flexibility to operate a dis-
criminating hiring policy which would reflect the type of campaign they
envisaged.
A more fundamental issue was raised by the chronic financial weakness
of most early modern rulers, almost without exception heavily burdened
with both short- and long-term debts, and desperate for new sources of
credit. One means to circumvent these fiscal problems was to draw elite
subjects into active financial partnership in the state’s activities, whether
through the sale of administrative and judicial offices, extensive patronage
networks which could trade political and social favour for financial and
administrative support, or direct participation in state institutions like
armies and navies.29 But if this could potentially alleviate the problems
of mobilizing money or credit to finance policy, then the hiring of foreign
mercenaries was doubly problematic.
Unlike military activity organized through a ruler’s subjects, the finan-
cial conventions for raising mercenary troops were clear and not easily
evaded. The formalization of a contract to hire mercenaries would be
accompanied by payment for the recruitment, equipping and assembly of

the unit, a sum would be provided for its relocation to the campaign
theatre or other place cited in the contract, and a substantial advance
paid on wages for the forthcoming campaign.30 Since the mercenary
commander recognized that his bargaining power would grow progres-
sively weaker as the campaign progressed, it made sense to extract as
much as possible early in the campaign to reduce the risks of possible
later default by the ruler/warlord, and to maximize cash in hand which
could gradually be trickled down to the serving soldiers.
This was not simply the exploitative behaviour of rapacious Swiss and
German colonels, living in a comfortable sellers’ market. The traditional
French adage ‘point d’argent, point de Suisse’ might be understood in a
different way: for without the advances provided by the rulers’ revenues or
his access to credit, very few of the mercenary commanders could have
afforded to recruit and equip their own units. In the light of later develop-
ments, where the very identity of the military enterpriser was linked to
his provision of troops and credit to the warlord, the difference is striking.
But the modest opportunities for making big financial gains during a
single campaign and the narrow profit margin so long as contracts were
short and fixed-term, both discouraged the unit commanders from mak-
ing a heavy financial commitment from their own resources, and made it
difficult for them to raise credit in their own names to fund these costs.
The small-scale condottiere might have held a renewable condotta from the
Republic of Venice or the Papacy which offered the possibility of regular
and predictable remuneration for his company over a number of years,
but it was precisely the small scale of this which made it possible. A similar
practice had developed for the potential commanders of Swiss and
German mercenaries, who would be paid a Wartegeld so that they would
hold themselves in readiness for possible military service.31 But the sums
involved were modest compared with the costs of keeping the full unit
in being.
Once under arms, the Swiss or Landsknecht colonel himself, and any
potential private investors in his contract, would be well aware of the
limited employment span of the unit, its uncertain fate at the end of the
campaign, the dangers of default by the warlord and the limited legal or
other recourse held by the colonel in that situation. Heavy personal
investments in the initial costs of recruiting and equipping a unit, or
large advances to keep it in pay and supplies, were simply not financially
sensible. Such economic factors within the complex culture of sixteenth-
century military elites are by no means the whole story, but they do seem
to have played their part in keeping down the level of personal investment
in raising and maintaining mercenary units.32
Towards military enterprise 79
If mercenary colonels were unable or unwilling to advance their own

credit to maintain their units, they may also have contributed to making it
more difficult to encourage local elites to participate in military service
where they suspected that they would be treated as second-rank elements
in their ruler’s armies compared with the mercenaries, and given lower
priority in matters of pay, working conditions and recognition of status.
The vast scale of mercenary hire alienated and exasperated a potential
cadre of officers who saw prestigious military service as their right and one
which, if they were carefully handled, they might have been prepared to
subsidize with their own resources. Swiss military qualities were grudg-
ingly conceded by French military commentators, but the latter were
unanimous in deploring the Swiss refusal to fight unless fully paid and
fed, all too frequently at the expense of the French troops in the army.33
Ill-feeling about the privileged status of the Swiss or the Landsknechte was
shared amongst most native troops, and may have been encouraged by
their officers. In the 1550s tensions and violence between Landsknechte
and Spanish troops ran high, leading to fatal clashes in the army besieging
St Quentin, and forcing Philip II to keep his German mercenaries separate
from the rest of his soldiers.34
Paradoxically the crisis arising from military developments and the
lengthening of continuous warfare also provided the possibility for a
solution based on that same reliance on hiring troops under contract.
For once the possibility had been established, these longer periods of
continuous war made viable the raising of troops under private contracts
in which the initial burdens of recruiting and equipping the units, and
possibly some of their maintenance and wages, could be shared between
the contracting commander and the warlord. Longer periods of continu-
ous warfare presented a solution to the age-old dilemma of the potential
military enterpriser. Moreover, when it became recognized that continu-
ous military activity was likely to last significantly longer, then a crucial
‘chicken-and-egg’ corollary arose. The very willingness of colonels,
commanders of warships, arms manufacturers or munitions contractors
to advance rulers and their governments new sources of credit for military
purposes might itself make it possible for rulers to wage war on a larger
scale and for longer.
Putting aside here the larger issues of social and cultural motivation
amongst military enterprisers, which will be discussed in Chapter 5, there
were two motives for the willingness of mercenary colonels to take on this
new and riskier role as contractors and creditors. One, obviously, was
the larger profit margins that would come from the long-term military
contract in which the contracting colonel had invested his capital; the
second was the greater leverage, whether personal or political, that this
willingness to meet the initial costs of recruitment provided with the

warlord at the point of negotiation and afterwards. Long before the 1550s
this had become more than a hypothetical discussion about the possible
balance between state and private input into military organization.
Although the shape of large-scale land campaigning had been determined
to this point by the stop-start rhythms of short campaigns and the rapid
settlements of disputes, not all military activity was subject to these
patterns. In cases where, for many decades, the ruler had been forced to
envisage military structures that were more permanent than campaign
armies needed to be, more sophisticated systems of private enterprise had
already been flourishing.
An early case-study in military

contracting: the Mediterranean galley squadrons
The building, running and maintenance of the Mediterranean galley
squadrons offer an excellent example of early military enterprise.
Galleys and their crews could not easily be assembled, disbanded and
reassembled on a short-term basis.35 This was both for military reasons –
the persistent threat posed by the Barbary corsairs to trade, communica-
tions and the security of the Mediterranean coasts – and for practical
organizational reasons: a navy that is demobilized and laid up will rapidly
lose its operational capacity; sailors will seek other employment and
abandoned vessels rot away.36 Training and maintaining effective oars-
men, whether slaves or volunteers, required regular practice, and it took
around two years of experience for a crew of oarsmen to reach an optimum
level of effectiveness in which their physical strength could combine with
properly disciplined rowing. Disbanding the galley fleet even over a single
winter threatened this process.37 For the Republic of Venice, the direct
involvement of the patrician governing class in Levantine trade and the
naval defence of the Empire had led to the creation of a state-run and
state-financed galley fleet, so that in 1500 Venice was the only European
state with a large permanent navy.38
In contrast, both the Habsburg monarchia of Charles V and the French
crown proved much more prepared to meet their naval requirements
through the negotiation of lump-sum, long-term contracts for the upkeep
of galley squadrons. And from the outset, private entrepreneurs were
prepared to meet the initial costs of building, crewing and maintaining
not just individual galleys, but entire galley squadrons under contract in
state service.39 They could make this capital investment in the knowledge
that their services would be required over the long term, and would be
rewarded by contracts which took into account their initial investment in
An early case study: Mediterranean galley squadrons 81
Fig. 2.1 Andrea Doria
fitting out the squadron and ensuring that it was ready for service.40
Political success and failure in controlling the Italian peninsula during
the struggles of the 1520s in fact hinged on one such contract, that with
the private galley squadron of the Genoese patrician and entrepreneur,
Andrea Doria, who in 1528 transferred his private squadron of twelve

galleys from France to Charles V in return for a contract worth rather
more than 80,000 ducats per annum: an increase to 6,700 ducats from
4,750 ducats per galley on his French contract.41 By 1530 the number of
Doria’s galleys contracted out to Charles V had risen to fifteen, for an
annual payment of 90,000 ducats. By 1533 there were twenty-seven
Genoese galleys in the service of Spain. By 1538 and the battle of
Prevesa, twenty-eight privately-contracted Genoese galleys were
involved, twenty-two from Andrea Doria and six belonging to his kinsman
Antonio Doria. By the 1550s Andrea held an established contract for
twenty galleys, and his annual remuneration for maintaining the fleet in
the service of Spain had climbed to 126,000 ducats. Besides the Doria, a
significant number of other Genoese families were also involved in hiring
galleys to the Spanish and to other powers; Marco Centurión, for exam-
ple, let out five galleys to the Grand Duke of Tuscany.42
Increases in the size and sophistication of the galleys themselves and the
impact of the price revolution had more than doubled the annual cost of
hiring a galley from around 6,500 ducats in the 1550s to more than 13,200
by the 1620s.43 This steadily rising cost of galley contracts briefly tempted
the government of Philip II to experiment in the 1570s with running the
galleys under direct administration by royal agents, so that around 100 of
the 146 galleys in the Spanish fleet came to be owned and directly
administered by the crown. But this direct administration proved a dis-
aster, costing almost twice as much per galley as the Genoese contracts,
and reducing the military effectiveness of the squadrons as a result of
failures to find enough experienced oarsmen and the bad management of
provisioning and equipment. By the mid-1580s the policy had been
reversed and the role of the Genoese, and in particular, Andrea Doria’s
nephew, Gian Andrea, was once again established at the centre of Spanish
Mediterranean naval policy.44
For the Genoese contractors there were various attractive supplemen-
tary financial advantages over and above the fixed payment for the man-
agement of the galley (see below pp. 207–8). Moreover much of the time,
whether directly under Spanish orders or carrying out a corso on their own
initiative, the galleys were engaged in privateering which itself offered the
possibility of additional financial rewards over and above the smaller but
predictable returns to be made from good management of the contract.45
Given the high capital investment, not in the galley itself, but in building
up both an effective crew and team of oarsmen, and the costs of regular
replacements, the additional, unpredictable financial benefits may well
have ensured that the contracts remained attractive. The profits from
successful privateering certainly provided a large incentive to the captains
Hiring naval capacity 83
and financial backers to ensure that they were maintained at a level of

military effectiveness and kept at sea.
Hiring naval capacity

Mediterranean galley warfare provided an early example of the military
enterpriser benefiting from a particular set of circumstances, principally
the calculation of the squadron owner that the warlord hiring the galleys
would need to maintain them for a continuous period. It might prove
possible to fund the galleys for brief periods outside the contracts: much
discussion in the Genoese Senate about establishing a fleet of ‘state’
galleys for direct military protection was based on the assumption that
the galleys could be self-financing by doubling as merchant vessels carry-
ing high-value cargoes, especially raw silk brought from Messina to
Genoa.46 This seems in practice to have been a dubious prospect for the
owners of high-cost, low-capacity galleys, but it was certainly the case that
sailing ships could alternate between mercantile and naval purposes. It
was unsurprising to see, both in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, the
development of contracts in which owners of individual ships or entire
fleets would be willing to hire these out, usually fully crewed and equip-
ped, to the service of a major power wishing to create or expand a naval
fleet, whether for a single campaign or a longer period.47 The expansion of
oceanic trading networks was of considerable importance here; since the
early sixteenth century ships were being built of a size and capacity to
withstand heavy seas, to remain at sea for months, and carry enough cargo
to make lengthy trans-oceanic voyages financially viable. This generally
meant the abandonment of ships of more than a thousand tonnes, which
could carry huge quantities of cargo but were unwieldy in handling,
required large crews and concentrated the potential loss from storm or
piracy. Development based on the evolution of the galleon, with its
relatively high ratio of length to breadth, its weight of around 300–600
tonnes and its excellent handling qualities, came to dominate the oceanic
mercantile and naval fleets of the European powers. Constructed for
specifically mercantile purposes, these ships would be equipped with
highly sophisticated systems of rigging, allowing a small crew to control
three masts and their several thousand square metres of sail. Such ships
could carry artillery, and indeed some armament would be considered
essential for defence against pirates or the ships of hostile powers. They
could also be built as warships, with at least one gundeck down towards
the waterline, heavy guns mounted fore and aft, and some lighter pieces
on the main decks. A full complement of artillery on a late sixteenth-
century, 500–600-tonne galleon would amount to forty to fifty guns.
Fig. 2.2 Merchant ship from Furtenbach – Dutch merchant/warship
A merchant ship would carry considerably fewer guns, but it could easily
be adapted to carry more if intended to serve, permanently or for a single
campaign, as a warship.48
It was thus possible for a ship’s master, using a ship constructed on a
single template, to pursue activity as an ocean-going merchant, a privateer
at own risk, or a contracted naval warship; only the temporary balance of
artillery to cargo, crew numbers and the provisioning of the ship would
vary. Ships operating out of the Adriatic free port of Ragusa (Dubrovnik)
exemplify this development. With a long tradition of large-scale mercan-
tile activity based on a concentration of skilled sailors in the city, com-
bined with an equally robust piratical and privateering background, the
Ragusans were well placed to sell their services as additional naval ships to
the Spanish crown.49 The numbers of Ragusan ships in Spanish service
have been exaggerated in some accounts, but contracts with Ragusan
shipowners were one of the key components in a sixteenth-century
Spanish naval policy which drew the largest part of its capability from
armed merchant ships contracted into service.50 At least three ships were
contracted to serve in the 1588 Spanish Armada, including one of the
largest ships in the fleet, the San Niccolo, of 834 tonnes, armed with
26 guns and carrying 68 sailors and 226 soldiers.51 The Armada itself
made explicit the central role of the armed merchantman in early modern
Hiring naval capacity 85
navies: the fleet totalled around 15,000 tonnes of purpose-built Spanish,

Portuguese and Neapolitan warships, against around 45,000 tonnes of
hired merchantmen.52
The Armada had been assembled as an oceanic fleet, but it was clear by
the early seventeenth century that the greater control and seaworthiness of
the evolving galleon gave it no less of an operational edge in
Mediterranean trade and warfare. Hitherto the flexibility of the galley’s
sail/oar combination, its shallow draught and its stability as a gun platform
had made it the weapon system of choice for the major powers. Although
fashion and prestige ensured that the major Mediterranean powers con-
tinued to maintain galley fleets into the later seventeenth century, for
practical purposes galleon-design sailing ships were now regarded as
superior and a necessary part of the fleet. Recognition of this by powers
that had only previously built galleys or modest sailing ships in their
Mediterranean shipyards gave considerable advantages to private contrac-
tors in other parts of Europe who had the established expertise in building
such ships to high specifications. Dutch shipyards benefited from con-
tracts to build ships for both the French and the Venetians; the Genoese,
who had taken some initiatives in trade outside the Mediterranean, were
able to contract to build eighteen Spanish sail warships between 1617 and
1623, though in an example of early modern outsourcing, nine of these
were built by the Fieschi family, who subcontracted the work to Catalan
dockyards.53
The greatest commercial opportunities, however, came with the option,
just as with the galleys, to lease out fully crewed and equipped sailing ships
for contracted periods, after which they could either pass to another
contract or, potentially, return to being merchant craft. If the Genoese
nobility specialized in hiring privately owned galley squadrons, the great
Dutch mercantile consortia recognized the financial benefits from build-
ing, crewing and leasing out warships. As early as 1617 the Amsterdam
munitions magnate Elias Trip had leased two fully equipped warships
to the Venetian Republic to assist in its war with the Uskoks, and
Trip provided another ship as part of a 1618 contract in which Dutch
shipowners leased twelve heavily armed merchantmen to Venice for
ten months in return for a lump sum of 840,000 florins. From the outset
Trip, like many of the other business enterprisers who dealt in ships for
military hire, specialized in large, heavily armed vessels of the sort that
might also have been built to serve the East India Company.54 The
Venetian reliance on these full-service contracts to provide them with
military capability in heavy-armed warships continued throughout the
seventeenth century, especially following the outbreak of war against the
Ottomans over Crete from 1645.55 Venice was by no means the only state
interested in buying private naval capacity ‘off the shelf’, and Elias Trip’s
shipping company alone also dealt with the Portuguese government dur-
ing the twelve-year truce, and then with Cardinal Richelieu of France who
wanted to negotiate a contract for six fully crewed Dutch ships to be
brought into French service in the 1620s.56 The Trips’ position as the
leading armaments family in seventeenth-century Europe was cemented
by their links to the De Geer family.57 The latter’s activities as arms
dealers had been closely linked to Sweden from the 1620s, above all as
developers of copper and iron works, and the manufacture of cannon.
Their ties to the Trip family expanded the range of their armaments
activities to include the contracting of warships. In 1644 in the midst of
the Thirty Years War, the Swedish field marshal Lennart Torstensson
decided on a pre-emptive strike against an apparently resurgent Denmark.
Torstensson and his troops would look after the land war, but Jacob de
Geer was approached to raise a fleet of thirty-two fully crewed and armed
Dutch ships, mostly converted merchantmen, which would supplement
Sweden’s navy and ensure an overwhelming naval superiority for the
period of the lightning campaign.58 The total cost of hiring these ships
for the forthcoming campaign was calculated by de Geer in December
1644 at 460,550 talers.59
These naval examples provide evidence that members of the military
and political elites had been prepared to involve themselves as creditors in
contracting to meet some of the military needs of the crown. Similar
initiatives can be seen in the upkeep of frontier and other strategically
important garrisons, where again military commanders or entrepreneurs
had been prepared to contract with the government for the payment and
maintenance of troops.60 The critical factor in all these developments had
been the perception that they were areas of longer-term military activity
and demand, where advancing credit brought a lower risk of default, or
other political or social benefits from longer-term involvement in the
military system could become a significant, compensatory inducement.
But this of itself would not necessarily have led to a widespread shift in
existing military organization on land to one also based on devolved power
and private credit. More was needed to tip a political and military balance
towards private enterprise, a balance which at a rhetorical level was still
influenced by hostility to the use of mercenaries, added to which at a
practical level there was no reason to assume that the move to longer wars
was a permanent feature of European military development. In the event,
this transformation from hired mercenaries to military enterprise was
driven by a number of evolutionary initiatives, development of which
was largely a result of contingency: the character of a series of major
European wars in the later sixteenth century. Yet the cumulative effect
The French Wars of Religion 87
had brought about a major transformation of military systems by the eve of

the Thirty Years War.
The French Wars of Religion

With the death of Henri II following his jousting accident while celebrat-
ing the conclusion of the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, France
entered a forty-year period in which the authority of the crown and its
agents suffered progressive erosion before reaching a nadir during the
1580s. Eight large-scale civil wars were fought between Protestants,
Catholics and the remaining forces of the crown, and these grew longer
and fused into one another as the struggle entered its worst phase in the
1580s. These large-scale wars were set against a provincial backdrop of
deteriorating central authority and endemic and permanent localized and
guerrilla warfare between rival factions, institutions and interests. All of
this set the scene for the first major example of the interlinking of lengthier
wars with the assumption of financial responsibility and direct control by
those whose soldiers were waging them.
For the French crown under Charles IX, civil war and the attempt to
reassert the young king’s authority began as the usual military business.
The crown in the later 1560s once again borrowed heavily against its tax
revenues and extraordinary sources of revenue to levy Swiss and German
mercenaries as the core of its campaign armies.61 Only as the tax revenues
dried up in the 1570s did the burden of fighting the crown’s wars via
mercenaries grow unsustainable, also revealing how little real ability the
crown had after these decades to call upon military support from amongst
its subjects.62
In contrast, for the French Protestant minority, and from the 1570s for
the forces of radical Catholicism, the waging of civil war forced the issue of
finding ways to support units of soldiers, potentially whole armies, with-
out any recourse to the financial and administrative support of the royal
government. The growth of protestantism in the years around 1560 meant
that for many Protestant communities, buying the military protection of a
local nobleman with military experience and his retainers or ex-soldiers
offered the means of protection against Catholic violence.63 When this
local violence escalated into the first civil war in 1562, this required the
Protestant military leadership to forge these local companies into a series
of regional armies. The costs of these expanded military operations were
met initially by forced loans and extortion from wealthy Catholics in
towns controlled by the Protestants, as well as by voluntary subscription
amongst the Protestants themselves.64
As the enemy came to be identified initially with a faction of Catholics

who dominated the crown and, after 1572, with the crown itself, the
Protestants both financed their own war effort and sought to deprive the
centre of funds, by appropriating the tax revenues from the areas that they
dominated.65 These funds were distributed to the locally raised Protestant
forces and on occasions used to buy the services of foreign mercenaries.66
Similarly, after the rejection of Henri III’s policies by the extremists of the
Catholic League, the process of appropriating royal tax revenues at source
continued apace. By the late 1580s almost all the territory north of a line
from Nantes to Lyon was paying taxes to the Catholic League rather than
the crown.67 Not only did the warring factions have the experience of
collecting military finance directly from appropriation of local tax reve-
nues, it seems clear that they even managed to increase those revenues
over the levels achieved by the unified state of the earlier sixteenth
century.68 In some cases they defied one of the crown’s most fundamental
marks of sovereignty by minting their own coins in order to pay the
soldiers under their command.69 Anticipating both revenues and lucrative
peace settlements, both Protestant and Catholic grandees were prepared
to raise credit on their own estates, wealth and possessions to fund recruit-
ment and the operations of their armies.70
Successful appropriation of tax revenues and the advance of private
credit was accompanied by personal enrichment for many of those raising
and leading troops in these decades, by profits from pillage, ransoms and
protection. Monluc regarded these opportunities as a normal and very
significant opportunity for personal profit, and openly discussed his prof-
its from successful pillage.71 Henri IV’s austere future finance minister,
Sully, admitted that he had made some 60,000 livres from military oper-
ations between 1575 and 1591.72 Less fortunate were those foreign mili-
tary contractors who had been prepared to raise units on their own credit
either for the crown or for the Protestants. Payments once within France
were patchy and fell far short of agreements, while the long-term debts
were largely repudiated by the new fiscal regime of Henri IV after 1598.73
This, of course, was very largely – and for kings of France, very worry-
ingly – a system of contracted-out warfare that flourished despite the wishes
and authorization of the crown. It was to have immense consequences in
the next century in setting the crown and its ministers resolutely against any
military contracts which granted French subjects command of troops in
return for up-front payment of costs and a proprietary interest in the units
they had raised. But the concern that this military devolution seemed to
have unleashed in the 1580s and 1590s does not change the fact that it
offered instructive lessons in the operation of privatized military systems on
a scale and operating for a duration not seen before in Europe.
The Army of Flanders and the Dutch revolt 89
The Army of Flanders and the Dutch revolt

A movement towards contract warfare which integrated more obviously
the aims of government and the interests of a group of military providers
was supplied by the Netherlands revolt. After the failure by 1572 to gain a
quick settlement under Alva, and a period of uncertain policy under the
new governor, Don Luis de Requesens, the Spanish settled down to a war
fought as a struggle to occupy and steadily reclaim the whole of the
Netherlands. If the military pressure was taken off the Dutch rebels for a
few of these years, it was because of Spanish decisions to concentrate the
military resources of the Army of Flanders against England or France.
The army that Alva originally marched north from Italy in 1567, along
what was to become known as the ‘Spanish Road’, consisted of just 8,795
Spanish and Italian infantry veterans, drawn from the standing troops of
the Spanish monarchy, deployed in the tercios viejos.74 These were grad-
ually increased as Alva put pressure on the Estates to fund an additional
13,000 troops as a permanent military establishment in the Netherlands.
In 1572 in response to the renewed threats of revolt and French inter-
vention, Alva increased the army to around 67,000 men.75 Though
the immediate threat in 1572 was contained, the military/political crisis
continued, and there was no substantial demobilization until 1577.
The Spanish crown believed that it could fund the army from enhanced
revenues: in the first instance these were to come from the Netherlanders
and then, as hostility to Alva’s new taxes mounted, from increasing credit
available to the Castilian crown thanks to silver receipts from the New
World. In practice, the direct financing of the Army of Flanders by the
Spanish crown was a haphazard, partial business – exactly as it had been in
the 1550s. Indeed in 1575 the crown declared another ‘bankruptcy’ or
debt rescheduling, lost control of its unpaid military forces, and briefly
unified the Netherlands in opposition to Spanish rule.76
But this led neither to the abandonment of the struggle in the
Netherlands, nor to any permanent reduction in the Army of Flanders:
in the 1580s the military establishment again stood at 60,000 troops.
However, the mechanisms by which the troops were raised and financed
had been evolving through the 1570s and continued through the next few
decades. Throughout the Low Countries’ wars the portion of the army
composed of Spanish veteran troops remained relatively small – usually
between 10 and 15 per cent of the total force in the 1570s and 1580s.
These were and remained the elite of the army, but they were also raised
under the most inflexible terms: a permanent force, recruited by royal
administrators as a direct charge to the crown, with officers appointed as
salaried employees.77 A far larger proportion of the troops were recruited
from amongst the Walloon population and the lands just across the
borders – the German principalities and the bishopric of Liège.78
Though these troops could be raised under what looked like ‘typical’
Landsknecht contracts – cash advances payable by the warlord for a con-
tract that was assumed to last only for a short period of service – it soon
became clear that these were no longer short-term, single-campaign
agreements. The German examples here are telling. Some 25,000
German infantry were recruited under contract to serve in the crisis of
1572, and the great majority of these regiments remained in service with-
out interruption until the general demobilization of 1576/7. Most of those
officially dismissed were contracted back into service in the next few years,
and some much sooner: Jakob Hannibal von Hohenems had seen the
original 1574 contract for his infantry regiment abrogated in the crisis of
1576, yet renewed again as early as December 1577.79 In 1580 the
governor of the Netherlands, Alexander Farnese, duke of Parma, pro-
ceeded to disband a number of German regiments which, despite the
hiatus following the sack of Antwerp, were considered to have been in
continual service for the eight years since 1572.80 What is clear as the
struggle continued was that contracts were being either explicitly drawn
up, or implicitly understood, as open-ended agreements, in which the
regiments would continue in service for as long as they could remain
militarily effective, or until the crown finally reached a political settlement
with its enemies. In this case the settlement was the Twelve Years’ Truce
of 1609, though even this by no means led to total demobilization of the
army.
German regimental contractors who now recognized that they were
raising troops for longer periods of paid service were prepared to absorb
some of the costs of recruiting, equipping and moving troops to the
Netherlands. Hohenems, who had contracted in 1574 to raise a regiment
of 4,500 infantry in Tyrol and Upper Germany, had spent 46,844 florins
on the costs of recruitment by November 1574, money raised via family
funds and his own credit.81 His own subsequent stipend of 400 florins
per month was sufficiently high to indicate his position as a creditor of his
warlord, the king of Spain. In comparison the maestre de campo (colonel) of
a royal tercio received 40 escudos (approximately 60 florins) per month,
together with a further 40 from the captaincy of the leading company.82 It
was equally clear that Count Florens von Berlaymont had committed his
own funds to the recruitment of his regiment of eleven companies of
German infantry, and that he and his captains had continued to meet
some of the costs of the wages of these troops throughout the period of
military service. The total sum owed to Berlaymont in 1580 when the
regiment was disbanded was 717,329 florins, while we know that one of
The Army of Flanders and the Dutch revolt 91
his captains, Ruprecht von Eggenberg, had a share in this overall debt
acknowledged at 23,715 florins.83 A similar process is notable for the Irish
troops serving in Flanders, where captains raised troops in Ireland at their
own expense and regarded their companies, once in service in the army, as
an investment that would provide for their subsequent livelihood.84
Seen at face value, financial commitments at this level by the colonels-
proprietor seem extraordinarily ill-judged. The Spanish crown was both
reluctant, and in many cases unable, to pay its debts to military contrac-
tors in full, and in the case of Berlaymont’s regiment the immediate pay-
off in 1580, albeit accompanied by promises of further instalments in
future, was a mere 55,000 florins in cash.85 Yet not merely did the
colonels apparently tolerate these funding shortfalls, remaining in service
despite apparently mounting arrears, but like the Genoese owners of the
galley squadrons, they seem to have been positively enthusiastic to draw
up new contracts with the crown. In December 1577, Hohenems accep-
ted a contract to raise another infantry regiment, this time of twenty
companies, to be recruited in the Tyrol and also to be armed and equip-
ped at his own expense.86
As with the management of the galley squadrons, it is necessary to keep
the bigger picture in mind when looking at the attraction of these con-
tracts. The major factor in the Netherlands is the development of what was
to become the key fiscal feature of the Thirty Years War, the contributions
system. From 1574 the military administration in the Low Countries
bypassed the existing regular tax system in the majority of provinces,
and allocated a fixed monthly sum to each community within the prov-
inces to pay directly for the upkeep of the troops garrisoned or stationed in
the area. The contributions were administered by special commissioners,
but the money was paid directly to the regiments, and the system was
gradually refined over the next decade. In 1591 it became possible to
adopt a variation that would become familiar enough throughout the
seventeenth century: provincial authorities in Flanders and Brabant
proved willing to agree a lump sum which they would collect themselves
on behalf of the troops, rather than submitting to the exactions of com-
missioners with their explicit threat of military enforcement.87
As the war settled into its character as one of territorial occupation and
garrisoning, the officers of the contracted regiments were able to claim
these local contributions on behalf of their units. Much of this payment
would be in kind, and food and quartering would be distributed to the
troops in lieu of pay, ensuring that immediate concerns about breakdown
or mutiny could be contained. Later official calculations take the provi-
sion of food and quartering for the soldiers as the equivalent of at least 50
per cent of their wages. Officers were given the opportunity to meet part of
the needs of their soldiers from a local tax which was not to be offset
against their final receipt of monies intended to pay their soldiers in
full.88 The contributions were in effect a form of interest against the initial
capital invested by the colonel, and the running costs of the regiment and
its companies forced upon him and his captains by the delays and short-
falls in payment from the central treasury. The military contractors by the
later sixteenth century had achieved a sufficiently strong position with
major sources of credit that these would not merely make loans to the
enterprisers themselves, but guarantee loans that the enterprisers had
negotiated with third parties to provide supplies or provisions.89
Typically in 1575 the banking house of Fugger agreed to guarantee a
payment of 4,000 florins which Colonel Hohenems owed on account for
the purchase of weapons and armour for his unit.90
This in turn linked the enterprisers into a world in which ultimate
access to financial resources was more than a simple question of what
the crown’s administrators might or might not pay of monies outstanding
at a particular moment. Ruprecht von Eggenberg, a captain in Florens von
Berlaymont’s regiment, was owed an outstanding sum of 23,000 florins in
1580, and in that year received a modest instalment of 5,500 florins
towards this from the Spanish crown. Yet instead of being ruined by the
tardy repayment, he managed to sell the remainder of the acknowledged
debt to the House of Fugger for the discounted price of 15,000 florins.91
Eggenberg went on to become an enterpriser-colonel in his own right, in
May 1587 receiving a patent from the Duke of Parma to recruit and
command a new regiment of twelve companies of German infantry.92
Such individual experiences may simply be exceptions to the general
experience of the military enterprisers, but it seems more likely that, in
the same way that the advantages of running a galley squadron need to be
seen in a broader financial context, the ability to collect local contribu-
tions as a form of ‘bottom line’ guarantee of subsistence, and the more
complex financial arrangements brought into play by longer-running
contracts, may have transformed the financial realities of this activity.
Without taking such factors into account the behaviour of German colo-
nels is, by any historical standards, incomprehensible. In other cases of
local Spanish commanders it led to accusations of substantial private
profiteering: Colonel Francesco Verdugo, appointed governor of
Friesland, produced an account of the campaigns of the early 1590s
which is an indignant denial of the accusation that he was siphoning off
for his personal gain 40,000–50,000 talers per month from the province’s
contributions.93 Verdugo is at pains to point out that the exaction of local
contributions represented the one means of maintaining the remaining
troops in Friesland, otherwise completely ignored by the central financing
The ‘Long Turkish War’, 1593–1606 93
machinery, and that far from profiteering from these, they were the one
factor keeping the troops operational.94
All of this was further transformed in the early seventeenth century by
the transfer of the Army of Flanders into the Genoese financial system. In
1603, the archducal government gave control of the army to the Genoese
noble and financier Ambrogio Spinola; Spinola possessed no previous
military experience but had organizational ability and massive personal
credit through his family banking connections.95 He controlled the com-
mand, pay and supply of the entire Army of Flanders, including those
Walloon and German colonels who were automatically thereby his sub-
contractors, as well as the tercios, for whose pay and supplies he was now
directly responsible.96
Spinola’s own financial resources and networks gave him the opportu-
nity, not seen again until Albrecht Wallenstein, to run a large army on the
basis of government receipts, but mediated through his own access to
credit: henceforth the payment of the army, the establishment of provi-
sioning and munitions contracts, the running costs of campaigns, could
draw upon his own and his family’s credit rather than that of the Spanish
crown.97 This certainly meant that he was able to defuse crises by borrow-
ing on his own credit to meet military costs; but in return, he either
assumed direct control of the collection of local revenues through the
army, or ensured the assignation of customs and other revenues to his
creditors. The system did not prevent the Spanish crown declaring a
further bankruptcy in 1607, which blocked the external funds required
for any attempt to take the offensive against the United Provinces. But the
ability to tie the funding of the army into the Genoese financial system by
means other than the loans contracted to the Spanish crown did create a
new element in the financial management of the army in the Netherlands,
which had not been achieved in an earlier period of direct state
administration.
The ‘Long Turkish War’, 1593–1606

Further steps towards the development of military enterprise can be seen
during the ‘Long Turkish War’, from 1593 to 1606. Easily dismissed as a
protracted series of border skirmishes little different from the history of
the Hungarian frontier throughout the sixteenth century, in fact it was the
costliest and largest-scale war fought by the Austrian Habsburgs before
the Thirty Years War itself. The process by which funds for the waging of
this war were accessed from the international community by the suppos-
edly detached and disfunctional government of Emperor Rudolf II stands
in impressive contrast to the activities of Charles V.98 The Hungarian
borderlands could not even support the ordinary garrisons from local
revenues. Fighting a major war in this theatre required that the vast bulk
of military expenditure be assigned against incoming subsidy and external
tax revenue. Systems by which subsidies collected in Spain, Portugal, the
Papal Lands and elsewhere were realized as cash payments in Hungary
involved tiers of international financiers and bankers operating largely
outside the direct control of the Habsburg administration but in conjunc-
tion with the commanders in the field. Above all, thanks to a forthright
interpretation of the terms of the 1570 Speyer Reichsabschied which stipu-
lated that the Imperial German territories in case of war were to provide
quarters and subsistence for an army engaged in common defence, the
Long Turkish War saw the imposition of agreed military contributions
across the Empire.99
Imperial taxes and international subsidies on this scale transformed the
management of the war. The Hungarian conflict was not just the ‘military
school’ of Europe – though it could claim that title more readily than could
the Netherlands in the first years of the seventeenth century; it was also the
‘military market’ of Europe. A cosmopolitan army, made up of regiments
from almost every nation, including many Protestants, was drawn in by
the opportunism or ambitions of existing or potential unit commanders.
The practical problem for military organization was straightforward: very
little of this money was raised in or near the Hungarian campaign theatre,
and not much of it could be matched to precise areas or locations where
troops were being enlisted. Raising troops for the Army of Flanders had
already demonstrated to German would-be colonels that a willingness to
deploy some of their own credit in raising troops many hundreds of miles
away from the Flanders’ military treasury would expedite, or in many
cases simply make possible, a recruitment process. This was even more
evident when raising regiments for service in Hungary.100
But no less important was the working assumption that these regiments
were, like their Flanders counterparts, being raised not for a single cam-
paign but on a more open-ended contract. Within the unit, this allowed an
early version of the business of the regiment/company to develop. From
their own funds or credit, colonels or captains provided weapons, cloth-
ing, food and munitions to take the troops to the campaign theatre, and
might continue to issue these on campaign.101 All of these would be
provided against regular deductions from the soldiers’ wages when these
were paid to the unit commanders from the contributions and subsidies
sent to the army. Credit advanced in this way became a large-scale
financial element in the funding of the armies, and the commanding
officers were increasingly expected to fall in with this new pattern of
funding on credit. A period in which large numbers of the Landsknechte
An alternative to military enterprise? 95
had been under-equipped, lacking armour and full weapons, had ended
by the second half of the century.102
Another distinctive factor in the conflict was that the agrarian and
population base of Hungary, and even the immediately adjoining lands,
was wholly inadequate to support the provisioning needs of Habsburg and
allied field armies whose numbers had climbed to around 30,000 in the
later 1590s.103 From the outset it proved impossible to sustain operations
using solely the local economy. Initially this meant the negotiation of
contracts with suppliers in Bohemia and Upper Germany, but competi-
tion for grain surpluses from these regions was already stiff and the burden
of sustaining armies in Hungary overwhelmed their capacity to provide
sufficient foodstuffs.104 Food had to be acquired and shipped from much
further afield, as did munitions and additional arms and equipment. The
food and munitions supply of the military operations was handled under
contract by a wide range of contractors from Genoa to Amsterdam.105 This
system could successfully mobilize the credit of a mass of unit officers,
suppliers and munitions contractors who were all confident that the war
would continue long enough to see the repayment of their financial com-
mitments. A figure like Maximilian von Liechtenstein invested not merely
as proprietor of a cavalry regiment but in acquiring and managing artillery
on behalf of the Habsburg war effort.106
An alternative to military enterprise?

All these later sixteenth-century conflicts point in the same direction,
towards a steady growth in the opportunities for unit commanders, or
those who wished to assume such command, to acquire a financial stake in
the raising and operations of their units, which they hoped to see reim-
bursed with profit. This direct financial involvement in the raising of
military force would have large implications for the manner in which
military operations, at all levels, were subsequently conducted. But was
there a viable alternative to this development? How directly were rulers
aware of this shift to reliance on military enterprise? While it would solve
some of their immediate problems of financing the recruitment and
operations of troops, it also involved a substantial delegation of authority
over the control of these units, and to some extent over the control and
operational priorities of the armies.
In some cases, of course, rulers were very conscious of this process: as
we have seen, the French crown recognized that the civil wars had been
linked to a massive devolution of military authority, which had reduced its
own authority to little more than a façade and had brought the country to
the brink of fragmentation by the 1580s. In other states rulers were aware
that they were making a choice, and no less aware of why they were doing
so. In at least one case where the government’s discussion of the merits of
state control versus military contracting was explicit, Habsburg Spain,
Philip III could go on record to his Council of State in 1607 that ‘no one
would be more eager than I to dispense with [military] contracts if that
were possible’.107 Clearly neither the king nor his councillors considered
that this was a possibility.
One plausible-sounding solution to reducing the costs of recruiting and
maintaining armies was the creation of local and national militias of
conscripted soldiers. This had been warmly espoused by theorists since
at least the fifteenth century, and very explicitly as a classicizing counter-
point to a reliance on mercenaries. The rhetoric was typically humanist:
Machiavelli’s critique of the unreliable, self-interested and venal merce-
nary was followed by the equally formulaic espousal of the virtues of a
citizen militia, as a means both to inculcate civic virtù into populations and
to produce effective combat troops, whose fierceness and resilience would
reflect their commitment to the defence of patria and identification with a
glorious common cause.108 Though Machiavelli’s own experiment with
the raising of a militia for the Florentine Republic, the conscription of the
reluctant contadini of the Tuscan countryside, had come to an inglorious
end in 1512 with the rout of his hastily assembled militia by Spanish
regulars, followed by the sack of Prato and the Spanish restoration of the
Medici in Florence, such projects merely went into abeyance.
By the later sixteenth century, under the rigorous and persuasive
spokesmanship of Justus Lipsius and numerous contemporaries, the proj-
ect for creating citizen – or subject – militias gathered new momentum.
Lipsius’ Politics had run through more than eighty editions and trans-
lations by 1650; his writings had a large impact on an international
political and administrative elite.109 The traditional, negative assessment
of the military qualities and reliability of mercenaries was supplemented
by a shrill note of complaint against the contemporary version of the
phenomenon. The extravagant, self-constructed identity of the sixteenth-
century mercenary, or of professional soldiers like those in the Spanish
tercios, was seen more and more as standing in provocative opposition to
the moral and social norms of wider society, itself the target of broader
attempts to enforce tighter social and religious discipline on the masses.
The individualism and self-assertiveness of the Landsknecht, Swiss, even
Spanish or Italian soldiers was measured in clothing, behaviour and
their double-edged position in relation to society – both claiming status
and self-consciously standing outside its norms.110 In a moral and
confessional climate that was increasingly intolerant of any kind of
nonconformity ‘from below’, the obvious appeal to early modern elites

of a conscripted, modestly paid and firmly controlled militia was its
potential to replace the extravagant display, self-assertion and hierarchy-
challenging attitudes of traditional mercenaries.
Yet it is important to bear in mind that these moralizing concerns were
merely an attractive additional inducement in establishing a militia: the
strongest selling point was its comparative cheapness. If the main issue in
raising an army was not the remoralizing of the corrupted citizenry, but
cutting costs, then rulers had all the more reason to return to past models,
and especially the model of Republican Rome, to create armies based
upon the selective conscription of the native population.111 Most of these
conscripts would be what Lipsius called ‘souldiers of ayde . . ., who do
rarely goe to warre, . . . and are [otherwise] occupied with other matters’.
Lipsius distrusted the idea of a professional, ‘standing’ soldiery. He
grudgingly conceded that it might be necessary to raise a skeleton force
of permanent soldiers to perform guard duties and other local functions,
‘but I thinke it not needfull, that he [the Prince] entertaine any great
number of them’. The main reliance should be placed on the conscripted
‘souldiers of ayde’ both to supplement the small number of professionals
in battle, and to assume control of garrisons, recent experience having
made Lipsius aware of the capacity of unpaid mercenaries in garrisons to
take subsistence and payment into their own hands.112
Lipsius was forthright on this subject, but an entire generation of
military theorists from Guillaume du Bellay in the 1550s to Jacobi von
Wallhausen in the 1610s all emphasized the advantages of creating a
citizen militia.113 The argument found a receptive audience amongst
rulers and their governments, since for a second- or third-rank power a
militia seemed the only practical means to maintain more than a handful
of soldiers under arms.114 Militias were undoubtedly cheaper than hiring
soldiers under contract. A Swedish calculation for an army to be raised in
the 1620s indicates that taking into account equipping, transporting,
feeding and paying the militia troops on active service, the costs were
still some 45 per cent lower than those of Scottish or German hired
infantry if these were serving directly at the charge of the crown.115
If conscripting a militia offered the prospect of raising troops at a
fraction of the costs of hiring mercenaries, the question of military effec-
tiveness remained. Hiring troops cheaply was of little use if they had no
capacity to stand up to the regiments of mercenaries with their cohesion
and fighting effectiveness based on slowly achieved group identity. The
recognition that the elite regiments of Swiss and Landsknechte were simply
better troops than their rivals in the military marketplace had been pre-
cisely what influenced the decisions of rulers to adopt this more expensive
option, even when demand meant that the best mercenary troops had
already been acquired by other warlords.116 In the eyes of both the militia
theorists and some military practitioners, this situation might be transformed
by subjecting conscripted troops to rigorous, externally imposed training
and drill, until they could master tactical and weapons manoeuvres with
such precision that they could rival any traditional, cohesive and organically
developed unit. Though Lipsius was an eloquent spokesman for the whole-
sale adoption of citizen militias by European princes, in fact his central
contribution to a debate about military organization and society was a set
of precepts about order, obedience and discipline. His neostoic doctrine of
‘true discipline’ imposed his moral and philosophical concerns upon military
life; his recipe for a disciplined and effective army was to demand ‘a severe
conforming of the souldier to value and virtue’.117 It was with the ‘exercises’,
or drill, of his military disciples like Maurice of Nassau, Stadholder or
military commander of the Dutch armies, and of Johann, prince of
Nassau-Dillemberg, that this discipline assumed a more concrete form.
The Nassau reformers took the Lipsian precepts of restraint and self-
discipline, and connected them to a specific set of classical tactical and
organizational prescriptions, based on the legionary drills demonstrated in
Aelian and Vegetius. As was claimed at the time by Maurice of Nassau, and
has been echoed ever since, not least by those historians who identify a
military revolution in this period, it was this new discipline and drill which
made possible a transformation of armies and of the seventeenth-century
battlefield.118 More prosaically, it was argued that the new system of collec-
tive, regularized drill, by the repeated practice of precise routines for using
weapons and deploying units, could match that slow accumulation of col-
lective identity and martial values within the traditional elite military unit.119
Regardless of whether they were to be applied to citizen militias com-
posed of part-time ‘souldiers of ayde’ or to conscript troops like the
Swedish levies, these systems of externally imposed drill promised to
turn inexperienced troops with little corporate identity or military tradi-
tion into disciplined, professional soldiers, responsive to the commands
and direction of their NCOs and officers.120 As an apparently quick and
cheap means to raise forces that would be militarily effective, it had great
appeal, and its dissemination came at a critical moment. Late sixteenth-
century rulers throughout the Holy Roman Empire and beyond its fron-
tiers noted with concern the destabilizing political effects of confessional
tensions; an established territorial defence seemed an essential safeguard
against this more threatening environment.121 Thus in a spasm of admin-
istrative activity, militias were introduced in a short period across a
remarkable number of states, the administrations of which set about
establishing liability of subjects for military service, selecting suitable
militiamen, and organizing the all-important training on the principles of

regular drill and rigorous discipline.122
For historians seeking to create a narrative shaped by the ultimate rise of
the state-controlled permanent army, these militias of the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth century offered an ideal evolutionary model.123
Created by direct government intervention and (modest) funding, organ-
ized and commanded by the appointment from the centre of members of
the local ruling elites, and based on ideals of service to the ruler and strict
and externally regulated discipline, they seemed to offer a convincing
‘path to modernity’ in terms of military institutions and the relationship
between military and political power.124
There was just one problem: the project of establishing militias was an
almost unmitigated failure wherever it was attempted, both organization-
ally and in any situation which involved actual combat.125 The one
obvious and much-cited exception was the kingdom of Sweden, where a
lastingly effective ‘militia’ was created, strongly identified with training
through drill and formal discipline and the adoption of more complex
tactics and deployment that this facilitated.126 But the crucial point here
was that the Swedish Estates had conceded to the crown the principle of
long-term service abroad for those conscripted from the Swedish popula-
tion. This was not a militia in the way that it would have been understood
by Machiavelli, Lipsius or any of the other rulers trying to establish such
bodies in their territories in the same period. The Swedish militia was
more properly a recruitment system for an army whose demands for
soldiers far exceeded any possibility of voluntary recruitment in the
crown’s territories. Near-constant Baltic wars turned Swedish conscripts
into a virtually permanent force during the first decades of the seventeenth
century, and provide a strong practical reason for their military quality.127
In contrast to the Swedish success, the comment of the Danish king,
Christian IV, that the Danish militiamen ‘ate as much as cattle and fought
like them too’, epitomized the more general experience.128 Obligations to
service restricted and narrowed by a mass of privileges, buy-out clauses
and exemptions, half-hearted training and widespread evasion by all
except the most vulnerable, reduced the training, still more the opera-
tions, of most such forces to little more than farce. An early disaster in this
respect had been the experiment in France in the mid-1530s with the
creation of infantry ‘legions’ based upon provincial levies and relying
upon the cooperation of the local elites to raise and command them.129
The legions failed both to produce an effective infantry and to mobilize the
enthusiastic support of elites for a shared military initiative.130
A warning about the problems of relying on militias was given by Karl
von Liechtenstein, Landeshauptmann and Feldherr of Moravia, who
complained that the militia, assembled in 1605 to face the threat of invasion
by Stefan Bocskai, were no better than disorderly peasants.131 The German
states that deployed their territorial militias, mostly in last-ditch defence
against invading armies such as the German Catholic Liga in the 1620s or
the Swedes in 1631–2, saw these forces systematically, and usually brutally,
annihilated by the invaders.132 If there were some serious possibility of
producing group cohesion and collective identity through the rigorous
inculcation of drill, it would require more than a few initiatives with reluc-
tant, part-time militiamen. Speaking admittedly of the later seventeenth
century, when the ‘science of drill’ had reached altogether new heights of
rigour and relentless day-on-day practice, Jacques-Louis Bolé, marquis de
Chamlay, commented that whereas it was possible to have good cavalry
troopers within a year of their enlistment, it took a minimum of five to
six years to produce infantry who grasped the rudiments of disciplined fire
and cohesiveness.133 Not surprisingly the militia experiments of the later
sixteenth century fell dramatically short of such a demanding preparation.134
Theories of drill and related ideas of tactical and organizational rede-
ployment were not irrelevant to military success in the seventeenth cen-
tury, though it is necessary to maintain a sense of proportion about just
how important they were, even when, as was the case with Gustavus
Adolphus, they were applied to military professionals in a well-conceived
tactical system. But it was simple delusion to believe that they could
transform a part-time, reluctantly recruited militia, and could offer mili-
tary effectiveness on a par with motivated, long-serving troops raised
under contract. The crushing defeats and collapse of the German militias
at the beginning of the Thirty Years War, and the incorporation of most of
the willing soldiers from the Catholic Landesdefension units into the
contractor-forces later in the war, put paid to this as a serious and viable
solution to the problem of raising troops.135
In the context of the early seventeenth century, this left little option for
states seeking to raise military force: a state-recruited, permanent army
was a financial and organizational impossibility, and the apparent panacea
of conscripted militias drilled up supposedly to professional standards had
been an embarrassing and tragic failure. To adapt slightly the final sen-
tence of Michael Roberts’ essay on the ‘Military Revolution’: the way lay
open, wide and straight, to the triumph of military contracting. The next
great war would see its fullest and most extensive evolution.
3 Diversity and adaptation: military enterprise
during the Thirty Years War
The previous chapter illustrated how the shift by European states towards
reliance on mechanisms of military enterprise was an evolutionary pro-
cess, shaped by a variety of pressures and problem-solving needs from
the early sixteenth century onwards. Whether military enterprise would
subsequently have expanded and flourished so extensively without the
particular factor of the Thirty Years War is a matter for speculation; hard-
pressed governments had certainly discovered before 1619 that the
contracting-out of military functions and the mobilizing of subjects’
resources which it permitted offered a practical solution to some of the
constraints on mobilizing military force. Yet the Thirty Years War,
through its unprecedented length, geographical scale and number of
belligerents, offered a vital forcing-house for the development of military
enterprise. At one level this has been noted by historians: the war is
strongly identified with the hiring and use of mercenaries, whose self-
serving and strategically sterile military activities are considered in part
responsible for the brutality, destructiveness and length of the struggle.
The career of the Imperial Generalissimo Albrecht Wallenstein, the great-
est of all condottiere, whose absolute authority over an army of more than
100,000 men raised and maintained through his own networks and
resources, is offered as the epitome of an age of military enterprise.
Whether seen as an extraordinary project launched by an organizer and
administrator of precocious talent, or the last gasp of a system of warfare
dominated by over-powerful and unreliable aristocratic power-broking,
Wallenstein’s army is placed at the apex of a process by which a long-
running form of military enterprise finally reaches its high-water mark in
the context of Imperial politics in the 1620s. After Wallenstein the military
world changes: fighting wars through private enterprise is everywhere
acknowledged as dangerous and unviable, even if many states were unable
to act upon that recognition until after the end of the Thirty Years War.
The present chapter seeks to take issue with this interpretation on two
levels. The Thirty Years War made military demands upon the belliger-
ents that were met through a range of different forms of military
101
102 Military enterprise during the Thirty Years War
organization and control. There was no simple choice to be made between

forces administered, financed and controlled by the state, or outright
delegation of military organization and authority to a Wallenstein or
some lesser ‘general contractor’ like Ernst von Mansfeld or Bernhard
von Saxe-Weimar. The examples from the half-century before 1618
have already made clear both the variety and extent of private involvement
in all aspects of warfare, and the choices that rulers, their governments and
sometimes other groups within society made in combining elements of
public and private resources in particular military partnerships. The pro-
cess was pushed forward by the pressures of the Thirty Years War, which
catalyzed further diversity and adaptation in developing mechanisms
under which the great majority of armies were raised and run as varied
forms of private–public partnership.
The result was the emergence of a spectrum of possible military systems
which can be grouped under three broad headings. In the first category
were those systems in which the enterpriser-colonels or the ‘general con-
tractor’ in control of the army were indeed operating more or less at their
own risk and profit, and independently of any particular state authority.
These armies might be hired into service by one or more powers, and in
some cases longer-term contracts might entail a more substantial state
interest in their operations and organization. But the forces remained
fundamentally the property and responsibility of the commanders and
their unit commanders. At the other end of the spectrum stood those
military systems in which a state administration played a predominant role
in running the armed forces, but nonetheless encouraged various forms of
limited private involvement in military organization and financing.
Between the two extremes stood an impressive array of armies and navies
in which very substantial levels of private involvement and decision-
making were nonetheless incorporated within a partial framework of
state authority and support. Within these categories there are both con-
siderable variations between the various military forces established, and
much evidence of developments and evolution within particular armies
over the course of an unprecedented period of hostilities.
One conclusion from this investigation of varieties of public–private
military partnership is that the army raised by Wallenstein, and taken to be
the high point of warfare by private enterprise, is not in fact a model for the
wholly privatized army. Wallenstein was never strictly speaking a ‘general
contractor’ independent of the financial support of his master, the
Emperor, even if the army may have approached fiscal and administrative
independence at a few points during his first generalship. Above all,
moreover, Wallenstein’s army should not be seen as some definitive
summit or terminus in the process of military contracting. The military
Military enterprise during the Thirty Years War 103
K. OF SWEDEN
BALTIC SEA
K. O F
NORTH DENMA RK
SEA
Danzig
Hamburg
Elb Stettin O F
K .
e
Bremen L A N D
K. OF Berlin P O
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ENGLAND Osnabrück Braunschweig
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Poznan
Amsterdam
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Magdeburg
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Rh
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Cassel Nordhausen Leipzig Breslou

Breslau
Brussels Erfurt
Cologne
Liège
Aachen D. O F
SIA
SILE
Schmalkalden
Cambrai K. OF
Frankfurt Prugue
Prague
Luxemburg Bayreuth
Mainz
BOHEMIA MAR. OF
Y
Nuremberg Brünn
Brunn
Verdun Metz Ansbach
R
Paris
Eichstätt MORAVIA
ine
A
Regensburg
Rh
Stuttgart Danube
G
Offenburg
N
K . Ulm Munich Vienna
O F
U
Salzburg
Montbeliard
H
F R A Ravensburg Buda
N C E Constance Ofen
L
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A
SWISS
I
CONFEDERATION
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O
E
F K. O
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SA
P
Lyons R E Trieste
VO HU NG A RY
HUNGA
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Y Milan P.
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F
V
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E
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I
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E LM
AT
IA
THE IMPERIAL CIRCLES, c. 1512

Scale 1:10,000,000 (160 miles = 1 inch)
Boundary of the Holy Roman Empire 0 Boundaries of the German Circles
50 100 150 200 Miles
0 100 200 300 km.
Austrian Circle Rhenish Palatinate Circle Bavarian Circle Upper Rhine Circle Upper Saxon Circle
Burgundian Circle Franconian Circle Swabian Circle Lower Rhine Westphalian Circle Lower Saxon Circle
Districts not included

in the Circles
Map 3.1 The territorial Circles of the Holy Roman Empire.

system set up by Wallenstein, though providing impressive results for

three to four years, was established on a basis that proved in practice
unsustainable. The similar system on which the army of Gustavus
Adolphus in Germany was built was no more able to achieve long-term
viability. But in both cases the failure was not a definitive verdict on
military enterprise, the point at which the state-run and state-controlled
army supposedly became the inevitable and only option. The principal
effect of their failure was to trigger a series of changes that streamlined and
rationalized armies which remained preponderantly privately raised and
sustained. The result, seen in the last decade of the Thirty Years War, was
the creation and operation of what were arguably some of the most
successful and cost-effective military forces of the early modern period.
A further important point which emerges from the overview is the
underlying consistency of activity at the subcontractual level. At the top
of these military systems are elaborate and differentiated structures for
procuring supplies and equipment, for financing military operations and
defining issues of authority and control between the military enterpriser
and the ruler or government officials. Yet beneath these are long-standing
mechanisms by which colonels and other unit proprietors raise troops,
organize and equip their units, keep their troops operational and try to
maximize military capability. This continuity is one of the central factors
in the argument that will be made in Chapter 4 for the military effective-
ness of armies raised under contract, but in the present overview it also
points to the potential of these systems to operate across national, linguis-
tic or religious-cultural frontiers.
Military enterprise at private risk: opportunism

and exploitation
In its scale, duration and, above all, the possibility of fighting across a
patchwork of small and medium-sized states that possessed limited
capacity to resist even a modest army intent upon financing itself at local
expense, the Thirty Years War might seem to open up large possibilities
for military commanders seeking to establish and operate independent
military forces. In these circumstances a few armies did come close to
being fully privately financed and privately run institutions, perhaps for
the first time in Europe since the ‘great companies’ of the fourteenth
century. But what had destroyed the original great companies was their
lack of any strategic goal beyond the immediate aim of self-enrichment
through plunder: they lacked durability and were acutely vulnerable to
any setback inflicted by concerted resistance from the territories on
which they preyed. The emergence and longevity of the ‘second wave’ of
Military enterprise at private risk 105
companies under the leadership of Hawkwood, Bongarten and others was

marked by recognition that the military forces they could raise and main-
tain had to be integrated into the political environment through service
contracts with established territorial powers. Renaissance Italy offered an
extensive market for the provision of private military force which would
permit initially independent captains to obtain some level of funding for
their troops, at least for the duration of the local conflict.
This was of course still more evident in the vast international market for
force that characterized the Thirty Years War. Both in fifteenth-century
Italy and the Holy Roman Empire after 1620 it became clear that such
service contracts were vital to the survival of military force initially raised
and operated at private risk. No more than in Renaissance Italy was it
possible to survive for long as an independent, self-sustaining and pred-
atory military force without the sponsorship of one of the belligerent
powers. Yet even under these conditions, and although the ‘general con-
tractor’, the military commander bringing his private army into condi-
tional state service, is an iconic figure in histories of the Thirty Years War,
the experience of such independent forces, dependent on the hiring
decisions and the fiscal and political priorities of a range of belligerent
states, was extremely chequered. Despite the apparently favourable con-
text of the war, independent military force rarely proved effective or
sustainable when set against forms of military organization in which the
links between private enterprise and a particular state were much stronger.
Only the most pessimistic or millenarian commentators in 1619 would
have predicted that the issues surrounding the religious and political
revolt of the Bohemian Estates against their uncompromisingly Catholic
king, soon to become the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, would
ignite a conflict that would last, uninterrupted, for thirty years. Yet even
with no assurance that the war would be a lasting one, nobles, military
professionals and wealthy commoners still came forward prepared to act
as military enterprisers in return for contracts and commissions, as they
had done earlier in the ‘Long Turkish War’. For many of those who
brought troops into service in the Imperial army, and notably a rising
star amongst the Bohemian nobility, Albrecht Wallenstein, the calcula-
tion – or gamble – was personal and political: Wallenstein raised a thou-
sand cuirassiers in Flanders at his own expense and almost certainly with
the aim not of making profits from the running of the regiment, but of
showing political solidarity and support for the Emperor with the expect-
ation of obtaining much larger rewards in the aftermath of military suc-
cess.1 However, as the war spread out into the Empire and drew in an
increasing circle of international powers, the prospects for those prepared
to raise military force also grew more extensive.
Ernst von Mansfeld

These activities were by no means restricted to those who offered to raise
troops for the Habsburg cause. Count Ernst von Mansfeld, illegitimate son
of a minor ruler who would provide him with no financial or territorial
inheritance, was already an experienced military enterpriser, who had
raised and maintained regiments for the service of Duke Carlo Emanuele
of Savoy since 1614.2 Sent to Germany with his troops as part of the Duke’s
commitment to the Bohemian revolt, Mansfeld shifted his contract across
to the army of Frederick V, the Palatine Elector, who was shortly to be
acclaimed king of Bohemia by the rebel Estates.3 The hopes for substantial
rewards from a grateful new sovereign collapsed with the defeat of the
White Mountain in November 1620. Although Mansfeld himself and
most of his army corps were not present, the battle destroyed the core of
Protestant resistance and left him little choice but to move out of Bohemia
before being caught by the Catholic victors.4
Drawing together his own troops and joining with various other colo-
nels who had been in Bohemian service to form an army of around 15,000
men, Mansfeld still found it useful to claim legitimacy from serving
an established ruler; indeed he now held the formal title of Lieutenant
General of the Palatine Elector’s army.5 However, thanks to the Bavarian
and Spanish occupation of the Electoral territories, Frederick had no
resources to meet the financial and supply needs of his contracted troops.
While in theory serving the Elector’s political and military interests, in
practice Mansfeld and his colonels behaved in the manner of one of the
great companies in Italy during the fourteenth century, moving their
troops through north-western Germany, trying to avoid the Spanish and
Liga forces established across these areas, and collecting local extortion
money to keep the army in being. In mid-1622, while Mansfeld’s troops
were looting their way through Alsace, Frederick decided to ‘disband’
Mansfeld’s army, which he manifestly did not control, in the hope of
gaining an Imperial settlement that would restore him to his territories.6
This dismissal merely formalized what was already reality, that the
troops and officers looked exclusively to their enterpriser-commander
who was running the army on his own account, or increasingly as director
of a shareholder company whose membership comprised his colonel-
proprietors. For beyond a little money invested from earlier military
activity, Mansfeld had no personal resources from which he could pay
his troops or keep them fed and equipped.7 If the army was to survive, he
needed either another formal contract with a new warlord, or a collective
decision to treat the army as a self-financing institution, living from
plunder and extortion. In the short term, political circumstances allowed
Bernhard von Saxe-Weimar and the Weimarian colonels 107
him to negotiate new contracts: shortly after being dismissed by Frederick

he entered Dutch service and remained until the Dutch ended the con-
tract in the winter of 1622/3.8 In 1624 he was commissioned by the
English crown to raise an army to fight on behalf of the Palatine Elector,
and in 1625 he was hired by Christian IV of Denmark to provide an army
to support Christian’s own military intervention in the Empire.9
This pattern of an army that might initially have been raised under
contract with a warlord, but which was maintained for periods between
these contracts by the commander himself, pooling resources with his
colonels and relying on casual plunder and, where possible, the extraction
of more regular contributions or protection money, became typical of
many enterprisers in the Protestant cause during the war.10 Running the
army as a private and independent force in this manner would rarely have
been the choice of commander or his colonel-proprietors, but it is striking
that in the unsettled political climate of the 1620s a figure like Mansfeld,
partly dependent on his own and his colonels’ risk capital, could maintain
an army that regularly achieved a full strength of 25,000 men. The set-
backs and failures that beset the Protestant cause in this decade left
Mansfeld and his shareholder-colonels with little choice between dis-
banding the army altogether and losing their invested capital, or seeking
to support its costs by whatever hand-to-mouth means were available
between formal contracts. Like the extortion of the fourteenth-century
great companies, the brutality and rapacity of the troops as they passed
through territory which they would not be able to occupy proved self-
defeating, leading to indiscipline, starvation and disbandment amongst
the troops. The lack of any kind of anchor of financial stability was to
prove a fatal liability, and the defeat of the army by Wallenstein at the
Dessau bridge delivered the coup de grâce to an already ailing military
machine.
Bernhard von Saxe-Weimar and the Weimarian

colonels
Despite his ducal title, Bernhard von Saxe-Weimar was the fourth son of a
minor princely dynasty. He had made a military career as a colonel in the
service of Mansfeld, the Dutch and, briefly, Christian IV of Denmark.11
By the time he joined Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1630 he had
acquired extensive military experience and an impressive reputation.
Rapidly promoted into the Swedish high command, he was placed in a
powerful position after Gustavus’ death as the trusted link between the
embattled Swedish government of Axel Oxenstierna and the German
colonels in the army.12 The Swedish defeat at Nördlingen (1634) changed
the direction of Saxe-Weimar’s career.13 He controlled what remained of

his own regiments, and had a reputation as a capable military leader.14 He
could still attract enterpriser-colonels to his command, but the elaborate
structure of contributions, confiscations and plunder which had sustained
the growth of the Swedish army was in ruins.15 One means to keep his own
and his followers’ troops operational was military enterprise on his own
account – relying on occupying territory, extracting contributions and
fighting off attempts to challenge his military base. But in the situation
of late 1634, with its shift in the balance of military power towards the
Emperor, this was extremely risky. The other option, conveniently
dangled by the French crown’s awareness that war with the Habsburgs
was now unavoidable, would be to accept the status of general contractor
in French service, operating an army which remained directly under his
own control in return for a large subsidy. Both sides agreed that the army
should be sizeable enough to act independently: in 1635 the lowest
strength that Saxe-Weimar would consider was 12,000 infantry and
6,000 cavalry. For this he requested 4 million livres per annum from the
French crown. Initially the French were only prepared to offer one mil-
lion, arguing that this was merely a subsidy for an army which was not
directly under French control or policy, and that the rest of the costs could
be made up from contributions, looting and occupation.16 For the
French, the army was envisaged as largely operating at the risk of its
colonel-proprietors.
The French crown held out for much of 1635 until Saxe-Weimar’s
own deteriorating military position threatened the various toe-holds
and protectorates occupied by French forces in Alsace and the
Rhineland. In October, and much against the wishes of the French finance
minister, Claude Bullion, a contract to bring Saxe-Weimar’s army into
French service was formally agreed, in which Saxe-Weimar received his
4 million livres a year to support the army, albeit with per capita deduc-
tions in the event that the army fell beneath its target strength of 18,000
troops.17
On the positive side, the French gained a remarkably effective com-
mander, with considerable operational vision and the ability to lead a
group of experienced, tough, but difficult and prickly enterpriser-colonels
who had a strong sense of being shareholders under a commander who
always needed to take their interests into account. Saxe-Weimar, in turn,
was independent of French ministerial interference in the day-to-day
management of his army, able to decide upon operations in accordance
with his own judgement of the militarily and logistically feasible. But the
failure of the French to pay anything approaching the promised subsidy,
while demanding, almost always in vain, that Saxe-Weimar collaborate
Bernhard von Saxe-Weimar and the Weimarian colonels 109
more closely with French military policies and armies, caused tensions
and resentments that were unresolved at Saxe-Weimar’s death in 1639.18
Saxe-Weimar recognized that the subsidy treaty with France, however
inadequately maintained, offered some stability and the possibility of
maintaining lines of credit, even if it narrowed his overall freedom of
military action.19 Many of his colonels remained unconvinced, unhappy
to have abandoned close cooperation with the Swedes and dissatisfied
with a zone of military operations so far to the west of the Empire, where
subsistence from a ravaged countryside was difficult. But Saxe-Weimar’s
army itself had evolved a great deal since Mansfeld’s time; it was smaller,
and better adapted to the fast-moving war of surprise, manoeuvre and
rapidly seized opportunities which was typical of Saxe-Weimar’s opera-
tional style. Even when his army was reduced to 11,000–12,000, the
troops were of high quality, serving in regiments that had already been
some of the best in the Swedish army back in 1634.20 Speed and compact-
ness greatly assisted occasions when the army had to rely on foraging and
local requisitioning of supplies, and in general facilitated the logistical
underpinning of Saxe-Weimar’s operations. The army was a flagship of
the new face of military enterprise as it was evolving through the 1630s
and 1640s.
Many of Saxe-Weimar’s shareholder-colonels were dissatisfied with the
French alliance and the cooperation with French forces in the Rhineland
that this required, and after his death in 1639 the colonels who inherited
the army and became its directors were well aware of their bargaining
power.21 Though the French government saw the death of Saxe-Weimar
as a timely opportunity to place the leaderless army under a French
commander and more directly within French service, the four colonel-
directors who became the spokesmen for the army’s own interests thought
differently. A number were now of the opinion that they should return to
Swedish service, and were able to use this as a lever in hard bargaining
with the French authorities and the acting French commander, Jean-
Baptiste Budes, comte de Guébriant. A deal was finally hammered out
between October 1639 and August 1640, by which the army agreed to stay
in French service on terms which respected their proprietary status and
virtual independence.22 The agreement held together, despite consider-
able tensions in the early 1640s, largely through the tactful and respectful
generalship of Guébriant and then Turenne, and was only finally broken
in 1647 when Cardinal Mazarin misguidedly ordered that the army of
Germany, largely made up of these regiments or their successors, should
move into Flanders in support of the French war effort against the
Spanish. The subsequent mutiny saw the departure of all but three of
the regiments into Swedish service for what remained of the war.23
Varieties of state-dominated contracting

At the other extreme from armies where the commander and the
contractor-colonels enjoyed a high degree of independence and auto-
nomy were those in which the ruler and his administrators continued to
exercise a dominant role in the military partnership. In some cases this
reflected a simple failure to move away from the traditional mechanisms
for hiring troops, in others a subtler blend of political and military moti-
vations. In two cases to be considered here, Denmark and the Dutch
Republic, it is hardly necessary to point out that state control over the
army was fully compatible with the substantial use of mercenaries, albeit
mercenaries hired under the traditional contractual system of fully paid
advances and subsequent wages, and incorporated into a force clearly
seen as the army of the ruler. Neither power wished to relinquish control
of payment and ultimate supervision of the troops, even if at the level of
unit organization, discipline and appointment they conceded authority to
the mercenary colonels and captains.
The Danish army of Christian IV

Amongst this group can be placed the Danish army in the first part of the
seventeenth century. Denmark’s wealth on the eve of the Thirty Years
War, and especially the personal resources of the king, Christian IV,
retarded the development of military enterprise, and supported a system
which had much more in common with the hire of Landsknechte in the
sixteenth century than with the military enterprise of the seventeenth. The
basic defence of the realm depended from 1614 on a militia of conscripts,
a system riddled with exemptions that was able to produce about 4,000
men in 1614 rising to perhaps 5,000 in the 1620s.24 Neither Christian nor
his Council believed that these could provide anything beyond local
defence.25 The response to more extensive military needs was the tradi-
tional one of hiring mercenaries on short-term contracts. These could be
raised from within the Empire: Christian’s duchy of Royal Holstein,
which gave him the titular headship of the Lower Saxon Circle, provided
fully legitimate access, as a prince of the Empire, to a wide network of
recruiting grounds.26 Given good seaborne communications and tradi-
tional political bonds, Danish rulers had also been strongly drawn to
recruiting mercenaries in Scotland.27
Though Christian failed to obtain the consent of the Rigsrad for his
intervention in Germany in 1626, and organized the military expedition as
duke of Holstein, a combination of his personal financial reserves and his
access to credit ensured that the customary system of mercenary hire was
The Dutch army 111
deployed to raise his army. Able to borrow 430,000 talers on the Kiel
money market at a comfortable interest rate of 5 per cent, and not
anticipating problems with obtaining further loans against tolls and rev-
enues, Christian saw no reason to deal with mercenary colonels on any-
thing other than the traditional basis of the payment of full advances, with
the corresponding subordination of the mercenaries to the king and his
military commanders.28 In addition the administrators acting directly in
the name of the king took on a significantly larger share of the supply
arrangements, whether this was to meet demands – via the sea – when the
troops were on the Jutland peninsula, or to try to ensure that they were
adequately supplied in Germany. In the summer of 1626 the royal com-
missioner for war, Aksel Arenfeld, was making extensive contracts to
obtain supplies from merchants in Hamburg and Bremen who would
ship them along the Elbe to supply the king’s army.29 The decisive military
failure of Christian’s German expedition can conceal the equally dismal
impact on the royal finances, brought to the point of breakdown from
where, grudgingly and temporarily, they were salvaged by the tax grants of
the Estates.30 The belief that large-scale war could be sustained by tradi-
tional hired mercenaries and supported exclusively from royal revenues
and loans was as impractical for Denmark in the 1620s as it had been for
France and Spain in the 1550s. Had Christian managed to establish a
permanent military presence in Germany, some form of military enter-
prise might have evolved in negotiations with German colonels. His fail-
ure to move in this direction earlier in the campaign was a lesson learnt by
Gustavus Adolphus four years later. It was only with the attack on
Denmark by Swedish forces in 1643–4 that Christian’s policy towards
mercenaries started to change. Simply because of the crown’s lack of
financial resources, some effort was now made to recruit military enter-
prisers, prepared to absorb the initial costs of recruitment and opera-
tions.31 This trend towards military enterprisers, principally drawn from
the German market, was even more evident as Denmark prepared for war
with Sweden in 1657–8.32
The Dutch army

The Dutch provinces pioneered an extensive variety of private involve-
ment in naval activity. This was seen in the effectively autonomous,
self-regulating world of the East and West India Companies; the encour-
agement of private investment and organization in the ‘directory ships’
intended to protect Dutch merchant shipping and carry out privateering
activity against the Spanish and Flemish; and in the mobilization of
the captains’ financial resources in the Admiralty fleets via supply and
equipment contracts (see p. 208). It seems surprising that, in contrast, the

management of the army should draw heavily upon traditional mercenary
contracts, though the reasons for this may be different from those in the
Danish case. That said, it is a well-entrenched myth that the Dutch
Republic drew entirely on hired foreign mercenaries to provide its military
capacity. In 1635 the infantry lists indicate fifteen foreign regiments
and eleven native regiments, to which were added another 3,500
Netherlandish soldiers in free-standing guards companies.33 All the
troops, foreign and Dutch, were nonetheless raised under what was a
traditional style of mercenary contract, in which the various provincial
Estates paid for the levy of an agreed number of troops, raised by colonels
who were treated and paid as employees, and not as proprietors given the
opportunity to invest their own capital in the military project.34 The
reasons for avoiding in their land forces what was normal practice in
Dutch naval warfare were practical and political. The political majority
in the States General of the Republic decided early after the resumption of
struggle with the Spanish in 1621 that they would seek to fight a defensive
and positional land war, recognizing the proliferation of substantial fron-
tier fortifications and the extent to which cities and towns were now also
strongly fortified. A war of conquest would be slow and expensive, while
defence in depth was likely to block most enemy offensives.35 Given that
their own troops spent most of their time garrisoning fortifications within
the United Provinces, developing a system in which colonels were encour-
aged to reimburse themselves for their own advances of credit via con-
tributions exacted on the localities would not be politically or
economically desirable. The States General, with its commitment to a
limited, defensive war, was primarily concerned to minimize the eco-
nomic and social impact of an army that was effectively a permanent
state garrison.36 It could more or less afford to do so, though a certain
amount of flexibility was provided to deal with delayed and late payments
to the colonels from provincial funds by making use of financial contrac-
tors, the solliciteurs-militair, who undertook to advance money to the
officers in return for a percentage from the sums ultimately paid over to
the armies.37 Another motive may be suspected for retaining a policy of
hiring mercenaries with up-front recruitment pay and wages/salaries
which reflected their status as employees. The ambiguous political rela-
tionship between the States General and the House of Orange, sovereign
princes outside the Netherlands yet employed as military commanders by
the States General within, might threaten to take on a military dimension
if enterpriser-colonels linked personal investment in their units too closely
with the policies and actions of the Stadholders, Maurice of Nassau and
Frederick Henry. Not only did the States feel under less pressure to make
The army of the Catholic Liga and the Bavarian army 113
use of the credit of the colonels they hired, they saw clear political advan-
tages in keeping them dependent on the provinces as paymasters.38
The army of the Catholic Liga and the Bavarian army

If neither the Danes nor the Dutch made use of what could properly be
seen as military enterprisers, developments in the Liga/Bavarian army led
to a very different relationship between state power and private capital and
organization.
The army of the League of Catholic German states (the Liga) had been
formed in 1610 through the direct initiative of Duke Maximilian of
Bavaria, whose duchy also provided the majority of the troops and fund-
ing.39 This imported into the army Maximilian’s characteristic concern
with direct control and accountability, which he was as anxious to apply to
an expensive army as he had been to the financial and legal institutions of
his duchy.40 In this concern he was abetted by his close working relation-
ship with his lieutenant general, Jean T’Serclaes de Tilly.41 Tilly shared
decision-making about all aspects of military policy with Maximilian
in person, and with the duke’s senior military commissioners, who stood
at the head of an elaborate pyramid of administrators, which reached
down to the level of the individual regiments and handled issues con-
nected with food and munitions supply and aspects of civil-military dis-
cipline.42 In the early 1620s the resources of Maximilian’s Bavaria and the
wealthy Rhineland territories that made up the other key Liga states were
sufficient to meet a high proportion of the costs of the army via self-
imposed military taxes.43
It might seem then that the Liga army was a straightforward precursor
of the state-financed, state-directed military force, in which both officers
and men were paid employees of the ruler and his state administration,
where control and accountability was maintained by salaried state officials
on commission, and the commanding officer himself was a willing servant
of a ruler who considered that all major military decisions should fall
under his purview. But underlying all of this, the essential character of
the Bavarian army remained that of a force composed of enterpriser-
colonels. Although they might be vetted for their Catholic credentials,
and although Maximilian took a strong personal interest in the military
capacities of his senior officers, the terms of the Bestallung, or recruitment
contract, are recognizably those made with military enterprisers.44 The
parallels with the Bavarian military system are not those of a modern,
state-run army, but more closely those of the contemporary Venetian
armies and galley fleets, based on hired mercenaries and contracted
service, but supervised by state officials – the proveditore – and with a
substantial element of state oversight and control over military policy-

making and execution. The colonel in the Liga army received full dis-
cretion to appoint junior officers, allowing these officers in turn to recruit
as they saw fit to produce good-quality recruits, a process which could well
include paying above the specified recruitment sums to attract better
soldiers. The colonel also held full administrative and judicial rights
over his men, and had responsibility for the provision of their weapons,
equipment, clothing and, in the case of cavalry, horses, much of which he
would recover from their subsequent wages. Above all, although it was
masked by the military successes and the relatively easy access to funds
from various forms of taxes and contributions in the 1620s, the
enterpriser-colonel was still entering into a financial agreement with
Maximilian and the Liga in which he would, if required, advance his
own capital to raise more troops, to maintain his existing forces or to
meet other shortfalls.
What the Liga achieved in the financially ‘good years’ of the 1620s was
control over the growth of military enterprise and the extent to which
capital could be invested in the army. This was seen most clearly in the
decision that none of the colonels in the Liga army should be allowed to
acquire command of more than a single regiment.45 Such a stipulation
could not be more different from the case with the armies of Wallenstein
or the Swedes, where multiple contracting was the norm and colonels
regularly invested in units whose actual command was placed in the
hands of the lieutenant colonel. The Liga army did not wholly forbid
multiple proprietorship: the cavalry general Jan de Werth, for example,
held three regiments. The restriction was more concerned with the
practicalities of military administration, with preventing the develop-
ment of powerful interests and too much financial exposure amongst
the senior officers.46 In a similar spirit, the Liga army stipulated at ten the
maximum number of companies in a regiment.47 Both these policies had
the same basic aims: to ensure that the colonels were present in person
with the army and controlled their units directly, and that the force that
they commanded and might need to finance was of a manageable size –
both adminstratively and financially.48 The weekly salary for a colonel in
the army of the Liga in 1629 was 62 talers (approximately 85 florins),
while in the same period Wallenstein’s colonels were receiving 400
florins a week, rising to 500.49
There were certainly opportunities for the Bavarian colonels to
recover some of their investment and to meet the costs of making their
units up to strength; even in the difficult winter of 1632/3, the ordinance
for winter-quartering accorded the Bavarian colonels billeted on Liga
The army of the Catholic Liga and the Bavarian army 115
territories 400 florins per month.50 Most of this was intended to assist
with the recruitment and reconstruction of the regiments, but doubtless
allowed the colonels some element of reimbursement for previous
expenditure.
This financial structure based on moderate but regular pay was subject
to slippage, above all as the Bavarian and other Liga territories suffered the
blows of invasion, devastation and occupation by the Swedes in 1631–4
and again later in the war. But the major army reforms following on the
Peace of Prague (1635), which abolished the Catholic Liga army but
permitted the Bavarians to retain an independent army under the overall
authority of the Emperor, reiterated the principles of restricted investment
and a strong administrative-supervisory presence with the army.51 The
advantages of this may have been less apparent in the campaigns of the late
1620s and early 1630s when the armies of Wallenstein, the combined
forces of Christian of Denmark and the armies of Gustavus Adolphus
were briefly pushing totals of troops under arms into the hundreds of
thousands, but in the longer run the Liga/Bavarian model of a small and
high-quality army was to prove the optimal solution to the challenges of
waging the Thirty Years War, with its logistical constraints and the need to
promote sustainability of financial commitments both at the level of
exactions from territory and populations and from the military enter-
prisers themselves.52
Over the period 1635 to 1648 by far the largest proportion of the
financing of the army came from agreed military contributions levied by
local authorities on the Bavarian and Swabian Circles.53 This was not a
system that depended on conquest, occupation and near-confiscatory
contribution demands to meet its own military costs. Between 1635 and
1648 the contributions and other local taxes levied across the two Kreise
amounted to 11.7 million florins, a huge amount by the standards of pre-
war taxation, but spread out across relatively prosperous territories and
imposed over fifteen years, it was a sustainable burden.54 State-sanctioned
financial support, coupled with an administrative presence within the
armies, permitted the maintenance of the Bavarian system of ‘restricted
enterprise’, encouraging the colonels to invest in their units, but at a
sustainable level compared with the central sources of funding.55 This
had a particularly significant consequence in maintaining the long-term
existence of a significant number of Bavarian regiments.56 While the
Bavarian army was not unique in its capacity to maintain a strong core
of experienced career soldiers under arms, it was certainly one of the most
successful of the armies of the Thirty Years War in this respect (see below,
pp. 171–2). Contemporaries largely agreed that the numbers and quality
of veteran soldiers were the key to military effectiveness, and it was

unsurprising to them that the Bavarian army, despite its small numbers,
had an impressive military reputation.
The limits of military enterprise

The Liga/Bavarian army, with its state-funded and ultimately state-
directed military organization which nonetheless recognized distinct
financial and organizational benefits in encouraging regimental proprie-
torship and regulated private interest, is an important model in the
evolution of early modern military institutions. However, its emergence
depended on the particular circumstances of leadership from the ruler of
the one financially robust major state in the Holy Roman Empire, on
substantial financial support from other relatively wealthy fellow mem-
bers of the Catholic Liga, and a political context which for the most part
allowed the Liga army more initiative and latitude in deciding on its
military commitments and the military scale of its responses than other
powers in the war. Other states were in less favourable positions, and the
temptation to establish a very different balance between the public and
private elements of their military organization was correspondingly
greater. The two obvious belligerents pursuing an expansionist
approach to the involvement of military enterprise in their war effort
were the Habsburg Imperial army and the Swedish forces operating in
Germany.
The Imperial armies from Wallenstein to Hatzfeld

In 1618/19 the Habsburg monarchy confronted the separatist revolt of its
Bohemian subjects with an empty treasury: Habsburg finances had been
drained and the long-term debt further increased by an expensive and
unnecessary war against Venice, fought on behalf of the Uskok
pirates in 1615–17. The Imperial army depended on those, like Colonel
Wallenstein, prepared to gamble on an Imperial victory over the
Bohemian rebels as the means to recoup their military investment.57
The gamble paid off. After a second campaign in 1620, the decision to
force the issue rather than risk a further campaign led to the battle of the
White Mountain, the destruction of the Protestant army, the reconquest
of Prague and the collapse of the revolt.
The orgy of confiscations and financial rewards which followed set a
pattern for the operations of the Imperial army for the next decade. Those
who had actively fought for the Imperial cause were on the inside track for
territorial grants, civil office and involvement in highly lucrative financial
The Imperial armies from Wallenstein to Hatzfeld 117
activities – most notably the debasement of the Bohemian currency.58 The

Bohemian episode was important in forming the military and financial
thinking, not just of Wallenstein when he became the Emperor’s greatest
military contractor from 1625, but of many of those who had been or
became involved in military enterprise on behalf of the Imperial cause.
The two key assumptions were that, firstly, while the Emperor was likely
to encounter substantial military threats and challenges in the future, he
would never be able to command the resources to raise and maintain an
army without very substantial financial support from his military contrac-
tors. The second assumption was that, given a willingness to accept a high
level of risk, it was possible to expect huge returns on raising troops for
Imperial service if the ‘Bohemian model’ of sweeping away traditional
constraints on tax burdens and seeking other means of financial exploita-
tion were to be applied more widely.
Albrecht Wallenstein’s initial proposal in April 1625 that he raise an
entire army on the basis of personal advances and the credit of his
colonels-to-be initially received a lukewarm reception at the Imperial
court. Authorization was finally given to Wallenstein to raise his proposed
new army, but the intention was to keep the force as small as possible – an
envisaged 24,000 troops – and to rely heavily on existing troops to form
the nucleus of this new army.59 Wallenstein, shaped by his Bohemian
experiences, had no intention of accepting these restrictions. By early
1626 Wallenstein’s army had a theoretical strength of 13,400 cavalry
and 54,000 infantry, and he calculated its actual strength at 58,000
men.60 Those colonels chosen to hold commissions under Wallenstein
were expected to demonstrate both substantial capital resources and the
organizational ability or territorial connections to raise and equip large
numbers of troops quickly and effectively. ‘The recent recruitment of both
horse and infantry is entirely carried out on the basis of advances of money
made by the officers, and up to this point (27 September 1625) they have
received not a penny from the Emperor.’61
Wallenstein’s attitude to proprietorship was diametrically opposed to
that of Maximilian of Bavaria. If colonels had the resources and the proven
administrative ability to raise multiple regiments, then they were the best
men to hold the extra commissions. Far from wishing to spread the
financial risk, Wallenstein was prepared to concentrate his army in the
hands of a smaller group of those with known credit and – so far as
possible – military competence.62 The issue, though, from the very outset
of Wallenstein’s negotiations and the establishment of the army was
repayment. This was not to be an all-or-nothing speculative venture like
the suppression of the Bohemian revolt, but a process in which high
capital investment received substantial and structured rewards.63
The terms of the original recruitment agreement and patent of com-

mand emphasized the extent to which this was not a private army serving
at its own risk in return for some temporary subsidy. The Emperor agreed
that Wallenstein would be allowed to collect contributions under Imperial
authority, and that the costs of paying the army would be charged directly
against these contributions.64 Initially the target area for the collection was
to be the Lower Saxon Circle, which was to contribute 2 million florins to
the recruitment costs, exacted from the populations by the troops them-
selves in the event that the Circle did not agree voluntarily to these
demands.65 The quartering ordinance promulgated immediately follow-
ing the arrival of the army set the weekly maintenance of a regiment of
twelve companies of cavalry at 6,000 florins, from which the colonel was
to receive 500 florins – clearly taking into account his level of previous
investment in the regiment. Wallenstein’s officers recovered their invest-
ment and grew prosperous on the additional takings from the contribu-
tions; there was no shortage of qualified volunteers competing to advance
cash to raise further regiments.66
If this policy caused a storm of protest – ignored by both Wallenstein
and the Emperor – from the Protestant territorial rulers in the Circle, this
was nothing compared with the impact through the winter of 1626/7
when, ostensibly to guard against the threat posed by Ernst von
Mansfeld and his army, Imperial troops were stationed in Habsburg
Silesia and Bohemia, and subjected them to the same financial treatment.
The impositions were as heavy and as discretionary as those imposed on
the Lower Saxon Circle.67 As time went on personal valuables, textiles,
leather, household objects, furniture, clothing and animals were added to
keep the payments flowing.68
Despite hostility, it would certainly appear that the contributions
regime had proved remarkably successful in allowing Wallenstein’s colo-
nels to recruit and equip their regiments. Morale and commitment
amongst the men and the officers was high: Rombaldo Collalto com-
mented to the Venetian Ambassador in Vienna that in his twenty-seven
years of military service he had never seen or commanded a finer army.69
A more ambiguous indication of the success of this policy were the 300 or
more officers from the Liga army who Tilly reported had defected to the
Imperial forces by early 1627.70 Moreover the exaction of contributions
was much more than just a local means to feed and pay the troops, and to
reimburse the colonels for their expenses in recruiting and equipping their
units. A large part of the operating costs of the army, the purchase of
artillery and artillery munitions, transport, the costs of the high command,
the amassing of munitions over and above the provision specifically
made by the colonels, part-supply of food while conducting particular
campaigns, the reimbursement of Wallenstein himself and entire net-

works of financiers for earlier advances to help set the army in being,
were all also direct calls on the contribution funds.71 On the basis of
anticipated contributions, Wallenstein’s financial agent, Hans de Witte,
negotiated a mountain of loans from an international network of cred-
itors – money which paid for almost all aspects of the army over and above
the basic regimental costs.72
The problem was quite simply that this level of financial support – and
therefore an army assembled on this scale – was not sustainable.
Complaints about the levels of contributions and the burden of military
exactions are so much part of the common rhetoric of military–civil
relations in the seventeenth century that it is tempting to dismiss them
as the all-too predictable hostility to a tax system which actually managed
to extend the fiscal burden on to those who would normally expect either
to escape the net altogether or make token payment.73 But the evidence of
non-payment and of rising levels of resistance, and of increasingly empty
threats in the face of the inability to sustain these regular exactions, all
suggest that the burden was genuinely excessive across many regions of
the Empire. If the halcyon years of Wallenstein’s experiment in military
enterprise were from 1626 to 1628, by 1629 the problems were reaching a
critical level.74 At the end of 1628, Silesia, assessed for an annual con-
tribution of 600,000 talers, had paid only 150,000, and even that had been
badly delayed.75
For all the size and military effectiveness of the army, it was extremely
vulnerable: de Witte’s edifice of revenue anticipation was probably
matched by the personal debts of the colonel-proprietors, who might
profit extravagantly from contributions for a few months, but had
incurred heavy liabilities in setting up their regiments.76 If colonels of
individual regiments in Wallenstein’s service in the 1620s claimed debts
of 20,000–30,000 florins, a multiple proprietor like Adolf von Holstein-
Gottorp had debts of 300,000 florins for raising and maintaining his
troops, while Hans Georg von Arnim, who had risen from colonel to
field marshal, left Imperial service with debts recognized – but not
paid – of 264,000 florins.77
The contrast with the Catholic Liga army is striking: the vast bulk of the
pay of the officers and soldiers of the Liga army was met from the
Bundeskasse, the agreed, assessed and regular payments of the Catholic
princes of the Liga.78 When such territories found themselves exposed
instead to Wallenstein’s army as it sought ever-wider territories over
which it could extend its demands, their response was obstruction and
resistance to what seemed ludicrously heavy demands. The contrast
between the sustainable, regular burdens of the Liga in a territory like
Swabia, and the heavy, and to a large extent arbitrary, burdens of the
Imperial contributions was summed up by the Abbess Katharina von
Spaur, when in June 1628 she wished heartily for Tilly’s Liga army to
move back into Swabia in order to drive out ‘Wallenstein’s grasping
rabble’.79
The only way in which the long-term sustainability of Wallenstein’s
army could have been secured would have been – as the generalissimo
himself recognized – through a wholesale reshaping of the political map
of Germany. Just as the reconquest of Bohemia had created vast oppor-
tunities in an atmosphere of feverish financial speculation, so a settlement
in the Empire which carried through substantial territorial confiscations
and adjustments, and permanently alienated resources into the hands of
officer-proprietors, might offer a solution. Wallenstein set himself on the
road to such a territorial reconstruction with his Imperial investiture as
duke of Mecklenburg in 1628. This was halted by the disintegration of his
political position in 1629 and the political and military crisis of 1630
which led to Wallenstein’s dismissal.
The dismissal brought down the entire edifice of Imperial war finance,
crippling the contributions system and freezing access to further credit.
The impact was felt directly by the Imperial colonels and other proprie-
tors. From having been better funded and possessing better-maintained
troops than any other force in the Empire, supplies of food and munitions
dried up, wages could no longer be paid and the officers’ burden of
unsecured debt hamstrung their ability to meet further financial demands
for the support of their troops, who grew increasingly mutinous and
insubordinate.80 The operational efficiency of the Imperial army col-
lapsed; troops billeted in Pomerania and Mecklenburg surrendered
towns and fortresses without resistance to the Swedish army in early
1631.81 Against the odds, Gustavus Adolphus was able to sustain his
position on the Baltic, recruit substantial numbers of German units on
his own account, and conduct a campaign which strengthened his pres-
tige, brought his forces deep into central Germany and ultimately, in
September 1631, to Breitenfeld, just outside Leipzig, where he won his
greatest victory.
A major reason why Wallenstein could make good his promise to the
Emperor in October 1631, that he would be able in only three months to
reconstruct a still larger army than the one he had commanded in the
1620s, was the proprietary interests of the existing Imperial colonels.82
The period from Wallenstein’s dismissal through to Breitenfeld had been
ruinous for many of those colonels who had continued to serve in the joint
Imperial-Liga army. Wallenstein’s reputation for managerial and financial
skills could work its previous magic, but still more important was the
largest single concession he squeezed from the Imperial Privy Council.83

Instead of leaving ambiguous the question of where the contributions
were to be collected to fund the army, the terms of the patent reappointing
Wallenstein as Generalissimo were explicit that the army was to be
recruited in the Habsburg lands of Bohemia, Silesia and Austria, and
the army was to be supported, at the first level, on the basis of stipulated
contributions payments from all of these territories.84 In the dismal sit-
uation in which the fortunes of the Habsburgs now stood, Wallenstein also
benefited from both a fixed Spanish subsidy paid directly to the army, and
the service of a certain number of regiments raised and maintained at
Spanish expense.85 None of this would fully meet the costs of the army,
but it would provide a basic structure on which revenue anticipations and
payments could be built with some degree of year-on-year certainty. It
certainly offered the colonel-proprietors the prospect that they could
resume their military activities, re-recruit their units and advance wages
and supplies to their men, with some likelihood that they would once
again see a return on these investments. Most of the familiar names of
well-established colonels from the regimental lists of 1627–9 reappear on
those of 1632 and 1633.86
The principle that Wallenstein’s new army would be supported from
regular contributions levied from the Habsburg lands for the duration of
the war, and that these charges might be mitigated but certainly would not
be abandoned when the army was able to occupy territory elsewhere in the
Empire, was a realistic step towards achieving sustainability on the basis of
assured revenues. No less important was the acceptance that the winter
quartering, with its opportunities for re-recruiting and re-equipping the
troops, should also take place on Habsburg or allied territory. It was
the apparent challenge to this principle in the winter of 1633/4, via the
demand from the Imperial court that the troops should decamp into
quarters in the adjoining German territories and therefore engage in a
winter campaign against the Swedish troops already occupying these
areas, which led to a key moment in the drama that culminated in
Wallenstein’s assassination.87 On 13 January forty-seven of the senior
officers and colonels-proprietor, assembled at Wallenstein’s winter head-
quarters at Pilsen in Bohemia, rejected the demand to move the army into
the Empire. After this, and in a move of which the significance has been
widely debated, each officer signed five copies of a document in which
they subscribed to an oath of unconditional obedience to Wallenstein.88
Whether or not this document should be interpreted as outright treason
against the Emperor, as Wallenstein’s enemies chose to see it, the explicit
refusal of the colonels and senior officers to countenance military action
over the winter months, which would jeopardize access to finance and
supplies essential for the recruitment and re-equipping of the army, is

highly significant.89 It points to the change from Wallenstein’s first gen-
eralship, bringing with it the recognition that the financial base of the army
was fragile and could only be neglected at high risk. The Habsburg lands
were the vital resource on which the ability to raise credit and repay
outstanding debts rested; military proprietors and Imperial authority
were locked together in a mutual, high-maintenance dependence whose
inevitable tensions bred suspicion, and ultimately complete breakdown.
Large armies depended on a heavy commitment of borrowed capital for
their creation and maintenance, and were trapped in a vicious circle in
which overly heavy contributions (most consistently levied on home
territory) required large numbers of troops to enforce, which in turn
kept the army larger than immediate military aims dictated, and conse-
quently inflexible over issues like winter campaigning, the long-term
ability to occupy hostile territory and the dependence on a steady flow of
credit.90 An army which could break out of this iron circle of dependence
would enjoy considerable operational advantages. The next stage in the
evolution of the Imperial army saw exactly this development: a further
change in the relationship between the Emperor, the military com-
manders and the colonel-proprietors, aptly symbolized by the change in
style from the generalship of Wallenstein to that of Field Marshal
Melchior von Hatzfeld.
Ironically the precipitant for this was not military defeat or political
disaster, but events which seemed to bring outright victory within grasp.
Despite the assassination of Wallenstein on instructions from the
Emperor on the night of 25 February, the army, now in the hands of his
subordinates, Matthias Gallas and Ottavio Piccolomini, operated with
coherence and decisiveness in the campaign of 1634. The Imperial
army joined with the Spanish forces of the Cardinal Infante to annihilate
the Swedish and German Protestant campaign armies at Nördlingen on
6 September, opening the way to the Prague settlement between the
Emperor and the great majority of German rulers. But the Peace of
Prague did not resolve the problem of external involvement in the war:
the Swedes remained a stubborn, unwanted presence in the north of
Germany; Richelieu’s France, caught out by the unexpected turn of
events at Nördlingen, entered the war in an attempt to preserve French
gains in northern Italy and along the Rhine which had been accumulated
since 1631. An Imperial army thus had to be maintained, or recreated, but
the circumstances of 1635 allowed an opportunity to reflect on the basis
on which it should be established and how it should be run.
Prior to 1635 the Imperial army had existed in an often uneasy relation-
ship with the independent Bavarian/Liga army, while the vast majority of
the Imperial troops had been concentrated under the direct authority of
Wallenstein.91 After Prague, the Emperor was able both to require the
disbandment of all pre-existing leagues and other associations in the
Empire, including the Catholic Liga, and to draw the forces of
Brandenburg, Saxony, the Rhineland electorates and Bavaria into a direct
military alliance. But recognizing the impossibility of creating a genuinely
joint army, the Bavarian, Saxon and Brandenburg armies were permitted
to retain their own structures and organization, as ‘mediate’ forces under
the authority of the Emperor.92 Military victory followed by a German
peace on Habsburg terms was to have paradoxical consequences for
the maintenance of Imperial armies over the ensuing decade. The great
majority of Protestant rulers in the Empire had now submitted to Imperial
authority and had joined a general military alliance. Those rulers who
were now fielding their own ‘mediate’ armies could legitimately claim that
they were making their military contribution directly and that they and
neighbouring states within the central and north German Circles should
be exempted from additional pressures to sustain the troops of the primary
Imperial army. Even if there were not already good reasons for rethinking
Wallenstein’s approach to raising and funding an Imperial army, the
dramatic shrinkage of the areas over which Imperial troops could
now be billeted and contributions exacted would in any case have forced
the issue.93
The directly controlled Imperial forces were divided into two: the main
Imperial field army, largely sustained from regular contributions exacted
from the Habsburg lands and on the basis of Spanish and other subsidies
to the Emperor, and an army based in the Westphalian Circle, or that part
of it which was free of remaining Swedish garrisons.94 The Westphalian
Circle was to become the financial mainstay, after Bohemia and Silesia, of
the Imperial military system. It supported an army that was directly under
Imperial authority (unmediated), provided local protection within the
Circle against Swedish and Hessian incursions, but was also expected to
participate in wider military operations. Westphalian troops were used to
reinforce the main Imperial army time and again in the 1640s, whether
to make good the effects of defeats such as Breitenfeld II and Jankow, or to
provide additional troops for campaigns such as Gallas’ ill-fated advance
into Holstein in 1644. At the same time the basic lesson had been learnt
that the apparent availability of resources should not encourage military
inflation: the number of troops retained within the Circle remained
limited and multiple recruitment contracts were not drawn up on the
basis of the colonels’ credit, necessitating an ever-higher burden of con-
tributions to meet start-up costs and the maintenance of large numbers of
these new regiments. The army was kept relatively small – fewer than
20,000 men including the contingents provided by the prince-bishopric of

Cologne and other territories in the Circle – the financial demands on the
territories were regular and predictable, and the surplus was used to
finance the supply, logistical support and occasionally pay and recruit-
ment of the other, main Imperial field army.95 Though a considerable
proportion of the contributions could be collected in kind and distributed
locally, some part still needed to be paid in cash. This could be used to
reimburse the merchants, manufacturers and suppliers for provisions
supplied to both the Westphalian and main Imperial campaign armies to
sustain their operations.96 Contributions were now regular, and they
were efficiently collected by local agents without excessive wastage. The
accounts for the Westphalian Circle in the 1640s bring together the costs
of the collection of contributions with the costs of the general staff, but the
costs of both range between 4 and 8 per cent of the total sums collected –
the expenses involved in collecting the revenues were certainly less than
50 per cent of this. The great bulk of the contributions went straight to the
regiments or to the military administration.97
All of this, partly deliberate planning, partly a contingent response to
circumstances, signalled a change in thinking about the scale of military
forces and the overwhelming problems of trying to find sustainable means
to feed, pay and operate armies. The apparently vast returns of a limit-
lessly exploitable contribution system had proved an illusion which had
left too many colonels and senior officers crippled with heavy debts which
drove them out of military service.98 The overly large armies, which were
both a cause of heavy contribution demands and the only means by which
they could be enforced, were threatened on all sides with the collapse of
credit and consequent failures of supply, equipment and the ability to
provide basic pay. A sustainable burden of contributions, preferably con-
ceded and collected by local authorities, could provide the basis for the
upkeep of regiments and a regular, albeit more modest, level of financial
return for the colonels. Successful military operations might still supple-
ment this and offer the possibility of reimbursement of the initial invest-
ment, but most colonels were not now dependent on such windfalls to
claw back a mountain of accumulated debt.
The Imperial armies commanded by Melchior von Hatzfeld first in
the Westphalian Circle and then the main army operating out of the
Habsburg lands in the mid-1640s were different in numerous respects
from Wallenstein’s armies. The control of the Habsburg authorities was
undoubtedly tighter: regular funding depended on the legitimacy of
Imperial authorization. The establishment of the future Ferdinand III,
then, after 1636, the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, as commander-in-chief
of the Imperial forces may not have added much to the sum of military
The Swedish army 125
talent, but it did make it more difficult for any of the Imperial lieutenant
generals to lay outright claim to supreme command. The new generation
of commanders anyway lacked willingness or ability to engage in
Wallenstein’s vast speculative enterprises, mobilizing military and finan-
cial resources that had seemed to give the army a high degree of inde-
pendence, but had actually proved an illusion. Long gone was the
situation in 1626 when Wallenstein’s father-in-law, Karl von Harrach,
could coolly inform the Emperor that His Majesty would only be able to
dictate the policy of Wallenstein’s army if he himself paid for its running
costs.99 By the 1640s, Imperial authorization to collect contributions, and
even the provision of direct funding from the Habsburgs’ own lands, was
the essential financial anchor of the armies. Wallenstein’s drive to domi-
nate and control a vast and expansionary military system was abandoned,
and command was divided; cooperation was still possible and desirable
on occasions, but the logic of sustaining troops and military operations
on a day-by-day basis dictated much smaller forces able to operate
independently.100
Hatzfeld worked within these constraints, as did his equally competent
successor from 1645, Peter Melander, Reichsgraf von Holzapfel. This
meant acting on military orders from the Imperial court which might be
misguided, partisan or based on an inadequate operational picture, and
accommodating at least some of those demands for military appointments
and exemptions from contributions and quartering based on courtly
petitions which Wallenstein had been so effective at refusing.101 Yet
their overall success in pursuing the war effort in a more sustained,
regulated and strategically coherent manner, thanks to more manageably
sized forces and known, if not always adequate, sources of funding, offers
a striking contrast with the earlier period. It is equally the case that the
regimental proprietors, now much closer to their Bavarian counterparts,
could still accumulate profits from the business of war and remained very
clearly shareholders in military enterprise, but with neither the huge
capital risks nor the short-term windfall profits of the Wallenstein epoch.
As with the Bavarian armies, it is striking that the Imperial forces in the
later 1630s and 1640s consisted of a smaller number of longer-serving
regiments, with similar effects of accumulating long-serving, experienced
officers and men.102
The Swedish army

Sweden began the seventeenth century under the shadow of Denmark.
The disastrous Danish–Swedish War which had ended the reign of
Charles IX and brought the young Gustavus Adolphus to the throne in
1611 had revealed Sweden’s military weakness, principally its financial

incapacity to sustain the Danish ‘Landsknecht’ solution of hiring large
numbers of mercenaries on short-term contracts to undertake military
operations. The Swedish crown saw its primary military/defensive
requirement from the mid-sixteenth century as strengthening and main-
taining the state-run navy. Like Denmark, Sweden possessed no large,
pre-existing merchant marine, so co-opting merchant vessels as privateers
or medium-sized warships to form the largest element of a navy was not a
significant option. Despite the very limited financial resources available to
the monarchy, Sweden was committed from the outset to a state-built and
state-financed navy.103 This merely compounded the financial problems
of supporting a land-based defence force. The only escape from military
impotence was to improve the size and quality of the conscript peasant
militia, a path seized upon by many second-rank rulers in the early
seventeenth century, but as was shown in Chapter 2, rarely producing
worthwhile results. In contrast, the transformation of the Swedish militia
is seen as the great success story of the reign of Gustavus Adolphus (see
above, pp. 98–9). Involved in the constant military activity of Gustavus’
campaigns in Livonia, Lithuania and ultimately Poland and Polish
Prussia, the Swedish militia took on most of the characteristics of a
permanent force of long-serving military veterans. The harshness of
rural life in most of Sweden inured the conscripts to wages that were
far lower than those paid to military professionals elsewhere in Europe,
while territorial conquests and plunder around the Baltic may have
offered some compensation for conditions of service far below those of a
German Landsknecht.104
Yet despite the military qualities of the conscripts, the numbers were
insufficient to sustain the ambitious territorial designs of Gustavus
Adolphus. If the militia could generate a native Swedish (and Finnish)
army of around 30,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry, high rates of attrition
through battle and sickness, the need to establish garrisons and hold
territory, all took their toll. By 1629 and the campaigns in Poland,
Gustavus had taken some 16,000 mercenaries into his army, some hired
after the collapse of the Danish intervention in the Empire, others con-
tracted from Scottish or German colonels.105 Much of this hiring was
sustained on the basis of an unprecedented opening-up of Swedish copper
and iron mines, armaments manufacturing and shipbuilding through
Dutch entrepreneurs and capital. By the 1620s Dutch penetration into
the Swedish economy was hugely profitable and netted large revenues for
the crown in vital European specie as well as providing letters of exchange
and related financial facilities in Amsterdam, Hamburg and other
European financial centres. This provided the mechanisms by which
these initial contracts to recruit mercenaries could be negotiated.106 Like

those for the mercenaries hired by the Danes, these were initially based on
typical contracts specifying advances for the costs of recruitment and
regular pay from the warlord.107 Some of these were to continue into
the period of the German war, though gradually they started to overlap
with a whole new generation of enterpriser-colonels brought into service
in Germany, providing credit in their own right against expectations of
larger financial rewards.108
When Gustavus landed at Peenemunde in 1630 to begin his campaign
in Germany, it was certainly not his intention to fight a limited war on the
basis of a small army of Swedish conscripts. Long before Gustavus and
Oxenstierna proclaimed the maxim bellum se ipsum alet (war should pay for
itself), the king intended to fight the war in Germany with the additional
resources of both mercenaries raised under traditional contracts already in
Swedish service and a new generation of military enterprisers. In both
cases wages were to be paid and large-scale credit reimbursed through
contributions imposed on conquered or occupied territory in the
Empire.109 Before he landed in Germany his agents had already been at
work: Dietrich von Falkenberg and Dodo von Kniephausen acted as
coordinators of this recruitment drive in anticipation of Gustavus’ arrival,
and ensured that a further 36,000 German soldiers were added to the
Swedish forces of around 43,000 at the beginning of 1631.110 Despite this
emphasis on new German contracts, Scottish recruitment for the next
couple of years ran a close second within the Swedish army, with six
generals, thirty colonels and 10,000 soldiers raised from Scotland.111
Thus the huge expansion of the enterpriser component of the Swedish
army was not some unanticipated consequence of victory at Breitenfeld in
September 1631; it had been planned by Gustavus from the outset of his
invasion as the means to match the armies of Wallenstein and the Catholic
Liga, and to avoid the fate of Christian IV, whose armies were assembled
too slowly and whose hiring of military enterprisers amounted to one
poorly coordinated contract with an independent army under Ernst von
Mansfeld.
There were, however, large implications to Gustavus Adolphus’ deci-
sion to expand the number of troops under his command. Given the
Swedish king’s limited financial resources and access to credit, it was a
foregone conclusion that he would seek to match the scale of his oppo-
nents’ forces by drawing heavily on the personal credit of aspiring colo-
nels. Native soldiers from the Swedish conscription system became a
smaller and smaller proportion of the total Swedish campaign armies, so
that while in 1633 the total strength of all the Swedish forces stood at
around 85,000 men, the native Swedes in these forces numbered no more
than 3,000.112 The largest proportion of the Swedes who were raised and
deployed were not in the campaign armies, but were garrisoned across
fortifications in the Baltic territories. Wallenstein had pioneered the prin-
ciple of exacting massive contributions, not just from enemy but from
allied and home territory, in order to reimburse colonels and other senior
officers who had engaged in substantial financial speculation; Gustavus
quickly adopted the same policy in recruiting his army from amongst
willing German enterprisers. Paul Khevenhüller, in religious exile from
his native Carinthia, joined Gustavus’ army as a cavalry colonel at the head
of a unit which he had recruited at his own expense, while in addition he
and his brother Hans also lent the king a further 70,000 talers at 6 per cent
interest per annum.113 After 1631 it seemed that enthusiasm to invest in
the Swedish king’s military activities was even greater than it had been for
Wallenstein.114
Underpinning this enthusiasm for massive capital investment in the
Swedish army, even after the death of Gustavus Adolphus, was the
Swedes’ ability to occupy great swathes of western and southern
Germany, mostly Catholic lands subjected to contributions in the form
of direct confiscations or war indemnities which were massive even by the
standards of Wallenstein’s system.115 As with Wallenstein, however, the
aim of imposing these extremely heavy burdens was not simply to provide
a one-off levy which could meet some of the outstanding debts of his
numerous subcontractors and investors; despite near-confiscatory exac-
tions, it was still conceived as means to a regular, substantial income flow.
This could finance a stream of new borrowing and financial investment,
one part of which was to pay for the expansion of an army that was
required to occupy the territories from which the burden of contributions
was to be extracted. After opening its gates to the Swedes in April 1632,
Augsburg was subjected to a regular and crushing burden of taxation and
requisitioning until the final collapse of Sweden’s position in the south in
early 1635. The Catholic bishop and the Fugger family alone were
assessed for an initial payment of 700,000 gulden, and as both had fled
the burden was laid upon the city, which received in return highly dubious
rights to the property of both parties. The inhabitants of the city were
assessed for contributions, both in cash and in kind, intended to support
the immediate costs of five regiments of Swedish troops, to indemnify
the officers for earlier costs, and to make a further payment to the overall
costs of the army.116 Resistance, backsliding and evasion were as much a
part of Augsburg’s relationship with the Swedish military as they had been
against the rather lower demands of Wallenstein’s army.117 Contributions
extracted at this level, even from a city as wealthy and well-placed as
Augsburg, proved unsustainable.118 The result can be seen in the rapid
collapse of the population of the city under this pressure, from 80,000 in
1632 down to 18,000 in 1635.119
If the burden on what was perceived as a major hostile city was massive,
the contributions burden even on territories that were nominally allied
with the Swedes from 1631 represented a dramatic break with any pre-
vious taxation regime. The extraordinary Protokoll drawn up in late 1634
after the departure of the Swedes from the Ober-Barnim Circle of the
Margraviat of Brandenburg provides a striking picture of the detailed
contributions imposed over the preceding four years of Swedish occupa-
tion, and the costs of this in terms of depopulation, ruined villages and
destitute peasant communities. The modest community of Neustadt-
Eberswalde, with 216 hearths in 1630, claimed to have paid the total
sum of 43,987 talers over the four-year period, but at the cost of a
50 per cent fall in population and 106 houses abandoned.120
Thus, in the heady days of Gustavus’ victories it looked as though the
Swedes were plunging straight into the same trap of unsustainability on
the back of massive self-financed recruitment as the Imperialists under
Wallenstein had done. And even after Lützen and the king’s death, the
appetite for further and heavier investment by enterprisers within the
Swedish army seemed undimininished. In 1633 an unprecedented agree-
ment was made by which the Swedish enterpriser-colonels formally took
over the debts owed by the crown to the subalterns, non-commissioned
officers and men of their regiments. Added to their own advances and
other payments, this produced individual claims by some of the colonels
against the Swedish government of 200,000–300,000 talers.121 In the
same year and in the face of mounting protests and non-compliance by
the territories subjected to contributions, a series of negotiations took
place at Heilbronn between the Swedish government of Oxenstierna,
the army commanders and the states allied with the Swedes, to try to
establish a formal and agreed level of support.122 These Heilbronn nego-
tiations established that the Swedish campaign army, taken at a minimum
of 45,000 men, would require regular financial support of 8.5–9.5 million
florins per year.123 This simply could not be paid through further regular,
heavy war taxes on the back of the already unprecedented exactions on
occupied territory.
The proposed resolution to this impasse had similarities with
Wallenstein’s plans in the late 1620s, involving a massive transfer of
confiscated lands into the hands of the officers as a ‘once-and-for-all’
means to cover their debts and allow them to meet their own obligations
to junior officers and men.124 But not only did this raise serious constitu-
tional concerns about the extent of Sweden’s rights of conquest within the
Empire, it also created a mass of practical problems. Passed into the hands
of colonels who wanted to sell the property to realize capital to meet their
own debts, the market was rapidly flooded. Colonel Claus Dietrich
Sperreuth received as his payment for debts incurred the town of
Wembdingen, valued at 100,000 talers, and the monastic lands of
Kirchheim. He would have been prepared to sell them for cash for a
fraction of this value, but the one potential buyer, the count of
Hohenlohe, would only purchase these lands via long-term annual instal-
ments, rejected by Sperreuth.125
With the battle of Nördlingen in September 1634 the matter of the
colonels’ debts was settled more dramatically, with the complete collapse
of the Swedish position in southern and central Germany. The areas that
could support the Swedish army were reduced to the Baltic coastal terri-
tories of Pomerania and Mecklenburg. This was itself problematic, since
these were territories envisaged by the Swedes as part of a lasting territorial
satisfactio in a forthcoming peace settlement, and not therefore to be
ravaged by punitive contributions. Nördlingen and the ensuing Prague
settlement between the Emperor and the German princes forced Sweden
to carry through the same kind of radical reconstruction of army organ-
ization and support that the Imperial war council and the army
commanders undertook after the assassination of Wallenstein.126 In part
this task was simplified for the Swedes both by the heavy losses and
subsequent desertion of troops following Nördlingen, and by Bernhard
von Saxe-Weimar’s decision to lead off a substantial group of German
regiments as an independent corps, which from 1635 would receive a
subsidy from France and operate in the west of the Empire.
All of this reduced the Swedes from a vast military presence to a single
campaign army and the garrison forces on the Baltic coast. Virtually
overnight, the army had been transformed from a large, cantankerous
coalition of enterpriser-colonels to a relatively compact force, no longer
able to draw support from large-scale contributions except by a laborious
process of re-establishing a permanent military presence deeper in the
Empire. In the meantime it would be forced to subsist on a minimal
contributions base in Mecklenburg and Pomerania, on subsidies from
allied powers and on a willingness to put up with limited resources and to
rely on hand-to-mouth credit.127 As with the thinking behind the support
structure for the Imperial army in the aftermath of Prague, the key issue
now facing the Swedish high command was to establish a system that
could ensure military sustainability through balancing secure occupation
of territory and realistic contributions with providing enough additional
resources to support the operations of a campaign army – albeit one that
would be much more modest than hitherto. When the Swedish military
position improved from the late 1630s a larger area could be brought
under permanent occupation. The generals Wrangel and Königsmarck

now held and garrisoned Holstein and lower Saxony which greatly
increased the permanent resource base from which regular, sustainable
contributions could be exacted.128
The most obvious difference in the operations of the Swedish campaign
army compared with its Imperial rival in the years after 1636 was that it
was unconstrained by the Emperor’s commitment to respect the financial
integrity of the states and Circles contributing their own armies to the
post-Prague military settlement, principally Saxony and Brandenburg.
The Swedes felt no obligations to the Protestant German states that had
abandoned them at Prague. Though some of the basic costs of the support
of the main campaign army would be met from the Baltic territories, the
high command were determined after 1635 that the costs of campaigning
should very largely be met via contributions, requisitioning and confisca-
tions levelled on Sweden’s earlier allies, now enemies. Contributions,
especially under Banér, were a great deal more like Brandschatzen – one-
off demands for financial indemnities to avoid the spoliation of territory or
the sacking of towns and cities. Local authorities were aware that the only
chance of negotiating these heavy claims downwards was to offer to collect
a significant but lesser amount quickly and without making any difficul-
ties.129 Moreover Torstensson, operating this system after the clear
upturn in Swedish military fortunes from 1642, saw the advantages of
not squeezing local resources completely dry; these were not territories
that would necessarily pass back under Imperial control, and it made
sense to preserve some of their capacity for payment in the future.130
The Swedish modus operandi was succinctly identified by the eighteenth-
century historian Père Henri Griffet, who recounts how on 1 February
1639 Banér’s campaign army of 18,000 crossed the Elbe with limited
provisions and no more than 5,000–6,000 écus in its war-chest. The
general terror of Swedish arms ensured that the duke of Braunschweig-
Lüneburg was prepared to supply and pay them all they required for the
campaign.131 By keeping the campaign army small, fast-moving and with
an intimidating reputation for professionalism and military effectiveness,
its survival could be ensured in large part through extorting local
resources.132
The late 1630s were marked by an impressive series of campaigns in
which Banér with a small army and his back to the Baltic coast managed to
avoid being crushed by numerically superior, better-supported Imperial
forces.133 By the early 1640s the tide was turning, as Swedish survival
changed into military consolidation in the north, growth in the military
establishment and its capacity to take the initiative once again. The
aggressive, territorially assertive campaigns of Torstensson from 1642
Fig. 3.1 Johan Banér
successively pushed Brandenburg (1641) and Saxony (1646) into neutral-

ity, which was secured by the agreement to pay the Swedish army regular
contributions.134 The success of the Swedish armies in campaigning deep
into German territory and the Habsburg lands in the years from 1642
brought additional large gains from the policy of ruthless extortion, a
process which finally culminated in the sack of the old quarter of Prague
in summer 1648, which netted around 7 million talers in spoil for the
Swedish forces of Königsmarck and Avid Wittenberg.135 The Swedish

commanders still relied upon the settled resource base in the north, which
could provide basic funding for both the garrisons and the campaign army
and additional financial resources to underwrite munitions and equip-
ment contracts via Hamburg and Amsterdam merchants. But they com-
bined this with a ruthless determination to plunder and extort resources
from territories across southern and central Germany as part of their
larger strategy of forcing the war to a favourable conclusion that would
meet one of the most intractable of Swedish war aims: the payment of a
financial satisfactio large enough to meet the accumulated debts and out-
standing sums owed to the officers and men of the army. While directed
towards a coherent strategic purpose, this extortion in the course of
successive operations also ensured that the commanders, senior officers
and colonels in Swedish service enjoyed a more consistent and lengthier
period of enrichment than any other single group of military enterprisers
during the war.136
The Imperial army in the later years of the war had become more
dependent on central and local authority to negotiate and administer the
collection of sustainable contributions, and the commanders had much
less access to extraordinary funds that they could collect independently.
The Swedish campaign army and its commanders still enjoyed a high
degree of autonomy, given that the largest part of its financial support was
extorted by direct military action on territory which almost without
exception could be regarded as hostile.137 Military decision-making was
still closely tied to the relationship between the commanders and their
colonels. Banér and Torstensson were both employees of the Swedish
crown, commanding some units of Swedish soldiers paid by the state, and
receiving a portion of their military funding from contributions collected
under the authority of the Swedish crown in north Germany. But they
were also colonels-proprietor themselves and held authority within an
army which was largely composed of German colonels-proprietor.138
They were thoroughly integrated, linguistically and culturally, into a
German military world. Banér wrote to the Swedish court in German,
and a series of senior commanders – for example, Königsmarck
and General-Major Kurt von Pfuel (Banér’s brother-in-law) – were
Germans who had passed from being colonel-proprietors to the high
command.139 The one large group of colonels who might have provided
a counterweight to the Germans, the Scots, largely disappeared in the
1640s as ‘Britain’s Troubles’ drew them back across the North Sea to fight
for crown or Covenanters.140 Swedish commanders negotiated with their
mostly German colonels as shareholders, fully conscious of their status
as proprietors and respecting their financial interest in the army.
Torstensson formulated his military policy independently from the gov-

ernment in Stockholm, merely reporting most of his decisions to the
Regency Council for ratification.141 But he was careful to win over the
army colonels when he took over the command in 1641, reassuring them
that their financial commitments were noted, and providing two months’
pay for each company to meet previous expenses.142 The contribution
demands and other financial burdens levelled on German territory were
elaborately broken down into funding for different purposes – subsis-
tence, recruitment, purchase of weapons and equipment, artillery and
munitions, fodder – making it very clear that the funding needs of the
colonels underpinned the entire financial system.143 Nowhere is
Torstensson’s direct control of military operations clearer than in the
1644 lightning campaign against Denmark, itself granted the almost
unique accolade of being known to posterity as ‘Torstensson’s War’.
Apart from the initial decision to launch a pre-emptive strike against
Denmark, every aspect of the campaign that was launched by the
Swedish forces in Germany was managed and coordinated by their
commander.
Above all, cumulative success in the 1640s did not create the tempta-
tion massively to expand the military establishment again. Though a
number of smaller campaigning forces were created to conduct subsidiary
operations, the bulk of the veteran troops were concentrated in the army of
Torstensson and his successor, Wrangel.144 As with the Bavarian and
Imperial armies, the effect was to maintain a number of long-serving
units containing a very high proportion of veteran troops. Although the
Swedish crown disbanded all its German regiments in 1649–50, the
mechanisms for recruiting German troops from the same group of enter-
prisers were simply left in abeyance (see below, p. 280).
Conclusion
These examples of armies with a substantial component of private finan-
cial and organizational involvement by no means represent a comprehen-
sive list of enterprise-based armies in the Thirty Years War. Numerous
smaller Protestant forces subsisted largely through an element of private
enterprise. At least one, the army established by Wilhelm von Hessen-
Kassel, had a lengthy and successful history throughout the war, and
achieved something of the permanence and professionalism of the
Bavarian army, while never enjoying a comparable resource base.145
Another force made up of long-serving regimental proprietors, initially
raised as the army of a ruling prince and funded in part from his own ducal
resources, were the Lorraine troops of Duke Charles IV. The French
Conclusion 135
occupation of his duchy from the 1630s turned Charles into a general
contractor in the style of Mansfeld or Saxe-Weimar, except that his own
dynastic imperative of ultimately recovering his duchy constrained his
ability to negotiate contracts and pursue military activity with the potential
freedom of a Saxe-Weimar.146
This chapter has given little attention to the huge Spanish military
establishment of this period. This is in part because the lineaments of
the system were set out in the previous chapter: the Spanish crown
brought together a core of troops – the tercios viejos – which were directly
organized and funded by the state, surrounded by a much larger military
establishment made up of military contractors – whether these were
German colonels serving in the Netherlands, or Genoese nobles running
the Mediterranean galley squadrons. The demands of warfare for the
Spanish in the later sixteenth century had been uniquely intense and
large scale, and the development of the military system had already
taken on a settled form by the beginning of the Thirty Years War, one in
which a massive presence of military contracting played its role in keeping
the organizational and fiscal pressures of the military machine just in
check.147 There was no evolution comparable with that seen in the
Austrian Habsburg forces or the Swedish army, and the Spanish military
system occupies its own important niche in the spectrum of private–public
military partnerships as they evolved in this period. The French mon-
archy’s unique experience in establishing an initially highly problematic
public–private military partnership will be considered in more detail in
Chapter 6. Nor has the diversity of naval organization been fully exam-
ined. This is again partly because many of the developments in combining
state-owned and state-built warships with privately contracted elements of
navies, and in outsourcing aspects of naval activity to private contractors,
had already occurred during the sixteenth century, and there was less
distinctive evolution in the period of the Thirty Years War.
What this chapter has sought to show is that there was no single model
for the organization of military force in this period; still less was there any
inexorable process towards a state-run, state-controlled army. No state
had the resources or the organization to create a significant army directly
under its own funding and control, and the only issue was what level of
private enterprise would be encouraged or allowed. Equally though,
Mansfeld’s and a number of other armies raised by so-called general
contractors demonstrate that the independent contract army raised
entirely at the risk of the colonel-proprietors lacked even medium-term
durability during the Thirty Years War. What is evident from the given
examples is that different political and military pressures can lead to very
different emphases in the relationship between central authority – most
often seen in the continued ability to finance, or facilitate financing, of a

part of the army – and the organizational and financial role played by
private contractors in raising and maintaining an army. These then dem-
onstrate a range of partnerships between state and private enterprise,
some of which failed spectacularly, in the manner of Wallenstein’s system,
others of which offer more constructive possibilities for combining mili-
tary sustainability and adaptability.
This will become more evident in the next chapter when the relative
military effectiveness of these armies will be considered. Private involve-
ment in military activity may make sense from a financial and organi-
zational perspective, but can it produce armies and navies capable of
achieving military objectives and operating as effective instruments of
strategy? Much conventional wisdom assumes that the involvement of a
private ‘mercenary’ element in warfare is tantamount to adopting a waste-
ful and ineffective military system, the only justification for which must
have been short-term financial expediency.
Part II
Operations and structures

4 The military contractor at war
It was an age of great generals, commanding small armies and achieving

great things . . .
Jacques de Guibert, writing of the Thirty Years War after the death of
Gustavus Adolphus in his Essai général de tactique of 1772.1
Interpreting early modern warfare

In the aftermath of Gustavus Adolphus’ victory at Breitenfeld in
September 1631, Imperial and Bavarian forces were fragmented across
the Empire and faced a large, confident army divided into powerful field
forces which were rapidly consolidating a Swedish grip across central and
western Germany. Elector Maximilian of Bavaria, whose main priority
was preparing for the imminent Swedish assault on Bavaria, appointed
Gottfried Heinrich von Pappenheim to command the remnants of
Bavarian and Imperial forces spread in garrisons across the Westphalian
Circle, with instructions to attempt a diversion which might take military
pressure off the south. Pappenheim had no financial resources, and cal-
culated that raising an army adequate to conduct this operation would
cost 300,000 talers.2 Neither Maximilian nor the Emperor would spare
troops and money from what they anticipated would be the main struggle
to decide the fate of southern Germany and the Habsburg lands.
Nevertheless, by stripping troops from the Westphalian garrisons and
drawing upon his reputation to encourage enterpriser-colonels to advance
some capital to raise or reconstruct units, Pappenheim put together a
modest force of some 4,000–5,000 troops, though these were, in his
own words ‘experienced men, hardened and eager to fight’.3
Pappenheim’s operational instinct was to take the campaign deep into
enemy-held territory, and in early January he broke out of Westphalia
towards Magdeburg in the Lower Saxon Circle, where an Imperial garri-
son was blockaded by Swedish forces of 10,000 men commanded by the
relatively inexperienced Johan Banér. Successfully misleading Banér
139
about the strength of his own troops, Pappenheim drew him off and
entered Magdeburg on 14 January 1632.4 Notoriously, of course,
Magdeburg had been sacked and virtually destroyed by the Imperial
army eight months previously; but it remained a prestigious and strategi-
cally important centre, and the military assumption was that such strong-
points should be held. Pappenheim simply incorporated the garrison into
his army, destroyed the artillery which he could not take with him, and
abandoned the city. Between February and October he conducted a
remarkable, extended campaign across enemy-held territory in Lower
Saxony and the borders of the Westphalian Circle, reliant on food and
provisions that he could organize through his own resources, and obtain
or seize locally. Plundering territory in a ruthless campaign of manoeuvre
and surprise, he wrong-footed Swedish and Hessian forces which totalled
almost four times his own 8,000 men, blocked a Swedish operation
against the major Westphalian city of Paderborn, in turn captured smaller
places such as Höxter and Einbeck, while defeating Swedish and Hessian
forces in detail. The campaign was a masterpiece of surprise, disinforma-
tion and rapid responses to evolving circumstances. While tying down
throughout the summer of 1632 substantial Swedish forces which might
otherwise have given Gustavus more flexibility in dealing with
Wallenstein, Pappenheim was able to use interior lines to defend
Westphalian territories against any Swedish counter-incursion.
Moreover in the midst of a campaign that covered hundreds of miles of
rapid troop movements and involved more than a dozen engagements
with enemy forces, he managed to ensure adequate food supplies for his
troops and even organized the purchase of new equipment and clothing
from merchants in Cologne, having them shipped to Paderborn for dis-
tribution.5 As a matter of operational priorities, Pappenheim had avoided
sieges of major places which might draw him into an unsought battle with
larger Swedish forces. However, he rounded off the campaign with the
remarkable capture of Hildesheim on 9 October, again by a combination
of bluff, surprise and intimidation. Most immediately important for
Pappenheim was the huge contribution of 200,000 talers imposed on
the city, a vital means to provide his officers with the wherewithal to pay
arrears of wages to their troops and reimburse themselves for their
expenses in the campaign. A few days after this, Pappenheim responded
to the ever-more insistent orders from Wallenstein that he move east to
reinforce the main Imperial army, and was to meet his own death at
Lützen a few weeks later.6
Three years later, in August 1635, a mixed force of ships set out from
Dunkirk on a raiding expedition of the type that had been characteristic of
the previous decade. The fleet comprised six frigates from the royal
Interpreting early modern warfare 141
Fig. 4.1 Gottfried Heinrich von Pappenheim
squadron, built and manned under the direction of the Spanish crown,
and fourteen other privateering ships independently owned by Dunkirk
armateurs, who paid their captains and crews but hoped to cover costs and
make profits from successful prize-taking and booty. Some of these pri-
vateering vessels, like those constructed for the Van der Walle family of
armateurs, were built to the same specifications as the royal frigates: fast,
well-armed, low-lying vessels of 150–200 tonnes, designed to catch and
Stade
26 April – 7 May Hamburg
Elb
e
17 April
Verden
United
Provinces
Brunswick
10–16 Oct.
Hildesheim
Magdeburg
(3) 31 May. 1632
14–17 Jan. 1632
Hameln
(1) 29 Dec. 1631 4–12 April
Rh 18 July
ine (2) 28 Jan.–17
Jan. – 17Feb. ’32 Einbeck
Feb.’32 Saxony
27 Sept. 21 Oct
26 July Paderborn (4) 6–8 July
7–9 Sept. 18–20 Sept. 1 July
Rohrort Dortmund 15 Nov.
Warburg
Halle
Völksmarsen Höxter Munden 28 Oct.
27 June ’32 (16 Mar.) 9–16 June Mühlhausen
Westphalia Leipzig
Höxter II
19/20 Aug. 16 Nov.
29 Sept.
Vicinity
Vicinity Of
of Maastricht
Maastricht Battle of Lützen
Hesse
Cologne
22 Dec. 1631
Spanism
Netherlands
Thuringia
Frankfuat am Main
Map 4.1 Pappenheim’s campaign in 1632

overwhelm the typical merchant ships, the fluyts, operated by the Dutch,
but potentially a match for heavier, slower warships.7 Others, drawn from
the pool of sixty or seventy privateering ships operating out of Dunkirk on a
year-on-year basis, were lighter, but still well armed and crewed. The fleet
was under the experienced leadership of the admiral of the Dunkirk royal
squadron, Jacques Colaert, who began his career as a privateering captain
employed by an armateur consortium of magistrates from Bergues.8 Setting
out into the North Sea, Colaert’s ships encountered the Dutch fishing fleet
operating out of the port of Enkhuizen: the fleet sank more than half of the
140 fishing ships, capturing more stragglers the following day. A few days
later they intercepted the Maas fishing fleet, overwhelmed their naval guard
and destroyed another twenty vessels. En route back to Dunkirk, laden with
prisoners and booty, the fleet ran into a Dutch battle squadron of twenty-
two ships and worsted them in the engagement, reaching security without
the loss of a single ship.9 The quantity of plunder was overwhelming,
together with 800 prisoners and the prize of a major Dutch warship. They
had managed to sink in the region of 8,000 tonnes of enemy shipping in just
over two weeks of operations.10 Earlier in the year, and following the
French declaration of war in April, another Dunkirk-based combination
of royal frigates and privateers had intercepted the French Dieppe fishing
fleet, capturing forty-two vessels from a fleet of fifty-two, together with one
of the largest French warships, the La Rochelle, captained by the father of the
later French admiral Abraham Duquesne, who was mortally wounded in
the combat.11 A month after his return to Dunkirk, Colaert and his fleet set
out again, and this time managed to intercept a large convoy of the Dutch
West India Company, capturing amongst other vessels the flagship of the
escorting warships.12 The impact of these losses on the Dutch economy was
severe and demoralizing: it was felt in the herring fisheries and in trade with
the Baltic and the Mediterranean, and had a significant impact on levels of
maritime insurance. Taken over the successive campaigns and losses across
the 1620s and 1630s it did a great deal more to disillusion the Dutch with
the conduct of the war than conventional military means ever achieved.13
These accounts of two very different military operations during the
Thirty Years War highlight the involvement of military enterprisers pre-
pared to finance and organize warfare on their own account, and give an
indication of the extent to which this involvement might determine the
methods and focus of the campaigning. Pappenheim himself articulated a
theory of aggressive, destabilizing and fast-moving operations as a deliber-
ate approach to war which, rather than relying on a single major encounter,
sought to make best use of limited resources and to exploit enemy weak-
nesses in detail.14 Colaert was invited to the court at Madrid, where he
proposed a coherent theory of intensified economic warfare based on a fleet
Fig. 4.2 Jacques Colaert
that included heavier galleons as well as the frigates, and further fortification
and harbour work on Dunkirk.15 Yet neither of these operations occupies a
significant role in most traditional accounts of the Thirty Years War.
Overviews of the century of European warfare from 1560 to 1660 have
been sharply divided. On one side, the period has been presented as an age
of dramatic tactical, organizational and strategic progress both on land
and at sea. It has been linked on land with the birth – or rebirth – of the
‘decisive battle’, and at sea with the triumph of firepower and line-of-
battle tactics. The period has been identified with great commanders,
whose military genius shaped and directed their armed forces in new
directions, and whose leadership and military achievements personify
the transformation of warfare: Maurice of Nassau, Gustavus Adolphus,
Maarten Tromp, Turenne, Blake, all occupy an assured place in accounts
of the changing character of early modern warfare and in the history of
military and strategic thinking. Perceptions of the period as one of pro-
gress and transformation were reinforced by widespread acceptance of the
‘military revolution’ thesis, first advanced as an integrated theory of
military change by Michael Roberts in 1955 (see above, pp. 14–17).
Though Roberts himself was measured in his assessments, subsequent
accounts of early modern warfare seized on the thesis, casting Gustavus
Adolphus of Sweden as the creator of modern warfare following a Dutch
prologue in which the basic foundations are laid by the military reforms of
Maurice of Nassau. Gustavus’ victories, most notably at Breitenfeld in
1631, signalled the birth of a ‘strategy of annihilation’, aimed via over-
whelming victories on the battlefield at ending wars quickly by the
destruction of the enemy’s will to resist.16
A very different view of this century of warfare, and above all of land
warfare, is not hard to find. Starting from accounts written at or just after
the time of the Thirty Years War, hugely reinforced by later eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century German romantic writers and in particular by
Schiller’s great trilogy of Wallenstein plays and his own history of the
Thirty Years War, the period was presented as one of all-destructive,
indecisive struggle, in which political aims and ambitions were totally at
odds with the military resources and strategy needed to achieve these. The
Thirty Years War shares with the first World War the dubious accolade of
being regarded as the pre-eminent example of a futile and meaningless
conflict.17
If the argument for an early modern ‘military revolution’ might seem to
have revived an interpretation of the period as one of tactical and strategic
progress, paradoxically much of the subsequent discussion and criticism
of the thesis has reinforced the trend towards a thoroughly negative
picture of wasteful, destructive and strategically sterile warfare. The argu-
ment for a transformation of the battlefield through tactical and organiza-
tional innovations had always owed more to the a priori claims of
reformers than to empirical validation through events on the battlefield.
There was nothing especially distinctive, let alone revolutionary, about
the redeployment of troops in shallower, linear formations which would
allow more infantry the opportunity to fire their muskets or arquebuses.
A wide range of tactical manuals published in the second half of the
sixteenth and in the early seventeenth century in Spain, Italy and France
indicate that there was a general evolution towards shallower, therefore
smaller, units of infantry on the battlefield.18 The enduring problem faced

by both theorists and military practitioners was not how to maximize
infantry firepower, which, given the limited range, slowness of loading
and chronic inaccuracy of handguns, might in any case seem an objective
of questionable value. The real issue was the trade-off between an infantry
formation that could optimize its weaponry but still retain the mass and
cohesion in defence and attack that would come from close-order, deep
formations.19 The same basic concerns shaped the deployment of cavalry
on the battlefield: horsemen armed with pistols as their principal weapon
might suggest relatively shallow, linear units, organized in small forma-
tions with plenty of flexibility in deployment; but cavalry deployed as
assault troops would be better in deep columns that could punch through
enemy units with their weight and momentum.20 There was no single
right answer to battlefield deployment, because there was in fact no
‘revolutionary’ solution to winning battles.
Although the 1631 battle of Breitenfeld is typically presented as the
triumph of new linear tactics and infantry firepower by the Swedes, what
saved the day for Gustavus Adolphus after the collapse of the Saxon army
on his left wing was his deployment of the Swedish squadrons of 300–400
men in solid, wedge-shaped brigades of 1,200–1,500, dominated by their
pikemen.21 They were the primary military units on the battlefield, robust
enough to confront the full-sized regiments of the Catholic Liga and the
Imperialists. It was this cohesion, coupled with experience and good
leadership, which allowed the (mostly Scottish) regiments of the second
line to wheel round after the collapse of the Saxon army and prevent
Tilly’s forces rolling up the entire Swedish army from the flank. After
withstanding this threat, the Swedes were in a position to launch their
massive, cavalry-dominated counter-attacks into the weakened centre of
Tilly’s army.22
Doubts that it is possible to draw simple and tactically significant
distinctions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ styles of troop deployment can be
extended well beyond the particular encounter at Breitenfeld.23
Historians’ stress on the importance of linear formations and drilling
infantry in counter-march and salvo, as if these could make or break
battlefield outcomes, has been misleading.24 At best, they are an anach-
ronistic prefiguration of developments which would only begin to come
into their own in the later seventeenth century when infantry were armed
with superior flintlock muskets, and pikemen could be phased out in
favour of entire units of musketeers equipped with ring-bayonets.25 In
an era when infantry firearms had limited killing power, most infantry
fighting took the form of ferocious hand-to-hand engagements, and expe-
rienced pikemen at the centre of units could present a virtually
Fig. 4.3 A typical small-scale cavalry engagement of the type which

dominated much fighting in the Thirty Years War
impenetrable barrier to an attacking force, it was the cavalry who more

often than not played the decisive role in determining battlefield out-
comes. Investment in raising the quality and the numbers of cavalry,
and keeping experienced troopers in service and well mounted, was
crucial to military success.26
The crucial element of firepower on the battlefield was provided by
artillery. But in comparison with the massive increase in the numbers of
field guns deployed by armies between 1660 and 1760, the numbers of
cannon deployed on the battlefields of the Thirty Years War remained
modest, though as capable as their sixteenth-century counterparts had
been of inflicting heavy casualties on close-packed formations at consid-
erable distances.27 The real possibility for a dramatic breakthrough in the
use of artillery on the battlefield would depend upon the development of
much lighter, specifically anti-personnel, field guns. Yet throughout this
period the problems of trading off lightness against reliability remained: a
three-pound cannon produced to a standard quality of casting still had a
heavy barrel and could not easily be manoeuvred, but lighter castings
threatened to overheat, crack or explode far more easily.28 Whereas the
Swedes persisted with their lighter guns and did achieve a significant
enhancement of firepower through distributing these as regimental field

pieces, the Imperial army used guns with lighter shot (usually three
pounds), but without making much attempt to reduce the barrel weight.29
The French army in contrast seems to have abandoned all attempts to put
lighter guns on the battlefield in this period.30
The evidence for specific and clear-cut advantage to be extracted from
new weaponry, tactics and organization is hard to find amidst accounts of
battles in which both sides deployed troops in largely similar ways, used
similar combinations of arms and possessed a shared awareness of the
tactical potential and limitations of their troops once on the battlefield.31
Pitched battles, it would seem, lost little of their traditional character as
unpredictable encounters in which numbers, morale, terrain and leader-
ship would blend in an uncertain mixture to produce uncertain outcomes.
If the new model Swedish army apparently vindicated its tactical qualities
at Breitenfeld, it went on to suffer a phyrric victory at Lützen and virtual
annihilation at Nördlingen in 1634.
One response to what might appear the unchanging and unpredictable
context of the battlefield and its failure to offer any kind of guarantee of
decisive military outcomes was to return to the opinion of contempora-
ries, revealed both in their direct writings and in the multitude of printed
manuals and guides to the art of war in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Here historians can be left in no doubt at all that the principal
form of early modern land warfare had become the siege. Manuals are
filled with details about ballistics, siege encampments and the steps to be
taken to construct or reinforce fortifications and to deploy artillery in
defence or amongst the besieging army. While siege warfare had not by
any means achieved the quasi-scientific precision it reached in the age of
Vauban, when the course and length of a particular siege could be pre-
dicted as a carefully choreographed military performance, it still had a
clear objective and, one way or the other, a clear outcome that could stand
in marked contrast to the chance and indecision of battle.32
In his interpretation of early modern military change, Geoffrey Parker
argued that not merely did the siege predominate over the battle as the key
military event in early modern land warfare, but the technological changes
brought about by the development of artillery-resistant fortifications were
themselves the precipitant of a military revolution. The financial burdens
imposed by the new style of fortification were discussed in Chapter 2, but
the military impact of these extended defence systems was no less signifi-
cant. With fortifications that were resistant to reduction by anything other
than blockade and starvation or systematic artillery bombardment, sieges
transformed the scale of warfare by their demands for manpower: not just
the number of troops on the ground to man the siege-works, but the
additional troops required to make good wastage from disease and deser-
tion in the siege camp, to convoy supplies to the encampment and to
provide one or more additional army corps to repel relief attempts. Sieges
could come to dictate the character of entire military campaigns. If some
commanders regarded a fortified city as a prize and bargaining counter
worth consuming an entire campaign to capture, other commanders who
might have sought a field engagement recognized that to leave heavily
garrisoned and well-defended fortified places in the rear of their army
would pose obvious dangers for the maintenance of lines of communication
and supply. And as Parker points out, the development of siege warfare was
more or less shadowed by a similar technological shift in the nature of naval
warfare, with its emphasis on more and heavier shipboard artillery and the
tactical shift to a style of combat based on firepower that was akin to the use
of batteries of artillery in sieges. The result was the same: more expense,
greater technological sophistication and higher demands for manpower.33
Historically convincing though the argument for the dominance of the
siege remains, it has a major consequence for the perception of warfare in
this period. If Michael Roberts argued that adopting new organization and
tactics on the battlefield restored military decisiveness, the great majority
of sieges, and the process of siege warfare itself, reinforce exactly the
opposite conclusion. Sieges were expensive, resource intensive in both
materials and the lives of military personnel and civilians, and achieving
the final surrender or conquest of a place stood a good chance of domi-
nating any given campaign to the exclusion of other operational objec-
tives. The French armies on the Flanders frontier between 1638 and 1646
poured resources into military campaigns that averaged just less than one
successful major siege per year, and in some cases that gain was offset by a
corresponding failure to hold a place elsewhere on the frontier.34
The same could be said about naval warfare in the Thirty Years War.
Both large-scale attacks on fortified coastal positions and set-piece sea
battles were costly, resource-consuming operations, which would con-
sume an entire campaign and offered only a small chance of decisive
results. The English failures at Cadiz (1626) and the Isle de Ré (1627)
were matched by the Spanish attempt to dislodge the Dutch from the
Brazilian coast (1639).35 Even Tromp’s encounter with the Spanish
fleet at the Downs had limited strategic impact, while the large-scale
Danish–Swedish engagement off Kolberger Heide (1644) was entirely
indecisive.36 Outright victories at sea usually reflected either substantial
numerical superiority or the ability to surprise a fleet in port or on the coast
before it could deploy for battle.
All of these factors appear to point in the same direction, confirming a
traditional picture of warfare as indecisive, destructive and futile. And
behind this stands another issue, widely seen as no less fundamental to

explaining the strategic stagnation of this warfare and what is taken to be
its particular, institutionalized brutality and savage treatment of civilians
throughout this period. For these conflicts were very largely fought by
mercenaries, with all the consequences that this was assumed to entail.
Officers providing troops for the belligerents under mercenary contracts
had naturally exploited the surrounding misery of a war-torn Europe to
recruit soldiers as cheaply as possible, regardless of military suitability.
The officers’ aim was to increase their profits from paying little or nothing
to their – disposable – soldiers, while making still larger gains from system-
atic plunder and looting of the areas in which their troops were stationed
or which they occupied. Serving for gain, and in command of soldiers of
the lowest quality, such mercenary commanders would naturally be
averse to any kind of campaign strategy that demanded resolute military
qualities from their troops, or might require moving away from territory
where subsistence and profit could be derived with minimal risk. Battles
and extended sieges would threaten to damage or destroy their investment
and place the whole process of personal reimbursement into the hands of
chance. In the same way, naval war in which a large proportion of ships
were in private ownership is assumed simply to be an aggregation of
private interests whose main aim must be the pursuit of plunder and
prizes, and will be completely resistant to incorporation within any serious
maritime strategy. In sum, the problems of fighting war by mercenaries
would be all of those which Machiavelli and other writers in the anti-
mercenary tradition portrayed as the evils of relying on condottiere
captains.
The objective of this chapter is to challenge some of these assumptions.
Far from being one of the main problems standing in the way of waging
effective war in the period down to 1660, military contracting offered a
partial solution to the challenges that were described above. Appreciating
some of the strengths and the resilience of military enterprise provides a
more realistic understanding of the waging of war in this period than the
typical preoccupations with supposedly progressive and conservative
approaches to tactical and organizational reforms, or simplistic assump-
tions equating direct state control of armies with military effectiveness and
‘mercenaries’ with the selfish pursuit of immediate financial interests. A
central issue in the present examination is the recognition, emphasized in
the previous chapters, that ‘state administration’ and ‘private enterprise’
cannot be neatly divided into separate spheres. There were good reasons
why rulers and their governments had encouraged wider and more per-
manent private involvement in warfare. The results of this movement
towards public–private military partnerships had resulted in a diversity
The military enterpriser in his military context 151
of models, from the almost entirely autonomous contract army to those in

which the ruler and his administrators continued to play a substantial role
in determining policy and providing heavy financial and organizational
support, and where the colonel-proprietors were best seen as minority
shareholders. Similarly diverse mixtures of state and private enterprise
had characterized naval warfare from an earlier period, and continued to
develop in these decades. But in all these cases, it may be suggested, the
presence of a private military interest, far from being disruptive and
weakening, was a significant reason why these armies performed more
effectively and with more strategic coherence than superficial accounts of
the war and typical prejudice would suggest.
The military enterpriser in his military

context: thinking operationally
One curious and largely unremarked aspect of warfare in this period is that
major field battles were fought with ferocity and commitment by both
officers and soldiers in all the major armies. As we have seen, the signifi-
cance of battles has been downplayed both in consequence of revisionist
thinking about the character of a military revolution, and because of
traditional assumptions about the reluctance of mercenary contractors
and their men to fight if they could avoid it. Yet pitched battles do not
disappear from the campaigns of the Thirty Years War, nor were they
fought with ever-diminishing zeal by unmotivated and reluctant soldiers
as the implications of their strategic futility became manifest. Indeed as
the war continued, battles were harder fought, with still higher propor-
tions of casualties amongst soldiers and officers, and with vicious hand-to-
hand combat at the heart of each engagement. Some of these battles,
notably Rheinfelden (1638), Freiburg (1644) and Jankow (1645), lasted
for more than a single day, and most directly involved in combat a high
proportion of all those soldiers who were serving in these comparatively
small field armies.37 A battle like Jankow, which pitched Torstensson’s
Swedish army of German mercenaries against the Imperial army of
Hatzfeld, was extraordinarily hard fought by any standards, with around
5,000 dead and wounded on each side from evenly matched armies of
around 16,000 men each. Three years earlier the second battle of
Breitenfeld had been, by contemporary consensus, the most savage battle
in memory, with 50 per cent of the Imperial army dead, wounded or taken
prisoner, and 30 per cent dead and wounded amongst the Swedes. A
point additionally worth stressing in all these cases is the high numbers of
senior officers and colonels amongst the dead and wounded in such
engagements: this was not war fought from a distance by commanders

who treated their units as cannon-fodder.38
This intensity of combat inevitably raises questions about the morale
and motivation of the soldiers, their self-perception and the extent to
which they must have possessed some understanding of the broader
campaign objectives for which they were fighting. Soldiers are unlikely
to fight with sustained commitment in horrific close-quarter engagements
during which they sustain 30–50 per cent casualties, if they assume that
they have drifted into the combat by accident, and that it has no larger
military purpose.39 This seems especially relevant to the Imperial and
Spanish armies in this period, so frequently presented as the self-evident
losers in a process of military and political transformation, and apparently
condemned to an uninterrupted sequence of battlefield defeats and set-
backs. It takes two sides to make a hard-fought, intense combat: at Jankow
in 1645 or at Lens in 1648 the Imperialists and the Spanish may have
suffered from faulty command decisions, but they were clearly not demo-
ralized and panicked from the outset in the face of ‘obviously’ superior
Swedish and French armies, and they were prepared to receive and
impose casualties on a level remarkable for any period of combat.
The ability to maintain high levels of combat commitment amongst the
troops of the major armies right down to the very last campaigns of the
Thirty Years War says something significant about the military qualities of
those involved; it is simply not convincing to adopt the traditional anti-
mercenary paradigm that these troops were simply ‘rabble . . . dredged up
from all over Europe and incapable of solidarity’, the inevitable product of
recruitment by colonels anxious to raise their units as cheaply as possi-
ble.40 The military qualities that ensured that these soldiers and their
junior officers fought with commitment and tenacity when called upon
to do so in battle should, however, be seen as only one part of a larger
story.
When discussing the waging of war, historians tend to focus attention
on the immediate tactical level of combat – how a particular battle or siege
was won – or they have examined the highest, strategic plane of warfare,
where the military meets the political in the formulation of military objec-
tives, in decisions about where and how war should be fought, and the
matching of resources, military outcomes and political will in negotiating
peace settlements. More frequently neglected is the operational level of
combat, standing between the tactical and this highest, strategic level.
It is relatively easy to focus on the individual battle and the tactical skills
that may have produced a victory in the field, or the specific organizational
and resource-deployment decisions that bring a siege to a successful
conclusion. But an effective commander needs to be capable of managing
his army through an entire campaign, or sequence of campaigns, and of

adopting a coherent military plan capable of integrating individual mili-
tary encounters, whether this is to break into enemy territory or to deny an
opponent his lines of communication or access to resources. To do this
means holding an army together, keeping it supplied and maintaining
reasonable strength, and either moving it in accordance with an original
campaign plan or making pragmatic changes to that plan as military
circumstances alter. The achievement and maintenance of this opera-
tional capability is the real determinant of military effectiveness, the
means by which local advantage can be transformed, over successive
campaigns, into strategic opportunity. Without this larger operational
capability, individual battles won or lost, sieges undertaken or abandoned,
can easily prove irrelevant – little more than the product of good or bad
fortune. The victory at Rocroi in April 1643 was not systematically fol-
lowed up by the victorious French army during the rest of that campaign,
and it is clear that neither the young duc d’Enghien nor the king’s council
in Paris had any coherent plan to exploit the victory beyond securing
Rocroi itself, with Enghien belatedly laying siege to Thionville, which
fell on 10 August.41 In contrast Lennart Torstensson, an experienced,
capable professional soldier, knew precisely how he would exploit the
opportunity provided by his victory at Jankow in early March 1645, and
conducted a fast-moving, hard-hitting campaign which took his army to
within one day’s march of Vienna by 6 April.42
This stress on operational capability should also be seen as part of a
larger issue, that of the underlying transformation of European warfare. In
Chapter 2 it was argued that the real ‘revolution in military affairs’ in early
modern Europe was about developing the means to meet the challenge of
ever-more protracted warfare, and about sustaining armies and combat
effectiveness for as long or longer than rival powers. The emergence of
continuous war fought over multiple campaigns was the most fundamen-
tal change in the character of European conflict, and it was the need to
keep armies in being for decades, not a handful of campaigns, which both
encouraged states to turn to the military contractor and had made his role
financially and organizationally viable. The ‘core competence’ of an army
had become the ability to sustain continuous campaigning, replenish
losses and remain militarily effective – in effect to develop operational
skills in the longer term, and to adapt them to changing circumstances and
the cumulative outcome of events. As Monro, Scots colonel in the service
of Sweden, said of the Catholic Liga, ‘once every year setting up ever new
Armies . . . their wisdom and constancy were so great, that presently the
next Spring, through their power and diligence, they had ever another new
Army afoote, which in th’end made their enemies, the Evangelists
weary’.43 The problem with this stress on the operational level of military
activity is of course summed up in Clausewitz’s familiar remark: ‘every-
thing in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult’.
Seventeenth-century commanders encountered external challenges to
achieving operational effectiveness: constraints in meeting the demand
for both food and munitions; problems of communication and trans-
portation; the impact of seasons, climate and disease on numbers of
military effectives, on physical resilience and troop mobility. They also
encountered limits from within the military structure: the quality and
staying power of their troops; adequacy of equipment and logistical sup-
port; effectiveness of command and control. These constraints could only
be surmounted by adaption, flexibility and a pragmatic willingness to
adjust methods and approaches without losing sight of overall objectives.
But within the limitations of the period, and with variations in effective-
ness that reflected individual military skill, organization, adaptabilty and
leadership, it is possible to say that the armies and navies of this period
managed to achieve a more impressive level of operational effectiveness
than they are usually credited with. Moreover they achieved this not
despite the involvement of military enterprisers and their activities, but
to a significant extent because of them.
At the root of the effective management of armies at an operational level
were two fundamentals, both of which reflect the preoccupations of the
military enterprisers who dominated the unit commands and through this,
the senior posts in the military hierarchy. The first was a strong personal
and financial interest, expressed collectively, in ensuring the sustainability
of the army. If the constituent colonel-proprietors in an army had been
prepared to invest money and credit to recruit and equip units of combat-
effective troops, now that these forces were raised they were concerned to
keep them in being. They had no wish to see their investment squandered
through ill-planned, unrealistic or badly supported military ventures.
This might of course suggest the typical anti-mercenary paradigm: unit
and army commanders would inevitably prove risk-averse in combat and
campaigning, acting, for example, simply to batten on to home or neutral
territory which could then be ransacked for military contributions to
recover their initial investment. But actual campaigning was usually less
straightforward than such easy calculations. In a few territories during the
Thirty Years War rival armies did manage to agree contribution treaties
which allowed the peaceful collection of war taxes by troops in adjoining
territories, or might involve protection money being paid by each side to
the other’s army to prevent military raids and plunder on their territory.
The best-known cases were on the borders between the Spanish
Netherlands and the United Provinces, where the armies from the later
Fig. 4.4 The surprise and defeat of the French Army of Germany at
Tuttlingen, 24 November 1643
1630s were reluctant to initiate new military activity, and both central
governments tacitly encouraged the maintenance of a locally financed
status quo.44 But contemporary commanders were aware that such agree-
ments usually depended on an extremely volatile military calculation. The
moment that an enemy field army could see both strategic and material
advantage in advancing into territory that was occupied by an army dis-
persed in an extensive, passive operation to garrison and collect contri-
butions, the fate of the latter would be sealed.45 Dispersed forces were
acutely vulnerable to a campaign army, graphically demonstrated for
example by the disaster that overwhelmed the French Army of Germany
as it dispersed into winter quarters around Tuttlingen in late 1643.46
Prudent military commanders thus had positive strategic and subsis-
tence interests in conducting an active defence of the territory they held
and denying control of other territory to the enemy. They had equally
strong financial and military incentives for carrying the war into enemy-
occupied lands to extend their own resource base and deny its use to the
enemy. To secure either goal they needed to maintain and deploy an
effective campaign or field army, even if in cases an overall majority of

their available troops remained spread out in garrisons. The operations,
success and failure of the field army would determine the larger sustain-
ability of the entire force raised by military enterprise.
Military enterprisers had an obvious interest in ensuring the sustain-
ability of the army, whether in terms of its internal cohesion, the avail-
ability of resources to keep it fed and supplied, or in pursuing military
policies that did not needlessly jeopardize its chances of survival. At the
same time, they were fully aware that the longer-term chances of recover-
ing their investment, making substantial profits from war and enjoying the
long-term social and political benefits of successful army command
depended strongly on the military capability of the army, and its capacity
to secure and defend its own territorial base and to threaten that of the
enemy; in sum, it would depend on the army’s effectiveness at an opera-
tional level.
The combination of these priorities fed into the construction and
operations of these armies at a number of levels, and in ways which
reflected the balance of interest and control between the ruler and his
administration on one side, and the military enterprisers on the other. Yet
the surprising point is the substantial common ground amongst all of
these armies and their modus operandi when compared with the priorities
and operating assumptions of armies which can be considered more
directly under the control of a ruler and administered more obviously as
a branch of the government.
Operational effectiveness
From Landsknechte to Soldateska: maintaining military

quality in armies raised under contract
Sustaining the army and ensuring operational effectiveness were the twin
goals shared by those with a personal and financial stake in the command
of the armies of the Thirty Years War, and both came together in the
selection and maintenance of the soldiers who would do the fighting.
The military contractors – captains and especially colonels – who
recruited a large proportion of the soldiers of the Thirty Years War were
unlike their Swiss, Scots and Landsknecht predecessors in that from the
outset they had taken on the costs of raising all or part of their units at their
own expense. As we saw in Chapter 3, in return for this exposure to
financial risk the proprietors could expect compensation in the form of
disproportionately higher pay or other opportunities for reimbursement
once the army began operations. The longer the unit continued in service,
Operational effectiveness 157
the larger the potential recompense for this initial speculative investment
and for any subsequent expenses that the proprietors may have been
required to meet to sustain the unit. It is easily assumed that this require-
ment to provide some or all of the capital to raise the regiment or company
would lead to cost-cutting and the levy of the lowest-quality recruits. The
temptation certainly existed. Western and central European societies of
the earlier sixteenth century had undergone sustained population increase
with accompanying economic polarization and mounting social tensions
provoked by scarcity of land, rising food prices and downward pressure on
wages. From the later sixteenth century whole territories were disrupted
by the destruction of warfare, population dislocation, high levels of unem-
ployment and underemployment amongst rural and urban labouring
populations, and family and community destabilization caused by relent-
less waves of epidemic disease. This was the background for an unprece-
dented growth in impoverished or destitute populations across most of
Europe. Given the relatively modest size of military establishments before
the later seventeenth century, the potential to recruit from this marginal
population was almost unlimited. These were men, often unfit or under-
age, abandoned by their own communities and regarded as unwelcome
vagrants or criminals by urban authorities, who could be acquired for little
or no enlistment bonus by recruiting officers. They were available in huge
numbers, easy to draw into military service by bribes of drink or food.
They were also, as military enterprisers were mostly well aware, the worst
material on which to build a militarily effective and sustainable company
or regiment.47
This did not of course mean that such men were not recruited, and
indeed they probably formed a transient majority of most ordinary regi-
ments serving in the conflicts of the later sixteenth century or the Thirty
Years War. There were many cases where colonels would simply opt to
prioritize short-term financial interests in forming a regiment predomi-
nantly from such recruits. In other cases, despite goodwill, a colonel and
his recruiting captains might lack sufficient cash-in-hand or the organiza-
tional capacity to find recruits of better quality, often in circumstances
where they needed to meet a stringent timetable to ensure that the unit
was ready for service by the beginning of a campaign.48 On some occa-
sions, and in the face of multiple, competing demands from different
enterprisers and their warlords, it might simply be impossible to find
anyone other than raw, underage or unfit recruits to fill the ranks. The
recruitment of troops after 1618 certainly did not fall into any straightfor-
ward, steady pattern of demand, but like everything else required for the
war effort was determined by peaks and troughs of demand and supply.
But, easy to enlist, these men were no less rapidly lost: often they were
physically weak or suffering from debilitating illness, susceptible to dis-

ease, or psychologically ill-disposed to permanent service in military units
which they had joined through necessity and which had offered them
minimal inducement either to enlist or to stay in service. These sort of
recruits were described as ‘falling away like flies, whether becoming sick
and incapacitated or deserting at the first opportunity’.49
Although some regimental commanders and captains might have
read the works of fashionable Calvinist military theorists, with their
proposals that formal drill and discipline should be uniformly imposed
on recruits via the detailed prescriptions of military manuals, they
would have no illusions that this could turn such raw recruits into
experienced soldiers between the time of enlistment and the first
engagements with the enemy.50 As Sir Roger Williams wrote in the
1590s when these issues of how to establish military effectiveness were
intensely debated: ‘It is an errour to think that experimented Souldiers
are sodenlie made like glasses, in blowing them with a puffe out of an
iron instrument.’51
Colonels and their military superiors were directly brought up in, or
influenced by, a military culture determined by the Swiss or Landsknecht
tradition of raising and maintaining combat-ready units based on sub-
stantial proportions of experienced soldiers. An enterpriser-colonel seek-
ing to ensure that the regiment raised in his name and with his capital
would prove resilient, long-lasting and militarily effective recognized the
received wisdom that a substantial minority of veterans defined the iden-
tity of the unit, gave it cohesion and combat effectiveness, and acted as the
‘master-craftsmen’ in what was effectively an apprenticeship system to
guide and train the bulk of inexperienced recruits in gaining a basic grasp
of weapon handling, unit manoeuvres and offensive and defensive tactics.
In recruiting, the ideal was to achieve a balance between experienced
veterans and inexperienced, but good-quality, recruits. Central to the
language of recruitment are distinctions like gedient and ungedient, ver-
sucht, vieux soldats or bons régiments as opposed to nouvelles recrues, and
bisoños, or the redolent concept of prioritizing recruits who were already
beschossene.52 As tactics and military deployment in battle remained rela-
tively simple and consistent, similar from army to army and reflecting
obvious decisions about the character and potential of soldiers and weap-
ons, then the marketability of those who already knew enough to provide a
solid foundation of basic skill and knowledge was considerable. And their
value was not just in the professionalism that they brought to the unit in
their own right, but in their capacity to set the pace, provide the direction
and, at the bottom line, instil the esprit de corps and morale required to hold
the unit together in battle.53
None of this would be remotely surprising in a naval context, where

captains had always been prepared to pay a premium for experienced
crew, vital to maintaining all of the specialized functions involved in
managing the ship, from reefing sails, to setting and repairing rigging, to
ensuring the proper stowage of cargo and artillery. Many other tasks on
board ship could be accomplished by casual labour, simply providing
coordinated and mobile muscle-power. But this unskilled labour could
not be deployed effectively without the crucial leavening of experienced
sailors. No one believed that a warship could operate effectively with a
crew made up only of ordinary seamen, and the process of training up
ordinary or apprentice seamen was one of the basic activities on board
ship. The distinction between the skilled ‘able’ seaman and the ordinary
sailor was established early, with differential rates of pay which reflected
the much wider marketability of the able seamen on merchant ships and
the need to compete for these skills.54
In the case of both navies and armies, however, the numbers of expe-
rienced men potentially available for recruitment at any given time will be
finite. It is certainly true that a long period of continuous warfare was likely
to increase the numbers of experienced troops in circulation, and long-
serving regiments will of course produce in time their own veterans from
initially inexperienced soldiers who have remained in service, as warships
engaged in long periods of active operations will do.55 If an army was
being created from scratch, as was often the case during the Thirty Years
War, one means to acquire veteran soldiers was to poach already estab-
lished, long-serving regiments from the service of other powers. When
Wallenstein was authorized by the Emperor to raise his army for a second
time in 1631, the attempts of some of his subordinates to lure experienced
colonels from the Bavarian into the (allied) Imperial army caused consid-
erable political bitterness.56 A related practice was to try to incorporate
prisoners of war into the captor’s own army. One part of the thinking
behind this was simply obtaining a resource of scarce, experienced sol-
diers, who it was hoped would stay in service, especially if incorporated
with their companions. If the raw recruits who had also been captured
deserted or melted away, that was a matter of indifference, since they
would do little to raise military quality even in the unlikely event that they
returned to their original units. Enlisting captured veterans on the other
hand also solved the problem of making sure that they did not re-enter the
service of their own warlord, which might well be the case if they were
simply released.57 On occasions this incorporation seems to have worked.
An ordinary soldier, Peter Hagendorf, captured in 1633 after the fall of
Straubing to the Swedes, served with a number of his companions until
the battle of Nördlingen in 1634, when he alone amongst them seems to
have survived the battle. He fell back into the hands of his old Imperial
regiment, where he was recognized and re-entered service until the end of
the war.58
However, it was unlikely that an army could be formed of entire regi-
ments bribed wholesale out of the service of another power, still less that
they could be formed from prisoners of war from enemy units. The
majority of experienced troops would need to be recruited piecemeal in
the marketplace. In practice, for reasons of both availability and cost, most
colonel-proprietors set their sights for the proportions of experienced
recruits realistically. Observing the Spanish army in the 1590s Roger
Williams suggested that it was enough that one in five of the troops should
be an experienced soldier to ensure that the units took on a character
defined by these men: ‘though his levied Armie be 50,000, the ten thou-
sand will both discipline them and keep them in order’.59
If somewhere around a minimum one-fifth of the unit might be made
up of experienced troops, it was anticipated that a good proportion of the
remaining raw recruits should be men who gave the physical and psycho-
logical appearance of being capable of sustaining the burdens and
demands of campaigning long enough to acquire some of the experience,
military skills and esprit de corps that would be passed on to them by the
experienced troops. In the Swiss military system, these were the Mats,
the young men judged strong, resilient and motivated enough to carry the
pikes and to work most closely with the veterans of several campaigns (see
p. 50). Military manuals by the late sixteenth century had conventional-
ized the notion of the suitable recruit for military service, and most of
the physical and mental characteristics were predictable enough.60 This
proportion of physically resilient recruits were at least as important as the
veterans: if the unit was to take on an identity, combat effectiveness and
military permanence, the experienced core of troops needed to work
amongst and transfer skills to a solid group of soldiers who would not
melt away after a few weeks or months in the ranks.
Obtaining both experienced veterans and good-quality recruits
required first of all a willingness to spread the net of recruitment widely.
Nothing demonstrates more clearly the extent to which privatized warfare
operated within an international market in which experience would always
trump notions of local or linguistic identity. In the process of recruiting his
first army in 1626 Wallenstein informed the Emperor that he had just
despatched recruiting patents for the levy of two regiments in Milan,
which would be made up of a high proportion of experienced veterans,
and accepted the delay that bringing them over the Alps and up into
Germany would cause.61 This concern to gain experienced troops eroded
the distinction, which had been a characteristic of the sixteenth century,
between armies composed notionally of ‘subjects’ and the foreign merce-

naries hired to fight alongside them. The principal concern was to find
experienced, good-quality soldiers; where they came from was immate-
rial. So an Italian colonel-proprietor in Imperial service might maintain a
regiment largely made up of experienced German soldiers, perhaps sup-
plemented by some Italians from an earlier recruitment, and a sprinkling
of other nationalities who had been subsequently enlisted.62 The increas-
ing internationalism of the soldiers is neatly summed up by the wide-
spread use of the word Soldateska in place of Landsknechte amongst the
Imperial, German princely and Swedish armies. The usage, meaning all
combatants receiving wages, originated in sixteenth-century Italy and
crossed the Alps to become the most typical, and at this point non-
pejorative, term for recruited soldiers.63
Finding sources of potential recruits with military experience was one
part of the story. Persuading them to enlist, often in competition with
other colonels who were trying to raise new units at the same time, was no
less important. The bottom line here was pay levels, or rather the combi-
nation of enlistment bonus and subsequent promises of high wages. On
paper, it certainly appears that the military enterprisers were prepared to
put their purses and credit behind their military ambitions when it came to
recruiting experienced or good-quality soldiers. In 1621 Ernst von
Mansfeld offered to pay his cavalry recruits 28 florins as a recruitment
bonus (Handgeld) and then 15 florins per month, considerably more than
the standard price for recruiting and paying a cavalry soldier, which in the
sixteenth century had stood at around 12 florins a month.64 This was no
one-off bribe to lure good recruits into a second-division army; it was the
beginning of a decade during which the pay for good recruits underwent
significant growth. The highest recruitment bonuses for recruits were paid
out by Wallenstein’s colonels, and by the late 1620s there were cases of
these reaching the level of 36 florins per infantry soldier.65 Wallenstein’s
generalships were notoriously associated with high bonuses and generous
pay for his soldiers and officers.66
Even allowing for variations between armies, wages in the 1620s were
generally at a level above those paid to recruits in the previous century,
when the ordinary Landsknecht had received the good wage of 4 gulden
(4 florins) per month.67 From a composite range of evidence, footsoldiers
were typically offered 6½–10 florins a month (ordinary versus double-pay
men), while the typical pay for heavy cavalry (cuirassiers) in this period was
15–18 florins a month, and for mounted arquebusiers 14–16½.68 There
are problems with such calculations. One is late sixteenth- and early
seventeenth-century inflation and currency debasement, and what is there-
fore assumed to be a decline in the real purchasing power of soldiers’ wages.
But the issue is not straightforward: Peter Burschel argues that soldiers’
wages were more resilient than those of skilled and semi-skilled craftsmen,
whose absolute standard of living suffered real erosion in the decades from
the 1580s.69 We certainly know that it was not until the later seventeenth
century that soldiers’ wages were formally cut across most European states,
reducing their pay – and their social and economic status – to the level of a
hired day-labourer rather than a skilled craftsman (see p. 286).70
An even more fundamental problem in discussing soldiers’ pay is that in
many circumstances wages were not paid at all, or stood heavily in arrears,
either because the colonels and captains simply lacked the means to pay
them, or more cynically because they calculated that withholding arrears
would keep the soldiers in service. More than anything else, what pre-
vented this having explosive consequences was a further characteristic of
this period, the substantial shift to provision of food, drink and lodging by
the unit commanders in return for deductions from wages. From the
perspective of the unit proprietor, this was to become an important
element of the ‘business of the regiment’, one of the financial attractions
of military command to be discussed in the next chapter (see pp. 209–12).
Evidence from soldiers’ sources suggest that this commuting of wages was
accepted; the quality of provisions and accommodation concerned them
more on a day-to-day basis, and would have a greater effect on their
operational efficiency.71 Indeed some evidence suggests that soldiers
came positively to resent being given cash for subsistence, preferring to
take their allowances in kind, whether for food or accommodation.72
So there is certainly a gap between the wage levels stipulated in docu-
ments, whether these are recruitment notices or official ordinances ema-
nating from the high command or central government, and the reality of
pay on the ground. And if these generous ‘paper’ sums were actually paid
out, most often in the form of a recruitment bonus and the first few pays of
the campaign, this would have been targeted towards recruiting experi-
enced, veteran troops. There is certainly plentiful evidence of sums much
below these levels being paid to recruit inexperienced but decent-quality
troops.73 Nonetheless, any soldier who thought that he would actually
receive a regular wage package worth precisely 6 florins per month would
have been extremely naïve. In most months his cash and benefits would
fall below that level, though it is worth noting that occasionally he might
receive substantially more than his basic rate of pay, with wages supple-
mented by bonuses for storming fortifications or other high-risk actions,
the distribution of plunder, or lavish food and lodgings in occupied enemy
territory.74
Yet despite the system of wage deductions and payment in kind that was
at the heart of the business of a regiment, the status implications and the
recruitment potential of comparatively high wages should not be under-

estimated. The myth that all of the soldiers of the Thirty Years War were
socially and economically marginal, forced into service or recruited for a
pittance, has a life of its own, and as long as soldiers from a later period
really do fit the stereotype, it will prove impossible to eliminate.75 In
contrast, there is plenty of evidence of recruitment amongst willing crafts-
men, journeymen, prosperous or middling farmers, or their sons.76
Cordula Kapser, in her study of the Bavarian army from 1635, is fully
aware of the limitations of her sources as a proportion of total recruitment,
but shows that fewer than 30 per cent of the recruits were described as
unemployed or without occupation in the recruitment lists.77 Those
ordinary soldiers who wrote diaries or memoirs are inherently untypical,
but they do describe those around them in terms which make it quite clear
that they are not identifying an underclass, for whom criminality and
soldiering were the only two ways of making a living, and who had no
capacity to integrate themselves into any ordinary society.78 An ordinary
soldier, Peter Hagendorf, whose diary informs us that he was disbanded
with a comrade in Italy in 1625, that both then worked as assistants to a
German lutemaker in Parma for twelve months, and who subsequently
spent 35 gulden in 1635 on the wedding to his second wife, does not
closely fit the stereotype of the brutalized and socially marginalized man so
frequently seen as the material of recruitment.79 It was doubtless the case
that the prolonged military disruption encouraged men who would never
have thought of enlisting in other circumstances to do so, but they were
not necessarily opting for the only choice available to them. A significant
proportion of recruits were far from being a desperate, demoralized
underclass, simply escaping from one marginal existence to another.
Kapser’s evidence leads her to the straightforward assertion that ‘recruits
(in the later Thirty Years War) simply cannot be classified as “criminals”
or branded as the “scum of society”’.80 Moreover enterpriser-colonels
were prepared to turn down soldiers they considered of inadequate quality
and to encourage selective recruitment.81 Franz Albrecht von Sachsen-
Lauenberg was initially dismayed when Wallenstein gave instructions to
his colonels that newly levied cavalry regiments were to be of no more than
1,000 men. However, he quickly realized that it provided an ideal oppor-
tunity to comb the ranks of his own newly recruited regiment to rid
himself of ‘a whole load of useless Croats and other filthy dogs . . .’82
If effort and expense were put into establishing new regiments, it was no
less important to ensure that both veterans and the better-quality inex-
perienced recruits were induced to stay in service, particularly as the latter
acquired the experience and skills which gave them veteran status in their
turn. The nature of the war, and the likelihood that regiments which were
raised and managed by colonels who had a personal interest in keeping

them operational would have more than a transient existence, began to
change the notion that military service was simply a short-term rite de
passage. Soldiering could and did become a permanent career for many of
the recruits. And permanence itself, with accompanying prospects of
promotion, higher pay and status, could become an inducement to mili-
tary service that had not hitherto been present. Military service as a
permanent career had always existed for a small number of officers and
soldiers in elite, permanent units, the vieux régiments in France or the
Spanish tercios, for example, and had been characteristic of some of the
condottiere and their companies in Italy. But it had remained an anomaly
elsewhere. Swiss and Landsknecht veterans had certainly existed, but the
absence of long-standing permanent regiments, the regular cycle of
recruitment, disbandment and re-recruitment, had given them little
sense of a single permanent, institutional base, or a secure, permanent
career. The development of an institutionalized, permanent soldiery
within the ranks of regiments raised by private contractors might well be
regarded as threatening or problematic in a civilian context.83 But setting
aside such concerns about militarizing a section of the population, it was
on practical grounds that the enterpriser-colonels did as much as possible,
through the system of financial rewards and a developing hierarchy of
non-commissioned officers (NCOs), to encourage lengthy service and the
building of military careers amongst soldiers and junior officers.
In this as well, their largest debt was to what could broadly be termed
the Landsknecht tradition of regimental organization and culture – though
it could as well be applied to the methods and organization of units in the
Army of Flanders, to Swiss, Scots or any other units which emphasized a
strongly internalized structure of authority and identity. This system was
maintained by generations of colonel-proprietors, though modified in
ways that took account of the need to recruit far more troops and to reflect
shifting assumptions about command structures and hierarchy. Their
success in striking this balance reinforced ideas of collective identity,
status and career ambitions amongst the recruits which had a decisive
impact on the military qualities of these units.
The major difference from the Landsknecht regiment was that training
and leadership at the vital small-group level was increasingly formalized
through financial bonuses paid to the experienced soldiers as ‘double-pay’
men, rather than through the soldiers’ own selection of Rottmeister to
preside over the groups of eight to ten soldiers (see pp. 62–3). The
double-pay men, associated with heavier armour and skill in handling
the pike in the sixteenth century, increasingly became the lowest rank of
NCO in these regiments. As leadership of these small groups of men
would suggest, the double-pay men were not an insignificant element in

the unit: a rule of thumb would be that ‘double-pay men’ would constitute
at least 10 per cent of a good-quality unit, but numerous cases exist where
the proportion of those receiving financial recognition for experience or
service rises to 30–40 per cent.84 Increasingly, the double-pay men them-
selves were often divided into groups receiving lower and higher levels of
wages, part of a promotional structure based on experience and service.85
This had been the case in the Spanish tercios since the sixteenth century,
where the company captain received an additional sum – typically 30
escudos – to distribute as wage bonuses to the veteran soldiers.86 Such a
system of progressive rewards within a company hierarchy targeted solid
experience and lengthy service.
Double-pay status as a recognition of experience could also be seen as
the first step into a hierarchy of NCO posts, with considerable increases
not merely in (partly notional) wages but in rights to provisions, lodgings
and shares of plunder or other military gains.87 This more hierarchical,
pay-differentiated system had certainly eroded some aspects of the robust
soldier-democracy of the Swiss and Landsknecht regiments. The soldiers’
own justice, the Spießrecht, had largely disappeared, to be replaced by
officers’ courts-martial, while the elected representatives of the soldiers –
the Führer and the Gemeinweibel – had also died out. Perhaps the clearest
visual indication that some of the assertive independence of the
Landsknecht tradition had been traded away was in costume. An incidental
consequence of the enterpriser-colonels’ concern to pay wages substan-
tially in kind rather than as a lump sum was to address the long-term elite
preoccupation with the soldiers’ moral and social non-conformity.
Soldiers’ clothing was in many cases now issued by the unit officers
against wage deductions, and while only in rare cases could the result be
described as a proper uniform, the concern of officer-proprietors to buy in
bulk and distribute at profit was unlikely to result in the issue of slashed
jackets, brightly coloured silk hose, ruffles and feathered trimmings on
hats and coats. The high point of Landsknecht sartorial extravagance in the
early sixteenth century had been about opportunity, fashion and soldierly
emulation as much as it had been a calculated, subversive social state-
ment. The direct issue by the officers of much cheaper, more utilitarian
clothing, less cash in hand for the soldiers and the absence of role models
and/or changing fashion all took their toll on the ‘Landsknecht-look’.88
Ordinary seventeenth-century soldiers for the most part lost some of the
image of the swaggering, profligate mercenary, and the result was a model
of consumption considerably less challenging to the soldiers’ social supe-
riors. Franz Albrecht von Sachsen-Lauenberg proudly described how he
had just issued the men of his regiment with a set of light woollen capes,
Fig. 4.5 Ordinary soldiers of the Thirty Years War in a sketch by Stefano
della Bella
which he describes as making them look like so many Capuchin friars.89

When regimental-proprietors of the later seventeenth century began to
think of full uniforms for their soldiers, they were designed in the same
way as dress for lackeys or a retinue: clothing and accoutrements were
often elaborate and costly, but specifically intended to identify the wearer
as the servant or employee of the colonel. Though such uniforms could be
ornate and deeply non-functional, they allowed the wearer little scope for
self-expression.90
Yet these changes did not alter the fundamentals of regimental life. It is
important to maintain a clear distinction between the military organiza-
tion and lifestyle of this period, and the kind of military regime that was
established in the relentlessly disciplined, drilled and socially marginal-
ized armies of the ancien régime. This attractiveness of the military career
rested partly on pay levels which implied that the soldier still retained the
status of a high-ranking craftsman or artisan, but also on recognition of the
soldier’s membership of an institution that still laid claim to an honour-
able status and marked this by its ability to defend its own privileges and
maintain a distinctive relationship to the surrounding society. Despite
external pressures to conformity in matters of disciplinary, religious and
social norms, the armies and the constituent regiments were still to a large
extent run by their own internal rules. If the new mechanisms for paying
wages had eliminated the extravagance of dress and the casual cash-in-hand
wealth of the soldier, it was still the case that discipline remained to some
extent consensual, and had more to do with shared perceptions of what
helped or harmed military effectiveness or cohesion than with the external
values of society.91 Some of the army commanders and some of the colonels
were determined to impose external disciplinary norms, but many others
were prepared to act to maintain the discipline required for military effec-
tiveness while doing little to regulate military/civil relations, and having no
interest at all in regulating morality and behaviour amongst the soldiers in
camp.92 This was not lethargy or indifference on the part of the officers, but
a recognition that what made these units work as cohesive, resilient and
effective fighting forces was their internal identity and dynamics, the per-
sistence of informal bonding and the small-group dynamics of the Rott.
Few colonels showed any desire to impose rigid confessional standards
on their soldiers, and life in the armies was characterized by a remarkable
degree of de facto tolerance and religious cohabitation.93 Some men were
certainly persuaded to take up military service ‘for the cause of religion’;
Robert Monro writes that this was the case for many of the Scots serving
with Gustavus Adolphus.94 Yet these were strict Calvinist Scots serving a
Lutheran ruler whose personal tolerance was at odds with a Swedish
Lutheran establishment which had no sympathy for the beliefs and
reforming aspirations of Calvinists.95 But within the army a Protestant
common front could be achieved based on respect for soldierly qualities
and a pragmatic sense of the need to play down divisive religious quarrels
that eluded the wider Protestant cause in Germany.96 Maximilian of
Bavaria’s uncompromising insistence on Catholicism, at least amongst
his officers, seemed an eccentricity in this military world.97
The communal and social life of the troops continued to focus upon the
Troß, with its women, sutlers, servants and the facilities for drinking,
eating, playing and socializing. This still provided local opportunities to
sell pillaged goods, borrow money, pursue crafts and skills acquired out-
side military life, and to live domestically with wives, children or the camp
women. Again, senior officers recognized the logistical and operational
liabilities of this vast ‘tail’ of army followers, their baggage and support
services. A few attempts were made to restrict or reduce the size of the
baggage column or the number of women and servants, but the centrality
of this structure of the Troß to maintaining regimental identity, keeping
long-serving soldiers in the ranks by providing them with a focus for their
social and emotional lives, was simply too great to risk substantial changes
or draconian restrictions.98
All of this contributed, in the soldier’s own eyes at least, to the sense that
he was a member of a corporation which continued to enjoy respectable
and honourable status. Though the external, civilian perception of the

soldiery was increasingly tarnished by violence and pillage, the exaction of
contributions, and the gulf between the actions and claims of the military
and the impotence and weakness of the civilian authority, this fear and
resentment is far removed from the later perception of the soldier as
despised and contemptible social flotsam, declassé, segregated into bar-
racks and subject to tight discipline, supervision and surveillance. An
example of this change can be found amongst the soldiers raised in
Switzerland. Throughout the Thirty Years War there was never any
difficulty in recruiting Swiss soldiers under contract to serve in French,
Imperial or other German armies. By the eighteenth century when wages
were lower yet paid regularly, but Swiss soldiers were subject to the typical
discipline of the ancien régime army, recruitment slackened and for the first
time Swiss colonels started to negotiate in their contracts to bring num-
bers of non-Swiss into their regiments.99
Within the army and the individual regiments, the perception of the
soldiers’ trade as honourable was boosted by the attitudes of the officers,
who continued to lead their men into battle and assaults as they had done
in the sixteenth century, in person and from the front. They were aware
that their soldiers were not brutalized automata, more frightened of their
officers than of the enemy, and that example and explicit participation was
the best means to achieve effectiveness. Grimmelshausen, whose writing
regularly subverts typical assumptions about the nature of the Thirty
Years War, created the fictional figure of the colonel who would not
accept any man into his regiment who was not convinced that by his
military behaviour he might rise to be a general.100 Such advancement
was not impossible: the memoirs of Colonel Augustin von Fritsch are the
account of a musketeer who rose to a colonelcy in the Bavarian army
around 1644 after twenty-five years of military service and successive
promotions.101 More typically, advancement to double-pay and to the
ranks immediately above, with considerably higher wages and rewards,
was a distinct likelihood if health and good fortune in avoiding death and
wounding permitted a long period of service. The great majority of sub-
altern officers were directly appointed to units as a result of the rights held
by the colonel or company captains as unit proprietors. But as with the
soldiers and NCOs, further career and promotional possibilities were
linked to accumulated experience as much as to favour and patronage.
Colonels, especially colonels who were proprietors of a number of units
over which they had delegated command, were especially concerned to
establish and reward a cadre of long-serving, managerially competent unit
officers. Melchior von Hatzfeld’s military career began in 1619 with a
lieutenancy in a company of one of the Sachsen-Lauenberg regiments.
Experience and outstanding managerial expertise ensured his rapid pro-

motion within their regiments until in 1625 he was made lieutenant-
colonel of Franz Albrecht’s newly levied cuirassier regiment, which
Hatzfeld helped to recruit and then managed until he himself became a
colonel-proprietor in 1631.102
The value placed on experience at all levels was even more the case in
naval warfare, where the possession of seafaring skills, however acquired,
or good organizational and leadership abilities would attract the attention
both of governments and of those prepared to finance and outfit naval and
privateering expeditions. Jacques Colaert had begun his career as a hired
captain in the service of a modest financial consortium. Vice-admiral of
the West India Company squadron from 1623, Piet Heyn, who captured
the Spanish silver flota intact in 1628 at Matanzas Bay, had spent much of
his earlier career as a captain in the Dutch East India Company. After his
success in 1628 he was promoted to lieutenant admiral of Holland, de
facto commander of the navy of the States General.103
Whether the motivation of colonels in raising troops reflected longer-
term financial self-interest, military and political ambition, status con-
sciousness and competition, or military self-perception, the results of their
concern to recruit good-quality troops and in encouraging their retention
are clear. In combat this strengthening of experienced and good-quality
troops provided units that were capable of precisely those fighting qual-
ities of unit cohesion, stability and resolution under fire, endurance and
tolerance of casualties that we know characterized the battlefields of the
Thirty Years War. The evolution of some aspects of the Landsknecht
tradition had not detracted from its essentials: the establishment of units
with strong internal cohesion, a sense of group identity and the fostering of
responsibility by experienced soldiers both to train and to mould the
recruits into a coherent tactical and organizational identity. These were
confident military forces, dominated by experienced soldiers who would
fight tenaciously in both conventional field battles and in skirmishes,
sieges or irregular combat, and were able to motivate the recruits and
the inexperienced in the ranks to do likewise. It also explains the surpris-
ing lack of asymmetry in these engagements: Swedish, Dutch and French
armies do not sweep their ‘traditional’ rivals from the field thanks to better
command and control, unit cohesion or tactics and deployment.
However, it was at the broader, operational level that this establishment
of regiments dominated by experienced troops was critically important.
The qualities that allowed these units to perform effectively in battle fed
directly into the qualities needed to ensure outstanding operational
capacity. These armies were dominated by tough, resilient troops, many
of whom had been serving for years, even decades, in their units. They
would undergo all the incidental hardships of long campaigns, in cases

even fought over the winter months. They were used to life in camp, and
prepared to march for hundreds of miles in the course of a campaign.
They expected food and drink, but not in the form of regular rations
delivered to the army camp on a daily basis, and they were attuned to
fast-moving campaigns in which supplies came via a mixture of pre-
arranged depots, their own capacity to carry rations and ad hoc depend-
ence on local requisitioning.104 In the face of very different demands,
changes of plan, unexpected developments, they showed resource and
flexibility in moving rapidly, and adjusting to different levels of support.
It is only necessary to think of the campaign that began this chapter, that
of Pappenheim in 1632, to see this kind of operational effectiveness in
action. His small forces were expected to undertake a series of sieges, hit-
and-run engagements, massive route marches in which opportunities for
recuperation never extended beyond a few days. This was no isolated
episode. Time after time the armies, in particular of the 1630s and 1640s,
showed themselves capable of the most extraordinary campaign fatigues,
whether the sustained pressure of rapid movement, manoeuvre and
repeated combats, fighting over winter months and in the face of acute
shortages of basic rations, or going from a lengthy forced march straight
into hard-fought battle, as Pappenheim’s troops did in mid-November
1632, when the last stage of this eight-month campaign culminated with
their arrival in the middle of the battle of Lützen.105
Paradoxically related to this, and usually seen as an indication of the
disastrous weakness of this type of military organization, were the inci-
dences of mutiny amongst these units. This issue could apply as aptly to
the Spanish Army of Flanders from the 1570s, whose mutinies are noto-
rious, as much as to the less familiar episodes in the armies of the Thirty
Years War. While mutiny by individual units, and still more by entire
armies, was a critical threat to operational effectiveness, it needs to be seen
as a response of elite troops to perceived injustices in the management of
the army, whether this was arrears of pay (more commonly a cause of
mutiny in the Army of Flanders than in the armies after 1618), operational
decisions, or orders that seem to threaten the integrity and cohesion of the
army. In these last cases the vast majority of mutinies were stage-
managed, if not actively led, by the unit officers, even the colonels. The
1647 mutiny of the remaining regiments from the army originally created
by Saxe-Weimar, which, still in French service, refused to transfer from
the German theatre to the Army of Flanders, was a direct response by
soldiers and officers to the fear, not just that their back pay would be
forgotten, but that the regiments would be diluted amongst the larger
French army and would lose both their special status and common
identity.106 Mutiny was almost always the resort of high-quality troops,

well aware that the warlord needed their services and that they had the
status and capacity to bargain with him. The likelihood that they were also
owed substantial arrears of back pay was a further inducement to bargain
rather than simply drop their arms and desert, but the behaviour is at least
as much about self-identity and status as simple financial calculation.
Large numbers of these troops did not want to leave the regiments that
had been the centre of their existence for many years or decades. The
Bavarian regiments who refused Jan de Werth’s inducements to enter
Imperial service in 1647 after Elector Maximilian had concluded the
ceasefire of Ulm with the Swedes and French were as concerned about
the dilution of their own military identity and cohesiveness as demonstrat-
ing dynastic solidarity with their Bavarian ruler.107
In contrast, desertion was the resort of raw recruits, envisaged by the
captains and colonels as little more than short-term ballast for the unit,
and recruited in batches at regular intervals. A small proportion of these
would be drawn into the companies on a permanent basis, and become
experienced veterans in their turn, but most would drift away. The sur-
prising equanimity, or fatalism, with which commanding officers con-
fronted desertion certainly reflects this awareness that a large number of
recruits were transient, and sooner rather than later likely to leave the
ranks in any circumstances.108 Desertion resolved the issue of outstanding
pay in the commander’s favour, and provided him with funds to recruit
further new recruits, a portion of which might add to the core of prized
permanent soldiers under his command.
All of these qualities which made these units combat-effective and
resilient under operational stresses can also be seen as dynamic factors
in the development of the armies and their military capacity. Unbroken
conflict meant that regiments that were formed on the basis of a core of
experienced soldiers and good officers remained in being for an unprece-
dented length of time. Evidence for this is especially rich in the case of the
Bavarian army, where we have the lists and details of all the units that were
disbanded in 1649. In a relatively small army of around 15,000 troops, six
regiments had served continuously through the entire war from 1620, and
a further six had been formed and in existence since before 1630.109 Albeit
that Wallenstein’s two generalships impose something of a caesura on the
regimental proprietors of the Imperial armies, it is impressive that some
Imperial regiments had a continuous existence back into the 1620s, and
that a large number stayed the course from 1634–5 until and beyond
Westphalia.110 There is no reason to doubt Redlich’s statistics that show
some (73 versus 139, 67 out of 128) German cavalry and infantry regi-
ments surviving for at least a minimum of six years of campaigning – and
nearly 50 per cent of these surviving more than ten years – especially as the
overall figure takes into account those large number of ‘false starts’,
regiments which suffered early disbandment as unviable or badly
managed.111
This extension of the life of regiments clearly had its own impact in
drawing many veterans into a military lifestyle which became to all intents
permanent and attractive in its own right. The well-documented trans-
formation of the Parliamentarian New Model Army from Lipsius’ ‘sol-
diers of ayde’ during the first English Civil War into a force of permanent
career soldiers serves as an excellent example of the process by which
individual soldiers were drawn to a permanent military career as an
alternative to civilian life.112 Parallels can be found in most of the armies
operating on the continent, and in many of the navies which were coming
to enjoy a more permanent existence.113
An intriguing, but insufficiently explored, issue is the possibility that
lengthy military service may have meant that veteran soldiers built up a
considerable level of epidemiological immunity. These soldiers were not
only physically resilient in the face of the strains of campaigning, but may
well have become biologically resistant as well. If so, and the growing
proportions of ‘old soldiers’ in regiments would tend to support it, this
would be vital to the effectiveness of the armies. The impact of disease-
related mortality and sickness on the effective strength of armies is every-
where apparent. The example of the parish of Bygdea has been used by
many writers to show the effect of military conscription on a typical small
Swedish community. Of the 215 conscripted soldiers who died on active
service between 1621 and 1639, 196 fell victim to disease while in garri-
sons on the eastern or southern shores of the Baltic.114 What was true of
garrisons was as true of armies in the field and at sieges, where the
proportions of deaths through plague, typhus or dysentery were cata-
strophically high. The thesis that mortality was far higher amongst newly
recruited soldiers who had previously been relatively unexposed to a range
of infections would thus further strengthen the continuity provided by the
veteran element.
Finally, an issue which will be discussed below in more detail was the
reduction in the overall size of armies in the second half of the Thirty
Years War. Falling overall numbers, especially in the campaigning armies
rather than garrison forces, increased the percentage of veterans who had
served progressively long periods in the ranks. Whether through lifestyle
choice or physical resilience, these experienced men will be dispropor-
tionately those who remain in the units as the overall strength of a regi-
ment declines from, say, 900 to 400. If a good regiment might contain
20 per cent veteran troops in the 1620s, it was getting closer to 50–60 per cent
or more by the last decade of the war.115 Moreover, with smaller armies
drawing from a population which had been exposed to several decades of
continuous military activity, it was simply easier to enlist troops who had
previous military experience. Taking the well-documented case of Bavaria
once again, and looking at the decade from 1638 to 1648, the proportions of
recruits from Bavaria and nearby recruiting areas with previous military
experience reached 58 per cent.116
For all these reasons it seems extremely probable that the military
quality, combat effectiveness and operational resilience of the armies of
the Thirty Years War improved during its latter stages. This conclusion
would not be startling in other military contexts, where it is usually
assumed that the experience of warfare leads to a cumulative improve-
ment in military effectiveness. But it directly challenges the usual percep-
tions of the Thirty Years War, and assumptions about the particular
sterility and futility of its second half.
Making the operational context work: intelligent design

and effective commanders
The military commanders in the Thirty Years War, whether they reported
to and acknowledged the decisions of a civil authority and ruler, or
whether they held a high degree of independent control over policy-
making and military decisions, all faced similar basic problems: the
increasing scale of war, both on land and at sea, was compounded by
the key development of the later sixteenth century, the lengthening of
periods of continuous war from one or two campaigns to conflicts which
could last for decades, and where the gains in one campaign needed to be
maintained and consolidated if military progress was to be made. Both of
these factors heightened those material and logistical demands of warfare
which early modern European societies were ill equipped on multiple
levels to meet. Low-density agricultural production over much of
Europe rendered it difficult and often impossible to extract local surpluses
large enough to feed all the additional mouths of a campaigning army and
its accompanying baggage train. But attempting to move provisions and
war material over longer distances encountered the problems of rudimen-
tary systems of communications and transportation. Since almost no ruler
and state administration could raise revenues sufficient to cover the
recruitment, equipment and running costs of their armed forces directly,
armies especially found themselves in some direct or indirect relationship
to coercive tax extraction, in which their role was either to force local and
regional authorities to raise much higher levels of revenue for military use,
or to extract these sums directly.117 Either way, military commanders

needed to take into account the requirements of territorial occupation.
The previous section sought to show how the basic material of the
armies, significant numbers of experienced soldiers, NCOs and subaltern
officers, was of considerably higher quality, more resilient and more
capable of pursuing extensive military operations, than the sterile and
negative picture of campaigning in the Thirty Years War usually allows.
But how were the twin demands of sustainability and operational effec-
tiveness to be met, given the limitations of logistics, communications and
financial support? How would it be possible for commanders to exploit the
potential of these effective military forces, given the limitations within
which they had to operate?
Whatever the role of the ruler and his administrators, however large a part
they played in overseeing military operations and strategy, commanders
needed to recognize that a large part of their army was a military investment
made by the constituent proprietors. Whether the colonels were major or
minor shareholders, they did not wish to see their units exposed to need-
lessly heavy losses of veteran troops and their resources, and would lose
confidence in commanders who failed to grasp this concern, or whose
incompetence in providing logistical support or tailoring the campaign to
realistic objectives threatened these losses. The two great field marshals of
the Bavarian army, Tilly and Franz von Mercy, though they commanded an
army in which the colonels held a comparatively limited financial stake,
were nonetheless scrupulous in not wasting troops: planning campaigns to
try to avoid unnecessary casualties, and to ensure that the army was not
forced to move far away from operations based on Bavarian and Swabian
internal lines without carefully structured logistical support.118
The most critical factor in determining the success of commanders at
the operational level was a determination to prioritize provision of food
and munitions for their troops. In this respect it is necessary to treat with
scepticism a picture of the Thirty Years War in which all armies seem
constantly to be starving, short of munitions and on the verge of mutiny
thanks to the neglect or incompetence of their commanders. At the most
basic level this is simply incompatible with the military successes and
operational capability that are demonstrated by most of these armies
much of the time. Sieges could push the ability to maintain supply to the
limit, which was one reason why so many commanders of armies operat-
ing in the Empire were reluctant to undertake sieges of substantial for-
tifications, with their unpredictable length and need to concentrate troops
in a narrow zone of operations.
There are certainly examples when armies, whether through incompe-
tence on the part of the commander or circumstances beyond their
control, are devastated by supply failure. The Holstein campaign of

Matthias Gallas in 1644 did not initially neglect the provisioning of the
Imperial army advancing northwards to try to catch the Swedish forces of
Torstensson in a pincer movement between Imperials and Danes.119 The
mistakes started after Gallas hoped that the surprise capture of Kiel would
blockade the Swedes in Jutland; but Torstensson simply bypassed Kiel
and moved rapidly southwards, threatening to cut off the Imperial forces,
who were dangerously outnumbered in cavalry by the Swedes.120 Gallas’
problems came as a result of trying to extricate the army from an unsus-
tainable position in the north, and without adequate supply convoys or
other means to supply that retreat. The Swedes meanwhile could sustain
their own operations from supplies assembled and despatched from
Pomerania. The problem was one all too common in military thinking:
the failure to consider a viable alternative option, an exit strategy, if the
initial plan failed. In fact, even allowing for this failure, the losses suffered
by the Imperial army in its retreat back were lower than the usual cata-
strophic accounts would suggest – some 11,000–12,000 men reached the
Bohemian frontiers from an original force of 14,000–15,000.121
Matthias Gallas was known to contemporaries as the ‘army wrecker’ for
this and for an earlier logistical disaster, the invasion of Burgundy which
he was ordered by Vienna to undertake against his own better judgement
in late summer 1636.122 It is easy to make him representative of some
general failure of planning and logistical awareness amongst Thirty Years
War commanders. Yet other field commanders of this period, including
Imperial generals like Pappenheim, Piccolomini, Hatzfeld and Melander,
did not have equivalent supply catastrophes to their names. They might
lose battles, but they did not reduce their armies to total starvation and
disintegration. So if the armies raised by military enterprisers were suffi-
ciently supplied with food and munitions to carry out military operations
that were ambitious and wide ranging and needed to be organized year
after year, how should this be explained? Why were the failures of Matthias
Gallas not the rule in this period, and what underpinned success in keep-
ing most armies of this period operational?
One obvious key to such thinking was in the transport of goods, espe-
cially bulky food and munitions, to supply an army that was itself moving
across country or pursuing operations away from its own main bases. The
war taxes (contributions) were as likely to be collected in goods as in cash,
but utilizing, for example, a substantial quantity of grain collected in
Styria to feed an army that was operating in Westphalia required careful
planning and preparation, and the coordination of a number of separate
transport facilities.123 Later, better-documented examples of supplying
troops over distances indicate that the transport costs could amount to
50 per cent of the total costs of the supply contract.124 From Wallenstein to
Karl Gustav Wrangel in the very last campaigns of the war, commanders’
guiding principle in negotiating the supply of their armies and therefore in
planning their military operations was inland water. Rivers meant cheap
and relatively reliable transport of bulky goods like grain and gunpowder,
and made it far easier to move heavy artillery and baggage. Much of the
conflict of the Thirty Years War was fought along axes determined by the
four great rivers of the Danube, the Rhine-Moselle, the Elbe and the Po.
Bernhard von Saxe-Weimar was prepared to attempt the siege of
Breisach in 1638 with a small army, and well into the campaign season,
thanks to his confidence that he could control transport on the Rhine and
negotiate the delivery of basic food supplies to his army.125 Throughout
the siege his army was fed and supplied with munitions via the efforts of his
banker and supply-contractor, Marx Conrad Rehlinger, based at Basle,
but with a network of supply contacts spreading into Upper Germany,
across to Lyon and down into northern Italy.126 For several months
Rehlinger assembled supplies of grain and other foodstuffs at
Schaffhausen and arranged their shipment down the Rhine to
Breisach.127 The fatal problem for the Imperial commander, Johann
Götz, in trying to break the siege was his own inability to gain access to
the Rhine and to use it as a supply artery. His troops were forced into ‘hit-
and-run’ tactics against Saxe-Weimar, as Götz proved unable to sustain
his forces long enough in the area around Breisach to pose a decisive
threat to the besiegers.
On a larger scale, it can be argued that all of Wallenstein’s military
operations in both his first and second generalships can be understood
with reference to the rough north–south axis of the Elbe, supported by
secondary use of the more easterly Oder. A huge proportion of the finance
and provisioning of his army was drawn from Moravia, Silesia and
Bohemia, not just because they were wealthy subject territories providing –
albeit grudgingly – more reliable support than the German Imperial
Circles, but because of the easy river transport of goods to Wallenstein’s
armies, whether operating in north Germany, disputing control of Saxony
or defending the Habsburg lands themselves. Key to Wallenstein’s entire
provisioning system was the port of Aussig on the Elbe, the point of
despatch by water for foodstuffs, goods and war matériel from
Wallenstein’s duchy of Friedland and across Bohemia and Silesia on to
the German battlefields.128 The centrality of rivers to logistics was no less
clear to the Swedes, who quickly learnt the lesson of Gustavus Adolphus’
1632 failure before Nuremberg, where the Swedish army had suffered
heavy losses through overconcentration and lack of access to river-borne
supplies, while Wallenstein’s defenders had been regularly supplied with
grain from Moravia, transported upstream along the Danube as far as

Regensburg.129 The Swedish general, Johan Banér, described the Elbe as
the Imperial armies’ first line of defence, with the implication that seizing
this line would open the way for decisive incursions into the Habsburg
lands.130 Practical operational decisions were made on the basis of facility
of communications and the availability of transport by commanders
throughout the war. If the Swedes selected Mainz as their operational
centre in western Germany from 1631 to 1634, this was a careful choice of
a centre which was on both the Rhine and Main. A similar operational
decision made the city of Heilbronn, with its position on the Neckar and
direct water-borne access to the Rhine, the centre of the Imperial and
Bavarian weapons, munitions and supply system from 1637 to 1640.131
But this would only go so far in resolving logistical issues which were as
much a reflection of low productivity and population density, and local
destruction and depopulation in many war zones, as of incompetent
preparation and management of supplies by commanders. Critical to
the success of troop supply at all levels and throughout the war is a far
more fundamental aspect of Europe-wide ‘military devolution’, one to be
considered in the next chapter as part of the general discussion of the
‘business of war’. The essential point is that military enterprisers them-
selves, or the state authorities behind them, were integrated into much
larger networks of producers, suppliers, merchants and distributors, upon
whose resources, services, expertise, connections and financial involve-
ment the entire logistical structure of the war effort depended. These
networks, with their ability to mobilize and distribute resources fast and
competitively over distance and across different territories, their inside
access to financial and technical knowledge, and their ability to mobilize
transportation and distribution facilities, were the critical factors in allow-
ing the armies enough logistical freedom to pursue military operations
with a reasonable chance of success.
Yet despite the support made available through these financial and
mercantile connections, commanders certainly could not assume that
they had unrestricted freedom to conduct their operations in any way
that they wished. What was needed, and more and more developed in the
second half of the war, was a positive willingness to match the size and
shape of armies, tactics and operational decisions to the constraints, but
also the possibilities, of fighting under these conditions and gaining mili-
tary results. If regimental quality improved as the war progressed, so with
a few exceptions, did generalship and that crucial strategic appreciation of
the most effective ways of using limited means to achieve realistic aims.
As the war progressed into its second and third decades, new gener-
ations of commanders emerged who had developed different approaches
Denmark
Wallenstein’s
Duchies
nia
mera Campaign of 1626
Hamburg Po
Campaign of 1627
Elb Mecklenburg
e
Campaign of 1632
Brandenburg
Sagan
Saxony 162
7
O
de
Leipzig Aussig Friedland
r
Rh
ine
Main Prague
Bohemia
Nuremberg Moravia
2
163
ary
ng
Hu
Rh
urg
16
ine
sb
26
ube Austria
Ha
b
Dan
Munich Vienna
Venice
Map 4.2 Wallenstein’s military system and the campaigns of 1626, 1627
and 1632
to campaigning and to priorities in waging war. Spread between the

armies of the Swedish, Imperials, Bavarians, Weimarians, and even the
‘French’ Army of Germany, they can be contrasted with both the tradi-
tional thinking of French and Spanish commanders, and with the earlier
approaches of ‘large army’ commanders like Wallenstein and Gustavus
Adolphus. These differences are strikingly evident, for example, in the
different approaches towards the 1636 invasion of north-eastern France
by the Cardinal Infante, commander of the Spanish Army of Flanders,
and his subordinate at the head of a force of Bavarian troops, Jan de

Werth. The Spanish commander was locked into the habits of slow,
attritional advance, spreading his forces out across French territory, care-
fully besieging each major French fortified town he encountered, although
most of them contained only skeleton garrisons and could not have
threatened the Spanish lines of communication.132 His operational aim
was simply to consolidate large numbers of Spanish troops on French
territory and hope that the pressures of contributions and the political
humiliation of territorial occupation would force Richelieu to make terms.
Werth, with his force of around 5,000 Bavarian troops and 2,000 Cossack
and Croat irregulars, operated independently. He had deliberately
brought together a highly mobile corps, able to carry much of its own
provisions and to seize more supplies once in France. He deployed his
force in a lightning strike deep through Champagne and into the Île de
France, causing panic in Paris and disrupting the attempts of the French
to raise a relief force, before being ordered to pull his troops back to
support the Cardinal Infante.133 Whether Werth would have been able
to raid Paris itself, the psychological and military impacts of his actions
were far greater than those of the ponderous advance of the main Spanish
force, and its equally slow withdrawal through the autumn once the
French had gained the opportunity and the vital months to raise a large
relief force.134 Werth was strongly criticized by Elector Maximilian, his
warlord, for having separated his troops from the main Spanish force. But
successful military operations were increasingly to resemble those of
Werth in subsequent campaigns, and the contrast with the slow, attri-
tional style of warfare fought in Flanders and elsewhere became ever
greater.
The main French and Spanish armies, whether in Flanders or northern
Italy, continued to pursue positional warfare based on lengthy, resource-
intensive sieges. As early as 1631 the limitations of this approach were
identified by the Bavarian commander, Tilly, who had commented that in
‘waging a campaign in Flanders the commanders have only a single and
limited objective’.135 Battlefield victories, whether Honnecourt won by
the Spanish on the Flanders frontier in 1642, or Rocroi, won by the
French in 1643, led only to the next set-piece siege. Large armies tied
down in a single location imposed a logistical stranglehold on such cam-
paigning: supplies had to be shipped to the armies in regular convoys,
which themselves required still more troops for escort purposes. Though
not constrained by a commitment to siege warfare, the huge armies of
Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus imposed their own logistical price in
terms of mobility and the achievement of campaign goals. Wallenstein
revealed a limited grasp of offensive action in both the mid-1620s and the
early 1630s. What he did best was coordinating the supply and support
mechanisms for armies occupying and defending swathes of central and
north German territory, Bohemia, Silesia and Moravia. It is not difficult to
detect the Generalissimo’s unease when operating away from this vast
recruitment, provisioning and financial base, serviced via its crucial river
artery, and easy to see why so many apparent opportunities to push his
enemies harder were missed by his reluctance to distance his forces from
this secure environment.136
In contrast to this, commanders who sought to conduct operations that
were mobile and faster-moving, and who could seize initially unantici-
pated possibilities as Werth and Pappenheim had done, had to be aware of
the dangers of overextension of their resource base. Their mercantile
agents and connections, their financial backers and supply contractors
could help to sustain the army, but only if they were given adequate notice
of intentions, were drawn into the planning, and shared common prior-
ities. However carefully prepared, provisioning an army will never work
smoothly; the great strength of the armies that these commanders led was
the presence of soldiers who might complain about shortages or poor-
quality food, but would not give up, would not quickly lose their military
effectiveness or become demoralized. Provided that they saw the conse-
quences of the operations leading to supplies and pay, they would tolerate
present hardships and continue to pursue fast-moving, hard-hitting mili-
tary operations. Indeed commanders could play upon these qualities in
the context of acknowledged, effective leadership. Encountering initial
reluctance from his Bavarian troops, who had been subjected to haphaz-
ard supplies and pay over the winter quarter of 1635/6, Jan de Werth
galvanized them with enthusiasm for his campaign into France simply by
promising to make them rich men from French booty; they then became
the cohesive, effective force on which Werth had relied so successfully in
the past.137
However, the most striking and observable change in the main cam-
paign armies of the later Thirty Years War was the progressive reduction
in their effective strength. Throughout the war the issue of army size is
complicated by the difference between the total number of troops being
maintained by a particular power or within a generic ‘army’, and the
numbers actually serving in a particular campaign force, one that might
be active in a battle or siege. In both cases the numbers rise to a peak in the
later 1620s and early 1630s. Wallenstein was considered to have more
than 100,000 men in his armies by 1628–9, and Gustavus Adolphus
perhaps 150,000 men in his service by late 1631; at Breitenfeld, 31,000
Imperial and 40,000 Swedish and Saxon troops confronted each other on
the field.138 By the later 1630s and 1640s the total numbers of troops
maintained by the belligerents had declined: the Imperial troops under

arms as early as 1634 numbered around 45,000 men, slightly fewer than
the total number of Swedish troops with their German allies.139 More
drastic still was the fall in the number and the size of campaign armies.
Under Gustavus Adolphus the Swedes had maintained five separate
campaign armies; by the time of Torstensson’s generalship in the 1640s
there were only two armies; the Imperial forces sustained only two in the
1640s, one of which in the Westphalian Circle was partly supported by
troops raised by the Cologne Elector. The size of these campaign armies
shrank significantly. In 1645 the two important battles of Jankow in
Bohemia and Allerheim in Swabia/Franconia demonstrate this change:
at Jankow 16,000 Imperial troops engaged with 16,000 Swedes, while at
Allerheim 16,000 Bavarian and Imperial troops faced a Franco-Hessian
force of 17,000.140 Only the second battle of Breitenfeld (1642) and
Rocroi (1643) – which anyway reflects the very different military condi-
tions of the Franco-Spanish campaign theatre in Flanders – were tradi-
tional ‘large’ battles, with more than 20,000 combatants per side.
It is usual to assume that this development was an aspect of the war as
European catastrophe; soldiers were no longer available, or if they were to
be had, rulers and/or military commanders could not afford to recruit or
retain them. Declining army size adds fuel to the notion that the momen-
tum of the war was lost in these latter years, which increasingly took on the
characteristics of a futile round of territorial occupation and devastation.
Yet specific military arguments about the benefits of small versus large
armies go back well before the era of supposedly exhausted territory and
declining population. The question arose at the time of Wallenstein’s first
generalship. The guiding principle of Wallenstein’s military management
was to build the largest feasible army via the imposition of contributions –
war taxes – over the widest possible territories (see pp. 117–19). However,
even at the time it was challenged by what might be called the Bavarian/
Liga model, or in Wallenstein’s own words, the ordentlich – the regular –
rather than his own unordentlich – irregular – system of army funding and
maintenance.141 Against Wallenstein’s model of military expansion, the
Bavarians opted for a small army, supported on the basis of secure, but
much lower, funding derived from contributions that had been accepted
by the various states of the Catholic Liga. The advantages of this were
underlined in Chapter 3 (see pp. 114–16): the reinforcement of military
quality rather than quantity in an army that, even in the 1620s, was based
on a small number of securely funded regiments. The disadvantage in the
epoch of multiple enemies and gigantic military establishments was the
ease with which the Bavarian/Liga army became overstretched. In 1628
Wallenstein could accomplish the military saturation of Holstein,
Schleswig and Jutland by his vast army moving as three separate corps,
each providing enough mutual support to ensure that the remaining
Danish forces of Christian IV could not risk challenging any one of
these columns.142 The success of this manoeuvre stands in sharp contrast
to the worries of Tilly in the same period that he lacked sufficient troops to
defeat a Danish counter-attack or maintain close control over occupied
areas of north Germany, and indeed his attempts to borrow forces from
the Imperial army.143
When Pappenheim was planning his 1632 diversionary campaign from
Westphalia into Lower Saxony, he was still strongly under the spell of the
‘irregular’ – Wallenstein – system for raising troops and waging war. With
an initially small force of experienced troops, Pappenheim ran circles
round the Swedish and Hessian troops in Lower Saxony. Yet his inten-
tions regarding the army were conventional: as soon as he could occupy
territory, extract heavy war taxes or occasional protection money, he
intended to recruit the army to the largest possible effective force. In this
he ran up against the advice of his military collaborator, Gronsfeld, who
had brought a Bavarian detachment to support Pappenheim’s activities in
1632. General Jost von Gronsfeld, one of the many capable commanders
operating in the Thirty Years War who have almost completely disap-
peared from the historical record, argued precisely the opposite, doubtless
from the perspective of Bavarian ‘regular’ warfare. To spend contribu-
tions on raising more troops rather than using the money to pay the wages
and provisioning of the existing forces was simply to pack the ranks with
inexperienced recruits – ‘useless boys’ in Gronsfeld’s words – rather than
focusing on the strength and coherence of the existing forces.144
Pappenheim appears to have been convinced. Although his death at
Lützen in November 1632 left his ultimate intentions unknown, he had
spoken significantly in correspondence about not wishing to create a
‘giant army’ in the Westphalian Circle and the Lower Saxon territories
under occupation, suggesting instead a total force of fewer than 20,000
(including the garrisons) and well supported through regular tax
exactions.145
By the mid-1630s the trend towards smaller armies was spreading
much more widely. The recognition that a smaller army made up of
more experienced and better-quality troops would lose little in strike-
power, but gain greatly in manoeuvrability and logistical durability, inter-
acted with political realities. Looking to the operational level of military
activity, and not seeing the future in terms of attritional frontier struggles,
great set-piece sieges or the notion of the once-and-for-all decisive battle
that would settle the war, a new generation of commanders began to
recognize the clear advantage of smaller campaign forces. In some cases
there was limited choice. For Banér, fighting to hold Sweden’s territories
in north Gemany and to prevent Imperial forces pushing the Swedes into
the Baltic, a large part of the Swedish military establishment had to be kept
in garrisons in the great fortresses along the coast, and after the Peace of
Prague, the recruitment opportunities for the Swedes in the Empire were
massively restricted. Banér conducted a remarkable series of defensive
campaigns through 1636–41 with an army that rarely exceeded 20,000 in
total, but was predominantly made up of seasoned German and Scottish
veterans prepared to accept campaigns every bit as hard-driven, tactically
resourceful and demanding of fighting commitment as the one conducted
by Pappenheim in 1632.146 The Swedish conscripts from the native
indelningverk system were kept as garrison troops in the Baltic territories,
ttin nia
Ste era
Elb m
e Po
Mecklenburg
Wittstock
9
163
Brandenburg
Brunswick 37
16
36 Magdeburg
16 O
Torgau de
r
Halberstadt
Hesse Saxony Pirna Silesia
Erfurt Chemnitz
Bohemia
Thuringia 1640
Prague
16
41
Franconia Cham
Moravia
Regensburg
Austria
ube
Dan Vienna
Bavaria
Campaign of 1636–37
Campaign of 1639–40
Campaign of winter/spring 1641
Map 4.3 Banér’s campaigns of 1636–7, 1639–40 and 1641.

partly because they were less experienced, partly as the Bygdea example
suggests, because they were already hugely vulnerable to epidemic disease
in garrisons and even more likely to suffer on active campaigning in
foreign territory.
But elsewhere, more troops could have been made available to increase
the size of field armies. Garrisons could have been pared down to raise
extra effectives – as indeed they were in the aftermath of military setbacks
or campaigns with a particularly heavy toll from sickness, desertion and
military casualties. In both 1642 and 1645 Imperial troops in Westphalia
were transferred to the main army to make good the heavy losses at
Breitenfeld II and Jankow.147 In general, however, the approach was
not, as a matter of military principle, to increase the campaign armies to
levels seen in the 1620s, but to keep them small. Even when opportunities
existed for expansion by recruitment or transfer they were not necessarily
taken.
The first obvious advantage lay in such an army’s smaller logistical
‘footprint’. Supplying the troops adequately with food and munitions –
by whatever means – was an imperative both in terms of the expectations
of the colonel-proprietors and in making possible any coherent opera-
tional plan. The considerably lesser burden of sustaining an army of
10,000–15,000 that could nonetheless retain its operational effectiveness
made a lot of sense. A larger army, which would almost certainly contain a
higher proportion of infantry, would increase the need for baggage trans-
port and swell the additional human ‘tail’ disproportionately, so that an
army of 25,000 might well involve double that number of mouths to
feed.148 It was surely no coincidence that two commanders with active
experience of fighting in this period, Turenne and Montecuccoli, should
both have expressed the view that feeding 30,000 mouths in a single army
(including the supply column) represented a ‘break-point’, above which
supplying armies – by any mechanism – became highly problematic.149
A further major implication of operating smaller campaign armies also
contributed indirectly to reducing the logistical problems of sustaining
campaigns. Smaller armies could make easier the operational objectives of
commanders who thought in terms of mobile, quick-hit campaigns, who
were prepared to cut deeply behind enemy lines, to threaten communi-
cations and to bring home the impact of war on territory which had
seemed secure from enemy incursions. The advantage of smaller forces
was that it was possible to be far more selective about the composition of
these armies. Overwhelmingly, commanders of the generation of Banér,
Hatzfeld, Torstensson, Turenne and Mercy sought to ensure that they
had high proportions of cavalry, irregular horse and dragoons or other
mounted infantry in their armies. By reducing the overall size of the field
Fig. 4.6 Banér as master of operational flexibility: the Swedish retreat

from Bohemia at Preßnitz, March 1641 (see p. 188)
armies, most of the infantry could be left in garrisons. This consequent

huge preponderance of cavalry in the field armies is another transforma-
tion seldom noticed in accounts of war in this period, all the more striking
when contrasted with the typical assumption that the period is shaped by a
military revolution which lays overwhelming weight on the importance of
infantry and infantry firepower.150 The figures are unambiguous, how-
ever: in Torstensson’s Swedish army of 1645 there were 8,500 cavalry and
dragoons against 6,000 infantry, while Mercy’s Bavarian army of 1644
was of 8,200 cavalry against 8,300 infantry.151 Partly thanks to Jan de
Werth’s largely cavalry contingent, even the Spanish army which invaded
Picardy in 1636 was of around 13,000 cavalry and 10,000–12,000 foot.152
The French field armies in general were slow to catch up with this trend,
as numerous despairing letters from commanders to the war minister
reveal.153 But by 1645 Turenne and Enghien’s forces at the battle of
Allerheim numbered 9,200 cavalry and 7,800 infantry.154
This growing preponderance of cavalry is clearly visible in contempo-
rary engravings of battles, where ever-larger cavalry wings fight out what
Fig. 4.7 The small cavalry-dominated army of the later Thirty Years
War: the battle of Mergentheim, 5 May 1645
was more likely than not to be the decisive aspect of the engagement,
especially given the cohesion of infantry units almost always placed in the
centre. But fighting major pitched battles was rarely the intention of these
generals in their approach to warfare; or rather, none of them believed that
a single battle, even under the most ideal circumstances, would have a
decisive, war-winning impact. Engaging in battle was a means to open up
the enemy territory to deep incursion, devastation and occupation – this
was certainly Torstensson’s intention in seeking combat at Jankow very
early in 1645, and the aim of the Swedish and French forces in forcing the
Bavarian army into battle at Zusmarschausen in mid-May 1648.155 Or it
was a means, usually when all else failed, to confront such enemy tactics
and inflict sufficient losses that they would have no capacity to press
forward with their larger strategy, as Mercy and Hatzfeld did at
Allerheim in 1645.156 But it was never more than part of an overall
campaign plan which would stress all the qualities of mobility, surprise,
rapid reaction and exploitation of circumstances for which large numbers
of cavalry were especially suited.
Shifting the weight of the army towards cavalry had some operational
disadvantages: horses were no less prone to disease; they also needed to be
fed, and though grazing or forage could offer them just enough sustenance
to remain healthy, to be properly effective they needed measures of oats or
barley; cavalry mounts in particular were expensive – a decent cavalry
horse cost considerably more than a basic infantry soldier. Replacement of
horses was one of the heaviest burdens on an enterpriser-colonel, and one
reason why cavalry regiments were much smaller than infantry units, and
why the financial commitment to running a cavalry unit was approached
with some trepidation by potential colonels. But the horses themselves
provided the potential to carry much larger stocks of provisions, while
cavalry mobility offered the possibility of obtaining subsistence from local
requisitioning, or moving quickly out of areas where there was minimal
scope for support. Overall flexibility was simply much greater than for a
force predominantly made up of infantry.
If the deliberate focus on cavalry was a product of the commanders’
approach to campaigning, another implication of this was a reluctance to
engage in protracted sieges. While the capture of fortified places was by no
means a negligible advantage in campaigns that sought to place cumula-
tive pressure on the enemy, the opportunity costs needed to be set in
context. Smaller armies, focused on cavalry, were not suitable for a tradi-
tional siege of blockade and entrenchment, nor would it be easy to spare
large numbers of troops to act as a garrison in the captured place.
Moreover a campaign which was conceived in terms of rapid movements,
surprise and deep strikes into enemy territory would inevitably fail if
combined with a grinding, attritional siege that would absorb six weeks
of the campaign and might cost a third or half the field army lost to disease
and casualties. The recognition that sieges, if they were to be undertaken,
would probably succeed not through formal siege warfare but, as with
Pappenheim’s capture of Hildesheim in 1632, through trickery, threats
and surprise, also shaped operational decision-making. The French Army
of Germany under Turenne and Enghien suffered heavy casualties and an
undoubted tactical defeat at the battle of Freiburg on 3–5 August 1644.157
However, the Bavarian army fell back from the positions it had earlier
defended so effectively: Mercy judged it prudent to reconstitute the forces
further south where they could safeguard Bavaria and other south
German territory.158 At Turenne’s urging, the French army rejected the
obvious next move of seeking to besiege Freiburg – the apparent objective
of the battle – and doubled back up the Rhine to take advantage of the
limited Bavarian/Imperial military presence there. Having determined not
to take Freiburg through what might well prove a slow and costly siege, the
French were now able to seize the vastly more important Mainz and
Phillipsburg by negotiation and bluff, together with a further series of

significant strong-points, which entirely transformed the strategic out-
come of the campaign.159
Smaller and much more mobile armies also permitted the opening up of
what was, albeit with considerable precautions, almost an additional
dimension to campaigning. The four or five months of winter quarter
was traditionally seen as the period when troops and horses had the
chance for rest and recuperation, and when regimental proprietors and
their captains could carry out the recruitment and re-equipping of their
armies and replenish their funds through the collection of quartering
payments – an essential part of the ‘business of the regiment’. But when
campaigns were seen in terms not of pursuing a single military objective
but of maximizing advantages through combinations of manoeuvre, occu-
pation and lesser engagements, then the operational benefits of campaign-
ing during the winter months became considerable. The early start to
campaigning was especially characteristic of the Swedes: by late January
1645, Torstensson’s army was already on Bohemian territory, ready to
force Hatzfeld into battle by early March. Traditional armies of this period
usually had not begun to assemble before April, and might not begin
serious campaigning until June.160 Similarly the army that could be
paid, persuaded or cajoled into remaining in action into the late autumn
could achieve impressive advantages in situations where the enemy forces
had already dispersed themselves. The most spectacular example of this is
provided by the Bavarian surprise and total defeat of the Franco-
Weimarian army at Tuttlingen on 24 November 1643, but there were
plenty of other examples of such unseasonal tactics throughout the war;
indeed it was one of the chief uses for irregular cavalry – Croats, hussars
and Cossacks.161 The Swedish armies, and as the war continued, their
enemies, were increasingly prepared to wage entire winter campaigns,
continuing to fight and to accumulate military and territorial advantage
without any normal winter pause. Johan Banér was the master of this
approach – masterminding the logistical support for a series of winter
campaigns in the later 1630s and persuading his troops to seize the
opportunities these presented. A notorious example was his daring raid
in January 1641, aiming to capture the Emperor and a group of Electors at
the Reichstag held in Regensburg, deep within territory considered under
Imperial control. The initial attempt at surprise failed, and Banér of
course had no heavy artillery to try to besiege a city on the scale
of Regensburg, so his troops moved across into undefended territory
around Bamberg, seizing Cham on 28 January.162 Encountering growing
Imperial pressure, Banér coordinated an impressive retreat from Bohemia
via the Preßnitz pass. Less attention-grabbing, but of much greater strategic
significance was the way in which Banér used the previous winters of 1637/8
and 1638/9 to claw back many of the losses of Swedish-held territory and
fortifications suffered as superior Imperial forces had pressed into north
Germany during the summer months.163
Again, though, while the tactical and operational advantages of winter
campaigning are obvious, sustaining these campaigns and retaining
troops capable of continuing into the summer months of the next cam-
paign was a serious challenge. Cavalry-based forces had an obvious reason
for not campaigning in the winter months given the absence of forage and
new grass for grazing, although this could be surmounted via the careful
stockpiling and transport of fodder. Waging such winter campaigns was
also about ensuring that fresh troops were fed into the army at the begin-
ning of the spring to reinforce and sustain those who had been active over
the winter: both Banér and Torstensson relied on new Swedish levies
arriving on the Baltic coast in the spring, who could replace existing
garrison troops who in turn could be used to reinforce their field armies.
It was also about finding means to guarantee the financial interests of
proprietors who were given no time in winter quarters where they could
live off local exactions and taxes that would be distributed to allow them to
re-equip or remount their troops, recruit replacement soldiers and reim-
burse themselves for some of the costs of the campaign. Matthias Gallas
on one occasion complained with some hyperbole that the ordinary
Imperial soldiers garrisoned across the Rhenish-Westphalian Circle, a
key contributions base for the Imperial army in the 1630s and 1640s,
were better fed and accommodated than the senior officers in his own
campaign army. But it was the ability to redistribute a portion of the
money and resources from those areas where contributions were collected
to the officers with the regiments on campaign that made this system of
lengthy, sometimes winter-long campaigning viable.164
To examine systematically this style of waging war would require a
detailed campaign history of the Thirty Years War, especially its second
half, and a different, or much longer, book.165 The modus operandi of
commanders like Piccolomini, Bernhard von Saxe-Weimar, Banér,
Torstensson and Mercy has been alluded to throughout the previous
section. Briefly to offer an example of military operations from the latter
stages of the war which complements the opening account of Pappenheim’s
campaign of 1632, attention could be given to the campaign conducted by
the forces of Turenne and Karl Gustav Wrangel in 1646.
In late 1645 the Swedish-backed forces of Amalie Elizabeth of Hesse-
Cassel had moved against the city of Marburg, hitherto awarded to the
Hesse-Darmstadt branch of the family in a succession dispute dating back
to the 1620s. In early 1646 Swedish and Imperial forces were drawn into
Hesse in support of the rival claimants. Prevented from retaking Marburg, a

substantial Imperial and Bavarian army under the overall command of
Archduke Leopold Wilhelm constructed a fortified encampment to block
any Swedish move southwards and to guard against the possibility of a link-
up between Wrangel and the army of Turenne. Turenne himself had spent
the early months of the year engaged in intermittent campaigning in
Lorraine, and countering a series of diplomatically motivated proposals
by Mazarin that he should move his army north on to the borders of
Flanders and Luxembourg in order directly to engage with the Spanish
forces there. The threat posed to the Swedish army by the superior
Imperial-Bavarian forces finally strengthened Turenne’s demand that he
undertake the military objective that had initially been agreed for this
campaign, a rendezvous with the army of Wrangel. But crossing the
Rhine directly from Alsace would put the Imperial-Bavarian forces between
the Swedes and the French, and risk the separate defeats of Turenne’s and
Wrangel’s smaller armies. Turenne’s decision, taken in late June, was to
march his army northwards on the west bank of the Rhine, crossing at
Wesel in Kleve, and then to return along the east bank and into Hesse
behind the Swedes, reinforcing their army against the combined Imperial-
Bavarian positions. This involved a march of 120 miles along the Rhine to
Wesel, and then back towards Hesse, itself a considerable challenge for the
cohesion and organization of an army, and saying much about the way that
military forces had been scaled down and were now dominated by cavalry.
On 20 July Turenne crossed the Rhine at Wesel, then marched his
troops rapidly upstream, uniting on 10 August with Wrangel’s army
encamped in Hesse. The Imperial plan was simply to await the Franco-
Swedish army in their strong entrenchments, hoping to inflict a heavy
defeat on any offensive they might launch in an area that was already
becoming increasingly denuded of supplies. But instead of assaulting the
Imperial encampment as expected, the allies launched aggressive surprise
attacks along both flanks of Leopold Wilhelm’s positions, aiming not to
draw the enemy forces into a battle, but to outflank them. This they
achieved rapidly and precisely, creating a situation in which the
Imperial-Bavarian army was now prevented from retreating southwards
by a reunited allied force, able to threaten its lines of communications, and
to render its elaborate and powerful fortified defences completely useless.
The allied temptation at this stage might have been to risk a battle,
especially as Leopold Wilhelm’s army had abandoned their previous
positions and were now moving tentatively northwards to link up with
Holzapfels’ Imperial forces in Westphalia. Instead they seized the remark-
able opportunity that this operational miscalculation by the Imperial
forces had opened up. Despite the lateness of the campaign season, and
the extensive marches already undertaken by Turenne’s troops, the deci-

sion was taken to sweep southwards through Swabia, outrunning Leopold
Wilhelm’s troops and moving into Bavaria in a surprise assault which all of
the efforts of the Bavarian army in the preceding three years had sought to
prevent. This involved bypassing the great city of Heilbronn, which
Turenne and Wrangel calculated they lacked the time and troops to
besiege. Although the intervention of the Imperial-Bavarian forces had
briefly tipped the balance in the Hessian struggle over control of Marburg,
the news that the allies were rapidly approaching an undefended Bavaria
produced the predictable orders for an immediate forced march south-
wards to try to intercept and throw back the invasion. But Leopold
Wilhelm’s troops were on the wrong bank of the Main, held up by the
recapture of Aschaffenburg, and forced to take an easterly route back
towards Bavaria, reaching Regensburg on 19 September. Turenne and
Wrangel swept southwards in two fast-moving columns passing north and
south of Nördlingen and devastating the northerly part of Bavaria, cross-
ing the Danube in late September to occupy all the duchy except Munich
and Ingolstadt.166 The systematic devastation of this territory by the
allies before the Bavarian forces could block them, and the failure of the
Imperials to lend adequate assistance, was instrumental in persuading the
Elector of Bavaria to agree to a separate ceasefire in March 1647.
This was not strategically sterile war; it was a hard-fought struggle to
dominate territory through mobility and flexibility, a willingness to exploit
opportunities as they arose via planned and coordinated operational
initiatives, and to use a combination of well-disciplined troop movements
and systematic destruction to make it impossible for enemy forces to
maintain themselves and to force a ruler to terms. Only from 1645 did
the military balance start to swing irrevocably against one side, that of the
Imperial-Bavarian forces, and even then both 1645 and 1647 offered
plenty of evidence of continued resilience and military effectiveness.
The war was a training ground for commanders, who developed extensive
military skills in planning complex and flexible campaigns, revealed tac-
tical subtlety, intelligence and deception, and understood the economical
use of force to achieve hitting power and shock disproportionate to
numbers.
What did this system of waging war owe to military enterprise? It could
be argued that these impressive commanders, placed in charge of armies
made up of a core of high-quality troops, were simply doing their job
effectively. In contrast, a Gallas or Savelli in the Imperial armies, a Dodo
von Kniephausen in the Swedish army, demonstrated the pervasive lim-
itations of logistics, structure and organization when armies were in the
hands of weak or incompetent commanders with little operational
United
Provinces
Rh Turenne’s Army Crosses Rhine, Turenne’s Army
ine 20 July.
Wrangel’s Army
Wesel Imperial/Bavarian Forces
Dortmund Kassel
10 August
Cologne Swedish Forces Under Wrangel
Marburg
(Late June)
Giessen
Imperial Fulda
Spanish and Bavarian
Koblenz
Netherlands Forces (June)
Main Frankfurt Bamberg

am Main
Aschaffenburg
Luxembourg Trier
Wurzburg
Thionville Nuremberg
Turenne’s Army Regensburg.
(June/July 1646) 19 Sept.
Metz Heilbronn
e
nub
Schorndorf Nördlingen Da
9 Sept. Ingolstadt
ine
Donauwörth
Donauwörth
Rh
Ulm 20 Sept.
Augsburg
Munich
Map 4.4 Turenne and Wrangel’s campaign in 1646
understanding. But military enterprise brought more to this equation.

The strong sense of commanders’ accountability to their colonels, who
were shareholders in the military project and who wanted success but did
not want to see their investment needlessly wasted, certainly ensured that
adequate logistical support for military operations figured high in
commanders’ calculations. Operations needed to be realistic and cost-
effective, not grandiose statements concerned with maintaining the rep-
utation of the ruler, or overly focused on a single military objective that
would undermine wider goals sought incrementally across the length of
the campaign. The relative independence of the commanders in many of
these armies dominated by military enterprise was another key factor. It
was the ability of Hatzfeld in Westphalia or Torstensson in Saxony to
make decisions on the ground, to control a large portion of the army’s

financial resources directly, to make contracts for supply and provisioning
with agents who were specifically linked to the commanders, not negoti-
ated via central administrators, which gave a vital flexibility to these
operations. None of this would necessarily work smoothly, but a means-
end rationality did dominate thinking, and ensured that military plans
were established, altered and developed in response to a realistic appre-
ciation of the military capabilities of the forces at their disposal, and a
clear-sighted awareness of the logistical burdens and challenges that these
plans would entail.
In contrast to this style of war waged by the Swedish, Bavarian or
Weimarian armies was the inflexible, slow-moving siege-driven warfare
of the main French and Spanish forces of the period, more under the
thumb of their respective rulers and serving dynastic priorities not just in
their political aims but in their operational methods. Nor was this simply a
characteristic of the monarchies of France and Spain; the rulers of the
Dutch Republic were no less anxious to exercise overall control of the
military operations of an army which they funded through state taxation
and borrowing.167 In all cases the difference in outcome was striking. The
lumbering advance of the Cardinal Infante in his 1636 invasion of France
has already been considered as an example of this approach in action (see
above, p. 179). However, as the French armies began to take the initiative
in campaigning from the later 1630s the military goals and deployment of
resources were shaped by a mirror image of Spanish policy. Large-scale
sieges on the north-eastern frontier drained military resources from other
campaign theatres and concentrated them, under the direct command of
the king and his first minister, on the siege and capture of fortified towns of
which the significance was as much a matter of dynastic prestige as opera-
tional utility. In 1642 Richelieu himself seems to have awoken to the
misplaced priorities inherent in this attritional campaigning: writing to
the French king early in that year, he argued that the commitment of an
overwhelming share of the resources of the war effort to a single siege on
the Flanders frontier in each campaign eliminated France’s capacity to
achieve military results elsewhere, exhausted the armies and the support
resources involved so that there was no chance of achieving anything else
during the remainder of the campaign, and did nothing to force the
Habsburg powers into a recognition of the need to negotiate a pro-
French peace.168
A few years later, during his successful campaigning across Westphalia,
Swabia and Bavaria, Turenne was to write to Enghien that it was his maxim
to undertake sieges as rarely as possible, and that with the military resour-
ces available to him he aimed to fight small, cumulative engagements
rather than large-scale battles. It was, he continued, quite false to attribute

more honour (my italics) to the conquest of a fortified city than to a
campaign which brings about control of a great sweep of territory. Had
the Spanish king devoted to open campaigning the resources in money and
men that he had spent on sieges and fortifications, he would still be the
mightiest of all rulers.169
Epilogue
It was not, however, Turenne’s theory of waging war that was vindicated
in conflict after 1648. Thereafter west-central European warfare assumed
a character familiar from traditional accounts of early modern conflict:
large-scale, cautious and slow-moving, with campaigns dominated by
sieges in which the occasional field encounters were always bloody and
most often indecisive. This transformation of warfare and the redefining
of the public–private balance in its organization will be the subject of
Chapter 6. From the perspective of the waging and character of warfare,
the most obvious consequence was the inexorable drift to military gigan-
tism that followed from elevating the authority of rulers in the organiza-
tion and control of warfare. In the first half of the sixteenth century it had
been the dynastic inheritance of the Habsburg Emperor Charles V and the
political context in which he operated that had been the primary factor in
stimulating the upward surge in the size of armed forces. In the same way,
the determination of Louis XIV to assert control over his armies and to
shape the French fiscal-military apparatus in order to underwrite his
international policies precipitated the second great round of international
military inflation. For Jacques de Guibert, whose favourable comment on
the commanders and strategy of the later Thirty Years War was cited at the
opening of the chapter, the military decay of ancien régime warfare started
with Louis XIV and his age. Guibert, whose opinions are normally only
cited in the context of the military debates of the 1760s onwards, offers a
dismal picture of growing state involvement in European warfare.
What Guibert noted was the return of war as carefully staged combat
between dynastic rivals, in which the reputation of rulers was a key
principle, both determining and restricting the ways in which campaigns
could be planned and fought. The state control of armies tended always,
and most notoriously in the second half of the seventeenth century,
towards overly large armies pursuing single objectives. Louis XIV’s deci-
sion to command his armies in person as an exercise of assertive sover-
eignty led to a concentration on siege warfare as an appropriate symbol of
an essentially dynastic struggle, and sapped resources from other cam-
paign theatres as it became a matter of dynastic reputation that the siege
Epilogue 195
should succeed.170 The ‘honour’ that Turenne had suggested was overly
associated with the capture of fortified cities and towns returned as the
determining motive in the conduct of war. Armies that were large enough
to ensure that there should be no setbacks in the royal presence were
assembled for the nineteen sieges at which Louis was personally present
between 1667 and 1692.171 The king’s personal command ensured a
further level of caution in a style of warfare that was already slow-moving,
attritional and risk-averse because of the size of the armies and the obses-
sion with maintaining supply via convoys from frontier magazines.172
Once a fortified place had been captured, there was a strong temptation
to abandon the campaign rather than risk further objectives where set-
backs might compromise the accrued gloire of the king.
A vast and inflationary expansion in armed forces did nothing to make
war more decisive or to achieve strategic goals.173 The close synthesis of
means and ends that had lain at the heart of the military enterprise of the
later Thirty Years War had been swept away at a military as well as a
political level. The dominance of the ruler and the centre in the formula-
tion of policy was accompanied by assertive control over military planning
and strategy. Behind this direct control of military force was what Marshal
Vauban identified as strategic formlessness: attritional war based on
unprecedented armies perpetuated conflict on a scale greater, costlier
and more burdensome than the Thirty Years War, but offered no guide
to winning the kind of strategic advantage that would give France or
indeed any other power the lasting political hegemony in Europe which
these expansionist political and military methods had sought.174
These developments represent a daunting challenge to unreflective
assumptions that increasing the state’s control over armies and navies
must equate with greater operational efficiency and higher levels of stra-
tegic and operational effectiveness. It was to be Europe’s tragedy that the
approach of Turenne and his military contemporaries was virtually dis-
regarded for a century after 1650, while dynastic imperatives, pursued by
armies and navies in which the state became everywhere the majority
shareholder, dominated the waging of warfare on a scale and with a
human and material cost beyond anything seen in the campaigning of
the Thirty Years War.
5 The business of war
SUPPLYING WAR FOR PROFIT

The previous chapter focused upon the military effectiveness of armies
raised under private contract. Unit commanders, whether on land or in
command of naval forces, were generally motivated by more than a short-
sighted desire to raise troops as cheaply as possible and then to exploit
them for immediate financial self-interest. Regimental proprietors and
ships’ captains sought to recruit experienced soldiers and sailors, and
acknowledged the need to offer these men incentives to stay in service
and to reward their military skills. Concern with operational viability
shifted military activity away from large-scale, attritional warfare where
the risk of supply failure and disruption was high. Enterprise encouraged
military thinking and practice more appropriate to the limitations and
possibilities available to armies and navies in this period: a strong empha-
sis on the mobility of field armies and willingness to draw upon the
military qualities and resilience of the experienced troops within them; a
massive downsizing in the scale of operational forces during the 1630s and
1640s as quality was preferred over quantity. All of this was the response of
experienced, ambitious and capable commanders, who were certainly not
combat-averse but were realistic in setting the pitched battle into a wider
context of operational warfare which put more emphasis on territorial
control and denial, and on maintaining the initiative through speed,
surprise and flexibility.
At the heart of this case for a more economical and flexible use of force
lay the management of logistics and finance. Albrecht Wallenstein put his
campaigning priorities with characteristic succinctness when he wrote
that his army needed bread, then munitions, and after these, wages.1
Military commanders who deployed their armies in increasingly mobile,
flexible approaches to campaigning were well aware that this put even
greater weight on well-coordinated supply systems, capable of meeting at
least a part of their armies’ needs across a campaign which might extend
over ten months and many hundreds of miles of marches, encampments,
196
Supplying war for profit 197
engagements and sieges. If they were sea captains the centrality of provi-
sioning their vessels for an entire voyage would in most cases be a self-
evident requirement before setting out from port.
Military commanders might facilitate logistical operations: they might
choose to move their armies along the routes of rivers to permit water-borne
transport of bulky supplies and equipment; they might plan their campaign
with the expectation that the army would reach locations according to a
timetable that would allow the stockpiling of food and munitions; they
might be able to requisition carts and wagons to assist in the transport of
supplies, or act directly to requisition foodstuffs from the localities through
which the army passed. Yet beyond this they would need to draw upon the
production, manufacturing and distribution capabilities of groups of spe-
cialists. These groups are themselves a vital part of the business of war, and
their activities have a direct impact on the ways and effectiveness with which
war was waged in this period.
Where armies and navies are raised and maintained by the central
state and its agents, it is frequently assumed that all these support
services will also be handled by the state. A centrally controlled system
of provisioning and administration would employ officials of varied rank
and responsibility, who would act under commission to collect together
supplies of grain, meat and other foodstuffs, or a range of munitions and
equipment, store them in magazines and issue them to garrisons, to
armies in the field, or to fleets of galleys or galleons. If transportation
of foodstuffs was required, or grain needed to be milled into flour and
baked into bread, this would be done through the agency of these
officials. Payment for all these activities and for the collection and
storage of foodstuffs would be met either directly out of state revenues,
or in the form of tax credits or other means of offsetting subjects’ fiscal
and military liabilities against provisions. Such a system could extend to
the production of armaments themselves, which in the purest form of a
state-run military support system would be manufactured in factories,
workshops or dockyards established and financed by the state, operated
by workers and specialists who were state employees, and whose activity
was exclusively determined by state contracts and demand. A total system
of procurement, distribution and production of this sort would represent
the ideal version of a system which the early modern Spanish Council of
State termed ‘administración’, the direct state control of military support
functions.
There is no reason why, even when the state’s role in the raising and
running of armies and navies is more restricted, aspects of military support
systems should not be directly administered. But in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Europe, there are few instances of such direct public
control. Shipbuilding was one area in which administración made a sub-

stantial appearance: from the sixteenth century the Swedish fleet was con-
structed in state dockyards, funded and under the control of government
officials.2 The Arsenale in Venice was state-run and its carpenters and other
craftsmen were employees whose priority was building and fitting out
galleys for the state, even if their secondary activities included building
and repairing private merchant vessels.3 But even in shipbuilding, policy
would more often oscillate between state control and the use of private
contractors. A generation of ocean-going warships were built under Philip
II’s orders between 1589 and 1598 in royal shipyards under the supervision
of royal ministers who bought the timber and hired the skilled labour; but
this policy of state-directed construction was reversed under Philip III.4
Some warships in both English and French fleets were constructed under
direct state authority by state employees, but the great majority were put out
to private contractors.5 The early seventeenth-century Danish fleet was
partly built in crown dockyards near Copenhagen, but rather more ships
were built by private contractors in the shipyards of Holstein (see below,
p. 222). Moving away from shipbuilding, there were a few cases of army,
and especially naval, supply provisioning being carried out by direct admin-
istration: in England during the Commonwealth the victualling of the fleet
was directly handled by state administrators, and after 1683 there was a
permanent transfer of the responsibility for provisioning the navy into the
hands of a government Victualling Board.6 On land, the Venetian provedi-
tore could be entrusted with direct responsibility for supplying the armies in
the field during a particular campaign or operation, though in practice this
was mostly managed through subcontracts with merchants and suppliers.7
In a similar way food supplies for the French campaigns of Henry VIII in the
1510s and 1520s were managed, with varying levels of success, by officials
of the royal household, the only body with experience of supplying food on
a large scale. But in turn these efforts depended heavily on support from
English and Flemish contractors and company victuallers who distributed
the food to the soldiers against wage deductions.8 There are cases as well
where the production and distribution of munitions and armaments might
be handled directly by the state and its officials: the Spanish powder
factories in Malaga, Cartagena and Pamplona were in royal hands, as
were the facilities for making match at Pamplona and the armour work-
shops in Guipozcoa. Only in 1632 did the Junta de reformación established
by Olivares recommend that all royal factories, with the single exception of
the gunpowder works at Cartagena, be put out to private contract.9 In
France, the collection of saltpetre had been regulated and undertaken by
the state from 1540, though again, this had been entirely abandoned by
1636 when production was placed in the hands of private lessees, who
contracted to provide 200,000 pounds of saltpetre for an agreed price of

80,000 livres per annum.10
The most obvious point about this list is the exceptional nature of these
initiatives, and their very small – and declining – role as a proportion of the
military activity of the early modern state. Why should this have been so? It
might seem an obvious priority that matters of supply and armament
which related directly to military capability and the defence of the state
should be in the hands of its officials and employees, whether or not the
armies themselves were raised from national levies or were hired under
contract. Direct control and exploitation of domestic sources of raw
materials like saltpetre, metals and timber for shipbuilding would offer
security in situations where contracts to obtain these materials from
private suppliers, especially from abroad, might dry up or become pro-
hibitively expensive in wartime. Moreover, state involvement in ship-
building, army provisioning or gunpowder milling would seem to offer
quality control, the ability to prioritize resources and some leverage to
ensure that production could match military demand.
These are issues that had been grasped by contemporary administra-
tors. The Spanish Council of State discussed the issue of administración in
the most direct terms, arguing not merely that it was more compatible
with the sovereignty and reputation of the crown, but that it was a means
to safeguard areas that were vital to the military security of the Empire:
ensuring direct control of supplies of raw material and of the manufactur-
ing processes required to ensure that munitions and armaments could be
made available in sufficient quantities, and that the mechanisms for feed-
ing armies and navies were predictably and reliably maintained.11 In an
apparent paradox, the greatest of all early modern military entrepreneurs,
Albrecht Wallenstein, drafted a project to establish a military manufactur-
ing zone within the Habsburg hereditary lands that would, under the
direction of its officials, provide all of the artillery, weapons, armour,
equipment and munitions required to equip present and future
Habsburg armies. Though the project was never carried through, the
arguments for the benefits of autarky and control of production and
supply in military goods suggest that, even in this unlikely quarter, state-
controlled arms and munitions production was taken seriously.12
Morever in contrast to these small-scale and apparently declining ini-
tiatives in the West, the Ottoman Empire appears from the early sixteenth
century to have taken direct control of all aspects of the provisioning of the
Sultan’s household troops, which included the standing force of
Janissaries, the permanent cavalry regiments and the artillery, in total
numbering around 18,500 troops in 1527 and rising to 75,000 in 1609.
This left substantial forces of provincial timar cavalry and other irregular
troops outside the mechanisms of state provision, and as the historian of a

major study of Ottoman warfare stresses, reliance on official archival
material may give an overly optimistic presentation of the success of
such state-administered logistical systems. But even with these caveats,
the evidence that the Ottomans chose direct administration to provision
military forces running into tens of thousands of troops is striking evi-
dence of a different decision-making process.13
But although the arguments for direct control and security of supply
might seem strong, in practice pragmatic considerations shaped the debate
about the public administration of military support systems. The main
consideration was the nature of military demand, especially for military
matériel. Supplying war represented a huge challenge to early modern eco-
nomic systems, and this intensified during the sixteenth century. As dis-
cussed in Chapter 2, European armies grew substantially in size during the
first half of the sixteenth century, but at the same time, at least until the
1550s, the continuous length of conflicts did not significantly increase. This
created a particular problem: an intensification of military demand for
weapons, munitions and foodstuffs immediately before and during a period
of conflict, but at the same time dramatic fluctuations in that demand as
campaigns were brought to a conclusion and uncertainty prevailed about
when or if there would be a resumption of hostilities. Supplying quantities of
muskets, match or cavalry harness to an army could require ratcheting up
production levels, perhaps developing new manufacturing and distribution
facilities, but to meet spikes of demand lasting for no more than a few
months. If averaged out over years or decades these demands were of far
more modest significance. This posed a virtually insuperable challenge to
any plan to create dedicated state-controlled, -staffed and -financed indus-
trial and manufacturing centres for the production of military goods and
supplies.14 The dimensions of the problem can be seen in the running of the
Venetian Arsenale, in many respects one of the most viable of such state-run
industrial and manufacturing plants, since its remit included not just the
building of a galley fleet, whose numbers steadily increased through the first
half of the sixteenth century, but the repairs, maintenance and military
outfitting of the galleys, and the construction and upkeep of the large fleet
of ‘great galleys’ which were leased out by the Venetian state to merchant
consortia in order to conduct trading expeditions with the Levant and the
rest of Europe.15 Yet even this level of demand was not sufficient to keep
the Arsenale permanently staffed and at work, and the tension inherent to
the need for a labour force who in specific emergencies would be able and
prepared to maximize productive capacity, but at other times would be
encouraged to drift off to seek employment amongst the squerarioli, or
private shipbuilders and repairers, remained unresolved throughout this
period.16 The manufacture of munitions – which also occurred within the

Arsenale – was even more problematic: very basic artillery and infantry
handguns, with slow rates of fire, required a distinctly pre-industrial quantity
of munitions to sustain them. A cannon in the field or at a siege, able to fire
five iron cannon balls in an hour, might pose considerable challenges to the
transportation capacities of an early modern army: getting shot, powder and
match to a military encampment in sufficient quantity to service a battery of
field guns was a serious problem. But simply manufacturing stockpiles of
ammunition and powder to ensure that usable artillery in fortresses, with
armies and in warships was adequately provisioned would not overstretch
the productive capability of a sixteenth-century European manufacturing
sector. The enormous stocks of munitions in many fortresses and in royal
and private arsenals were more indicative of the difficulties of managing
supply and demand in this industrial sector than a sign of the fearsome
potential of early modern gunpowder weaponry, while even more indicative
was the often vast overproduction of armour, harness and edged weapons.17
In this context, Wallenstein’s ideas for a dedicated Habsburg armaments
complex were prescient in so far as they postulated a permanent state of war
in which high demand could be maintained over the long term.18 But even
in such a case it is not self-evident that the demand for armaments as well as
munitions would be sustained for long enough and at a high enough level to
justify the work of this dedicated military-industrial complex.
Moreover, even where the possibility for a sustained, regular demand
existed, governments showed little interest in stepping in to assume control
of production and distribution. The main military-technological innovation
of the later sixteenth and seventeenth century, the cast-iron cannon, trans-
formed patterns of military demand. The European market for consider-
ably cheaper, but acceptably reliable English cast-iron gun-barrels could
support eight or nine iron foundries in full-time production in Sussex and
Kent.19 The trade in iron guns was integrated into a network of interna-
tional merchants, above all, Elias Trip from Amsterdam, who until 1622
organized the importing of 200–300 English iron guns per year into the
Dutch Republic.20 Yet although the manufacturing of iron cannon was a
genuinely viable, specialized military industry, the English crown felt no
impulsion to assume direct control of its production, even though the
destination of some of the exported cannon alarmed the government, and
the concern to ensure a steady supply of iron guns for English naval vessels
might have seemed a priority.21 A similar picture emerges when the
Swedish manufacturing of iron cannon emerged as a major competitor in
the 1620s, with guns of comparable quality and lower price. But here again
the capitalization and development of the industry was in the hands of
merchant-entrepreneurs, in this case the powerful Dutch partnership of
Fig. 5.1 The diversity of military production: seventeenth-century

artillery, munitions and supporting equipment
Louis de Geer and Elias and Pieter Trip who began producing and market-
ing Swedish iron cannon from the mid-1620s. De Geer organized and
financed the production of cannon in Sweden, hugely developing the
foundries at Arboga under licence from the crown, but with technical
expertise and much of the skilled labour provided by Dutchmen and gun-
founding experts from Liège.22 The scale of the industrial activity dwarfed
English manufacture: in 1630 alone the Trips imported 1,182 cannon from
Sweden, on which they paid an advance of 223,000 guilders, and then
proceeded to sell across Europe. Again, the Swedish crown seems to have
been content to leave the manufacturing of iron cannon in the hands of
private and non-native enterprisers, and only briefly, from 1652 to 1656,
sought to establish a crown monopoly over the export of guns.23
Provisioning under contract: the privatization

of military supply
If the direct involvement of the state and its administrators in the produc-
tion and distribution of military goods was rare and becoming rarer in
Provisioning under contract 203
early modern Europe, various and very different private interests were
involved in the business of war. All of the mechanisms for equipping
and supplying armed forces were in various ways inadequate to the task,
and resilience in the system was owed to the multiple levels on which it
operated.
Sutlers and small traders

The commonest form of supply without any direct state intervention
could claim to be almost universal from the earliest times. This was
provided by small-scale individual traders and sutlers following in the
wake of the army on their own initiative, and forming a large part of the
Troß or general baggage and support train which until the eighteenth
century accompanied most armies. These, the Marketender in a German
context, vivandiers in French armies, were a flexible and important ele-
ment of any supply system in this period, providing a freelance mechanism
to concentrate available local resources to provide basic provisions for the
army – bread, meat and beer – but in addition offering a much wider range
of food to troops of different ranks and wage levels, and absorbing the
costs of initial purchase, transportation and distribution in the prices they
charged to the soldiers.24 In addition to food, these traders would offer a
variety of second-hand military equipment, clothing and other goods
needed by soldiers either at the beginning or throughout military service.
Sutlers frequently enjoyed an additional and profitable role as the
receivers and redistributors of plundered goods. This was a mechanism
geared towards, and indeed thriving on, the cash-in-hand military econ-
omy of the Swiss, Landsknechte, and other sixteenth-century soldiers.25 In
ideal conditions, where an army was operating in prosperous, densely
populated territory, a host of small suppliers could more than meet the
needs of a substantial campaign army. In 1507 the French army on
Genoese territory was supplied by local victuallers whose carts stretched
twelve miles along the valley of Polcevera.26
Though reliance on small-scale private enterprise was convenient and
cost-efficient for commanders and those organizing military force, it
presented obvious problems and dangers even in a period of smaller
armies and shorter periods of conflict. Small-scale sutlers and private
traders had limited ‘reach’ when it came to locating supplies of foodstuffs.
They could buy up local goods – or whatever the local community was
prepared to sell – but they had no larger network of agents and factors able
to gather in food supplies from further afield in the event that the army’s
demands were greater than anticipated, or the immediate area was poorly
provided. Such small-scale dealers were certainly not immune to localized
production and distribution difficulties, and though relying on them was

strongly preferred to permitting the troops to go off in search of food
supplies themselves, they had little more capacity to make good inadequa-
cies and to guarantee that the troops would receive a basic subsistence.
Though their privately owned wagons and carts were an inseparable part
of every sixteenth- and seventeenth-century army, and formed a focal
point of any military encampment, they added considerably to the overall
size and cumbersome bulk of the Troß, the vast quasi-town of support and
supply facilities that accompanied the army, and potentially slowed its
progress to the rate of the heaviest artillery-piece and the most overladen
and ill-constructed wagon. Given that the bulk of the army’s food supplies
would be held in the hands of the accompanying convoy of sutlers and
provisioners, rapid marches by the campaign troops might well be held
back every few days in order to allow their suppliers to catch up. Added to
the practical problems of supplying an army was the burden imposed on
food supplies by a sprawling collection of private suppliers and their
dependants and employees, themselves of course so many extra mouths
for the food supplies being transported to the army.27
Apart from whether suppliers would be able to find sufficient food stocks
to sell, there was the risk that the sutlers would be frightened away by the
indiscipline of the troops. All military codes in this period contained harsh
penalties for soldiers who robbed from or committed violence against the
sutlers, recognizing the potential risks of driving away local and small-scale
suppliers. In so far as the military authorities were involved in this mecha-
nism for army provisioning, it was in policing and protecting the sutlers and
their encampments, not always with success.28 A robust reply to complaints
that inadequate provision had been made to feed a detachment of
Wallenstein’s army serving in Poland in 1629 emphasized that the indisci-
pline of the men and their thieving from the Marketender ensured that no
local supplier was now prepared to bring foodstuffs to the military encamp-
ment, hence the poor state of the troops.29
Despite these concerns and limitations, the sutler/trader was by no
means an endangered species during the seventeenth century: thousands
of them, perhaps best exemplified by the fictional figure of Mutter
Courage,30 were in the rear of every army throughout the Thirty Years
War and beyond, offering a combination of food, clothing and other
necessities, and a variety of looted and plundered goods which had been
sold to them or exchanged. They were part of that distinctive world of the
soldier, with its claims to social respectability and possession of occasional
purchasing power, yet set apart from civilian life and possessing its own
structures, morality and conventions.31 The traders shared the opportu-
nities and risks of soldiering: victories brought better sales of food and
Provisioning under contract 205
Fig. 5.2 Female sutler and companion
drink, and a potential windfall of booty to be bought or exchanged cheaply

with the soldiers and sold on for profit. Defeat brought the risk of losing
everything as the traders fled with the troops, abandoning wagons and
goods to a plundering enemy.32 Central though they were to the character
and the daily life of armies and garrisons, an exclusive reliance on small-
scale traders and sutlers to supply troops, especially armies on campaign,
would have provided only marginally more logistical security than
dependence on foraging and living off the land.33
The ‘business of the regiment’ and ‘business

of the warship’
The traditional mechanisms for hiring mercenaries offered limited busi-
ness opportunities for the Swiss, Landsknecht or Scottish colonel or cap-
tain. Paid a substantial sum in advance for the recruitment and movement
of his unit to the specified muster-point, and often provided with another
advance to cover three months of the unit’s wages, the colonel could hope
to make a profit by recruiting soldiers for less than the price per head
agreed with the warlord. Even this might prove difficult in practice as he
would often be under pressure to complete recruitment rapidly, and fail-
ure to obtain troops of adequate quality might lead to disputes at the
mustering. The soldiers brought their own weapons and equipment with
them, or borrowed/hired it from the community, and in most circum-
stances they expected to provide for their own subsistence and accom-
modation from their wages (see pp. 67–9). Unit commanders might be
able to make a profit over and above their own salaries by manipulating the
troop rolls and pocketing the wages of dead-pays, men who died in service
but continued to be paid until the next muster re-established the effective
strength of the unit and adjusted the pay accordingly. Swiss captains in
French service quite early managed to extract the concession that their
units would be paid at the strength fixed at the beginning of the contract
after the first muster, and that this would continue to determine the rates
of payment regardless of the accidents of disease or battle. Though this
was in part intended to ensure that the widows and dependants of Swiss
soldiers received some compensation, it was also a means to increase the
commander’s profits from the contract.34
In general, though, what became known as the ‘business of the regiment’
was relatively limited, and it was private enterprise at sea that from the
earliest stages provided the model for substantial collateral profits to be
made from the management of ships and crews. Those Genoese patricians
who ran individual galleys or entire squadrons in the service of Spain or
other powers in return for an annual lump payment had the opportunity to
enhance their profits via good, or simply hard-nosed, management of a
financial package which was intended to cover the costs of not merely
equipping and maintaining the galley itself, and recruiting and paying
wages to the crews, but also purchasing the food supplies for the campaign,
The ‘business of the regiment’ and ‘of the warship’ 207
acquiring munitions and equipment, and conducting routine repairs and

maintenance.35 The Spanish government was aware that managing these
operating costs could provide the possibility for substantial profit by the
galley owners. In 1607–8, for example, rival Genoese patrician families the
Centurióne and the Spinola were being encouraged by Madrid to undercut
a basic price of 14,000 ducats per galley per annum for the management of
the Spanish Mediterranean fleet.36
Yet in addition to the operating profits to be obtained, skill and luck
permitting, from the comprehensive management of the galley, the con-
tracting owners also received numerous concessions which could increase
their overall business profits. Given the unreliability of the Spanish crown as
a debtor, the right to collect 14 per cent interest on late payment of the
instalments owed under the contract was a considerable, though doubtless
not always gratefully received, concession.37 However, it meant that when
even Andrea Doria himself had difficulty collecting all that was owed him –
in 1552 he was able to collect only 96,170 of the 123,000 ducats out-
standing on his account – this could produce a respectable return on the
unpaid sums. It explains in part the apparently limited concern about
unpaid arrears on the contracts. In 1588 ten galleys contracted out to
Cosmo Centurión, Agapito Grillo and Giovanni Antonio De Marini had
steadily accumulated 100,000 ducats in unpaid instalments during the
1580s. Despite this, when the government in Madrid had sought further
contractors in 1584 to run the galleys of the squadron based on the Spanish
coast, Centurión had offered to run twelve of them.38
If interest on outstanding payments represented an additional aspect of
profit, another important provision in the contracts with the Spanish
monarchy was the granting of licences to the galley owners to export
wheat from Sicily at a fixed, reduced price. Although nominally intended
simply for the production of biscuit, the staple of the crews’ diet, the
licences for export always exceeded the galleys’ needs, and allowed the
owner to engage in private trading.39 A similar ‘imperial’ concession came
from the licences to export bullion from Castile, which was in theory
merely a concession to meet the payments owed on the galley contracts.
But given the brisk contraband trade in American silver, licences for
exporting even limited quantities of bullion could offer cover for illegal
but lucrative dealing.40 Finally, armed and heavily crewed galleys were
also the preferred means for transport of high-value merchandise in secure
conditions, and offered the possibility for profitable freelance mercantile
activity while otherwise fulfilling the requirements of the military con-
tract.41 This of course became a time-honoured though irregular means
by which naval captains reconciled military service with a level of private
profit.42
The Genoese galley squadrons give some sense of the profits that could
be made from Spanish contracts. In apparent contrast, the captains of the
warships built and run by the Admiralties in the United Provinces during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not make comprehensive
contracts to crew, equip and maintain their ships. As employees, like
their men, they were paid a modest salary, which would potentially be
supplemented, as with all naval activity, by prize money and other gains
from raiding or combat. But by far the most important source of income
for captains was the ‘provisioning pennies’ (kostpenningen). The provision-
ing of warships was the responsibility of the captain and the flag officer for
each ship. The Admiralty paid them a fixed allowance per crewman per
day, which varied between 5 and 7 stuivers, and this was deliberately set at
a higher rate than was necessary to cover the expense of the prescribed
rations. The margins for profit were quite generous, varying between one-
third and one-fifth, and over a lengthy voyage in a ship with a large crew,
could net a profit of several thousand florins. The less welcome side of this
arrangement was an element of risk: the commanders were expected to
purchase the provisions in advance, and were never sure that the sums of
provisioning pennies would be paid immediately on their return. When
the Admiralty coffers were near-empty, paying the provisioning costs was
always regarded as the lowest priority, and the relatively high margin of
profit afforded by good management was taken as the equivalent of formal
interest payments on the delayed repayment.43
Examples of the ‘business of a warship’ could be multiplied across the
period, and naval warfare was considerably ahead of comparable develop-
ments on land. But with the post-1560 shift towards longer-term military
contracts the potential for more comprehensive ‘regimental business’
developed in line with these maritime initiatives.
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century military manuals for the ‘perfect
captain’ detailed an extensive range of duties, responsibilities and behav-
iour appropriate to a regimental colonel, but notably absent from these
was one of his main functions: the arming, equipping and provisioning of
his soldiers. Vehemently asserting that he was ‘no tradesman’, Franz
Albrecht von Sachsen-Lauenberg, one of Wallenstein’s colonels, was
nonetheless typical in mastering the skills of finding goods and supplies,
negotiating contracts, and arranging for the transport of these goods to his
regiment.44 As the numbers of soldiers being recruited increased, the
convention that the soldier brought along his own weapon and equipment
when he was enlisted was tacitly abandoned. Colonels also had overall
responsibility for replacing damaged or lost weapons and other equip-
ment, and, most important and expensive, making good killed or injured
horses in cavalry regiments. Army commanders considered that the
collection of contributions by the colonels justified demands that they

provide additional equipment for their units. After the battle of Lützen,
Wallenstein insisted that all the cavalry, not just the cuirassiers, should
now be provided with breast- and back-plates, at cost to the colonels,
while the Generalissimo’s orders also specified, for example, that colonels
should ensure that their regiments were equipped with handmills,
whether to allow units to produce flour for bread rations or, in at least
one case, to mill charcoal to make gunpowder.45
But the colonels also had their own financial incentives to take on much
of the support of their troops. As indicated in the last chapter (pp. 161–3),
soldiers’ wage rates were maintained at a notionally high level throughout
the Thirty Years War: enterprisers did not want to reduce quality of
recruitment, still less to discourage experienced soldiers from staying
within the regiment. But one reason why colonels continued offering
high wages lay in their financial dealings with their soldiers for the provi-
sion of most of the latters’ basic needs. With good management this could
provide the colonel with a significant return on his financial investment
from within the regiment itself.
Though the colonel would now almost always provide weapons or equip-
ment for his recruits, the assumption that having appropriate equipment
remained the soldier’s own responsibility was maintained, and the colonel
sold the equipment to his soldiers against deductions from their wages.
Selling the tools of the soldiers’ trade via regular wage deductions which
represented a substantial mark-up from the bulk purchase price was the first
stage in the development of the regimental business.46 It was accompanied
by a wider shift to direct provisioning and away from the full, cash payment of
the soldiers’ monthly wages.47 By the Thirty Years War the soldiers’ pay was
normally divided into ‘subsistence’ and ‘reserved’ portions. The subsistence
portion was usually made over entirely in kind, as food and drink, directly
distributed or allocated by the unit commander, and now calculated as the
equivalent of half to two-thirds of the soldiers’ total wages.48 In some circum-
stances it might be granted as a daily financial allowance, a regular, small
portion of the soldiers’ wages.49 But significantly, these cash subsistence
payments never became institutionalized in any of the armies of this period,
suggesting that the colonel-proprietors would prefer to distribute subsistence
in kind, with its opportunities for taking advantage of savings in acquiring
food and other goods.50 Lodgings, when these could also be calculated as
part of the soldiers’ wages, offered another opportunity for the proprietor to
meet a part of his soldiers’ wage bill without direct payment. When both
provision of food and of lodging were fixed as part of the contribution burden
imposed upon a territory where the troops were billeted, the advantages to
the officers were commensurably greater, since they were almost certainly
acquiring these food supplies and services at below the rates at which they
would supply them to their soldiers.51 After paying the soldiers a large part of
their wages in food and drink or as a subsistence allowance, and taking the
various deductions for provision of weapons, equipment and clothing into
account, the remaining money owed would be held by the unit commander
until finally distributed to the troops as lump sums at occasional musters.
There were practical advantages in placing some aspects of equipping and
provisioning the troops in the hands of their colonels, quite apart from giving
them a further financial incentive to commit initial capital to the regiment.
But in a European manufacturing sector dominated by small-scale produc-
tion and supply at the level of individual workshops, obtaining weapons or
armour even for a few hundred men at very short notice, and in competition
with numbers of other colonels trying to do exactly the same thing, was no
easy task. The problem was not primarily financial, although it is notable how
large a part of the expense of raising a regiment would consist of purchasing
military equipment, leaving to one side the enormous expense of mounting
cavalry units.52 Many aspiring colonels were engaged in the hunt for credit as
well as goods. Franz Albrecht von Sachsen-Lauenberg was a younger
brother, and perennially hard-pressed for cash and credit, and in the course
of recruiting his ‘neusächsisch’ cavalry regiment in 1625 he persuaded his
lieutenant-colonel, Melchior von Hatzfeld, to raise several thousand talers
on his own credit in order to fund some of the costs of equipping the
regiment.53 The main issues, though, remained the short space of time
between receiving a commission and presenting a fully recruited, fully
equipped regiment for a first muster, and the limited access of the individual
colonel to a range of widely dispersed producers and manufacturers. If an
army was being assembled in the vicinity of a great arms-production centre,
Nuremberg, for example, or Liège, then the problems might be manageable
even if numbers of colonels were all looking to buy equipment or have it
manufactured at the same time and as quickly as possible. Or if a colonel was
well organized, and had some previous experience of raising troops, he
would delegate a competent and trustworthy subordinate to organize pur-
chase and despatch of goods from a more distant centre of arms manufactur-
ing. Wallenstein’s colonels in early 1632 were acquiring cuirasses in Milan
and Brescia, cheap muskets in Leipzig and across towns in Silesia, and
gunpowder and match from Viennese contacts.54 Jan de Werth had an
established relationship with arms suppliers in Cologne, and purchased
weapons and equipment for his regiments there.55 When Franz Albrecht
received permission to raise his regiment in 1625, Hatzfeld was immediately
sent to Nuremberg, where he organized the purchase and transport of
weapons and equipment, and obtained credit with the bankers Anton and
Tobias Geiger.56 Hatzfeld’s specialized knowledge and good contacts in the
world of arms producers became well known; other colonels, having been
less successful themselves, approached him for advice and assistance in
equipping their units.57 Yet even Hatzfeld’s abilities could not overcome
all the problems of timing and delivery, and when after a lengthy and
financially profitable winter quarter in Silesia, Franz Albrecht’s cuirassier
regiment was inspected by Wallenstein in June 1627, a large part of the
armour that had been ordered for new recruits and to replace damaged or
missing equipment had not arrived. Wallenstein had little patience with these
failings, however explicable: the inadequately equipped companies were held
back in Silesia as garrison forces, while the main army moved off against
Christian IV.58
If colonels encountered problems in trying to collect together arms and
armour for their soldiers, the provision of munitions or foodstuffs posed
still greater difficulties, above all for an army on campaign, and these
could quickly develop beyond the resources of the regimental
commander, however potentially attractive the financial returns from
supplying his men might be. In some garrisons, the commander might
be able to draw up contracts with local merchants or even directly with
producers, or he might arrange with the local authorities for some of the
contributions payments owed to his regiment to be commuted into food
supplies, which could be regularly delivered and distributed to his troops
against deductions from their wages which he would then claim.59
However, when garrisons were established for overtly military purposes,
rather than to ensure the collection of contributions – the Hungarian
borderlands, for example, or the Spanish garrisons on the Atlantic islands
or in North Africa, or in territory in the Empire which was not unambig-
uously held by one particular power – reliance on local supply contracting
might easily be disrupted, and would render the garrison vulnerable to
external pressures.60 The problems were compounded when troops went
on campaign, especially when pursuing the fast-moving, rapid-strike style
of warfare which became characteristic of the second half of the Thirty
Years War. There was little possibility that the troops could be issued with
more than a few days’ worth of initial supplies through the particular
negotiations and supply provisioning of the colonels.61 In these cases
and in meeting many other provisioning and support demands, it was
the networks of large-scale private suppliers, manufacturers, merchants
and financiers, working in conjunction either with state administrators or
more often with the military commanders as contractors in their own
right, who provided the largest part of the military support for armies
and navies. They stood at the heart of the business of war throughout this
period.
Supplying war at an international level

Fundamental to the economic systems of early modern Europe was the
difference of scale between mechanisms of production and systems of
distribution. Production of arms and munitions was heavily decentralized
and dispersed into the workshops of individual masters, who aimed to
meet small-scale orders with limited manufacturing capacity.62 There
were exceptions, as noted earlier, especially iron cannon, iron and copper
mining and production, and occasionally the milling of gunpowder.
However, in general, the manufacturing of small arms and military equip-
ment, the production of match and shot, and the collection of saltpetre
were in the hands of small producers. Centres of arms manufacturing like
the Southern Netherlands and lower Rhineland – Namur, Lüttich,
Maastricht, Aachen/Stolberg and Cologne – or the southern German
centres around Nuremberg and Suhl in Thuringia, were aggregations of
small workshops, independently owned, and producing goods to order,
often able to shift into other areas of production as demand rose and fell.63
This had the advantage of being highly flexible, much better adjusted to
the inevitable fluctuations in military demand than any highly capitalized,
state-sponsored set of armament factories could achieve. But at the same
time, coordination of this manufacturing capacity, the ability to collect
together and deliver its products to meet large-scale demand, whether
from states or individual military contractors, was concentrated in a few
great urban centres with multinational reach, and was controlled by an
elite of merchant-financiers with extraordinary networks of agents and
contacts spread across Europe.
If the short duration and stop–start rhythm of wars before 1550 had
imposed limits to demand for munitions and armaments, these limits
were starting to erode in the later sixteenth century, and by the Thirty
Years War it was clear that there were permanent and large-scale profits to
be made from controlling supplies of military goods and production.
Although this did not immediately lead to changes in the mechanisms
of production, larger-scale and more consistent demand drove the expan-
sion of three great, international military-provisioning centres, Genoa,
Hamburg and Amsterdam, and a host of second-rank centres of arms
distribution just beneath them: Nuremberg, Augsburg, Frankfurt am
Main, Milan, Brescia, the city and the wider episcopal state of Liège, for
example.64 The obvious mercantile advantage of the three greatest
centres is that they combined excellent communications into the hinter-
land while being a major port, thus being ideally placed for the import
then redistribution of bulk military goods. What gave these cities their
dominant role, however, was not so much their location but the presence
Supplying war at an international level 213
Sweden Danzig
Hamburg
London Amsterdam
The Hague Utrecht Essen
Weald Gouda
Delft
Dordrecht
Antwerp Maastricht Marsberg
Tournai Solingen
Mons Cologne Leipzig
Aachen Friedland
Liège Frankfurt
am Main Suhl
Namur Prague
Moselle
Bishopric of Liège Strasbourg Nuremberg
Augsburg
Vienna
Basel
Helvetic
Confederation Financial Centres
Armament Production
Milan Brescia and Distribution
Venice Financial and
Lyon Armaments Centres
Genoa
Map 5.1 Key centres of arms production and finance in Europe,

early seventeenth century
of a fiscal-mercantile elite of specialized dealers in military goods. The

potential to make huge profits from supplying war was driving the busi-
ness and financial activities of figures like Elias Trip and his family
associates, Louis de Geer and Guglielmo Bartolotti, who played a dom-
inant role in this burgeoning sector of Amsterdam’s commerce through-
out the 1620s and 1630s. In Hamburg, the same armaments roles were
occupied by those like the Marselis brothers, the firm of Verpoorten-
Ruland-Groenedael, or Walter de Herthoge, close associate of Hans de
Witte.65 In Genoa, the merchant house of Stefano, Antonio and
Bartolomeo Balbi was a powerful force in the international arms trade,
while banking houses like the Centurión and Serra, whose primary concern
was financing the Habsburg war machine, were nonetheless prepared to
extend their activities to army supply.66 Most of these individuals, families
and firms were interlinked in international networks which could combine
huge amounts of capital, technical knowledge and market influence. Elias
Trip sought with his own capital to control the European export of English
iron cannon through Amsterdam in the early 1620s; from the second half of
the decade and in partnership with Louis de Geer he sought to dominate
the still more profitable Swedish production of iron guns.67 In 1626 Elias
Trip, Louis de Geer and three other merchants launched a company which,
working with the Marselis firm in Hamburg, aimed to control the entire
external supply of saltpetre, whether imported from the Baltic, West Africa
or the Far East.68 This aim of achieving a monopoly of gunpowder supply
(usually through control of saltpetre) drove a series of international business
partnerships through the 1630s, each one being thwarted by the opportu-
nities that an increase in the price of gunpowder offered to other enter-
prisers who managed to obtain supplies of saltpetre from elsewhere and to
manufacture gunpowder competitively.69 The financial rewards were
exceptionally high: a Danzig merchant, Peter Möller, and his Amsterdam
business partner, Arndt Pilgrim, managed to control saltpetre imports via
Danzig over two periods of three years, and netted a return on their initial
investment of 220 per cent, while normal profits on purchase-resale busi-
ness of this sort would be 14 per cent.70
While it was certainly not in the interests of military commanders to see
the distribution and the price of gunpowder or other military materials
monopolized by a particular commercial consortium, in fact these
attempts were symptomatic of a process far more important for meeting
military needs: a drive to bring together the production and distribution of
military matériel and to concentrate it in certain centres, from where
distribution to armies would be both easier and more able to meet sudden
peaks of demand. Whether this was via Hamburg, Genoa, Amsterdam, or
the other German or north Italian cities associated with arms distribution,
the effect was to focus supply through networks which were more capable
of bringing together production, and arranging the reliable and rapid
amassing and transportation of arms, munitions, clothing and indeed
foodstuffs than any other mechanisms in early modern Europe. Almost
all major companies involved in marketing of munitions, or dealing in
bulk food supplies and other raw materials, were based on these elaborate
networks. They cut across not just national, but confessional and indeed
military boundaries. Julia Zunckel offers a telling example of a contract to
supply troops raised to defend Genoa, negotiated in 1625 by the Genoese
firm of Balbi, which involved buying gunpowder in Amsterdam via the
Amsterdam merchant and the Balbi business-partner, Guglielmo
Bartolotti. Bartolotti was born Wilhelm van der Heuvel in Utrecht and
spent his youth in Hamburg. He adopted his Italian name to cement the
partnership with his uncle from Bologna, who directed a substantial
trading company dealing between southern and northern Europe.
Bartolotti/Heuvel would ship the powder that he would purchase in
Amsterdam, via neutral Hamburg ships, back to Livorno, thence to
Genoa. Given the acute shortage of saltpetre on the Amsterdam market
in 1625–6, Bartolotti’s completion of this assignment was extraordinarily
Essential structure of the international armaments trade in the first half of the
seventeenth century
ENGLAND SWEDEN RUSSIA

(artillery production) copper exports
firearms exports
DE GEER
INDIA DANZIG
Saltpetre export to
Europe from the 1620s
LÜBECK
AMSTERDAM HAMBURG
Centre of the arms trade – especially Centre of the arms trade,
for the anti-Habsburg powers especially in dealings with
TRIP – DE GEER – BARTELOTTI Spain. VAN UFFELN-BERENBERG
MARSELIS (monopoly control) GROENEDAEL & VERPOORTEN
RODENBURG-DE GREVE-RULAND
MARSELIS (DENMARK)
ANTWERP LÜTTICH – NAMUR – MAASTRICHT

Connections with Spain AACHEN/STOLBERG - COLOGNE
through Italian and Southern Southern Netherlands and Lower Rhenish
Netherlands’ merchant houses production complex for arms and equipment
DORCHI – MAGGIOLI – ANDREA CURTIUS – FREY-ALDENHOVEN
NUREMBERG SUHL
Arms industry Arms industry
ALBERTINELLI SCHNEIDER
SOHNER – EGGHOLD JUNG – KLETT
SHÖNER – HERBERT HERLEIN
ITALY AUSTRIA
SPAIN TRIP – QUINGUETTI PESTALOZZI – VERTEMA
CALENDRINI – BARTOLOTTI FERRARI
HURREAU
Fig. 5.3 Supplying war: the mercantile interconnections between key

production centres and traders – copied with permission from
J. Zunckel, Rüstungsgeschäfte im Dreißigjährigen Krieg, p. 76
efficient, and his costs reasonable, charging a commission of only 3 per cent
on the deal. The ability of the Balbi firm to deliver on the contract rapidly
and reasonably depended on their connections with Bartolotti, and in turn
Bartolotti/Heuvel’s own links with the munitions empire of Elias Trip and
Louis de Geer.71 The obvious fact that the gunpowder was being provided
from the United Provinces to support the defence of Spain’s main Italian
ally while Spain and the Dutch were at war underlines the international
character of this network and its ability to tap sources regardless of military
and religious boundaries, and on the basis of well-established networks of
business associates.
The example also underlines the high level of commercial/fiscal sophis-
tication that underpins this international system. In an early modern
context of rudimentary and limited administrative capacity on the part
of governments, the supply of armies was being integrated into a remark-
able structure of mercantile experience and organizational skill and
knowledge about supplies, available production capacity and transport
options.72 Moreover, as the Thirty Years War continued, these systems
grew more extensive. A high-point was reached with the network estab-
lished by Hans de Witte, Wallenstein’s right-hand man in finance and
supply throughout the first generalship. De Witte’s network linked an
unparalleled number of centres and personal contacts, on whose credit,
administrative efforts and connections with manufacturers and suppliers
de Witte could hope to draw. Stretching from Venice to Antwerp, and
Madrid to Prague – the centre of de Witte’s activities – all the major
trading and financial centres were represented by trusted merchant-
financier-agents of de Witte’s, from Walther de Herthoge in Hamburg,
Anton Frey-Aldenhoven in Cologne and Amsterdam, Witte’s nephew,
Arnold de Witte, in Antwerp, the Pestalozzi firm in Genoa and Milan,
Johann Schwendendörfer in Leipzig, Abraham Blommaert in
Nuremberg, Giovanni de Valli in Venice, and a wide range of high-value
contacts in both Prague and Vienna.73 De Witte’s system interlinked at
multiple levels: de Witte’s chief agent and negotiator in Hamburg, Walter
de Hertoghe, worked closely with the arms-dealing mercantile consor-
tium Verpoorten-Ruland-Groenedael, two of whom were family relatives,
and who maintained close business and personal contacts with some of
the great Amsterdam munitions dealers, headed by Elias Trip.74 De
Hertoghe’s other connections included the powerful Genoese trading
agent, based in Antwerp, Jan Paolo Dorchi, who was the key link in
moving supplies and munitions between northern Europe and the
Mediterranean for the benefit of Habsburg armies.75 The result was a
wide-ranging network of financial resources and goods in which, for
example, war taxes might be collected from populations in the Lower
- Key centres in
de Witte’s system
14
Hamburg
R. E
2
lbe
Amsterdam 17
4
3 Naumberg 10
11 16 Arnsdorf
Antwerp Dresden 7
England 8 Leipzig 19
Cologne Pirna Breslau
1 6 15 Hohenelbe
23
Aachen Aussig
12 Suhl
9 Frankfurt 20 24
Darmstadt am Main Prague Tetschen
18
Nuremberg
22
Strasbourg 5 26
Augsburg Vienna
21
Schlaggenwald
25
Venice
13
Genoa
Map 5.2 Financing and supplying Wallenstein’s army: Hans de Witte’s

European network of agents and contacts in the late 1620s
Hans De Witte’s mercantile and financial connections
The network of agents and correspondents:
1) Aachen (entrepôt for weapons and armour): managed from Cologne
2) Amsterdam: managed through agents in Cologne and Hamburg
3) Antwerp (home town of de Witte; financial and manufacturing centre)
Main agent was his nephew, Arnold de Witte
Subsidiary agent was Loys de Braa
4) Arnsdorf (Riesengebirge) (copper mining)
Agent was Hans Jakob Heid
5) Augsburg (critical banking and trading centre)
Key agent was the merchant and banking company of Georg Ammann
and Giulio Cesare Pestalozzi
Subsidiary agents were Otto Lauginger, Adolf Löschenbrandt,
Sebastian Pesch, Andreas Scheler, Philipp Warnberger and Martin
Zobel
Map 5.2 (cont)

6) Aussig (vital for shipment of foodstuffs and war matériel from the
duchy of Friedland)
Key agent was Salomon Freydenberger
7) Breslau (Silesian trade; trading connections with Poland and Ukraine)
Agents were Flandrinis Erben and Batholomäus Mudrach
8) Cologne (financial centre, and centre for weapons and armour/
munitions)
Key agent was Anton Frey-Aldenhoven
Subsidiary agents were Peter Carlier, Johann and Peter von den
Bergen, Robert Kaffart
9) Darmstadt (delivery points for weapons and armaments – along a
line which included Trier, Heidelberg, Mainz and Cologne)
Managed by de Witte through his agent in Cologne
10) Dresden (centre between Bohemia and middle/lower Germany)
Agents were Abraham Prollhoff, Matthias Krüger and Adolf Luders
11) England (cloth, stockings, ironwork)
Managed via Hamburg
12) Frankfurt am Main (money and trade fairs)
Key agent was Daniel de Briers
Subsidiary agents were Gerlach Beckh and Hans Haichnet
13) Genoa (links to Hamburg and Amsterdam: money and munitions)
Agent was Italian merchant family of Sepossi
14) Hamburg (nodal point of de Witte’s supply system)
Key agent was Walter de Hertoge
Subsidiary agents were Heinrich Kreutz, Augustus Meschmann,
Jakob de Moers and Cornelius Rosenthal
15) Hohenelbe (silver mining)
Agents were Hans Perschmann and Stephan von Rehewaldt.
16) Leipzig (spring and autumn money fairs)
Agent was Johann Schwendendörfer
17) Naumberg (money fair)
Agent was Edwardt Beckher
18) Nuremberg (marketing and provision of arms and munitions)
Key agent was Abraham Blommaert
Subsidiary agents were Georg Ayermann, Hans Philipp Jeßlin,
David Laurer and Hans Kautzdorf
19) Pirna (key transportation point)
Agent was Georg Beutel
20) Prague (central point of the de Witte system)
Large number of connections and agents, amongst the most important
of whom were Bartholomäo de Pauli, Hans Ulrich Keßler, Jakob and
Leon Bassavi, Matthias Hoffmann, Hans Keller and de Witte’s wife
21) Schlaggenwald (tin mines)
Agent was Bartholomäus Stempel
22) Strasbourg (trade to/from France)
Key agents were Martin and Andreas König
State administration and private supplier contracts 219
Saxon Circle, and used in part to mobilize credit contracted with Genoese
financiers, whose loans had been used to pay Hamburg arms manufac-
turers and suppliers, who in turn had shipped their goods to an Imperial
army based in Bohemia. Such a system of highly personalized contacts,
frequently sharing the closest financial interests, would seem to be the
antithesis of bureaucratic, externally supervised administration, and a
licence for every kind of corruption and malpractice. In practice the
tight, personalized integration and the overlapping and extensive financial
interests created a strong set of shared interests, all of which ultimately
depended on sustaining the success of Wallenstein’s army.
State administration and contracts with private

producers and suppliers
That these networks for coordinating production, mercantile activity and
movement of finance were sophisticated, international and strikingly
effective within the limitations of their time was not lost on rulers and
their administration. We have already seen that direct control of the
production and distribution of military material was either economically
unviable, or where it might have worked, governments in fact showed little
interest in the possibility. On the positive side, the strengths of a flexible,
responsive and wide-ranging private sphere seemed correspondingly
greater. It was the Genoese Great Council who authorized the negotia-
tions to purchase gunpowder from Antwerp via the Balbi firm’s network
of contractors, who obtained the powder quickly sand cheaply via
Amsterdam. Recent work on the English Civil War has shown that the
Map 5.2 (cont)

Subsidiary agents were Reinhardt Mirkelbach and Franziskus
Quischardt
23) Suhl (weapon and munitions manufacturing)
Agents were Valentin Cronenberger, Hans Haidenblut, Hans
Heilmann, Balthasar and Georg Klett, Erhard Röder and Hans Stöhr
24) Tetschen (transportation on the Elbe)
Agent was Matthias Hosche
25) Venice (money and high-quality goods)
Agent was Giovanni de Valli
26) Vienna (court merchants and financiers)
Key agents were Ulrich Keßler, and members of the Pestalozzi
family (Antonio, Giovanni Baptista, Stefano)
Subsidiary agents were Italian business family of Giulini, Alessandro
de Ferrari, Silvano Seraphin and Christoph Landtsperger
Parliamentary war administration could draw on a complex and sophisti-

cated mercantile system that combined existing capacity to provide food
for London markets with transportation via commercial carriers, to move
food supplies to the New Model Army throughout 1645. It was the
existence of such a system that could be harnessed to military needs,
which seems to have allowed the New Model Army to operate, like
many of its Continental counterparts, very effectively and without the
presence of any elaborate supply commissariat.76
This reliance on contracts made with the private sector was what the
Spanish Council in its debates termed ‘asiento’, the outsourcing of military
responsibility for the provisioning, supply or equipment of armies and
navies. It has already been seen at work in the contracts between the
Spanish crown and one group of the asentistas de galeras, Genoese noble
families prepared to run galley squadrons in return for an agreed annual
payment and the various financial and political concessions that were
rolled into the contract (see pp. 81–2, 207). Such arrangements were
characteristic of those states in which the ruler’s administration still played
a large part in the organization and direct financing of war, states as
diverse and varied in the control exercised over military organization as
Spain, France, the United Provinces, Bavaria or Venice. Asiento could call
upon the vastly greater capacity of private commercial, manufacturing and
industrial sectors to meet the immediate needs of warfare, organize trans-
port and delivery, and in general keep costs lower than would be possible
from directly administered enterprises.
In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Spanish monarchy and its
various territories had already developed armed forces of unprecedented size
and permanence. The open and sustained conciliar debate that took place
over the merits of direct state control – administración – and asiento for
equipping, provisioning and maintaining this war machine, had no
European parallel. The major work on this subject remains the book and
numerous articles by I. A. A. Thompson, and his account of the comprehen-
sive devolution of the support systems for the Spanish navies, garrisons and
armies in this period.77 For, if the monarchy and its councillors in the later
sixteenth century appeared undecided in their debates between the benefits
in political and prestige terms of direct state administration, versus the
cheapness and efficiency of private contracting, the work of Thompson and
other historians leaves no doubt that in practice the issue had been resolved
by the reign of Philip IV (1621–65), with a virtually total abandonment of
direct state administration. Government policy was unequivocal: ‘provision-
ing of the armadas, the galleys and the African presidios, munitions procure-
ment, shipbuilding and fleet organization, and the victualling of the armies
for Catalonia and Portugal were effected almost exclusively by asiento’.78
Long before the Thirty Years War, the Spanish monarchy had already
been negotiating supply contracts for both armies and navies on a scale that
dwarfed the activity of any other European state. Once the decision to out-
source had been taken, the contracts were bold statements of confidence in
the capacity of the private sector. As the primary naval power in the Atlantic
world, the Spanish crown was prepared to negotiate contracts such as that
drawn up in 1603 with Gonzalo Vaz Countinho to pay and supply the entire
Atlantic fleet, 40 ships and 6,392 men, for eight years in return for 740,000
ducats in the first year and 790,000 in each of the remainder.79 Indeed the
Spanish crown’s administrators seem to have considered that large-scale
contracts were the most efficient and economical, and usually selected
their contractors from a tight-knit group of major financiers and merchants
capable of mobilizing money and resources on this scale. So after 1601, for
example, the provisioning of bread rations to the entire Army of Flanders was
entrusted to a single private contractor, holding the office of proveedor de
víveres, a contract worth more than 2 million escudos per year.80 By the
1620s and 1630s the government was diversifying the contracts once again,
and the largest were with the Genoese supplier Marco Antonio Gentile and
the Flemish Amand de Hornes, while in the 1640s the contact for supplying
bread to the army, made with Vincenzo Lazagna, granted him 75,000
escudos a month on the taxes from Antwerp.81
Where possible then, the Spanish administration would seek to concen-
trate financial, administrative and organizational control in the hands of a
single contractor. Thus, for example, a contract was made with the Genoese
Antonio Graffior in 1639 for the manufacture of gunpowder, giving him
rights to all the saltpetre produced in Castile in order to supply the crown
with 41,000 quintals of gunpowder over seven years.82 Some exclusive
contracts of this type could prove very successful: in 1628 a contract was
made with the Liège iron-master, Jean Curtius, to set up a cast-iron cannon
and shot factory at Liérganes, near Santander. By 1640, 1,171 guns and
nearly 250,000 assorted pieces of shot had been produced and delivered.
Though there was still heated debate about the relative weight and durability
of cast-iron guns compared with bronze, the financial factor gradually took
the upper hand. Cast-iron artillery once again demonstrated its commercial
viability, and a series of contracts would ensure that Spain could be self-
sufficient in iron guns until the end of the eighteenth century.83
Not all contracts were on this vast scale, for many military functions
simply did not permit this kind of consolidation. In December 1603 a
contract was signed with the Lisbon businessman Manuel Gómez de
Acosta to supply the garrison troops on Madeira and Terceira with all
their pay and provisions for six years. For these services the contractor
would receive a total sum of 61,770 escudos from the crown rents on the
two islands. When dealing with small, isolated garrisons and their for-
tifications, the most obvious contractor for a long-term supply contract
might be the governor or captain himself. Individual deals with captains of
garrisons in the Spanish monarchia or for the upkeep of individual vessels
had been common under Philip II, and continued into the seventeenth
century.84 This was no less true of France, where the crown frequently
sought to make contracts with governors of fortifications to meet the costs
of the garrison in return for a stipulated share of locally allocated tax
revenues. When Colonel Hans Ludwig von Erlach was appointed gover-
nor of Breisach, the French crown in consideration of his expenses as
governor also gave him full rights to exploit the surrounding iron mines for
his own profit, manufacturing and selling cannon balls and other arms to
supply the French magazines in Alsace.85 Similar contracts could be made
for the construction and repair of fortifications, and it would appear that
the king himself was not above haggling over deals with his soldiers:
Jacques de Chastenet de Puységur, captain in one of the French elite
regiments, claimed that in 1639 Louis XIII in person offered him the
contract to construct some of the siege-works around the city of Hesdin,
proposing a payment of 6,000 livres. Puységur eventually argued the king
up to 7,700 livres and undertook the work on the basis of this contract.86
This was not the first time that he had been drawn into contracting for the
crown: in 1632 he had been sent by Louis XIII to Liège to purchase 4,000
muskets and 2,000 breast/backplates, and to negotiate the best price for
these – presumably under commission. Puységur bought the weapons and
armour in Liège and Utrecht, had the guns proved in Holland, and
organized the shipping of them from Holland back to Rouen.87
Puységur may well have made a decent profit on the fortification work if
the king’s original offer had been realistic. However, if the Balbi contract
to provide gunpowder for the Genoese government is typical, weapons
and munitions procurement yielded relatively small returns. Acosta’s
contract for the upkeep of the Madeira garrison over six years envisaged
total profits of around 12 per cent on 61,000 escudos.88 And of course it
was possible to make an outright loss. A large-scale shipbuilding contract
in Vizcaya made between the crown and the shipbuilder Martin de Arana
in 1625 fixed a price of 72,000 ducats for six galleons, calculated on
overall tonnage, so that the total paid was 79,752 ducats taking into
account the slightly larger ships actually constructed.89 Arana claimed
that he had spent a further 6,000 ducats without reimbursement to fulfil
the contract, extra expense which was ultimately disallowed by the audi-
tors who looked over the ships before taking delivery of them in the king’s
name and adjudicating on the completion of the contract. However, in
1631 Arana was nominated Superintendent and Captain of War over the
soldiers garrisoned in Santander, a prestigious military appointment and

sufficient to persuade him to take on another contract a year later to build
a further nine galleons for royal service.90 Such non-economic benefits of
participation in contracts were not unusual. For numbers of these con-
tractors the social – and perhaps also political – potential of the contracts
outweighed strict economic calculations about maximizing profit. This
will be explored in greater detail later in the chapter, when examining
more generally the nature of profits and benefits from the business of war.
Another case, that of the construction of ships for the Danish navy by
Christian IV in the early seventeenth century, can demonstrate a different set
of motives for drawing on private contractors, ones that were essentially
political rather than financial. Although it might be assumed that a ruler
constructing a navy through a combination of his own revenues and state
taxation would channel the project through state dockyards and employees,
the building and equipping of the Danish royal navy was put out to private
contractors.91 The building contractors were initially drawn from Scotland,
and either hired their own labour and procured building materials as part of
the contract, or might agree to make use of labour in the royal dockyards and
be provided with wood, iron and other materials.92 Increasingly through the
1620s and 1630s, Christian’s warship commissions moved across to the
outright delegation of all aspects of construction to private contractors.93
An important factor in this shift was that more of the warships could be built
under contract in the duchy of Holstein, independent of Denmark but under
Christian IV’s rule. In the context of frequent and rebarbative disputes over
military expenditure with the Danish Estates, it was convenient for Christian
to argue that the ships built in Holstein were entirely funded from his private
revenues, and had not cost the Danish state anything.94 Even if some of these
contracts produced ships that were deemed less well built than those com-
missioned in the Danish dockyards of Bremerholm, the advantages of con-
structing these ships outside of the reach of the Rigsrad was as important as
exercising direct control over the product.95
There was, and always had been, a spectrum of success and failure in these
systems. At one end stood the well-ordered negotiation of contracts by states
with relatively well-managed, solvent fiscal systems, carefully monitored by
officials to ensure compliance and to anticipate shortfalls and breakdowns.
In some cases this effectiveness was attained by small states where the scale of
the logistical challenge was contained within an administrative system which
was efficient and well supervised. The Bavarian/Liga army was supported by
administrative officials within a formal Proviantwesen, charged with coordi-
nating army provisioning, and headed by an Obristen Proviantmeister to bring
together the needs of the armies and the resources of private contractors
whose activities remained at the centre of supply operations.96 Huge, well-
funded contracts were negotiated to ensure the provisioning of the main

Bavarian fortresses, most of whose lavish reserves fell into Swedish hands in
the invasion of early 1632.97
In other cases, in the Dutch Republic, or England in the later seven-
teenth century, a creditworthy fiscal administration could draw up credi-
ble contracts on the basis of which enterprisers, drawn from a developed
and extensive mercantile and manufacturing community, would provide
food and supplies with confidence and reliability.98 But elsewhere – and
even to some extent in these cases – the effectiveness of these arrange-
ments was much less evident. One set of problems was a direct conse-
quence of the central negotiation of contracts. For many states the chief
benefit of negotiating supply and maintenance provision centrally, and
with large-scale contractors who were also based institutionally and polit-
ically at the centre, was that it enabled contracts to be drawn up against
anticipation of taxes and other revenues. Thus large-scale, centrally nego-
tiated contracts for military provisioning and services became one part of
the great, fragile edifice of revenue anticipation and deficit funding that
was critical to the finances of the great majority of the major European
states from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. Negotiating contracts on
anticipated revenues was not only typical of contracts on the largest scale;
it could extend down to relatively small supply contracts, like those for the
French provisioning depots, the étapes, which were frequently supplied
against the tax revenues for the généralité or region, and involved direct
negotiation between the central Bureau des finances, the regional trésoriers
and particular local contractors.99
In many cases these arrangements were made with no direct involve-
ment of the military commanders in the field, and without taking into
account their operational needs. There was limited flexibility, and a strong
tendency to arrange the contract in a way that looked realistic from the
centre, but which in practice made overly narrow or blatantly unrealistic
assumptions about the impact of operations on the capacity to meet basic
requirements for providing food and munitions. The negotiation of con-
tracts by the French government with its munitionnaires provides over-
whelming evidence of this weakness, but enough material in the work of
Thompson and others shows that this was a problem which extended well
beyond the kingdom of France.100 In the French case, and in contrast with
contracts negotiated by commanders in the field, the failure lay in the
detail: time after time in the 1630s and 1640s central government nego-
tiated contracts which focused on a narrow requirement, for example, the
need to fund the production of bread rations for an army of 35,000 over an
eight-month campaign. But beyond that, little attention was devoted to
detail and practicalities: how was the grain collected under the terms of
such a contract to be milled into flour, then baked into bread, where and
by whom? How far were mechanisms for transport and distribution taken
into account? The expense of providing transport could easily exceed the
cost of grain or other basic foodstuffs, and it was the area in which the
French munitionnaires proved most consistently inadequate.101 One rea-
son why naval supply contracts may have worked more efficiently, with
fewer spectacular breakdowns and failures, is that the collateral aspects of
supplying a naval squadron were less complex, at least in the area of
transport and distribution.102
Faced with contractual arrangements that seemed to institutionalize such
problems by shying away from the complexity and expense of anticipating a
dynamic and unpredictable military scenario, certain assumptions about the
character of warfare, especially land warfare, took root. In an operational
context, there were sound reasons to avoid a static, positional style of war-
fare, focused on set-piece sieges which absorbed most of the military effort of
a particular campaign. But the implicit assumption underpinning inflexible,
centrally negotiated supply contracts was that this was the one style of warfare
which could reduce – though not by any means eliminate – the risks inherent
in arrangements for supply which had very limited flexibility or adaptability
built into them. If that was the assumption of central government when
negotiating supply contracts, it was an attitude passed down to commanders
in the field, who were directly affected by the potential breakdown of supply
contracts and rightly pessimistic about the ability of contractors to deliver to
the army in any other than the most straightforward and largely static
contexts. Unsurprisingly many commanders, albeit not without frustration
directed both at the ‘grasping munitionnaires’ and the disengaged and unre-
alistic central government, simply accepted the constraints that such a
system imposed.103
The concentration of very large contracts in the hands of a small number
of powerful private enterprisers had a further potentially damaging conse-
quence. As we have seen, many of these men would be prepared to accept a
high level of financial and economic risk, even to make uneconomic con-
tracts, in part because they hoped that their activities on behalf of the ruler
would bring social recognition and benefits. In some cases the willingness to
undertake provisioning contracts and to lend financial services might also
be a lever to bargain for high military office. This latter was seen, for
example, in the military careers of various members of the Fugger family,
notably Franz Fugger, count of Kirchberg, who rose to the rank of general
in the Bavarian army.104 It appeared most extravagantly in Ambrogio
Spinola’s proposal that he would finance the entire Army of Flanders,
initially during the siege of Ostend, in return for overall military command
of the army.105 This combination, though provoking to traditional military
grandees, was overall quite beneficial. After all, it brought a direct fusion of
the interests of the military suppliers and financiers and the military
commanders which centralized supply contracting tended to separate.
However, the more typical and more damaging pressure was for a direct
role in central government: this could be through the informal contacts
and connections that would be gained from access to ministers and
courtiers in the process of negotiating contracts, or through a subsequent
institionalizing of their position by assuming administrative functions
and offices. A cause of confusion in this period, which has encouraged
mistaken assumptions about the penetration of state bureaucracy into the
armed forces, is to miss the point that all of the apparently formal-
sounding titles – General/Obrist-Proviantmeister, munitionnaire-général, pro-
veedor general de víveres, factor general – were either administrative offices
purchased by the contractors, or honorific titles granted to financiers and
suppliers who had made such contracts. They tell us more about the
privatization of the administrative activities of the state than the progress
of bureaucratic encroachment on the activities of the private contractors.
Where states such as France had developed an extensive administration
based on purchasable office, the twin roles of military supplier and gov-
ernment administrator could be combined especially easily and publicly.
Debts owed by the crown on provisioning contracts could be commuted
or bargained into the purchase of office, and office which almost inevitably
either concerned the supervision of military supply, or lay at the heart of
the financial administration, and therefore dealt directly with the payment
or reimbursement of military contractors.
François Sabathier, who was granted a nine-year lease in 1634 to provide
saltpetre and to manufacture gunpowder for the French armies, consis-
tently pulled strings in central government to try to build his lease into a
monopoly, although his record of supplying the armies was patchy and
elicited widespread complaints from senior officers. Although the implied
benefit of relying on a major operator like Sabathier was to ensure France
was self-sufficient in gunpowder, his regular failure to meet stipulated out-
puts meant that large quantities of foreign powder still needed to be
imported through the later 1630s.106 Moreover Sabathier’s ambitions and
influence extended from supplying war to financing it, and in 1636 he and
his business partners offered to waive a debt of 800,000 livres for supply of
munitions in return for the two highly lucrative offices of trésoriers de
l’extraordinaire des guerres, in effect the paymasters of the army. Refused on
this occasion, in 1638 Sabathier used his connections and leverage to
acquire the office of the trésorier of the parties casuelles, with a huge financial
interest in the sale of offices in the financial and judicial administrations.
Now on the inside track for opportunities to obtain lucrative contracts to
lend money to the crown, Sabathier had also become financially overex-
posed with outstanding loans totalling 9 million livres by 1640. His com-
bined exercise of the roles of munitions supplier/manufacturer and crown
financier had produced a disastrously unstable situation in which his loom-
ing bankruptcy threatened a complete breakdown in the supply of gunpow-
der to the armies. Desperate attempts to shore up his position and to hold
off his creditors were driven by fear for the armies in the face of the collapse
of his activities, and were an indictment of arrangements which had in
practice brought benefit to no one except Sabathier and those of his sup-
porters and financial backers in Richelieu’s ministry.107
Even where there was no formal venality of administrative office, a
tendency for overlap between government and contractors was an inevi-
table consequence of a powerful military-supply interest which had strong
personal and business ties to government. In the United Provinces a large
numbers of the councillors on the Boards of the Admiralties, who formu-
lated, funded and administered naval policy, had begun their careers as
contractors for ship provisioning and shipbuilding, and almost all contin-
ued to maintain strong financial interests in provisioning and mercantile
activities. This meant, for example, that the councillor to the Rotterdam
Admiralty, Joost van Coulster, could demand priority payment on his
contract to provide beer to the navy, and even more typically the councillors
would give priority to the hiring out of their own ships for Admiralty use.108
Supply contractors might thus appear to be exploiting supine admin-
istrations, too ready to grant over-advantageous contracts to friends and
associates. But there was another side to the coin. The real problem for all
those prepared to enter into military contracting with European states was
the latter’s chronic lack of creditworthiness throughout the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.109 One good reason why such contractors sought
to extend their role into the state’s administration and to build up their
connections and dealings with elements of central government was the
simple recognition that rulers were extremely bad creditors. Most states
were encumbered with long-term debts, the servicing of which claimed a
large part of current income. A second-rank principality like Saxony
had seen its long-term debt rise from 1.6 million florins in the 1550s
to 5.4 million in 1621; this was dwarfed by the debts of the Austrian
Habsburg monarchy, which stood at 32 million florins by 1612.110 For
most European states, the Thirty Years War began under the shadow of
debts which made access to further credit a complex process that would
usually involve hard bargaining and high rates of interest. Worse, most of
these states possessed fiscal systems which either explicitly, through the
requirement of negotiating taxes with powerful Diets or Estates, or implic-
itly, through the entrenched power of privileged and tax-exempt ruling
elites, made further development of the state’s revenue-raising potential

an extremely tough and frequently unsuccessful struggle.
Contracts made with the central state were thus pushed into the murky
waters of fiscal regimes in which as little as possible was paid for in cash or in
advance, where assigned revenues would frequently fail to generate antici-
pated yields and had often been allocated to more than one creditor, and
where debts were a negotiable commodity, transferable or open to bargain-
ing and renegotiation for financial or political advantage.111 These were
fiscal regimes that existed on the constant verge of bankruptcy, squeezing a
hand-to-mouth existence through creative accounting and a mass of special
relationships which could massage the confidence of certain individuals,
groups or consortia to persuade them that they would enjoy preferential
treatment in meeting payments and honouring debts. In 1608 when the
milliones (sales taxes) in Castile had been reduced to 2 million ducats per
year, 3.3 million ducats of expenditure were still assigned on them; the
complaints of French munitionnaires, and indeed of many governors of
fortified places, that they had been assigned revenues that were either worth-
less or so slow and difficult to collect that they would realize only a fraction of
their value, are a constant litany in the correspondence with the Bureau des
finances.112 The Franco-Italian financier Philip Burlamachi’s dealings with
the English government from the 1610s through to his bankruptcy in 1633,
which involved the supply of munitions to foreign powers, the funding of
Mansfeld’s army and the expedition to La Rochelle, was a long saga of
government default on contracted payments.113
In this situation many supply contractors cut back their own financial
commitments as heavily as possible, knowing that this would lead to
practical problems in maintaining contracts but anxious to avoid financial
overexposure and outright loss.114 The result of this was the erosion of the
contract as in any sense a binding commitment. The French munitionnaire
knew that his negotiations with the central regime were a charade in which
any sanctions that the regime might threaten for non-performance of
contracted services would be mitigated by the inevitable non-payment of
outstanding monies due on the contract.115
Military contractors and private suppliers

While the administrations in France, Spain, the United Provinces and
other states negotiated directly with private contractors for the provision
of military equipment and supplies to their armies and navies, this was not
the only model for large-scale military supply. As we saw in Chapter 3, the
flourishing of military enterprise in lengthier warfare from the later six-
teenth century had developed into a number of different varieties of
Military contractors and private suppliers 229
private–public partnership. In the most extreme cases, for example the

armies of Ernst von Mansfeld or Bernhard von Saxe-Weimar, the con-
nection with state administration was almost non-existent. Both armies
might receive intermittent or irregular financial subsidies from powers
who sought to direct the armies’ military effort in certain political direc-
tions, but these states did not intervene administratively to arrange con-
tracts to supply equipment, munitions or food to these armies.
Responsibility for this lay entirely with the military commander, though
probably acting in conjunction with his ‘shareholder-colonels’, and it
would depend on that commander’s relationships and contacts with net-
works of private contractors. This was of course a very similar situation to
that of the vast majority of privateering fleets or individual privateering
ships. Whether an Uskok pirate, a Dunkirk privateer or a Genoese or
Maltese galley captain operating on his own risk, it was assumed that the
owner of the ship would take full responsibility for feeding and arming the
crew and maintaining the ship, even though the privateering activity was
indirectly supporting the political aims of the ruler who sanctioned it.
In other cases the situation was mixed: the circumstances in which
Wallenstein raised his army, his authority to issue commissions to subcon-
tracting colonels and the vast amount of private capital raised for military
operations, all implied that the independent negotiation of supply and
munitions contracts with contractors would predominate. To a large extent
this was the case, while a further, unique character in his management of
army supply was added when Wallenstein became a private military con-
tractor in his own right, turning his duchy of Friedland in Bohemia into a vast
centre for the production of arms, munitions and food. Yet at the same time
Wallenstein, even at the height of his power, never became independent of
financial support from his warlord, the Emperor. Throughout the years of
war he continued to receive taxes imposed across the Habsburg lands and
directly collected under the Emperor’s authority, even if the threat of
‘military execution’ by his troops was the ultimate sanction against default
and delay. Substantial payments were made in kind, and although
Wallenstein’s troops would be the ultimate destination of the grain, cattle,
beer and other goods that might be exacted in the Tyrol, Silesia, Westphalia
or Franconia, these would almost certainly be collected and transported by
state and local authorities, not as a result of private contracts made by the
Generalissimo.
In contrast, and after the death of Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish army
commanders negotiated supply contracts largely on their own initiative.
Receiving modest subsidies from France and the United Provinces, and
contributions from garrisoned north Germany (see p. 133), war finance was
largely raised by simple occupation and extortion of German territory
beyond these directly occupied lands. The Swedish government in

Stockholm would not have wished to micro-manage the provisioning and
equipping of the army in Germany. Leaving this initiative in the hands of the
commanders, while these latter had direct control of war finance, placed
them in the position of negotiating virtually everything connected with the
equipping, supply and feeding of the army.
Can generalizations be drawn about the way in which supply contracts
made by commanders acting more or less independently differed from
contracts made by state administrators? If the besetting problem of many
centrally negotiated contracts was their inflexibility and inability to adjust
to changes in operational plans, how far will there be a just-in-time, ad hoc
character to contracts made by commanders, often in the midst of a
campaign or after a change of military circumstances or plans? How
does the far more local and specific focus of many of these contracts –
aiming to provide food or munitions for an army in particular locations at
a particular moment in a campaign – change the nature of the assignment?
Were supply contractors able to cope with the demand for much greater
flexibility, less advance warning of specific needs and far less time for
preparation and organization?
The evidence – not least the success of many of the campaigns and the
ambitious operational approaches to war described in Chapter 4 – suggests
that this type of negotiation of contracts on the ground did in fact work
considerably better than the direct, centralized negotiation of supply. There
are limitations and failures, as we shall see, but in general the mechanisms
seem more capable of underpinning ambitious and extensive military
actions.
A central strength of this system came from the direct relationship of the
commanders, who had control of the funds from contributions and other
sources to pay for the army’s logistical needs, with the financiers, merchants,
manufacturers and producers who would contract to pay, feed and equip the
armies. It is important not to underestimate the significance of these person-
alized and close relationships in the working of supply operations which both
parties recognized as integral to the wider success of the military campaign.
The fact that military commanders were themselves proprietors of regi-
ments, had usually established their units through initial borrowing of
funds, or had drawn on letters of exchange and other financial instruments,
and had made contracts with arms suppliers and other provisioners, gave
them initial, direct experience of working with financial and supply special-
ists. Pappenheim is aptly described by his recent biographer as having
developed a flair for building relations with contractors and for supplying
his troops which underpinned his campaigns of 1631–2.116 The particular
business partnership between Wallenstein and the Flemish Calvinist Hans
de Witte is the best known of these relationships in the Thirty Years War.
The success of Wallenstein’s entire military system during his first general-
ship depended explicitly on the extraordinarily close ties with de Witte, and
through de Witte, with a vast, international web of financiers, merchants and
suppliers. Wallenstein and de Witte first met as fellow members of the
coinage consortium set up to debase the Bohemian currency in the aftermath
of the rebel defeat.117 Their experience of the windfall profits to be made
from the exploitation of reconquered Bohemia created a shared understand-
ing of the potential that Wallenstein’s project offered for the funding of a
gigantic army through punitive contributions levied across an ever-widening
arc of German territories. His confidence in the viability of Wallenstein’s
system underpinned de Witte’s extraordinary mobilization of financial
credit, and the contracting, purchase and distribution of armaments, muni-
tions and foodstuffs.118 When confronted with the mounting resistance to
heavy contribution demands, de Witte’s warning of the dangers of allowing
the flow of payments to slacken off were recognized by Wallenstein, although
by 1629 the problems of resistance had become too widespread to permit any
solution.119 The Emperor’s dismissal of his Generalissimo in August 1630
predictably brought the whole edifice of borrowing and contracting on credit
crashing down, and led to de Witte’s suicide a few weeks later. But without
him Wallenstein’s huge system could never have taken off, and he would
never have gained his reputation as a master of the detail of military logistics.
Equally, though, without de Witte’s own profound, and ultimately mis-
judged, confidence in Wallenstein, his own capacity and willingness to
mobilize finance and resources would have been incomparably more limited.
Wallenstein’s business relationship with de Witte was far from unique,
and many other enterpriser-commanders of the period managed to achieve
similar, close partnerships with figures who, though often financiers,
extended their activities as provisioners, coordinators of supply operations
and intermediaries in acquiring arms and munitions. The working relation-
ship between Bernhard von Saxe-Weimar and Marx Conrad Rehlinger had
begun at the time of the Augsburg financier’s involvement with Gustavus
Adolphus and Axel Oxenstierna. Rehlinger had been prosecuted by the
Imperial authorities for his support for the Protestant cause in the 1620s and
had gone into exile in Switzerland, from where he gave financial support to
the Swedes, while his two sons held commands in Gustavus’ army.120 The
connection between Rehlinger and Saxe-Weimar, which followed the
duke’s establishment of an independent army after the defeat at
Nördlingen, proved far closer. It was money and supplies tirelessly
assembled on credit by Rehlinger at Basle and Schaffhausen, and shipped
down the Rhine to Saxe-Weimar’s army, which made possible the capture
of Breisach in 1638 (see p. 176). Moreover, because a significant part of
Saxe-Weimar’s financial support came, at least in theory, from the French

subsidy paid him from 1635, the duke had also developed close relation-
ships, initially through Rehlinger, with the Lyon-based Hervart family and
the Paris–Amsterdam dealings of Jan Hoeufft.121 After Saxe-Weimar’s
death in 1639 the business relationship with Barthélemi Hervart was main-
tained by Hans Ludwig von Erlach, the most senior of Saxe-Weimar’s
colonel-successors.122 Both were crucial in allowing Saxe-Weimar to con-
vert French subsidies via letters of exchange into pay for his troops in
Germany, and to maintain a steady supply of munitions to his army from
well-established Amsterdam sources.
Amongst the Swedish enterpriser-commanders, Lennart Torstensson
relied heavily when planning his operations on the financial and supply
services of Melchior von Degingk, who in turn collaborated closely with
the most important figure in the financing of the Swedish armies through-
out the 1640s, the Hamburg-based Johan Adler Salvius.123 Amongst the
Imperialist generals, while he was still only a lieutenant colonel, Melchior
von Hatzfeld was known to be well connected in the world of both finance
and munitions supply. His connections and financial activities in the late
1620s tied him closely to the Nuremberg banking firm of Geiger, but by
the later 1630s when he had become a field marshal he had shifted his
financial base to Cologne, initially working through the finance house of
Heffing, but from the later 1630s relying more and more on the services of
the financial agent and merchant Daniel Resteau.124
These direct, personal contacts between the enterpriser-commanders
and chosen figures in the financial-mercantile world contributed to the
supply of the armies. Both parties identified strongly with the outcome of
military operations. If the commanders were prepared to raise extra credit
or deploy their own capital to meet shortfalls and crises in demands for
munitions or equipment, their business partners and hommes de confiance
would extend their own credit, draw on the support of business colleagues
and connections, and exert themselves well beyond their immediate finan-
cial self-interest to hold contracts together, to compensate for delayed or
inadequate payments or to make good shortfalls in the delivery of goods.125
But the vital role of these link-men, whether a de Witte, Degingk or a
Resteau, was to provide the entrée into the international networks of finance,
manufacturing and supply that needed to be drawn upon if armies were to
receive sufficient support to maintain operational effectiveness.
All of this was no guarantee of success. Even with Wallenstein’s prioriti-
zation of logistical demands, and with de Witte’s capacity to mobilize, focus
and collect together production, to identify stockpiles of goods and food-
stuffs, to arrange transportation and to anticipate political or practical
difficulties via his networks of agents, army supply did not always work
smoothly. In spring 1625 Wallenstein and de Witte were in negotiations

with the small-arms merchants of Suhl, in Thuringia, for a contract to
provide muskets and edged weapons as quickly as possible for seven
Imperial regiments. The merchants would have to deal with a large number
of individual metalsmiths, woodworkers and armourers, but a contract was
fixed with costings and a three-week deadline for delivery.126 In fact the
delivery was weeks late while the final price was 22,000 gulden more than
the stipulated contract, and without this extra sum the merchants claimed
they would be unable to deliver at all. After initial fury and the temporary
arrest of the Suhl merchants in Prague on Wallenstein’s orders, the
Generalissimo and de Witte recognized that the weapons were essential,
and that no one else was likely to be able to deliver more quickly, and so
de Witte went on to negotiate a characteristically thorough additional
contract for the assembly and transport of the goods to the regiments.127
Though the Suhl merchants failed to meet a stringent contract, at
another level the episode demonstrates an impressive ability to pull
together large and complex supply contracts via pre-industrial mecha-
nisms of production, even if not as quickly and cheaply as ideally – or
unrealistically – wished. De Witte and Wallenstein continued to negotiate
a vast variety of large munitions, food and transport contracts, making use
of innumerable contacts across and well beyond the Empire. The cumu-
lative evidence is that these contracts came to operate more smoothly over
time and with growing experience.128 Above all in arranging the trans-
portation of goods, initial equally frustrating setbacks seem to have been
followed by a long period of reasonable success in meeting the needs
of the army, and anticipating or resolving obvious problems as far as
limited technology and the poor infrastructure allowed. The Imperial
army continued to rely very heavily for its support on a network of agents,
producers and bankers, who contracted their services, under admittedly
careful scrutiny by de Witte, down to 1629.129 Focusing on one city,
Nuremberg, a key munitions centre in its own right but whose merchants
had capital and controlling interests in Suhl and other Thuringian centres
of small-arms production, gives some sense of the continued scale of these
operations. In Nuremberg, de Witte financed purchases for the army
chiefly through the major banking house of Blommaert, and in each six
months from the latter half of 1626 through to the first half of 1630 the
financial transactions never totalled less than 200,000 gulden.130
Yet occasional contractual and delivery failures, combined with his
larger strategy to ensure that the Emperor’s financial debts to him were
so vast that they could only be repaid through the wholesale transfer of
territory within the Empire, seem to have crystallized Wallenstein’s dissat-
isfaction with an exclusive reliance on decentralized military production.131
Electorate
of Saxony
Elb
e Friedland (Frydiant)
Raspenau (Raspenava) Duchy of Silesia

Tetschen
(De ˘in)
(Dĕc̆in) Reichenberg
Böhmisch-
r
Ije
(Liberec)
Aussig Leipa n
lze Wallenstein’s Duchy
(Ústí nad Po
Labem) of Friedland Hohenelbe (Vrchlabi)
Arnsdorf (Arnultovice)
Elb Kingdom of
e Arnau Bohemia
(Hostinné)
Gradlitz
Jitschin (Jic̆in) (Choustníkovo
Hradis
Hradis̆tĕ)
Iser
Hor̆itz Neustadt
(Nové Mĕsto
Kingdom of Bohemia
nad Metují)
Metuj
Mo
Königgrätz
ldau
(Hradec Kralove)
Prague
20 miles
20 kms
Map 5.3 Wallenstein’s duchy of Friedland
Both contributed to his decision to establish a large-scale production base

in his own duchy of Friedland, a territory granted him by the Emperor from
the confiscated lands of Bohemian rebels. Wallenstein was able to mould
the economic life of the duchy from its foundation, and did so around
its capacity to act as a primary source of food and industrial-munitions
production for the army that he raised from 1625.132 Wallenstein con-
trolled a territory of around 1,200 km2, and was seeking to provide support
for anything between 60,000 and 100,000 troops. The economy of
Friedland, though unable to meet the needs of the army in full, played a
substantial role in this operation from 1626 to 1634. Grain production was
requisitioned in tens of thousands of hectolitres and stored up before being
shipped to the army.133 Around Reichenberg, Wallenstein co-opted settle-
ments of cobblers, tailors and cloth-makers, able to produce thousands of
pairs of shoes, sets of clothing and military cloth for each campaign.134
Above all, massive new armament workshops were developed around the
settlement of Raspenau, centred upon furnaces and iron mills run by
Italian armaments specialists, but staffed by a mass of village smiths and
local iron-masters whom Wallenstein conscripted from the entire sur-
rounding area. From the Raspenau works, hundreds of artillery pieces,
shot, powder and handguns were produced from 1627 onwards.135 Of
Fig. 5.4 Louis de Geer
crucial importance to all this activity, Friedland was well placed for the
eastern river arteries, and munitions, weapons and grain could be trans-
ported from the port of Aussig down the Elbe as far as Dessau or
Hamburg, where they would be unloaded from barges and transported to
Mecklenburg, Holstein, Stralsund or wherever the army was present in
the late 1620s. In one sense the enterprises established in the duchy should
not be seen as strictly ‘industrialized’: the producers were not a homoge-
nous labour force under a single, centralized management; rather they
remained agglomerations of individual craftsmen and their workshops.
But they had been brought together, often in shared physical space, in
Raspenau or Reichenberg, to meet production targets set by Wallenstein
for prices that he had determined, and with the assumption that the
military demand of the army would be a permanent source of employment
for them.136
Friedland was Wallenstein’s uniquely personal achievement. It
undoubtedly gave him more flexibility in both meeting the needs of the
army and managing a precarious edifice of credit and revenue anticipa-
tions. In its relationship with the army it might be seen as an early example
of a ‘military-industrial complex’, albeit singular in that army procure-
ment and industrial supply were directly controlled by one and the same
person. And as its complete collapse after his assassination and the dis-
membering of his confiscated duchy was to demonstrate, it was not strictly
necessary to ensure effective army supply: reliance on decentralized pri-
vate suppliers via capable financial and mercantile agents continued to
deliver results. Indeed, Wallenstein’s Friedland system was to some
extent a creation required to mitigate some of the self-generated problems
of supplying his own, unprecedentedly large armies, and was especially
suited to the particular circumstances in which two such armies had been
recruited from scratch in a matter of months in 1625–6 and 1630–1.
If there was a comparable agglomeration of privately owned production
capacity in the same period, albeit under the control of a consortium
rather than an individual, then the network of iron and copper mines
and furnaces, iron foundries and artillery manufacturing that Louis de
Geer financed in Sweden was the nearest equivalent. From the early
1620s the expansion of Swedish iron mining and production, above all
in the crucial context of armaments manufacturing, had been contracted
by the crown to private enterprisers. Initially the largest contracts for
control of armaments manufacturing were with the Liègois de Besche
family, who gained control of the ironworks at Nora, Lindesberg and
Österby.137 But this period of control by the de Besche family interests
quickly gave way to the capital and expertise of their hitherto junior
partner, Louis de Geer. Though originally also from Liège, the family’s
move to Amsterdam and their close business and marital association with
the Trip family of munitions dealers gave them access to resources and
financial potential far beyond their original reach. With the willing sup-
port of the crown, armaments manufacturing – from iron mining to bulk
export – was handed over to a Dutch business monopoly and based on
Gefle
Falun
Location of Väsland Leufsta
agents/representatives
Dannemora Forsmark
Copper mine
Öregrund
Iron mine
Avesta
Foundries of
factories owned Upsala
or rented by de Geer Torshälla Norrtälje
or Trip Flögfors
Västerås
Finnåker
Arboga
Jäder Stålboga Stockholm
Olösa Aker
Örebro Nakka
Björnedam
Julita
Bruk Skeppsta
Södertälje
Hällestad
Nyköping
Finspäng Sjösa
Fada Bränn Ekeby
Vänga
Nälvekvarn
Vänersborg
Linköping Fiskeby
Nörrkoping
Västerik
Göteborg Jönköping
Map 5.4 The de Geer/Trip consortium: involvement in Swedish copper

and iron mines, foundries and munitions works
huge financial investment via the partnership of de Geer himself and his
brother-in-law, Elias Trip.138 While attempts to encourage investment
from within Sweden itself had produced minimal sums, by 1626 the Dutch
consortium had already committed over 400,000 guilders.139 Although
disagreements with Gustavus Adolphus over de Geer’s aggressive market-
ing of Swedish iron cannon abroad led to the formal termination of the
monopoly agreement in 1631, in reality the Dutch association’s domi-
nance of Swedish armaments continued unchecked.140 The main arms-
producing areas were dominated by private manufacturing plants owned
and operated by de Geer on behalf of capital provided by his own family
resources, the Trip family and other Dutch financiers, and produced a
comprehensive range of weapons and munitions from heavy artillery
through to iron cannon-balls.141 The range of interests extended to
brass production, saltpetre and shipbuilding.142 Though not an arma-
ments monopoly, it was an extraordinary concentration of capital, skilled
Fig. 5.5 Hendrick Trip’s cannon foundry at Julitha Bruk, Södermanland, Sweden
labour and manufacturing resources, which outlived the original directors,

but stayed within the same entrepreneurial nexus. No fewer than five
members of the de Geer family married into the Trip dynasty over the
course of the seventeenth century.143 But the next generation brought
disputes between the two families to a climax, as Elias Trip’s wealthy and
ambitious son, Hendrik, nicknamed le roi de canons, took an overtly con-
frontational approach to the business relationship with the de Geer family,
developed his own interests in Sweden and in 1646 succeeded in breaking
de Geer’s monopoly of the Swedish gun-casting industry, provoking a
fierce competitive struggle for control of production.144 The Trip family
now became directly involved in manufacturing in Sweden, and it was the
Trip-financed cannon foundry, the Julitha Bruk, near Nyköping, whose
painted image hung in one of the salons of Hendrik Trip’s Amsterdam
townhouse (see Fig. 5.5).145
In addition to impressive networks of international contacts and organiza-
tional expertise that these systems could demonstrate, the other strength of
these privatized supply systems was fiscal. There were two sides to this.
From the enterpriser-commanders’ perspective, the private commercial
world offered sophisticated and flexible mechanisms both for raising large
amounts of credit at reasonable rates of interest, and, no less crucially, for
moving money around relatively easily and cheaply to pay for and organize
delivery of food, arms, munitions and, in cases, soldiers’ wages. An essential
precondition of the expansion of military enterprise had been an extraordi-
nary increase in the possibilities of raising credit during the sixteenth cen-
tury. The steady concentration of capital in the hands of elites – whether the
traditional landed classes and institutions, or ever-larger numbers of mer-
chants, manufacturers or office-holders – had created enormous demand for
investment opportunities and much larger capital resources in the hands of
investors. One aspect of this was the establishment of numerous private
banks in the period from the 1580s to the early 1620s, which could take
deposits, invest and offer security for clients, as well as acting as sources of
loans.146 By the Thirty Years War, military enterprisers were looking not
just for sources of credit, but for opportunities to deposit their own profits in
private banking houses (see p. 241). The other consequence of the growth of
capital and the search for investment opportunities was a huge internation-
alization of the system of finance, marked by the considerable development
in the regular use and sophistication of letters of exchange, credit notes and
mechanisms to facilitate currency exchange.147 Both Banér and
Torstensson were to rely on the Swedish financial agent in Amsterdam,
Erik Larsson, who was the vital figure in negotiating sales of Swedish copper
and grain brought from the Baltic to Amsterdam, but then arranging for the
money from these sales to be remitted as sums for the payment of the armies
in north and central Germany.148 Larsson’s activities were dwarfed by the

largest single provider of credit and financial facilities to the Swedish armies
in the last phase of the Thirty Years War, Johan Adler Salvius, whose
operations were conducted from Hamburg, the centre of his own network
of financiers, credit and access to exchange and transfer facilities.149 At the
heart of the entire system of military financing lay the regular money fairs of
Frankfurt, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Prague, Lyon and the traditional
Mediterranean financial centres.150 While agents of central governments
did seek to obtain credit via the money fairs, there was a heavy-handedness
about their involvement in what were essentially private contractual activ-
ities, with memories of the Grand Parti of Lyon and other clumsy attempts to
manipulate the credit markets always in mind. For an agent like de Witte,
personally attending all the major German money fairs four times a year was
an essential part of his credit-raising activity on behalf of Wallenstein, but it
was no less about managing and building personal relationships with groups
of creditors who were themselves present at these events. It was when de
Witte could no longer persuade his usual contacts and partners at the
autumn money fairs of 1628 to advance him further credit that the serious-
ness for Wallenstein’s system of the failure to meet contributions targets
became clear.151 Wallenstein’s project may have faltered, but the networks
of private financiers and their control of an immense proportion of
European financial resources continued unchecked. In a frank discussion
about the state of the war held by the Emperor’s councillors in Vienna in
1633, it was simply treated as uncontentious that the bulk of available cash in
the Empire was in the hands of the Hanse and a few other major Imperial
cities. If these were to close their gates and their banking and mercantile
elites refused to sustain the costs of the war, then no army would be able to
maintain itself in the field.152
The potential to mobilize and deploy private credit had been trans-
formed by the seventeenth century, and the military enterprisers were to
be major beneficiaries of this throughout the Thirty Years War. It was no
accident that the key agents/hommes de confiance who acted as the liaison
between the military enterprisers and the world of private suppliers were
financiers, and that it was their financial networks and contacts which
were prized and drawn upon at the outset, even if – like Hans de Witte –
increasing amounts of their time and energy might be spent directly
negotiating, as well as financing, munitions and armaments contracts.153
The multiple benefits of this sophisticated international system for raising
money by finding credit, but also transferring it from one centre to
another, organizing currency exchanges and finding competitive rates of
commission, were all directly relevant to the military contractors and their
activities.
For gold or honour? Military enterprisers’ motivation 241
But the relationship had another side. Given the quantities of European
capital available for investment, and the general unreliability of most rulers
and their governments as borrowers, the military enterpriser could offer a
more attractive financial proposition for financiers with capital to invest.
Unlike the state, the military enterpriser did not usually seek to borrow
money while already encumbered with long-term debts attached to his
potential income. Moreover the enterprisers’ chief means of realizing capi-
tal, direct access to money raised as contributions, for the most part looked
more attractive than most sources of normal state revenues.154 This was not
inevitably the case: some state revenues, such as farms on indirect taxes or
loans against the Spanish silver shipments, continued to attract ready capital
and competitive bids to lend money. Moreover some contributions systems,
notably Wallenstein’s and de Witte’s vast edifice of deficit finance, proved
disastrously over-ambitious in the medium term. But in general, heavy but
sustainable levels of direct war taxes, extracted under threat of military force
and in large part received directly by the military commanders who had
borrowed money or negotiated supply contracts on anticipated income from
these contributions, looked more attractive to creditors than most typical
early seventeenth-century state revenue systems, crippled by inefficiency
and corruption in collection, and handicapped by networks of privilege
and protection.
FOR GOLD OR HONOUR? MILITARY ENTERPRISERS

AND THEIR MOTIVATION
Financial reward was a driving force in explaining the attraction of military
enterprise, and must be explored as a primary motive for the involvement
of many commanders and colonels, as well as for those bankers and
financiers who were willing to underwrite their activities, and those who
provided the war goods, munitions and foodstuffs on credit against antici-
pated returns from military success.
Unsurprisingly, the shift from the mercenary-commanders of the six-
teenth century to the enterpriser-creditors of the seventeenth saw a trans-
formation in the potential for profit in proportion to the much higher
levels of capital investment involved. Back in the early sixteenth century, a
figure like Georg von Frundsberg could accumulate, though also lose, a
fortune of 70,000–80,000 florins during his career and could borrow
10,000 florins on his own account, while the notoriously money-
conscious Schertlin von Burtenbach was considered in the last decade
of his life to have sufficient resources to provide a loan of 30,000 florins.155
In contrast, even a strikingly unrapacious military commander of the
Thirty Years War like Count Tilly had accumulated a fortune of 500,000–
Fig. 5.6 Equestrian portrait of Karl Gustaf Wrangel (1613–76)
600,000 talers by his death in 1631.156 Bernhard von Saxe-Weimar,

operating as the leader of his shareholder-colonels, calculated his own
fortune at 1,170,346 livres in 1637, though this had declined to around
1 million by his death in 1639, of which 450,000 were on deposit with the
banker Jan Hoeufft in Paris.157 When it is borne in mind that Bernhard
was a fourth brother, with an income of 5,000 florins per annum from the
Saxe-Weimar revenues – just enough to provide him with a loan to raise a
regiment at the start of his military career – then the likelihood that he
could have realized larger profits in any other realm of economic activity
seems doubtful.158
Amongst the commanders, some of the largest fortunes accrued, unsur-
prisingly, to the Swedish generals, whose ability to squeeze the occupied
territories in the north of the Empire for regular contributions was enhanced
by campaigns from the later 1630s which brought the Swedes back into
central and southern Germany as conquerors and occupiers, and ultimately

on to the lands of the Habsburgs themselves. At his death, Johan Banér may
have left as much as a million talers on deposit with Hamburg bankers, while
Königsmarck managed to make enough from his German campaigns to buy
an estate in Sweden which generated an income of 130,000 talers per
annum, and left more than 2 million talers of property and money when
he died in 1662. Karl Gustav Wrangel achieved similar financial success,
enough to purchase substantial, income-bearing estates back home, and to
pay for the building of Skokloster, the key element in his own aristocratic
self-projection.159 While large profits were made by generals who avoided
death or capture (and therefore a heavy ransom to gain release), individual
colonels, especially those who held multiple colonelcies, could also make
substantial gains. Franz Albrecht von Sachsen-Lauenberg, younger son of
the duke, was able to cut an impressive figure at the courts of Dresden and
Vienna on the profits from contributions and the running of his regiments in
the late 1620s.160 Colonel Hans Ludwig von Erlach had 312,000 livres on
deposit with the Hervart bank in Lyon in the late 1640s.161 Even lieutenant
colonels and captains who held some share in the proprietorship of regi-
ments might expect to see considerable profits accruing when serving in an
army enjoying military success and access to contributions. Melchior von
Hatzfeld, employed as lieutenant colonel and recruitment manager for
Sachsen-Lauenberg’s regiment in Wallenstein’s army, had himself man-
aged to deposit 12,000 talers with the Nuremberg bank of Tobias Geiger by
the end of 1626. To this he added another 7,000 talers in 1627 which most
probably came from his share in the profits on the Silesian contributions,
followed by a further 10,000–12,000 talers to be sent via Hamburg to
Nuremberg to be placed on deposit by Geiger in 1628.162
Whether examining the fortunes of Swedish generals or Bavarian col-
onels, in general the financial returns from land warfare came primarily
from the regular collection of contributions, subsistence and other exac-
tions from civilian populations. These monies could either be used to offer
direct reimbursement for the colonels’ initial investment, or could pay
official military salaries whose high level reflected senior officers’ initial
capital outlay.163 This was coupled, as we have seen, with the opportu-
nities to make slow but steady profit on the management of regiments, to
some extent through the appropriation of these high levels of contribu-
tions to provide food, accommodation, arms and equipment as deduc-
tions from the soldiers’ wage bill. Income was also based, as with naval
captains, on a potentially substantial ‘irregular’ element of military activ-
ities: looting and plunder. An officer after the Bohemian campaign of
1620–1 suggested that any colonel or captain in the Liga army who had
not made at least 30,000 florins from loot had to be simple-minded.164 On
occasion profits from looting could transform the economic and social
status of the officer. Aldringen and Gallas’ three-day plunder of the city of
Mantua in 1630 allowed them to take possession of the ducal palace with
its entire contents, estimated to have a value of 18 million scudi.165 Gallas’
profits from the sack were to supply the capital which, supplemented by
the transferred Bohemian estates he received for his part in the elimination
of Wallenstein, was to provide the basis of his family’s elevation into the
great Bohemian nobility for the next three hundred years.166 In early 1647
Karl Gustav Wrangel was able to combine operations to weaken Imperial
forces in southern Germany with the opportunity to capture and loot the
city of Bregenz, of limited strategic value, but known to be a fortified
centre in which large amounts of money and goods had been deposited
from all over the surrounding area. The capture of Bregenz netted some
2 million gulden in hidden goods in the town and another 4 million in
ships laden with valuables that had been unable to get out of the lake
harbour, a large portion of which helped to consolidate Wrangel’s already
growing fortune from military enterprise.167
Such transformative profits from successful plundering or looting were a
significant factor in building the fortunes of some of the commanders over
and above any ‘regular’ income, while at a lesser but still significant level
they extended down to individual officer-proprietors, as to the individual
ships’ captains engaged in privateering or with-profit involvement in a naval
operation. But in general they were probably more important in reinforcing
a general climate of expectancy and enthusiasm for service, especially
service which naval and military enterprisers would probably need to fund
on their own account.168 Booty had always been a major inducement to
involvement in warfare, and at all levels of military service, but it was
especially important in an army based upon the capacity of proprietors to
raise private financial credit to recruit and sustain their units. One obvious
factor in the conspicuous consumption of colonels and higher officers in all
the armies of this period – the quantities of silver plate, jewellery, costly
clothing and furniture which they carried in their suite – was precisely its
capacity to maintain a confident façade of wealth and creditworthiness.169
For many officers this was indeed a façade. While involvement in
military enterprise in the right circumstances could appear an attractive
financial investment opportunity, the reality was often less profitable.
Money from a regular flow of contributions and from quartering arrange-
ments that might accord a colonel four times his already generous
monthly salary in return for rearming and recruiting his regiment up to
strength, might suggest a huge return on the initial investment. Yet these
extremely generous financial arrangements could simply reflect favour-
able but transient military-political circumstances, for example, the
Swedish occupation of western and southern Germany in late 1631 and

1632. Or they were based on an allocation of contributions and levies so
heavy that it was inherently unstable, as was the case with the initially rich
pickings for Wallenstein’s army from the contributions in Moravia,
Bohemia and Silesia in the mid-1620s. Calculating on the permanence
of these potentially fragile arrangements, senior officers were tempted,
and encouraged by their commanders, to commit more of their own
capital to raising extra troops, becoming creditors for the running costs
of the armies, and engaging in other financial speculations. The result, as
seen with the Swedish colonels by the end of 1634, was a group spectac-
ularly indebted for the costs of their regiments, for the purchase of lands in
territory which had now passed out of Swedish control, and even for loans
to the Swedish crown assigned against revenues which had now evapo-
rated (see p. 129). Hence the enduring paradox of the Swedish war effort
until 1648, that the crown could lose the war, which would wipe out any
obligations to its debt-ridden officers, but could win it only on terms
which would recognize the vast indebtedness of the colonel-proprietors
via a financial or territorial agreement generous enough to pay off their
debts. The first demand produced by the Swedish negotiators at
Westphalia for the satisfactio to meet the debts of the officers was an
impossibly high 20 million talers.170
Even booty and prizes, which might seem an opportunity for clear profit,
in reality proved much less straightforward. Individual privateers were
running ships at their own cost, and hoping to finance this through the
capture and sale of prizes, namely a ship itself, its merchandise or – if a
warship – its military equipment and munitions, the ransoms that might be
gained for crew or passengers. Prizes might seem to offer spectacular
returns, but they need to be set in the context of the running costs and
fitting-out of the ship, the wages of the crew, and as Robert Stradling
reminds us in the case of the Dunkirk privateers, a 10 per cent levy on
prize money for the crown, and a ‘voluntary’ donation of one-third of the
value of the prize to the church, in particular the parish from where the
ship’s master originated.171 Though the global quantity and value of prizes
taken and held in a privateering base like Dunkirk in the 1620s/1630s looks
spectacular, and provides evidence of naval war waged with a clear opera-
tional impact, the net gains for privateers look very much less impressive.
Indeed, communities like the Dunkirk privateers were victims of their own
success: the sheer number of prizes, merchandise and goods at Dunkirk
would depress the likely return on sales well below the typical price for such
goods elsewhere. Finally, in a situation where the shipowner might have
borrowed sums of money at interest before his voyage to cover the necessary
costs and to pay some of his crew’s wages in advance, the prize commissions
at Dunkirk had to move slowly through the list of prizes, ascertaining own-
ership, hearing appeals, and finally ensuring that the appropriate deductions
were made from the sale prices paid before the money was handed over to
the captains.172 Adrien van der Walle, the largest of the Dunkirk armateurs,
had funded eighteen privateering ships in 1623, twelve the following year,
and was said to have paid 100,000 florins to the crown as 10 per cent of the
value of his prizes. Yet he died almost completely ruined in 1633, by that
time able to finance only one ship.173 Adrien’s son, Jacques van der Walle,
diversified his commercial activities, relying as much on trade as on privat-
eering to recover the family fortunes.174
Similar risk factors and difficulties of capital accumulation were evident on
land. While some officers did spectacularly well from the manipulation of
their military skills, deployment of credit and good fortune, this was by no
means inevitable. An element that is easily overlooked is the level of mana-
gerial skill and effort that was required to run a regiment as a business
concern, whether put in by the colonel in person, or by carefully chosen
and competent subordinates. This went hand-in-hand with direct, per-
sonal leadership in reinforcing the authority of the junior officers and
forestalling problems and disputes. Melchior von Hatzfeld can be seen
as the model of the hard-working, efficient regimental officer, subse-
quently staff officer and field marshal; he can be contrasted with the
young colonel Jakob Hannibal II von Hohenems, who levied a new regi-
ment in Upper Germany during the course of 1621 to serve under Spinola
in the Army of Flanders. The 13,000 florins required for levying and
equipping the unit had been lent to him by family and local sources, but
despite this liability he seems to have made minimal provision for the
establishment of capable subordinates or any system of good management
in the regiment, and he himself left the army to spend time in Germany
during the winter of 1621/2. When he returned to Brussels in the middle of
April 1622, Jakob Hannibal found that his regiment had been disbanded
nine days previously after months of indiscipline and high levels of deser-
tion, aggravated by the absence of senior officers. A ferocious letter from
his father left Jakob in no doubt that this was his own responsibility, and the
dismissive final remark that ‘what has been lost will not be regained, and
you have saddled yourself with a burden of debt that you will never be able
to repay’, was doubtless the fate of many other would-be colonels.175
For contractors the highest-risk activity was, for both commanders and
individual colonels, involvement in military ventures entirely at their own
expense – without a regular financial injection of subsidy and support.
The dangers here were obvious: money was advanced or borrowed to raise
regiments, purchase equipment and supplies, and the only way that this
could be repaid without some sort of subsidy from a sponsoring power was
through military success, the extraction of protection money or other

incidental benefits. While Ernst von Mansfeld was fortunate in his ability
to find a series of sponsors for his army throughout the early 1620s (see
pp. 106–7), keeping the army together in between periods of subsidy,
when accumulating large profits was almost impossible, would erode the
resources and credit of the commander and his colonels. Mansfeld’s own
stipulation in these contracts for a large personal element in the payments
for the army reflected this uncertainty.176 Mansfeld was relatively lucky or
skilful in finding a number of short-term sponsors for his army, but the
example of Charles IV of Lorraine makes clear just how ruinous trying to
support an army with no controlled supply base and no assured subsidies
from a sponsoring power could be. His army in the 1640s fell from
10,000–12,000 men down to 6,000–7,000, and with the French complet-
ing their conquest and occupation of the duchy, nothing could now be
expected from the duke’s own lands or from his subjects to help maintain
military costs.177 The one diminishing asset possessed by his colonels was
the military skill and experienced personnel of their units, and after the
arrest and imprisonment of Charles IV by the Spanish in 1654, their only
option was to enter the service of other armies, albeit writing off years of
accumulated and unpaid salary, and carrying over large personal debts in
the management of their regiments. Even in a period of protracted
European war, it proved impossible to maintain an army on the same
self-financing basis as a privateering squadron and to hope to make
enough through protection money and plunder to cover costs and sustain
expenses.
One threat to profitability came from standing entirely outside the
financial support of the warlord – whether this was in the form of subsidies
or rights to control and collect contributions. Another factor likely to
reduce profits came from maintaining a traditional ‘hired mercenary’
link to the state administration. Just as the Landsknecht and Swiss colonels
of the sixteenth century minimized their capital input into what they
considered would be short-term military engagements, some of the
Swiss, Scots and other nationals still sought to avoid making a capital
investment in their own units, and offered service simply as employees, at
the head of a unit which they had raised through funds directly provided
by the contractor. This was the case with many of the foreign regiments in
French service, or the Irish regiments in the service of Spain. Indeed the
local and organizational tradition of both Scottish and Irish colonels
seems to have been set strongly against speculative military enterprise as
it had developed on the Continent. Few were prepared to recruit without
money provided for the levy, equipment and transport of their troops, and
they accepted contracts which recognized that they were employees rather
than investors, and adjusted their own salaries and financial arrangements
accordingly.178 Beyond the traditional profit-making benefit of being able
to recruit their own men more cheaply than for the agreed price specified
in the contract, there was for them little scope for profiting from the
‘business of the regiment’, or from handling large sums from contribu-
tions or quartering. An initial capital investment did not seem to be within
reach of such colonels and consequently opportunities for systematic,
large-scale reimbursement of regimental costs did not arise.
Many of the Scots involved in service with the Danes, then with the
Swedes, certainly held a similar, traditional view of their contractual relation-
ship with the warlord. Even when they were prepared to cover some of the
initial costs of recruitment, they expected rapid reimbursement for the
immediate expense, rather than seeing themselves as long-term stakeholders
in the military-financial fortunes of the Swedish monarchy.179 Colonel
Robert Monro, for example, seems to have made no money at all from his
years of Danish and Swedish service which began in 1626: he returned to
Scotland in 1637 with a commission to recruit his regiment up to strength,
but then became involved in the Covenanting rebellion against Charles I, a
new direction to his military career which was ultimately to take him to
Ireland as lieutenant general of the army sent to repress the revolt.180
Colonel John Hepburn left Swedish service after a dispute in 1632, but had
no proprietary claim on the regiment that he had commanded in that army,
which was transferred to the aforesaid Robert Monro. It was rumoured that
James Ramsay had made a vast fortune of 900,000 talers from his governor-
ship of Hanau in the early 1630s, but at the time of his death after the loss of
the city his relatives were pressing the Swedish government for compensation
of 50,000 riksdalers, suggesting that his fortune may have been altogether
more modest.181 It might be added that the beginnings of the British civil
wars led a large number of Scots colonels and their regiments to return to the
British Isles at the very point, the first half of the 1640s, when the tide of war
was turning in favour of the Swedish armies and those colonels who had
invested heavily in their units and the Swedish military enterprise were likely
to see large-scale returns, culminating in the satisfactio of 1648.
Acting as a military enterpriser involved financial risks as it also involved
obvious personal, physical risk. Colonels, and indeed commanding officers,
were not distant figures, managing their regiments or armies from a safe
remove. Personal leadership meant personal hazard, and even in a world
typically characterized by high levels of mortality and of interpersonal
violence, the chances of death, injury or capture in pursuit of the business
of war were significant. Amongst senior commanders, Tilly, Gustavus
Adolphus, Pappenheim, Piet Heyn the admiral of the Dutch West India
Company, Mercy, Holzapfel, Guébriant, Richelieu’s admiral, Maillé-
Social ambition 249
Brézé, were all killed in battle, while Mansfeld, Christian of Halberstadt,

Spinola, Banér and Saxe-Weimar all died from wounds and illness while
campaigning.182 Hatzfeld, Gustav Horn, Jacques Colaert, Jan de Werth
and Raimondo Montecuccoli were all subject to long periods of captivity
and only escaped paying ruinous ransoms because they could be exchanged
for someone important enough on the opposing side.
The risks of the business of war were carried by the participants at all
levels: whether Bernhard von Saxe-Weimar, who died wealthy but aged
only thirty-six in 1639, or the ordinary soldier Peter Hagendorf, whose
Tagebuch survives in Berlin, who served in the Piccolomini regiment
continuously from 1634 to 1648, was promoted to corporal, lost two
wives and seven of his children who had shared his military life, whose
own carefully accumulated small savings were regularly wiped out or lost,
and who records that in 1649 the regiment was disbanded at Memmingen
when he received a final pay of three months’ wages, in total 39 gulden.183
All pose the obvious question of why anyone would want to make a career
in military enterprise.
Social ambition
The obvious response requires us to understand military enterprise as a
social and cultural phenomenon, not simply as an exercise in profit-making.
Moreover, as has been hinted in both this and the previous chapter, the
ability to satisfy social aspirations is one of its greatest strengths in mobilizing
capital, resources and effort, and in delivering military results beyond any
that war seen purely as financial/economic business would have yielded.
That military enterprise is about more than just financial calculation can be
seen right at the summit of the system: Fritz Redlich put the case directly and
forcefully when discussing the career of Wallenstein. Why should someone
who had managed to build up a vast fortune by essentially political means
immediately after the Bohemian revolt – through territorial confiscations,
loans to the Emperor, participation in the currency devaluation – have
became so heavily involved in military enterprise? What was the real attrac-
tion of this risky form of business activity, when we are dealing with a figure
already so well placed within the highest reaches of the political establish-
ment that other, safer options were easily available to him?184 If Wallenstein
had wanted to become the most powerful territorial prince in Bohemia with
considerable political weight at the court in Vienna, he could have achieved
this by traditional patterns of aristocratic accumulation and exploitation.
In the case of Wallenstein, as with the vast majority of those who chose to
commit capital, organizational resources and their persons to the risks of
military enterprise, the most direct answer to the question is social
validation or socio-political ambition. For Wallenstein, whose aspirations

already extended beyond Bohemia, becoming the Emperor’s pre-eminent
military contractor was the means both to reshape the political and terri-
torial map of the Empire, and to become the prime beneficiary from that
reshaping.185 Achieving semi-sovereign authority through ducal status in
the Empire via the territories of one of the major German (or Italian) rulers –
Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Mantua – or above all perhaps, one of the
Electorates, would only be achieved through these vast projects of military
enterprise waged on behalf of and as chief creditor of the Emperor. Only this
military power would give him the political authority to cut through the
thickets of his enemies at the court in Vienna and his even more tenacious
enemies amongst the Imperial princes.186 At a more mundane level, the
great aristocratic families of Lombardy saw military service in the Spanish
armies, substantially at their own expense, as a means to preserve and
reinforce their privileged status and role within the Spanish system.187
At the other end of the social scale, successful military enterprise could be
the route from low-born obscurity to noble titles and the highest social
status. Two emblematic figures, both from the Imperial armies, were Jan de
Werth and Peter Melander, Reichsgraf von Halzapfel. Both succeeded in
rising through the military ranks to the level of field marshal, shifting
between armies at crucial moments in their careers in response to attractive
offers of promotion, and both demonstrated outstanding military skill and
organizational ability. Both ended up with noble titles and seigneurial
estates and made marriages into traditional families which would not have
been thinkable without the wealth, connections and reputation that had
come through their years of military service.188 Jacques Colaert began his
career in 1623 as a hired corsair captain in a ship financed by the magistrates
of Bergues, was promoted to captain of one of the frigates in the Armada of
Flanders and reached the summit of his career in 1637 as admiral of the
Dunkirk Armada. He was received at the Spanish court in Madrid, and
rewarded with pensions and membership of the Order of Santiago.189
It would be mistaken, however, to see military involvement in the
Thirty Years War as providing an easy or much-frequented route from
obscure origins to high noble status. As the regularly recurring names
suggest, such dramatic social ascents were rare. Much more characteristic
of the period, and of the opportunities opened by military proprietorship
and enterprise, was the acceleration of social ascent within the traditional
nobility and amongst those who already had some wealth.190 The career of
Matthias Gallas was far more typical. From an established noble family in
the prince-bishopric of Trent, he moved slowly through experience in the
ranks to junior officer, reaching the grade of captain in his thirties. But the
Thirty Years War and the demand for experienced soldiers and officers
Cultural validation 251
fast-tracked his career: he passed into the Liga army, was appointed
lieutenant colonel, and rapidly, in part thanks to profits from his military
activities, gained his own regiment. Wallenstein gave him the second
major opportunity of his career, by offering him the post of general in
the Imperial army in January 1629. From 1634, when he was one of the
leading conspiritors in the elimination of Wallenstein and went on to serve
as acting commander of the Imperial troops at Nördlingen, his social
ascent never faltered. Despite a military record characterized by medioc-
rity and incompetence, he established himself as a favourite and adviser at
the Viennese court under Ferdinand III. His vast profits from the sack of
Mantua and the substantial Bohemian estates he received in 1634 pro-
vided him with the economic base, and his court connections the social
nexus, from which he could ensure that his family were positioned
amongst the aristocracy of the central European Habsburg lands.191
Similar biographical accounts could be provided for many of the military
commanders who used the war to advance their families up through the
ranks of the noble hierarchy in a way that would normally have required
several generations of state service, land purchases and marital politics.192
Nor was this restricted to those already titled. On the supply side of war,
numbers of already wealthy merchants and financiers could see social
opportunities in supplying military needs, whether directly to the state or
indirectly to its military agents. The Spaniard Martin de Arana accepted a
contract to build six galleons for Philip IV in 1625 at a price that would
involve financial loss to himself, but saw this in the wider context of social
preferment for his family. For in return he received the military governor-
ship of Santander for himself and, more important for the social aspira-
tions of the family, a knighthood in the military Order of Santiago for his
son.193 Hans de Witte’s commercial acumen would probably have served
him better – or at least longer – had he involved himself in, say, the
Hamburg–Mediterranean trade, but his social aspirations would be sat-
isfied far more comprehensively – gaining both titles and status at court –
through his close involvement with Wallenstein.194
Cultural validation
As with Wallenstein, other instances can be found of men who had no
obvious financial need to became involved in military contracting. The
great Augsburg banking houses of Fugger and Rehlinger established family
members as colonels or senior officers. At least three Fugger served in the
Bavarian army during the Thirty Years War. Marx Conrad Rehlinger’s two
sons who served as colonels in the Swedish Protestant army were no less
part of a larger family tradition: as recently as 1622, Mathäus Rehlinger had
been lieutenant colonel of one of the regiments raised by Augsburg.195

Hans Ludwig Zollikofer (1595–1633), who raised and commanded an
infantry regiment, was the son of a patrician banking family from St
Gallen, but was also the grandson of a sixteenth-century Swiss mercenary
commander.196 All of these men might have pursued status and recognition
through typical, and in their cases probably more lucrative, family activities.
Military command was not merely a means to pursue socio-economic
advancement; it also provided validation and reinforcement for existing
social status. The direct association of traditional noble status with mili-
tary service was deeply entrenched in the cultural assumptions of
European elites.197 The impôt du sang – the willingness to serve at risk to
life – was not merely an excuse to resist paying the taxes levied on the
Third Estate, but a lively justification for the assertion and maintenance of
noble privilege, and in theory, at least, for the exclusion from ‘true
nobility’ of those whose titles came from administrative service or simple
purchase.198 Whether for status reinforcement or status building, military
service and especially military command, with all its potential for social
interaction with the highest ranks of court or aristocracy, held a profound
and enduring attraction for European elites. It is striking, and by no means
untypical, that virtually the only route into the ranks of the high court
nobility at the early modern French court was through military service:
fewer than half a dozen French dukedoms were created on any other basis
during the seventeenth century.199
War and military command could demonstrate moral and physical qual-
ities which a European elite far more extensive than a traditional ‘sword’
nobility had been educated to esteem.200 The notion of military duty well
performed, of a métier d’armes which could define an individual in an
honourable, self-validating relationship to the rest of society, can be traced
back to long before the epoch of professional, meritocratic officer corps.201
The military commander, even the regimental colonel, was placed at social
centre-stage, given the opportunity to display qualities of personal leadership
and decision-making that were validated by a mass of religious, moral,
historical and literary traditions and assumptions shared throughout elite
society.202 For these men, war was not primarily a risky but quick route to
substantial financial gain; it was a species of cultural self-fashioning. The
future marshal Bassompierre relates how, when he was a young man, his
parents, an established noble family from Lorraine, continually urged him to
abandon his life at the French court and to offer his military services in the
Long Turkish War at the head of a regiment they were prepared to raise for
him. Bassompierre declined the regimental command, arguing he had no
experience of the territory where he would be leading the troops, but went to
serve as a volunteer, albeit with an appropriately large supporting retinue.203
Such men were fully aware that they were actors both in front of their
immediate audience of commanders and other officers, and in the eyes of
a public of all those who shared the common set of educational and cultural
assumptions about values associated with military leadership. The great
majority of published tracts and manuals on the art of war identify and
prescribe the qualities required of the ‘perfect captain’, while extensive and
widely disseminated narrative accounts of military campaigns, such as Peter
Abaline’s Theatrum Europaeum, continued to describe and discuss battles
and other military engagements in terms of the feats and leadership of
military commanders.204 These assumptions may help to explain the extra-
ordinary, reckless courage of commanders such as Pappenheim or Ottavio
Piccolomini on the battlefield, going far beyond any reasonable expectations
of military leadership.205 Pappenheim’s self-presentation – his claim to
recognition and status – was based on this reputation for military success
achieved through reckless leadership and personal bravery. His letters to
Wallenstein were finely crafted acts of self-presentation which, while never
directly questioning his ultimate subordination to the Generalissimo, pro-
moted his personal and, in his view, vital contribution to the Imperial war
effort.206 Pappenheim was an excellent example of traditional, lesser nobility
projected into high status through his military abilities, even if his death at
Lützen prevented him cashing in his accumulated social capital.
As striking, however, are the large numbers of those colonels and
commanders who already possessed princely status, for whom military
enterprise also held strong attractions. If Pappenheim needed to prove
himself, Ottavio Piccolomini-Pieri was already from an established and
distinguished princely family, as was Marquis Annibale Gonzaga, or
Georg von Braunschweig-Lüneburg, and his son, Johann-Friedrich.
Many of these men had imposing titles, but little to support this claim to
social pre-eminence. The progressive abandonment of partible inheri-
tance by many German and Italian princely families in the sixteenth
century, in favour of territorial consolidation under inheritance by primo-
geniture, may well have been a significant factor driving military enter-
prise. Numerous second and third sons served in the armies of the
Emperor, Sweden or Spain, men who would receive a pittance from
family lands which had been settled on their elder brother – enough
perhaps to set themselves up as colonel-proprietors. Even more impor-
tantly, they were well aware of the gap between their princely titles and
their actual standing and importance in a social and political context. The
key factor for such figures was not just that military service as enterprisers
offered them, with luck, the possibility of transforming their financial
prospects, but that they would be able to deploy the cultural values and
associations of military command to build a reputation and achieve
external validation. For many of these colonels who were younger sons or
members of minor cadet branches of princely families, the ambitions were
primarily those of status recognition, gaining the attention of key power-
brokers, the respect of peers. Franz Albrecht von Sachsen-Lauenberg’s
concern to obtain approval and validation from Wallenstein seems almost
obsessive, and led him into frenetic and expensive activity to ensure that
his first regiment was better recruited and better equipped than any of the
others in the army.207 When he failed to meet the expectation that he
would set his second regiment in order as quickly and lavishly, his letters
shows that he was mortified – almost paralysed – by the prospect of ‘losing
credit’ with Wallenstein.208 For a figure like Annibale Gonzaga, sixth son
of the prince of Bozzolo – a cadet line ruling over a few dozen square
kilometres enclaved within the main Gonzaga duchy in north Italy – a
regimental command in the Imperial army, promotion and recognition of
services was the means to bring himself to the attention of the great.209
Such service was the particular métier of the Gonzaga: one of Annibale’s
elder brothers, Federico, was colonel of a German unit in the Army of
Flanders, while another, Alfonso, marquis of Pomaro, raised two regi-
ments for the French army in 1637.210 In all these cases it offered the
possibility of achieving what their ancestors from the other minor princi-
palities of Sabbioneta and Guastalla gained in the later sixteenth century:
no great territorial aggrandizement, but high status and offices at the
courts of Vienna and Madrid, recognition of status through titles and
access to the powerful at a level far higher than cadet princely status could
otherwise bring them (see p. 46). These were figures who in the course of
their military activities would frequently be presented with the choice
between straightforward capital accumulation from the profits of regi-
mental management or access to contributions, or cultural and social
self-fashioning through extravagant gestures in raising and maintaining
their troops or sustaining an impressive entourage and living extravagantly
within the army.211 In many cases they were likely to choose the latter,
probably to the material benefit of the army of the warlord.212
War remained a business, but engaging in it, far from threatening loss of
social status – the dérogeance attached to much commercial activity –
positively facilitated the assertion and fulfilment of social and cultural
ambitions. All of the triumphalism of martial imagery could be deployed
to reinforce the status of those engaged in military command, whether
they had themselves depicted dressed in full armour, or in stylized eques-
trian portraits which conveyed both a control of the surrounding battle-
field and an implied discipline and mastery of their own persons
symbolized by the perfectly controlled warhorse. A paradigm of such
self-representation can be seen in the painting of the Swedish Field
Fig. 5.7 Tomb of Melchior von Hatzfeld (1593–1658), Church of

St Jacob, Prusice, Lower Silesia, Poland, c.1659–63
Marshal Wrangel by David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl (see Fig. 5.6). Such

images were replicated for those of considerably less status and wealth
amongst the military enterprisers.213 Ostentatious celebration of martial
success and status was not restricted to portraits. Grandiose tombs had
always been a medium by which to celebrate the military achievements of
rulers and great aristocratic commanders, and the successful military
enterpriser was as likely to adopt this form of validation for his military
role. The image reproduced here of Field Marshal Hatzfeld’s tomb, with
its sculpted frieze depicting his various battlefield triumphs (Fig. 5.7),
played upon a style of personal military monument dating back centuries,
and seen most famously in Philibert de l’Orme’s tomb of François I in
St Denis with its frieze depicting the battle of Marignano. Celebrating the
military triumphs of still-living commanders was no less important. We
are indebted for some of the best and most topographically convincing
images of battles in the Thirty Years War to the large-scale works of the
Flemish artist Pieter Snayers. Many of his battle scenes were painted in
response to commissions from Ottavio Piccolomini, and in these paint-
ings Piccolomini’s own exploits, or simply his commanding presence, are
prominently displayed to a viewer of the painting at ground level.214
Fig. 5.8 Engraving of Wrangel’s newly built palace at Skokloster
Fig. 5.9 Jan de Werth in retirement as a country nobleman

Fig. 5.10 The painted ceiling of the main salon of the Trip House,
Amsterdam
If military enterprise was at root a highly developed form of commercial

activity, the cultural credentials of military command shrouded this in the
traditional values of a sword-bearing nobility. The central hall of
Wallenstein’s palace in Prague depicted the Generalissimo recognizably
as the war god Mars.215 His involvement in warfare as a vast exercise in
financial speculation in no way constrained his willingness to link himself
with the most traditional representations of military power and authority.
This self-validation was no less willingly accepted by a wider society
accustomed to according the highest social status and deference to mili-
tary commanders. In the hands of a wealthy and successful enterpriser like
Karl Gustav Wrangel, military success could be transmuted into some-
thing more. From the later 1640s Wrangel used his military profits to
build his great palace at Skokloster in the most fashionable Italianate style;
he set up and financed networks of agents and information-gatherers
around Europe who acquired art and precious objects for his collections;
he self-consciously pursued the patronage of the arts and literature.
Wrangel not merely claimed the social validation of military command,
but used the profits of war to refashion himself from a backwoods Swedish
noble into a knowledgeable, cosmopolitan member of an international
aristocratic elite.216 Wrangel represented the most extensive example of
such refashioning, but the capacity of his contemporaries to shape their
post-war image could also be seen, for instance, in the portrait of Jan de
Werth, commissioned by de Werth from the Cologne painter Johan
Hulsman, at the time of his marriage to his third wife, Susanna Maria,
countess of Kuefstein. From recklessly brave, financially successful
military commander to staid landowning noble, portrayed in the classic

stance chosen here, we have another example of the extent to which
military enterprise could render rapid economic mobility easily compat-
ible with social credit and standing.217
Above all, association with the ‘business of war’ brought a level of social
standing and cultural validation even to those who had entirely ancillary
roles in military activity. The Trip family, pre-eminent for three gener-
ations as Amsterdam arms dealers, could use their profits to construct a
palatial townhouse in Amsterdam which, far from playing down the
commercial basis of their socio-economic success, positively celebrated
it. From the external detailing of the house, which included mortar-
shaped chimneys, to the internal ceiling panels on which winged cherubs
hold up piles of muskets and artillery barrels, this was a form of commer-
cial success which carried enough martial prestige to be celebrated in its
own right. Of the two sons of Elias Trip who had the house constructed in
the 1650s, Hendrik’s own portrait depicts him standing in front of a pile of
newly cast artillery barrels.
Financing war brought public recognition and status of a different order
from normal commercial success. When Jacques van der Walle, large-
scale armateur of the Flanders privateers, returned from Spain to Dunkirk
in 1637 after the privateering successes of the 1630s, crowds came out to
see him ‘as if he was ten times more important than his status deserved’.218
Men became military enterprisers and engaged in war as a commercial
activity because it offered a remarkable opportunity, with luck and skill, to
make substantial profit on an initial capital investment, while at the same
time reinforcing (or creating) social and cultural prestige through associ-
ation with the noble métier d’armes, which lifted the activity entirely out-
side the normal world of financial management and ways of earning a
living. Instead it offered a powerful means of social validation and a
mechanism for cultural self-fashioning. Seen in these terms many of the
risks and obviously unattractive sides of military enterprise could easily
melt away. At the same time, it also reinforced the business of war: it was
the socio-cultural dimension of military enterprise that encouraged colo-
nels and more senior officers to overreach themselves financially, to make
calculations about the maintenance of their regiments that were not
economically rational, and to compete for esteem and recognition by
high expenditure and heavy levels of personal commitment, both materi-
ally and in conspicuous examples of courage and leadership. War
remained the primary theatre of social and cultural esteem, and military
enterprise harnessed much of the enthusiasm of the actors to play large
and impressive roles.
6 Continuity, transformation and rhetoric
in European warfare after 1650
The demobilization of the armies of the Thirty Years War during 1649
and 1650 allowed rulers to take stock of what had been an evolutionary
process in the management and operations of their armed forces. Large-
scale warfare waged for an unprecedented, continuous duration had
presented an organizational and financial challenge which swept away
the notion that armed forces could be raised and funded exclusively
through the state and its administrators. The various initiatives to bring
private investment into the organization and financing of war certainly
had not proved uniformly successful, but nor was it the case that the
co-option of private resources had been a disastrous failure. Indeed,
it would have been impossible to wage war on this scale and over this
time-scale on the basis of the resources – manpower, provisions and
finance – that could be mobilized or extracted by early seventeenth-
century governments and their direct agents. The better credit of the
private sector, its greater technical and organizational know-how, and
the access to international networks for raising resources, capital and
manpower, far outweighed anything that a state administration could
have hoped to achieve. The ability of the belligerents to protract the
Thirty Years War over decades of successive campaigns was a human
and material disaster. But it is important to recognize that the duration of
the war was not simply a consequence of military stagnation, a dismal and
universal failure of organization and strategic potential. To a large extent it
was the effectiveness and adaptability of their outsourced military organ-
izations which allowed the belligerents to continue waging war, to over-
come individual military disasters, and to stave off the prospect of
surrender on entirely unacceptable terms.
There were thus good reasons to think that for many European rulers
the organization and deployment of military force after 1650 would rest
upon the further development and refinement of various forms of public–
private partnership: they and their governments would continue to control
and finance some aspects of a military system, but would also seek to
involve the credit and the organizational resources of their subjects or of
260
The representation of seventeenth-century warfare 261
outside military contractors. The main argument of this chapter is that

this is precisely what does happen during the later seventeenth century,
and that there is a far greater degree of continuity in military organization
than is traditionally allowed. Far from being swept away as a despised relic
of the Thirty Years War by rulers intent on establishing direct state control
over their military forces, military enterprise continued to flourish in
numerous forms for another century, and in some cases for longer. At
the same time, a number of new factors do intervene after 1650 to change
the character of these public–private partnerships, and in some areas a
more explicit level of direct control of armies and navies does emerge:
cases in point would be the development of purpose-built fleets of rated
warships, or the systematic imposition of drill and discipline as the main
peace-time activity of armies. Yet the extent of this assertion of the direct
power of the state over its armed force should not be exaggerated. The
assumption that the development of European military organization is
predetermined towards a fully state-controlled ‘monopoly over the means
of violence’ regularly leads to a myopic focus on those areas in which the
power of the central state appeared to be advancing, and an equal ten-
dency to dismiss or ignore the larger context in which reliance on private
organization, resources and finance remained central to military activity.
This tendency is compounded, not so much by the facts of military
organization after 1650, which point quite unambiguously to continuity,
but by the language in which armies, warfare and its participants are
discussed in formal tracts and other published writing. It is very easy to
be misled by insistent strains of rhetoric in understanding early modern
military affairs and organization. The earlier chapters of this book urged
scepticism about the a priori assumptions of an anti-mercenary rhetoric
deeply embedded in military and political tracts from at least the fifteenth
century onwards. But a more general set of assumptions permeates the
language of early modern writing about military institutions and the
waging of war. These writings have created a misleading picture of six-
teenth- and seventeenth-century warfare, and they pave the way for the
strident rhetoric of ‘absolute’ authority which has distorted the general
perception of ancien régime societies and their armies and navies.
The representation of seventeenth-century warfare

In 1643 the Italian historian Count Gualdo Priorato published a biogra-
phy of Albrecht Wallenstein which, with seeming incongruity, he dedi-
cated to Louis XIII of France.1 Priorato’s biography was cast in a
traditional, humanist-inspired heroic mode, with obligatory classical
references sprinkled through the text: Wallenstein, like Scipio and
262 Continuity, transformation and rhetoric after 1650
Hannibal, punished faults severely, but also rewarded good service gen-
erously. He brought the appropriate princely combination of distance and
magnificence to his actions and behaviour, but also took pains over the
welfare of his troops. Wallenstein is slotted into the well-established
rhetorical formula of the ‘Perfect Captain’, who uses his authority to
encourage devotion amongst his officers and respect from his men.2
What is absent from the account is any description of Wallenstein as
general contractor, the great ‘entrepreneur of war’. He is certainly
described as using ‘sue proprie spese’ – his own money – to raise regi-
ments, and ultimately to raise an entire army of 40,000 men. But this is
presented as a courtly strategem by a mercurial and wealthy aristocrat – a
means to seize the attention and gain the trust of his overlord, the
Emperor.3 Of the wider issues of ‘military devolution’, the huge structures
of credit, supply and subcontract on which Wallenstein’s military system
rested, there is no trace in Priorato’s account. Wallenstein’s life offers a
dramatic and tragic account of a nobleman who rises to the highest
princely status through gaining the favour of the Emperor, and is betrayed
twice by the latter’s dynastic ambitions – a fitting subject for a series of
reflections on glory, success, and the mutability of fortune. Priorato’s
biography of Wallenstein is far from historically worthless: he makes
shrewd points about Wallenstein’s attritional strategies and his aim of
overwhelming his enemies by numerical superiority; about his refusal to
accept worthless nominees to military office; about his ability to inspire
extraordinary loyalty from talented subordinates. But the basic facts about
military enterprise as a vast system of financial speculation secured against
the exaction of contributions and other income streams are entirely
excised from the account.
This would appear to be characteristic of writing on the art of war
throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.4 The vast number
of treatises on the ‘perfect captain’, the ‘management of arms’, the lives of
great commanders, make no allusion to the central aspect of military
organization and practice in the period. Mercenaries are discussed, but
they are confined to their traditionally defined role of (foreign) soldiers
raised and serving the ruler for regular pay within a traditional structure of
a royal or princely army. Even Raimondo Montecuccoli’s Trattato della
Guerra, drafted while in Swedish captivity in 1641 and full of references to
the contemporary war, offers a chapter on ‘preparations for war’ which is
clear sighted about the need for money in all areas of raising and support-
ing troops, but nowhere refers to the role of private contractors.5
Unsurprisingly, the majority of treatises declare that the prince’s own
subjects are superior to mercenaries, although there are a few dissenting
voices. Girolamo Frachetta’s Il Prencipe asserts that there may be
circumstances, especially when the ruler is the sovereign of multiple

territories, in which the hiring of mercenaries might be a good choice,
though not if such soldiers are hired from ‘perfidious nations’ – an
unspecified, but presumably substantial, category.6 Though it is usually
taken for granted that the regimental or army commander should have
private wealth, both to cut an impressive figure and to meet out-of-pocket
expenses for his troops, there is nothing in any of these works even to hint
at the transformation of the commander into a creditor, entering the
service of the ruler and conducting war as a form of venture capitalism;
nothing to indicate that senior officers might be making autonomous
decisions about contracts for supply, about funding – often through
complex webs of international financiers – or about the shape and size of
the army.
There is no aversion to discussing military matters of technical, organ-
izational or mathematical complexity in such tracts. Many of them focus
strongly on ballistics and the conduct of siege warfare, often with an
impressive level of technical detail, and they certainly challenge any
simplistic notion that the qualities of a good officer were no more than
the honour code and habits of command of the traditional nobility.7 But
the financial aspects of establishing, equipping, maintaining a unit, or an
entire army – the extent that those with overall command of the army
would assume direct organizational and financial control of the supply of
munitions, armaments and foodstuffs – simply never makes an appear-
ance. Sections on logistics are most typically a series of platitudes about
ensuring an adequate provision of supply wagons – with no indications
about how these should be obtained, or how logistics might constrain
military operations. The payment and supply of the army is taken as
straightforwardly the responsibility of the ruler: Pierino Belli helpfully
points out that soldiers should be content with the supplies provided by
the state, and ought not extort anything else from the populations where
they are stationed.8
Yet as the previous chapters have indicated, the financial and organiza-
tional realities of raising armies and navies were perfectly clear to the
military protagonists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We
might treat as a particular case the explicit and detailed discussions in
the Spanish Councils of State about the merits of state administration
versus contract, administración versus asiento, in the management and
funding of all aspects of war. But the practicalities of relying on military
enterprisers, of contracting with individuals or consortia for the waging of
war on land and at sea, establishing military systems in which the credit of
officers, suppliers or other investors would be reimbursed through mili-
tary operations, permeate the official and unofficial documentation of the
period, from the level of Wallenstein’s and Torstensson’s extensive

administrative correspondence with their respective sovereigns, down to
the private letters of innumerable colonels and lesser officers in search of
subcontracting opportunities, sources of funds or loans, or just seeking to
carry out levies and equip their troops. Though the absence of any dis-
cussion of military enterprise in theoretical tracts on the art of war or the
‘duties of the perfect captain’ has undoubtedly contributed to the margin-
alization of military enterprise in historical discussion, the reality of pub-
lic–private partnerships at the heart of the early modern military system
hardly requires assertion. Underlying the dissonance between the reality
of military devolution and the carefully crafted picture of war presented in
published treatises and books are the vested interests of both rulers and
military contractors.
It might be assumed that military devolution was no more problematic
than any other delegation of authority by the ruler. The establishment of
commissioners and office-holders to act as the ruler’s representatives in
the collection of taxes, the regulation of legal disputes or the general
administration of the localities was not seen as incompatible with a ruler’s
sovereignty. Moreover, as previous chapters have asserted, military dev-
olution in its evolved and most successful forms was far from being a total
abdication of military power and control by rulers into the hands of private
military contractors. In all but a handful of cases, the state retained a
shareholder interest in armed forces acting in its name, and in many cases
this interest amounted to a majority holding. Just as the threat of treason
or betrayal by military enterprisers has been greatly exaggerated, so the
extent to which the contractors’ operations could be seen as flouting or
undermining the authority and the will of the ruler needs to be kept in
perspective. There was, however, a particular sensitivity about military
authority, in that delegating military command could be seen as under-
mining a ruler’s sovereignty.
The modern interpretation of sovereignty, entailing a claim to a
monopoly of authority within a specific physical territory, legitimated by
those living within that area, corresponds poorly to the situation in early
modern Europe, where sovereignty was personal and dynastic rather than
territorial. The typical means to build up or defend a claim to sovereign
status was through adducing ‘marks of sovereignty’. These would often
entail customary practices and actions by a ruler, recognized by other
rulers, which could be interpreted as signs that his or her authority had
been accepted by a (subject) population. The most familiar mark of
sovereignty was the distribution of justice, that of determining all legal
cases in the final degree. Other marks would include the right to mint
coinage, or the establishment of a court – preferably linked to a princely
capital, and thus a statement in bricks and mortar of the sovereign pre-
tensions of the ruler.9 But a vitally important series of marks of sovereignty
lay in the right to determine peace or war, to make alliances and to engage
or disengage with other states without external constraint. All of these
required control of the instruments of waging war – whether these were
citadels and fortresses emblazoned with the arms of the prince, or com-
mand and control of the armies and navies through which his military
power was projected abroad. Reliance on such marks of sovereignty did
nothing to eliminate conflicts. The hotly disputed right to determine their
own foreign policy and to make war on their own account was at the heart
of debates about whether the German (and the Italian) princes of the Holy
Roman Empire possessed outright or mediated sovereignty.10
If the direct exercise of military command, whether over subject troops
or indeed over hired forces, was deployed as a mark of sovereignty, the
delegation of even a part of such military authority to a contractor might
call into question the sovereignty of the delegating agent. Though the
ruler had full authority in theory to delegate both military and civil
functions, he might prove particularly reluctant to concede the former.
When the Council of State in Castile spoke of the shame and dangers of
relying on asiento they had in mind the perception of the crown’s sover-
eignty and its reputation.11 An idealized military hierarchy in which high-
born subjects subordinated themselves to the ruler’s authority in order to
command the ruler’s troops provided a more comfortable working out of
the implications of sovereign authority, and this idealization was what
early modern military writings assumed.
Rulers’ concerns to play down the implicit challenge to sovereignty
posed by the reality of warfare were neatly complemented by concerns
amongst the military contractors themselves. As indicated at the end of
Chapter 5, for many of those involved as military proprietors, financial
return was by no means the only motive for their involvement in contract-
ing. Investment in setting up a regiment was also an investment in the
social prestige of military service, and this would be debased if it were
overtly discussed in terms of monetary investment and capital returns.
It was akin to the more venerable presentation of war in terms of chivalry
and knightly values as the means to uphold and validate the idealized
culture and social prestige of a militarized nobility. Both sought to re-
inforce ideas of social status and hierarchy attainable through the disin-
terested pursuit of warfare as a vocation. Neither princes nor military
contractors wished to draw out the implications of war as a business or
trade, dominated by colonels who were more obviously shareholder-
investors than ‘perfect captains’. Neither would have cared much for
publications on the art of war purporting to describe the duties and role
of the ‘perfect subcontractor’. Tracts on war and military service were

written within a set of conventions which made them marketable, or
ensured that they would be well received by their dedicatee. However
useful a guide to sourcing weapons manufacturers, purchasing soldiers’
clothing at bulk rates or contracting with merchants for munitions trans-
port would have been in practice, this would break radically with the
idealized notion of what military command ought to be about, and the
nature of the relationship between officers and ruler.12
Such unreconciled divisions between constructed ideal and reality are
by no means unusual: the history of the early modern nobility offers the
example of a profound and largely unbridged gap between texts describ-
ing a series of idealized functions and socio-political reality. There is no
reason to assume that this dissonance between military ideal and organiza-
tional reality would have been confronted, let alone resolved, through
explicit discussion of the issue. Military devolution served both the mili-
tary purposes of rulers and the military, economic and social aspirations of
the contractors more effectively than any other viable military option in
the early modern period. It was in no one’s interests to raise questions, or
to dispel the myth that the traditional values and command structure of
the military was in place, while in fact profiting from a system that
responded remarkably effectively to the changing nature of war.
French exceptionalism
However, not all states had emerged from the experience of early modern
warfare down to 1650 with the perception that military enterprise had
provided a means to resolve some of the financial and organizational
dilemmas of warfare. By far the most important of these exceptions, the
state which was to draw attention to the gap between military theory and
reality and was to shape a different and widely imitated public/private
military paradigm, was France.
Although France’s hiring of foreign mercenaries in the first half of
the sixteenth century had been exceptional only in its vast scale, the
Wars of Religion transformed the attitude of the crown and its central
administration towards the organization and control of military force
(see pp. 87–8). To a greater extent than anywhere else in Europe military
devolution in France was identified by the crown and successive govern-
ments with self-assertive noble power and confessional separatism. Thus
while other European powers from the early seventeenth century saw
military devolution as a potential means to deploy private credit through
a military partnership, in France it represented a return to political
anarchy in which at various points the survival of both the crown and the
French exceptionalism 267
state had seemed at risk. Cardinal Richelieu’s actions as first minister

during the later 1620s brought to an end a renewed period of open
confessional and aristocratic revolt in France, but this did nothing to
change the antipathy of the crown and its ministers to privatized military
force. The general menace of militarized noble revolt still seemed very
real, and both Richelieu and his successor, Mazarin, ruled through the
manipulation and management of factional groups within the government
and the court elites.13 Neither wished to see appointment to the army
become a free-for-all in which purchasing power and connections to
credit not directly under their own control might be a route to powerful –
and threatening – military command.14 Though it became more difficult
after 1635 and the beginning of large-scale, multi-theatred war, both
ministers sought as far as possible to keep major military commands in
the hands of family, clients and allies.
This had the consequence of centralizing the direction of much of the
war effort, so that it was exercised directly in the name of the crown
through its central agents. The priorities, strategic thinking and dynastic
preoccupations of the centre were thus imposed on the formulation of
military plans and operations. France spent the 1630s and 1640s waging
an expensive, slow and attritional war of sieges on the Flanders frontier,
which at times seemed more like a convention-bound duel between the
kings of France and Spain than a piece of seriously conceived operational
planning.15 The negative attitude to military enterprise inherited from the
religious wars had another consequence. Neither Richelieu nor Mazarin
had any hesitation about hiring foreign military contractors, whether of
individual units, multiple regiments or even a general contractor like
Bernhard von Saxe-Weimar. The regiments were not for the most part
organized like Saxe-Weimar’s force: an independent army corps operat-
ing on the initiative of the commander (pp. 107–10). The majority were
simply incorporated as professional stiffening into the main French cam-
paign armies and placed under the command of the French military
hierarchy, just as they had been a century earlier in the 1530s or
1540s.16 But the readiness to hire foreign troops under these traditional
‘mercenary’ contracts stands in sharp contrast to the absolute refusal to
sanction military proprietorship either at the level of colonelcies, or still
less at the level of entire armies, by French nobles or other wealthy
subjects of the crown. French subjects who became unit commanders
were forcefully reminded that they held no proprietary rights over their
unit; in no sense were they serving under contract, but entirely at the
pleasure of the king.
The obvious, practical problem in this was that the French crown could
no more fund directly the costs of its war effort after it entered the
European war in 1635 than could other European rulers. Harnessing the
credit of serving officers was, for France, no less than for the Empire or for
Sweden, the only way to make large-scale, long-duration war viable. This
imperative to find ways to draw on the credit and financial resources of
wealthy subjects, while, as a point of principle, simultaneously rejecting
overt military enterprise with its recognition of the officers’ proprietary
status, produced a deeply unsatisfactory compromise unique to France.
The typical French unit or army commander was placed under intense
pressure to commit his own funds to the recruitment and upkeep of units,
without receiving any of the benefits of outright proprietorship which
would have been the case had he been serving in a contract army.
Acquiring a commission as a colonel or captain would very frequently
involve an informal undertaking to meet the costs of recruitment, or to
contribute substantially towards them. Once his unit was in being, the
unit commander was pressured to meet wage shortfalls, pay for food and
replace equipment under the threat of disbandment or réformation if the
unit was judged to have fallen below effective strength or to be unfit for
combat. None of these personal charges and expenses were recognized by
the crown or its administrators, for to do so would imply that the officer
held some kind of proprietary right over the unit, or at a higher level, the
army. The French elites continued to compete for military office – factors
of social prestige and noble self-identification saw to that – but aware that
it was almost impossible to undertake military service without suffering
moderate to heavy financial loss, officers were for the most part reluctant
to contemplate lengthy service or to enter into sustained financial com-
mitments. The high turnover of newly created regiments in the French
army from the 1630s to the 1650s was a reflection of the officers’ decision
to treat service as a social rite de passage, whose costs were too heavy to
sustain for more than a campaign or two. It was compounded by the
administration’s own cynical calculation that it was cheaper to hire and
disband units on what was virtually a year-to-year basis, drawing on the
initial enthusiasm and capital of a steady flow of aspiring unit officers.
Though the established infantry regiments, the vieux and the petits vieux,
were permanent entities – régiments entretenues – the individual captains
and other regimental officers were placed under similar pressure since the
constituent companies could be threatened with elimination or consol-
idation, again without compensation.17
The French crown’s principled rejection of military enterprise was one
which no other European rulers followed, even if they assumed a variety of
approaches to the issue in practice, from open discussion of contracting in
the Spanish Council to a more typical position, in which the larger issues
were simply taken for granted behind a focus on detailed practice. The
French exceptionalism 269
impact of this stance as a means to defend its sovereignty in military affairs

was to some extent attenuated by the French crown’s heavy reliance on
contracts with foreign military enterprisers. More importantly, it proved a
severe handicap for the French war effort from 1630 to 1659. One part of
France’s military underperformance in these decades undoubtedly
reflected the assumption of royal and centralized control over the conduct
of war and the construction of military policy, so that the adaptive organ-
izational and operational developments of other armies fighting in the
Thirty Years War were largely missed. But at least as great a role was
played in this failure by the system of unacknowledged financial exactions
upon the officer-corps, which created an army in which far too many
regiments had a fleeting existence, and too many officers were resigned
to short military careers from which the main benefit would be social
validation rather than military professionalism. In the words of one
Spanish military grandee, writing in 1684 of this earlier epoch: ‘the
French infantry used to be the worst in Europe, and have become the
best mainly by the improvement in their officer material’.18 The determi-
nants of military effectiveness and resilience in other armies, principally
the establishment of units with strong internal coherence and identity
based on large numbers of veteran troops, and commanded by a profes-
sionalized cadre of long-serving officers and NCOs, were unattainable in
this French system.
The irony here is that the French crown missed what might have been
the benefits of mobilizing larger resources and organizational skill via
acknowledged military devolution, because it associated such devolution
with the challenges to its authority seen in the Wars of Religion; but this
sensitivity did not save the crown from what, setting apart the British civil
wars and their aftermath, was the most devastating European military
revolt of the mid-seventeenth century. The ability of the great nobles to
draw the armies that they commanded into support for their struggles
against First Minister Mazarin or against each other during the Frondes of
1648–53 served to confirm the worst suspicions of royal government
about the threat posed by delegated military force.19 Although
Mazarin’s agents managed to buy off the vicomte de Turenne’s troops
in 1649, the prince de Condé’s military revolt gathered momentum after
his release from imprisonment in 1650. By 1652 all the French army corps
were either mutinous for want of pay and provisions, or under
commanders who were in open opposition to the crown; France’s military
positions in Catalonia, Italy and Flanders suffered major setbacks as
Spanish forces pressed home their advantage. In 1653 the comte
d’Harcourt, a hitherto loyal cadet of the House of Guise-Lorraine, seized
Breisach and used his troops to try to take over control of Alsace.
Following the restoration of Mazarin and the end of fighting in the heart of
France, the prince de Condé took his army, composed of regiments
commanded by his clients and noble supporters, and passed into
Spanish service in the Netherlands, where he continued his armed strug-
gle against Mazarin along the Picardy/Champagne frontier until the Peace
of the Pyrenees in 1659. During that time he was joined by a trickle of
other grandees, notably the duc de Noirmoutier, the maréchal
d’Hocquincourt and the comte de Créqui, which threatened to become
a flood after any major reverse for the French royal armies.20
French responses
The experience of the entire decade 1648–59 served to confirm the
ministerial elite in its profound hostility to the devolution of military
authority in so far as it was linked with the threats of noble and provincial
assertion. What successes they had enjoyed as a result of such devolution
into the hands of foreign contractors such as Saxe-Weimar in the 1630s
and his colonel-directors in the 1640s were overlooked in the conviction
that independent military power had posed a threat to the existence of the
state. And this was the dominant attitude when the young Louis XIV and
his ministers began the project to reaffirm royal authority from the early
1660s.
The army reforms of Louis XIV have usually been presented as the
second stage in a military revolution that had begun with the Orange-
Nassau military commanders of the Dutch Republic, and had been
revealed in its full battlefield potential by Gustavus Adolphus of
Sweden. For a time, the story runs, the revolutionary thread was lost in
the supposedly aimless, devolved confusion of the later Thirty Years War.
But it reappears triumphantly in the military and administrative reforms of
the French war ministers, Michel Le Tellier and his son, the marquis de
Louvois, who created, it is considered, the first, truly modern, state-
administered, -financed and -controlled army for Louis XIV.
Soldiers, recruited by state administrators and placed under the author-
ity of an extensive and well-structured military administration, were paid,
fed, equipped and uniformed, and were subjected to exacting standards of
military discipline, control and inspection.21 A standing, peace-time army
ensured that a good percentage of French soldiers were long-serving,
drilled in tactics and use of weaponry, and possessed an esprit de corps
both within their unit and the army at large. Equally, a large-scale perma-
nent force offered a series of rewards and sanctions with which the war
minister and his administrators could curtail the independence and
organizational abuses of the officers. Those who served in the permanent
French responses 271
units, and many experienced officers who were retained on half-pay as

réformés with the option of appointing them to new regiments with the
coming of war, came to view military service as a career rather than a
short-term and costly exercise in social assertion. The officers from the
colonels up to the high command were genuine royal employees, subject to
tight ministerial control. All of this tells a familiar story about the triumph of
rational administrative procedures and centralized control over an undis-
ciplined, potentially autonomous military force managed by unruly groups
of the elites. And given the poor performance and haphazard control of the
French war effort down to 1659, this imposition of a centralized admin-
istrative order can appear, and has usually been presented, as straightfor-
wardly progressive, an uncontentious step towards modernity.
In reality, it is far from obvious that Michel Le Tellier and Louvois had
anticipated Max Weber in embracing rational administration and bureau-
cratic procedure in the 1660s and 1670s as the self-evident solution to
army reform. The reassertion of administrative control over aspects of the
army was important, though the starting point of this reorganization was
more obviously to ensure that a high proportion of both the civilian
administrators and the senior officers in the armies were Le Tellier clients
or allies.22 In the same way, Jean-Baptiste Colbert was building up an
unprecedented French fleet on the back of a network of relatives, clients
and business associates in and outside the navy.23 But the armed forces
were part of a much larger royal project. Louis XIV did think that he was
doing something new in the 1660s. After the challenges and near-anarchy
of the previous decade, and a legacy of weak and threatened royal author-
ity for the previous century, his priority in 1660 was a massive re-emphasis
upon the undisputed and indisputable sovereignty of the king. Individual
administrative policies were all subject to this much more grandiose and
multi-faceted reassertion of the king’s outright authority on both practical
and ideological levels. This is the message of Louis XIV’s own memoirs;
most administrative developments are passed over or mentioned in only
the most fleeting manner. The main message of the text is Louis’ deter-
mination no longer to negotiate with his subjects, no longer to compro-
mise in the assertion of his sovereign authority.24 This seems to have been
borne out to a large extent in political practice. As historians have grad-
ually abandoned the implausible notion of a seamless ‘rise of French
absolutism’ from Henri IV or Richelieu to Louis XIV, they have become
more aware of the profound change in the political and cultural atmos-
phere which pervades the decade of the 1660s. The language of politics
itself shifts abruptly from negotiation to obedience, from self-assertiveness
to abject deference to royal authority. Beneath the façade, the space for
negotiation and compromise may have remained, but in a more limited
guise and only on condition that the outward forms of obedience and the
language of subordination were upheld.25
Ably supported by ministers of state in their dealings with institutions
and the provinces, and by the habits which Louis XIV inculcated and
rewarded at his court, this policy sought to reassert royal sovereignty over
all key aspects of political life. The combination of symbolic gesture and
image creation, the demand for appropriate behaviour from subjects,
together with some innovation and institutional transformation, all
touched heavily upon the waging of war and the control of the armies.
In what was probably a conscious echo of Thomas Hobbes, Bishop
Bossuet, in his Politique tirées de propres paroles de l’Ecriture Sainte, argued
that in the truly godly and well-governed state, the king alone would be
armed. The implications of such a claim can be seen in the assertion of the
king’s sovereignty over the armed forces of the realm, in which there can
be no sharing of military control and authority.26 The early iconographic
identification of Louis as Apollo, god of the arts, order and harmony, was
a relatively short-lived affair compared with Louis as ‘le roi de guerre’,
whose sovereignty was wrapped in the personal assumption and control of
military activity, and of his armies.27 By the 1670s this image-building had
focused upon the representation of the king as Louis le Grand, the military
ruler who was heir to Alexander and Charlemagne, and whose military
deeds should be celebrated with the same, conventional focus on the
person and the military deeds of the ruler.28 An aspect of this with con-
siderable repercussions for the management and conduct of war was the
king’s determination to command his armies in person, and in campaigns
that should be structured to reflect the greatest possible lustre on his
control of the army and his personal role in the action.29 The immediate,
distorting effects of such personal leadership, and the related problems of
command and control when France was waging war in four or five
separate campaign theatres simultaneously, were subordinated to this
determination to act out his possession of sovereign authority.
There had been monarchs before Louis who had built their iconogra-
phy and self-image on a representation of their military skills and author-
ity. But never so comprehensively as Louis XIV, nor at a moment when it
had such repercussions for wider debate about the control of armed
forces.30 From the painted ceilings of the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles
to the language of royal edicts and ordinances, from the prologues of
Lully’s court operas to religious ceremony, the king’s sovereign status as
roi de guerre was endlessly reaffirmed.31 An extraordinary range of literary,
cultural and ceremonial rhetoric celebrating the king’s authority and
sovereignty bore down time and again on the single point of the king’s
absolute and unmediated control of his armed forces.
The goal for Louis and his war ministers was not some abstract ideal of a
bureaucratically administered army, but the elimination of any implica-
tion of negotiated obedience or ‘bargaining’ with the officers and other
power-brokers in the existing military structure, so that Louis’ own
authority appeared direct and unchallenged. As the French crown had
never embraced formal military devolution, an explicit rejection of dele-
gated military authority was unproblematic. The implications here of
hiring foreign troops for French military service could easily be dealt
with. General contracts with foreign military enterprisers such as that
with Saxe-Weimar had never dominated French military activity, and it
was easy to return to the hiring of individual mercenary regiments which
would be fully integrated into French armies and serve under French
command and military discipline. As a result 15–20 per cent of the
French army continued to be composed of Swiss, Irish, Scottish and
German mercenaries, but there was no sense in which the colonels were
treated as more than employees of the crown.32 Effort was even made to
eliminate some of the distinctive privileges of the Swiss mercenary con-
tingent, affirming the principle that all units served under the authority of
the king on the same terms.
The more pressing issue from the 1660s was the need to define a new
relationship with the native French officers and through them the rest of
the army. On one side, the crown and its ministers wanted to affirm the
crown’s absolute control of the army, both through the language of
military authority and in the reality of command and control. On the
other side, it was vital to find some mechanism for military organization
and funding that would be more effective than the previous, disastrous
practice of arbitrarily extorting money from colonels and corps
commanders to raise and maintain their units, while conceding no pro-
prietary rights or financial security in return. Even if the second issue was
primarily a matter of securing greater operational effectiveness, the two
were clearly related: an army in which the principal officers considered
that they were placed under unacceptable levels of financial pressure in
ways that seemed to subvert the role defined for them by the terms of their
commissions and service, would be unlikely to offer unconditional obedi-
ence to the crown, whether in practice or even in language.
If a move towards an overtly contractual, proprietorial relationship with
French unit officers might have offered them the benefits of a secured
‘investment’ in their units, this would not easily be compatible with the
new political climate of the 1660s, in which the king and his ministers
explicitly rejected anything that was suggestive of negotiation or bargaining
with subjects. The opposing model would be the establishment of an army
which was directly state-administered, state-controlled and state-funded,
where the officers were not required to commit any of their own funds,
and where they were genuinely the employees and servants of the state. If
the army was small enough, it might be possible to establish a direct
relationship between the costs of the troops and available crown revenues.
The initial post-1659 demobilization had reduced the French standing
army to a permanent force of around 55,000 men – a level at which,
arguably and at a fairly basic level, the crown might have been able to
assume the operational costs and create an employee-army. However,
from the outset of the personal rule, the king and war minister were in
no doubt that France’s future foreign policy would require large-scale
military expansion above this military core, and by the War of Devolution
in 1667, the army had already been increased to 70,000 infantry and
35,000 cavalry.33 Could the model of the directly administered, state-
funded and state-raised army remain compatible with progressive military
expansion up to a standing army of 140,000 on the eve of the Dutch War
in 1672, a wartime strength of 250,000 troops between 1672 and 1678, a
post-war standing army of 180,000 which was then built up to the highest
point of military expansion, around 340,000 troops, in the early 1690s?34
The economic history of France from the 1660s until at least a decade
after the death of Louis in 1715 should be painted in the gloomy shades
of rural depression, modest urban expansion restricted to a few large
centres, and demographic stagnation. The national resource base had
not expanded since the earlier seventeenth century, when the inability
of the crown to offer adequate support for an army which was scarcely
25 per cent of the size of that established in the 1690s had precipitated
the deluge of arbitrary financial burdens on the military officers. All of this
would make it optimistic to assume that now, in the later seventeenth
century, heavier taxation or greater efficiency gains in its collection would
somehow bridge the gap between available state funds and the ever-
increasing size and demands of the French army, not forgetting
Colbert’s navy, which had itself reached 140,000 tonnes and eighty
ships of the line by the 1680s.
Recent work on Louis XIV’s reign has demonstrated that while deploy-
ing a rhetoric of royal authority, the resources and resilience of the crown
and its central government depended in large part on its practical willing-
ness to compromise with different groups of the elites, offering them
continued privileges, concessions and benefits in return for their politi-
cal cooperation and financial commitment. It was in finding ways to
extract unprecedented financial support from those who were otherwise
exempted from the normal burdens of taxation, that the flexibility of the
regime was most evident. As the costs of ever-lengthier and larger-scale
wars continued to mount, Louis’ regime sacrificed any possibility of
eliminating the intermediate authority of its privileged subjects in return

for their willingness to underwrite the costs and burdens of royal policy.35
What was characteristic of the relationship with the elites in civil society
was no less the case in the crown’s dealings with the army. As recent
studies have demonstrated, the mechanism by which the French army was
subjected to greater central and ministerial control while maintaining the
willingness of the elites to undertake military service and, most crucially,
to bear a high proportion of its costs, was a formalization and institution-
alization of venality in military office.36 The official line throughout the
seventeenth century was that the purchase of military office was pro-
hibited under a series of ordinances and edicts; this held true in that
blocks of colonelcies and captaincies were not placed on the open market
and offered to the highest bidder for the profit of the crown. But in
practice almost all newly formed regiments were commissioned on the
basis that the colonels-to-be were squeezed to make an informal, private
financial contribution, whether this was to meet all or a significant part of
the costs of recruitment and setting up the unit. It was also the case that in
régiments entretenus – the small number of regiments with a permanent
existence – although officerships were not sold openly, considerable sums
were paid informally as a kind of ‘entry fine’ by the incoming officer taking
over the colonelcy or one of the companies. This was specifically to
compensate the outgoing officer or his relatives for the loss of the post
and the expenses that he had incurred while holding it. Both of these
practices had flourished in the army under Richelieu and Mazarin. The
ministers had turned a blind eye to the second style of ‘internal venality’,
but given the relatively small numbers of permanent units, it could have
limited effect on the perceptions of the officer corps as a whole.
The crucial point about the ‘reform’ of the French army after 1661 was
that this type of venality was not grudgingly retained as a reluctant con-
cession to the unprofessional attitudes of the officer corps. Many histor-
ians writing about the reforms of Le Tellier and Louvois have treated this
as an anomaly, an unfortunate remnant of traditional military organiza-
tion, totally out of keeping with the spirit of their modernizing initiatives.37
In fact it stands at the very heart of the compromise that the crown and war
ministers needed to establish with French elites if the latter were to
continue to provide large-scale financial support for the state’s military
activity. Tolerating ‘internal venality’ within the officer corps of the regi-
ments was indeed a standing affront to ideals of thorough administrative
and professional reform in the army; it was impossible, for example, for a
long-serving lieutenant to acquire a company command without securing
funds to pay his outgoing predecessor.38 But a far more important con-
sideration than this for the crown and ministers was that abolishing
venality would discourage wealthy potential officers from investing in

their units – providing higher-quality equipment, horses and clothing,
meeting the costs of food and supplies, even wages – and so depriving
the crown of the financial means to make military expansion viable and
sustainable. This objective was frankly stated in 1666 by Louis XIV, who
wrote in his memoirs: ‘convinced that the French infantry had not been
very good . . . I placed the colonelcies . . . into the hands of the highest
ranking young people at my court . . . (they) being in a position to sustain
the expense necessary to maintain them in their proper condition’.39
Emulation, magnificence and status display would certainly persuade
some officers to spend their resources in ways that would help to share the
financial burdens of the military establishment. It explains the paradox of
armies that adopted military uniforms from the later seventeenth century,
but where those uniforms were infinitely varied in design, detail and
expense to accommodate the whims of colonel-proprietors, anxious to
impose their own identity on their unit. A typical French colonel of
dragoons spent 5,695 livres in 1703 to have the standards of his regiment
made to his designs, and to ensure that his initials were embroidered over
all of the baggage covers, saddle cloths and headgear of the units.40
Venality provided a recognition of these financial commitments, indeed
would determine the price that the unit would fetch if the commander
wished to demit his office. Royal policy strengthened this in a number of
ways. Characteristic of Louis XIV’s regime, the price of these payments to
acquire captaincies and colonelcies was prescribed, but the effect of this
was simply to establish these official sums as the minimum price on
assuming the office.41 No serious attempt was made to prevent posts in
more prestigious or better-maintained regiments being sold for substan-
tially higher prices.42 In 1675, for example, the colonelcy of the top-
ranked gardes françaises changed hands for the extraordinary sum of
500,000 livres, but even the colonelcy of a more modest established
regiment, that of Périgord, was sold for 50,000 livres in 1714. In the latter
case the incoming colonel failed to meet the full contracted price and was
duly removed from the office; the regiment returned to its original pro-
prietor and 6,000 livres from the monies actually paid was accorded to this
previous owner as damages.43 Colonel-proprietors in turn had the right to
sell the commissions for subordinate officers in their units, and this would
also become the price for a subsequent purchase by a replacement. In the
1740s captaincies in ordinary regiments might sell for 6,000 livres and
lieutenancies for 3,000, but again prices rose astronomically for more
prestigious regiments.44
Secondly, the size of the permanent army greatly increased. Thus,
though a wartime regiment established on the basis of funds provided by
a newly commissioned colonel continued to carry a risk of disbandment

without compensation at the end of the conflict, far more regiments were
now part of a permanent military establishment in which internalized
venality would offer the officers some financial security for their own
‘investment’ in its upkeep. In the case of the newly created regiments,
the situation was ameliorated by the greater willingness to keep these units
in service for more campaigns if at all possible, avoiding the apparently
capricious way that earlier administrations would disband regiments
because it was cheaper to persuade a new group of officers to invest than
to assemble the financial packages that would allow the reconstruction of
existing ones. Finally, and despite the grave concerns about military
effectiveness voiced by some of the senior staff, aspiring colonels of new,
wartime levies were allowed to form regiments containing significantly
fewer companies and men than in the past.45 If short-term service in the
royal army was to continue to attract members of the elites, the investment
demanded needed to be more moderate than hitherto.
On the back of a venality which was positively encouraged in all but the
units of the king’s household – where more traditional royal patronage was
allowed to flourish – a new and more effective relationship was forged
between the crown and those members of the French elites drawn into
military service.46 High levels of private investment in the army allowed
not merely the achievement of unprecedented wartime peaks in the mili-
tary establishment, but a permanent army which was of a scale and quality
far beyond the resources that the crown could afford even from a more
successful tapping of tax resources across the realm.47 The relationship
was quite different from that prevailing in the earlier century. For twenty-
five years after 1660, the crown was able to honour a reasonable propor-
tion of its basic financial obligations to the army, and as military service
increased in prestige during the reign so the demand for officerships
continued to exceed supply well into both of the last wars of Louis’
reign. For these reasons the notion of a more powerful system of external
control, better discipline of the soldiers in garrisons, more uniformity of
arms and equipment, was not a myth.48 But it rested on a compact with
the officers which, especially in periods of military expansion, recognized
their contribution to the overall costs of the army and the continuing need
for their support if adequate financial support was to be maintained. This
was reflected not merely in the official acceptance of venality, but in a
military culture in which sensibilities about social hierarchy, as opposed to
functional rank, were still tacitly accepted in many cases of appointment
and command. Civil administrators were left in little doubt that they
needed to tread warily round an aristocratic and to some extent self-
financing officer corps in enforcing standards of discipline and central
control.49 The notion that the officer corps had been subordinated to
central government is far removed from reality.
Recognition that the shift towards a state-administered and -controlled
army was little more than skin deep is underlined in those areas of military
administration where the crown did not consider that its claims to sover-
eignty were compromised. The entire operation of food supply, arms and
munitions production, and supply for the armies continued to be put out
to contract and handled by munitionnaires and other contractors far into
the eighteenth century. These contracts were still for the most part nego-
tiated centrally on a vast scale, though the crown was considerably more
capable of honouring their financial terms, at least in the first decades of
the reign.50 Much of the business of the regiment was left to unit
commanders: the supply of clothing and other regimental and company
equipment such as standards or musical instruments; the supplementary
costs of better-quality horses in the cavalry; all of the trappings of estab-
lishing a regimental headquarters. These were devolved with a shrewd
sense that the colonel-proprietors would provide better-quality materials
than would be budgeted for via a state contract or direct provision.51 For
both Louis and Louvois, Marshal Vauban’s great chains of fortresses
along France’s frontiers were potent symbols of the king’s authority and
his status as roi de guerre, and they would not for a moment have counte-
nanced the earlier practice of contracting the upkeep of garrisons to
enterpriser-governors. However, the actual construction of these for-
tresses involved no such affront to the king’s sovereign status, and
Louvois’ correspondence with the king is full of detail of contracts with
local entrepreneurs and consortia for remodelling terrain, constructing
walls and bastions, and beautifying the sites with decorative stonework,
grass and tree-planting.52
The same division between negotiable and non-negotiable areas of
sovereignty was evident in the navy of Louis XIV. Developed by Colbert
on the principle of overt royal-ministerial control, the building and supply
of the navy was underpinned from the outset by massive contracting
with financial-mercantile elites who had private and informal connections
to Colbert and the naval administration.53 The notion of centralized,
bureaucratic control was constantly subverted by the necessary deals to
maintain the flow of finance and material resources to the navy, deals
which frequently involved granting an official role in the naval adminis-
tration to individuals whose involvement had been that of private
contractor. The roles of financier-supplier and administrator-supervisor
were thus frequently conjoined: for example, François Berthelot was
commissaire général of powder and saltpetre, and he and his family were
virtually monopoly suppliers of these goods.54 Beneath the grandiose
Beyond France 279
assertion of royal power, in which the capital ships bore titles evocative of
the Bourbon monarchy and their elaborate decoration and heavy arma-
ment symbolized royal sovereignty no less than did Vauban’s fortresses,
the navy was a creature of the financial and mercantile interests on which
Colbert and his son, Seignelay, had drawn for its construction and
maintenance.55
Beyond France: military enterprise in the later

seventeenth century
There were historically specific reasons for the French monarchy’s
uncompromising rhetoric of royal sovereignty asserted over its armed
forces, and at first sight there was considerably less pressure on other
European states to adopt such a style. As we have seen, the deployment of
military enterprise under the aegis of rulers had offered a relatively suc-
cessful means of waging war, and had not been seen, as it was in France, as
a direct challenge to sovereignty or the legitimate authority of the ruler.
There was thus no immediate pressure to abandon military enterprise
in favour of some model of directly administered and funded military
force. Despite traditional assumptions that the path of European military
history is inexorably linked to the growth of the power of the state, there
was no obvious reason why rulers should have drawn this lesson from the
previous decades of conflict. The immediate problem posed by the end of
the war was securing the disbandment of well over 100,000 soldiers and
restoring the territories of the Empire to a peace-footing. And for the great
majority of rulers and their governments, the response to 1649/50 was
straightforward: swingeing cuts in the size of their military establishments.
The Bavarian army was slashed from its wartime strength of around
20,000 to a few hundred men, becoming little more than a princely
bodyguard.56 Such demobilization by the German states – and many of
their Italian counterparts after 1659 – was actually quite compatible with a
traditional suspicion of standing armies as an incitement to princely
aggression and trouble-making within the Empire. A just ruler had no
need of a Praetorian Guard or a corps of Janissaries, which would provide
rulers of a despotic and restless disposition with the means to tyrannize
subjects and neighbours alike.57 But demobilization also reflected
assumptions of continuity about how military forces were to be acquired
should they be needed in the future. As before, it was assumed that
military enterprisers would kick-start the system of recruitment and
would bring together the armies required for subsequent purposes.
Their combination of organizational resources and credit would once
again allow the immediate recruitment of the army, permitting the ruler
to bring together tax resources, license the collection of contributions and

find other means to meet the longer-term financial burdens of warfare.
Such assumptions were successfully demonstrated by Charles X of
Sweden. The German regiments in Swedish service had been entirely
demobilized by 1650/1, leaving only the levies of Swedish troops to
provide the garrison forces for the Baltic territories.58 Faced by what he
interpreted as a dynastic challenge from John II Casimir, the Polish king
since 1648, Charles resolved upon that ever-favoured Swedish military
strategy, the pre-emptive strike.59 In 1654 the king sent instructions to
Königsmarck, the governor of Bremen-Verden, and Magnus de La
Gardie, instructing them to carry out recruitment on their own credit, to
be recovered by the substantial returns from the waging of a war that
Charles was about to unleash on Poland.60 The following months were
spent in a hectic round of recruitment, both through the persons of
Königsmarck, La Gardie and their relatives and clients, and through
direct patents given out to German nobles and military professionals
acting as enterprisers.61 Some of these, like Graf Johann zu Waldeck
and Graf Christoffer von Dohna, were multiple proprietors, and many
were familiar from the armies of Torstensson and Wrangel.62
The conflict which ensued from 1655 to 1660 demonstrated just how
quickly and effectively experienced Swedish and German enterpriser-
commanders could reassemble credible and effective forces against tradi-
tional expectations of reimbursement through contributions and plunder.
Militarily, the first stages of the war, fought against Poland, and under-
pinned by forced levies of troops and contributions from Brandenburg
and Saxony, were a restaging of the mobile, hard-hitting campaigns of the
1640s.63 Politically, however, the war raised the stakes both in the Empire,
where Swedish aggression threatened to involve the Emperor, and in the
Baltic, where the Dutch prepared to lend powerful naval support to the
Danes, the next victims of Sweden’s ability to tap the resources of military
enterprise. The war of 1655–60 might appear simply to have inaugurated
a new round of conflict fought via military enterprisers on the basis of
contributions, plunder and other war profits, but in fact it marked the end
of an era.
The ability to contract an army into existence through the efforts and
credit of military enterprisers had in practice almost always been the
preserve of the major powers, with their apparent access to greater resour-
ces and their more permanent need for troops. The exceptions to this –
Bavaria, Hessen-Kassel, Lorraine – had built up the reputation of their
forces over time, and could attract or retain enterprisers through a repu-
tation for military effectiveness and an ability to draw on local loyalties,
even when, like the Bavarian army, they paid the contractor-colonels less
Beyond France 281
well than their Imperial counterparts. But confidence that it would be

possible to build up contacts and obtain the services of military contrac-
tors in a competitive, sellers’ market was inevitably eroded as peace
continued and the contractors of the Thirty Years War retired, died or
lost the ability to call upon numbers of experienced veteran soldiers to
form the core of their units. It was unsurprising that Sweden, as the
greatest military power of the previous decade, could still assemble a
force of military contractors in short order and place it under the com-
mand of veteran generals with direct experience of the last period of the
German war. But for lesser German princes, such confidence that the
international military market could still conjure up an army was danger-
ously misplaced.
The economic and military climate in the Empire was becoming less
hospitable to military enterprise. Individual enterpriser-colonels found it
harder to raise a quota of troops and to secure assured, long-running
contracts, and the situation was equally unpropitious for anyone trying
to play the role of the general contractor. Christoph Bernhard von Galen,
bishop of Münster, appeared to be treading in the footsteps of enterpriser-
princes like Christian of Halberstadt and Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, using
his territories to raise troops which he maintained from his own resources
and credit, while looking for profitable opportunities to gain contracts for
them in external conflicts or in alliance with greater powers. Able to raise
anything up to 20,000–25,000 men on his own account, and possessing an
impressive artillery train, he seemed a model of the traditional large-scale
enterpriser.64 His colonels were mostly subcontractors, borrowing
money from the Cologne banking house of Grote in the 1660s to finance
their regiments.65 But in fact Galen was an anomaly. He was just about
able to support his army in the volatile military circumstances of the
1670s, but only at the cost of changing alliances and warlords with such
regularity that he destroyed all political credit and he found it impossible
to secure lasting benefits from his military activities.66 Another late-
flowering example of princely contracting, Duke Johann Friedrich of
Braunschweig-Lüneburg (1625–79), raised an army of around 14,000
men in the mid-1660s. But the opportunities to deploy these troops
profitably under contract in conflict within the Empire did not arise,
and he drew on his close cultural and social ties with Italy to lease three
of his regiments into Venetian service.67
Awareness that the market for hiring military force might be a great deal
smaller than in the past raised other questions about defence needs and
the ability of rulers to provide adequately for territorial defence after 1648.
It is not difficult to understand the dilemma of Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector
of Brandenburg. Holding the eastern part of Pomerania, which had been
Fig. 6.1 Johann Friedrich von Braunschweig-Lüneburg
wrested from Sweden’s grasp at Westphalia only through huge diplomatic

efforts, he and his councillors were well aware that Stockholm regarded
this territory as an important means to safeguard a Baltic ‘lake’ composed
of territory under its control. The Elector was equally conscious that
Sweden viewed the dynastic assertions of the Polish king with concern,
and that if Charles chose to intervene in Poland it would almost certainly
be across and at the expense of the territory of Brandenburg. In this
situation, waiting on events, and hoping that he would be able to raise
troops under contract as an impending political/military crisis dictated,
would be simply to repeat the disastrous policies of the Thirty Years War,
Beyond France 283
when states with no military resources became pawns of the active bellig-
erents. The best that could be hoped for then – and probably also in the
1650s – would be a subservient neutrality, in which the state paid heavy
contributions in return for not having to billet troops.
The dilemma of the Brandenburg Elector was simply a more direct
version of the concern of many German princely rulers about drawing on
what now appeared an increasingly unreliable, ‘last-minute’ mechanism
for raising military forces, and one that might well fail to meet its targets
altogether. It was a familiar story from other parts of Europe in earlier
periods, when the local market for hiring troops had been restricted or
overburdened. In 1606–7, when trying to raise troops for what appeared
an imminent war with Spain’s Italian territories, Venice had been forced
to stretch the net of military contracting as far as the Netherlands, and still
found itself spending very heavily to raise paltry numbers of troops.68
In this context, the notion of a permanent defence force again reap-
peared on many German rulers’ agendas. The previous, pre-1618
attempts to create conscript militias were acknowledged as failures, and
few argued for reviving such projects on any grounds except the original,
flawed one of cheapness. But if a part-time militia was dismissed as a
serious option for anything other than last-ditch home defence, then the
other means of ensuring that the ruler could have assured access to
military force was through the establishment of permanent, regular units
of troops. The exposure of their territories to military contributions
imposed by the armies of the Thirty Years War had demonstrated to
rulers that their subjects possessed far higher tax-paying capacity than
had ever been envisaged before 1618.69 But the collection of contribu-
tions, even when explicitly conceded by Diets and other representative
bodies, had been underpinned by the sanction of readily available military
force. This direct recourse to force was not available to rulers in the years
after Westphalia. Neither was the strongest argument to gain grudging
consent to these impositions, deployed, for example, with success in the
Western Circles of the Empire in the 1630s and 1640s: that the alternative
to paying these defence taxes was being overrun by enemy forces and
subjected to heavier and more capricious taxes, accompanied by wide-
spread looting and destruction.
Yet at a less immediate level the arguments about the needs of defence
could still be used, and although the revenues that would be granted by
territorial Diets and Estates were smaller than the sums extracted as
contributions in the war years, there was no going back to the minimalist
tax regimes of the pre-1618 era.70 Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg led
the charge towards the creation of permanent, regular ‘defence taxes’.71 A
combination of the looming threat posed by Sweden and a backstairs deal
with his tax-exempt nobility allowed him to negotiate a state-collected

contribution of 530,000 talers, granted for six years from 1653 by the
Estates of Brandenburg. And in a great break with previous practice,
instead of using these revenues to hire troops under contract, they were
deployed to boost the number of permanent troops in the Elector’s army,
so that by 1655 these forces had reached 4,000 cavalry, 5,000 infantry and
500 dragoons.72 Friedrich Wilhelm was by no means alone in recognizing
that a permanent body of troops seemed the one way of meeting the need
for soldiers who were both militarily effective and readily available. Few
rulers proved able to mobilize troops on the scale of the Great Elector, and
most negotiations for new military taxes were hard-fought with subjects
who were both hostile to heavier taxes and often recognized the ambig-
uous status of a ‘defence’ force.73 By 1657 the Bavarian Elector,
Ferdinand Maria, had reassembled a Bavarian army of 4,000 infantry
and 1,500 cavalry.74
For many territorial rulers, this might appear more of a straitjacket than
an opportunity. But although it might initially seem that many of these
rulers had used up their political credit and bargaining power to establish
defence forces which amounted to little more than a standing bodyguard,
the new system had considerable potential for adjustment in their favour.
As external political and military threats grew, so the potential leverage
possessed by a ruler against popular or Estates’ resistance to higher
‘defence taxes’ would be enhanced. Where German princely rulers proved
initially reluctant to move down this path, or their powerful subjects had
successfully opposed attempts to establish a heavier post-war tax burden,
the force of events made the process increasingly difficult to resist.
Mounting international tension and then war in the 1670s led to an
anti-French coalition amongst the German princes under the leadership
of the Emperor. Arguing that defensive war was a common Imperial
burden, Emperor Leopold authorized those German princes who had
previously raised armies and now deployed them in the service of the
alliance to recover some of their costs by levying contributions on their
neighbouring, non-militarized German states for the duration of the con-
flict. The message was clear, and in the 1680s a large number of previously
foot-dragging states had adopted small permanent forces so that they
could contribute directly to the military needs of such coalitions and
avoid the inevitably over-heavy contributions imposed on their territories
by the already-armed states.75
Much of this development of new permanent forces should be seen as a
pragmatic response to changing military circumstances, above all the
recognition that military enterprise could no longer provide a secure
base for raising troops quickly and effectively. There was, needless to
Beyond France 285
say, almost always a degree of personal and dynastic ambition in the desire
to create standing armies more directly accountable to the ruler, even if
the price for this was to have fewer troops than military enterprise might
have given the prince. At the very least, a princely army provided oppor-
tunities for direct courtly patronage and promotion that were unavailable
in an army raised by enterpriser-colonels. Beyond this pragmatism, two
other factors may have helped to push the balance further towards perma-
nent forces.
Although falling short of the extreme assertions of sovereignty that
Louis XIV and his ministers considered an essential aspect of his govern-
ment programme, many of the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire were
sensitive to questions of sovereignty and the control of military force. In
particular, Article 65 of the 1648 Peace of Münster specifically empha-
sized that the sovereign status of the German princes was defined by their
rights to raise armies, make alliances and decide on war and peace.76 It
was on these claims that the greater territorial princes justified their free-
dom of action from their overlord, the Emperor, and their status as
independent political actors. A defence force that was clearly under the
control of the ruler, sanctioned by taxes granted by his Estates, would
make this point about the possession of sovereignty more effectively and
explicitly than troops raised through an international system of military
enterprisers and their support networks. The success of Louis XIV’s
military experiment, and indeed the speed with which Louis achieved
pre-eminence in European politics, inevitably drew attention to his rhet-
orical claims and his elaborate posturing as the roi de guerre. A model
which had apparently proved so successful naturally found its willing
imitators.
Moreover the demonizing of the armies of the later Thirty Years War
was deliberately seized upon as a means to sell the burdens of a standing
army to subjects, and to reconcile them to higher taxes and greater author-
ity in the hands of the ruler. By playing up the supposedly anarchic, self-
seeking and universally destructive character of the armies of the 1630s
and 1640s, and especially the implication that most of the soldiers came
from outside the Empire and had no purpose within its borders except
looting and indiscriminate violence, the new, permanent forces of the
post-war rulers could be presented as guarantors of restored order and
stability. To some extent, as we shall see below, the different way in which
these troops were recruited, and the changed attitudes to military life and
its relationship to wider society, could provide some support for the
contention that these were a different style of armed force. But the
representation of the Thirty Years War as a German catastrophe, wrought
by foreign, contracted troops outside the control of rulers, civil authorities
and military commanders, pursuing war for profit at the direct expense
of the people, served the interests of German post-war rulers extremely
well. It had the incidental effect of establishing a mythology of the ‘all-
destructive war’ and the ‘all-consuming armies’ that has lasted for cen-
turies, and still colours most accounts of the Thirty Years War and its
military character down to the present.77
Thus to a large extent the German princes, and indeed their few Italian
counterparts such as Carlo Emanuele and Vittorio Amedeo II of Savoy-
Piedmont, were willing victims of their own rhetoric about the control of
military force.78 By preaching the virtues of standing armies and the direct
authority of the ruler as an antidote to military chaos, the possibility of
maintaining forces on the basis of the credit and private organization of the
military contractor would seem to be restricted much more explicitly. The
previous gap between military rhetoric and military reality was signifi-
cantly harder to ignore.
State control of military activity

After 1650, there were areas in which the power of rulers and their
administrators over military organization and structure grew, in terms of
both practical control and public perception. Much of this growth mirrors
the organizational changes seen in the French army from the 1660s,
though accompanied by a less strident rhetoric about breaking with the
past and establishing princely authority. A large element of the changes in
the character of armies reflects the consequences of trying to fund perma-
nent forces with the modest financial resources available from state rev-
enues. Even a force of a few thousand men, sustained directly through the
peace-time resources available to a second-rank German or Italian ruler,
would be unsustainable on the basis of the wage levels that had been
typical for soldiers in the Thirty Years War. Wartime circumstances had
meant that wages were frequently delayed, or paid by contributions from
occupied territory or simply from opportunities for plunder. A peace-time
army would need to be paid far more regularly and directly from state
resources. The only obvious solution to funding an army was to reduce the
levels of pay, usually on the spurious grounds that pay would now be met
in full and without the delays and shortfalls that had been typical of an
earlier period. The pay of an ordinary soldier fell from the 6–7 talers
offered by the recruiting officers of the Thirty Years War, down to the
2½ talers offered to recruits in Brandenburg in 1679, from which 1 taler
4 groschen was deducted for food and clothing, leaving actual pay of
1 taler 8 groschen per month.79 As was noted in earlier chapters, the
later seventeenth century was the real turning point in the decline of
State control of military activity 287
soldiers’ social status, and this was mirrored in these dramatically falling
wage levels.
Less frequently remarked, but also important as part of this package of
reducing the operating costs of a permanent army, is the disappearance of
the ‘double-pay men’, the veterans who received either a full or consider-
ably higher salary for their military experience and their key role in unit
organization and deployment.80 In future the company hierarchy was sim-
plified into a majority of ordinary soldiers and a small minority of NCOs.
The latter’s pay was better than that of a traditional double-pay man, but
their numbers were far smaller, they performed more general functions, and
they were more clearly separated from the men. The double-pay men had
been a central element in the ‘informal professionalism’ of military units in
the Landsknecht and Thirty Years War tradition, the small-group dynamic
based upon the Rott and the Rottmeister, and their disappearance was sig-
nificant as part of a larger restructuring of unit dynamics.
It might have been the case that the traditional, ‘apprenticeship’ system
of military units, recognized in these differential wages between experi-
enced soldiers and recruits, would have been unsustainable outside the
context of permanent war, given the far smaller numbers of those still
available for service with significant experience of combat. But in fact this
whole system was being challenged by the fashionable importation of the
model of rigorous, externally imposed drill and uniform practice in weap-
ons and tactical deployment. When undertaken by militias and other part-
time, quasi-informal forces, the failure of ‘revolutionary’ systems of exact
discipline, taught through the drill manual and the barrack square, was
unsurprising. To produce units which deployed their weapons and man-
oeuvred on the battlefield and under fire with perfectly synchronized
collective movements in response to a formal repertoire of orders, and
where drill and punishment had eliminated individual actions and reac-
tions from this process, took a great deal of time and effort. But permanent
armies, maintained over long periods of peace, had the time to inculcate
these formalized practices, and permanent establishments of NCOs
would have the task of teaching them. After the five to six years of regular
drill which the marquis de Chamlay had suggested was the minimum
required to train infantry soldiers (see p. 100), they would have achieved
an impressive level of collective military performance both on the parade-
ground and in combat. The principles on which these military units had
been prepared for combat were radically different from those of the Thirty
Years War: they were characterized by a shared, uniform base of drill and
rigorous subordination to instructions from above to provide cohesion in
attack and under fire, rather than the previous, balanced mix of experi-
enced and inexperienced troops held together by a common sense of esprit
de corps and professional identity. Given the decline in the quality of

ordinary soldiers being recruited in the later seventeenth century as the
impact of reduced wages and lower social status took its toll, the inculca-
tion of collective drill and unquestioning subordination almost certainly
offered the best option for producing a combat-effective army. Moreover,
with the technological developments of the later seventeenth century, the
flintlock musket and the ring-bayonet – which finally eliminated the pike-
man from the battlefields of Europe – the relentless drilling of infantry in
formalized fire-drills and unit manoeuvres may even have had a serious
tactical point. Massed infantry fire from units which could now stand
shoulder-to-shoulder thanks to the more compact flintlock mechanism
could have significant impact in close-range engagements. Though the
deadliness of artillery on the battlefield still far outweighed that of infantry
firearms, the ability to train units of infantry to maximize their rates of fire
made tactical sense. From the later seventeenth century an infantry fire-
fight might have real military consequences, rather than being the prelude
to the kind of hand-to-hand, pike against musket-used-as-club fighting
that would actually have decided infantry engagements between experi-
enced troops before this time.
There is no doubt, however, that the shift across to this style of military
training and discipline also represented a public manifestation of the
authority of the ruler over his entire army. The uniformity of drill, and
the requirement that the soldiers be subjected to discipline in every aspect
of their military performance, transformed both the behaviour and
appearance of soldiers. Soldiers raised by the state’s administrators
would be dressed and equipped to a common pattern, and indeed as the
choreography of military drill took root, putting troops into full uniforms
would have both functional and aesthetic purposes. The insistence on
minute observance of drill on the parade-ground was carried across into
the general imposition of disciplined comportment on guard duty, on the
march, and in the behaviour of troops towards their superiors and those
with authority outside of the army. The notion of the army as a well-
regulated machine, in which the parts could move only in accordance with
their stipulated roles and authority, was far removed from the informal
discipline and structures of authority of the Landsknecht tradition. The
perception of the individual soldier suffered a further decline: not only was
he socially marginal, but he was now the ‘dumme Soldat’, capable only of
unthinking obedience to orders.81 The army as a whole came to represent
the authority of the ruler and the state, visibly manifested through the
parade-ground performance of uniformed troops, well disciplined and
subordinated to minute regulation in every aspect of their military behav-
iour and action.
Low wages, plummeting social status and relentless discipline, which

aimed to eliminate the casual – immoral – idleness of previous generations
of professional soldiers, ensured that soldiering really did become the last
resort of the most marginal social groups. And not only was it far more
unpopular and ill-paid, but the logic of elaborate drill and discipline
required long-serving soldiers, not men who would want to leave service
after a year or two. As a result many rulers discovered that the ranks could
be filled only by some form of direct conscription, a process which marked
another departure from traditional perceptions of military life. At the
same time, the ability to impose such long-service conscription, albeit
on the most marginal and often criminal elements of society, marked a
further apparent watershed in the increase in the authority of the state over
its armed forces. Focus on collective drill and other disciplining activities
also encouraged the hitherto relatively sporadic practice of confining
soldiers to barracks, rather than billeting them on the local populations.
Barracks provided a more consistent pattern of discipline, while also
separating the soldiers from civilian life to a greater extent than ever
before. This process should not be exaggerated; the poor wages of soldiers
ensured that many of them still pursued some minor trade or skill in their
free time, and the two worlds overlapped socially and economically.82 But
the perception of soldiers as visibly set apart from society for a large part of
their professional life grew in importance, and again emphasized the
extent that the state and its specialist administrators seemed to control
the levers of military power far more directly than in the past.
Though these developments might appear to be shifting the patterns of
military recruitment and maintenance towards state-raised, territorial
forces, the use of hired, foreign troops by no means disappeared in
Europe after 1650. Indeed given the small scale of most of the forces
that could be raised by second-rank powers, the option of supplementing
the modest standing elements with some additional hired troops remained
attractive and in many cases essential. Notable, though, is the return of the
traditional mercenary contract, in which the hired troops are integrated
into the established forces. Enterprisers were not being contracted to raise
forces to serve independently and alongside the rulers’ troops, still less to
replace them altogether. Payment would be made for the costs of recruit-
ment and assembly, terms of service stipulated, and the troops hired
would be directly assimilated into the army of the ruler, even when they
might on occasions outnumber the standing forces.83
On the other side, for some princes, the ‘soldier trade’ – hiring out
native troops from their armies to other powers – was either a way of
meeting the costs of a ‘standing’ army that was pressing heavily on their
tax revenues, or a means to curry favour with a desired ally amongst the
greater powers.84 Faced with the massive burden on small state resources
of trying to maintain permanent military forces, the obvious way to try to
cover the costs and maintain the army without a crippling or unacceptable
tax burden was to lease out all or part of the army. Mercenary units had
been returned to the status of individual force-enhancers – a means to
raise additional troops quickly, especially when domestic recruitment was
sluggish. They were still there in the mid-eighteenth century when, noto-
riously, a high proportion of ‘British’ troops fighting anywhere from
Brunswick to Boston were Hessian mercenaries in the direct pay of the
British crown, and where the armies of Frederick the Great made equally
heavy use of Germans who were not the king’s subjects.85
The growth in the size of permanent forces and the range of military
functions over which the state took some direct responsibility also had an
impact on the size and status of central military bureaucracies. France was
by no means a unique example of this, but during the 1660s the office of
secretary of state for war was elevated to the status of war minister, with a
permanent seat in the conseil d’en haut going to Louvois in 1672.86 This
was paralleled in the growing importance of the Generalkriegskommissariat
in Brandenburg or the Hofkriegsrath in Austria.87 In all cases the number
of salaried officials grew, together with the scale and range of supervisorial
activities, and the perception of the army as being directly under the
control of the ruler and his expanding power base.88 The growth in the
scale of administrative activity connected with the armies and navies of
European powers from the later seventeenth century speaks for itself in the
exponential increase in paperwork generated and preserved in the various
state war archives, many of which were officially founded as depots for this
material in the same period.
Probably the most unambiguous practical example of the direct
increase in state control over armed force came not with land forces, but
with navies. The decisive factor here was not some ideologically motivated
decision to take direct control of navies, but a technological change in
warfare at sea, in its decisiveness akin to the role of siege artillery and the
trace italienne for fortress design back in the early sixteenth century.
Although the importance of shipborne gunnery had been steadily growing
through the sixteenth and the early seventeenth century, this remained
relatively unsystematic: heavier, ship-smashing guns, whether mounted in
the prow, stern or along the side-decks, were certainly used with the aim of
disabling an enemy vessel to permit subsequent boarding, or intimidating
a crew with firepower so that they surrendered. But there was nothing that
dictated a particular form of ship to carry such weapons, or the number
and weight of guns carried. As we have seen, throughout the first half of
the century, a substantial proportion of fleets would still be made up of
armed merchantmen (see above pp. 83–6). This dual role lay at the heart
of the private/state conduct of naval warfare down to the 1650s, and
underwrote the willingness of shipowners and merchant captains to par-
ticipate in naval campaigns, whether deploying their vessels as acting
warships or as privateers. When rulers had built and controlled most of
their navies before the 1650s it had usually – as in the case of Denmark and
Sweden – been a reflection of the smallness and weakness of their mer-
chant fleets, rather than a deliberate decision to concentrate resources in
the hands of the state.89
The Anglo-Dutch Wars and the evolution of the line of battle had a
decisive effect on maritime technology. The shift from naval tactics that
aimed to intimidate or damage ships prior to boarding, to fleet actions
which would be decided overwhelmingly by broadside batteries of heavy
guns, was a major step in the emerging technology of warships.90 It
inaugurated fleets made up entirely of rated vessels, the firepower of
which would dictate the place they held in the fleet and their role in the
artillery duel which would characterize future naval actions. A single gun-
deck posed much less of a structural problem to the role of the ship as
cargo-carrier than did the designs for custom-built, rated warships after
1650, which from the third-rate upwards needed to be built to far higher
specifications, with the capacity to carry sixty to seventy cannon on two or
three reinforced gun-decks.91 At this battle-fleet end of the business, naval
and mercantile technology were no longer interchangeable. It simply
made no economic sense for private shipowners, who might have envis-
aged a partial military role for their previous ships, to build to the speci-
fications of a rated warship. Armed merchant ships might act as privateers
in time of war and supplement the naval activities of the main fleet, but
they would be a dangerous liability if they tried to fight as part of the main
navy. The last major sea engagement involving substantial forces which
combined purpose-built warships and hired merchant ships was at the
Listerdyb in May 1644, when Dutch armed merchantmen were heavily
outclassed by the Danish warships of Christian IV.92
European states therefore faced a simple challenge after the 1650s. If they
wanted a fleet capable of fighting in line of battle they would have to build it
and maintain it at their own expense. Heavy warships could not double as
commercial carriers and they were too costly and unfit for purpose as
privateers; the most obvious private–public funding mechanism for operat-
ing navies would no longer work. These ships would only come into
existence if the ruler was prepared to spend heavily from tax revenues to
build, arm and crew them. It was this strategic realization which underlay
Colbert’s massive naval building programme, and was felt no less forcefully
amongst all the other powers with substantial maritime pretensions.93
Fig. 6.2 A custom-built third-rate warship; contrast this with Figure 2.2
The persistence of military enterprise 293
Table 6.1 Number of ocean-going warships of 1,000 tonnes

and above, 1650–1710
1650 1670 1680 1690 1710
Britain 14 33 62 55 80
France 1 45 60 68 73
Netherlands 0 32 29 30 64
Sweden 3 14 9 17 27
Denmark/Norway 6 13 15 16 30
Source: Glete, Navies and Nations, II, pp. 549–649.
The creation of navies which were directly commissioned, owned and

administered by rulers under state authority had an impact on many of the
support structures for the building and maintenance of the ships.
Although many of Christian IV’s ships had been built under contract in
the private dockyards of Holstein, later in his reign the construction of
larger warships and ship maintenance and repairs were carried out at
the first comprehensively state-owned, state-controlled dockyards at
Bremerholm, outside Copenhagen.94 The immense increase in the ton-
nage of the British navy in the later seventeenth century created a powerful
demand for shipbuilding and for ship maintenance and repair facilities.
From the 1690s the dockyards at Portsmouth and Plymouth were
expanded over the existing naval base at Chatham. All first- and second-
rated ships were now built in the royal dockyards, and this brought both
the direct employment of an army of skilled and unskilled employees, and
tighter supervision of the design and construction of the large numbers of
smaller ships still built in private dockyards. The direct expense of the
naval programme now fell almost exclusively at the door of the govern-
ment, and this drove a steady increase in the authority and reach of the
Admiralty Board.95 Here at last was a military operation on a large enough
scale that it really could – unlike the Venetian Arsenale in its heyday –
justify the full-time employment of skilled and unskilled labour as direct
employees of the state.
The persistence of military enterprise

All of these developments might seem to suggest that the armies and
navies of European powers had indeed crossed a threshold from con-
tracted armed forces to armies and navies that were organized and funded
by rulers and their administrators. But as in France, where a strident
ideology of direct crown control of the armed forces was accompanied by

compromises and mechanisms that sought to mobilize the resources and
ensure the involvement of wealthy subjects, the wider European reality
was just as nuanced.
As in the great age of military enterprise, the essential question
remained as to how to gain access to the resources of privileged, tax-
exempt elites. The notion that rulers and state administrations could raise
the incrementally larger sums that would have been required to fund the
costs of the expanding armies of the later seventeenth century through
taxation and better fiscal administration is no more convincing in the
case of Austria or Brandenburg-Prussia than it was in the case of Louis
XIV’s France. Most arguments that seek to link the growth of
early modern armies and the development of state and fiscal power in
some reciprocal explanation of mutually reinforcing growth become
lost in a hazy circularity of implicit and untested assumptions.96 When
case studies are examined, evidence that permanent armies were
capable of the long-term imposition of coercion on domestic popula-
tions, above all on those elites who controlled the bulk of resources,
proves unconvincing.97
The ability to finance armies which could achieve unprecedented
expansion in the later seventeenth century and beyond can only be
explained by placing the socio-political elites back into the picture, and
demonstrating that they had a convincing blend of motives not merely to
continue their involvement in military activity, but to underwrite a large
part of its immediate costs. As in the case of the establishment and
expansion of the army of Louis XIV, the notion of a clear-cut divide
Table 6.2 Growth in European army size, 1660–1760
1660 1667–8 1675–8 1695–7 1705–10 1745 1756–8
France 55,000 85,000 250,000 340,000 255,000 345,000 290,000

Austria 30,000 60,000 60,000 95,000 120,000 200,000 210,000
Prussia 12,000 14,000 45,000 31,000 44,000 135,000 200,000
Britain 16,000 15,000 15,000 68,000 75,000 53,000 47,000
Dutch Republic 70,000 70,000 63,000 77,000 90,000 31,000
Spain 77,000 30,000 70,000 51,000 51,000
Russia 130,000 220,000 250,000 345,000
Sweden 70,000 63,000 90,000 110,000 51,000
Savoy-Piedmont 5,500 6,000 23,000 26,500 55,000
Saxony 12,000 25,000 30,000 25,000
Source: Figures taken from J. Luh, Kriegskunst in Europa, 1650–1800 (Cologne, 2004), p. 17.
between the world of military contractors and the world of the ‘permanent
army’ breaks down once this is addressed. Both before and after 1650 the
rulers of states, whether German or Italian principalities or the greater
powers, sought means to enlist the capital, and to some extent the con-
nections and organizational resources, of their elites in the raising of
armed forces and the waging of war. The public–private military partner-
ships might vary in form and emphasis, but the underlying assumptions
remained that substantial private involvement in the organization of war
was both a practical requirement and not necessarily incompatible with
the ruler’s authority over his armed forces.
At the most basic level, in almost all armies the officers remained the
creditors of the crown, lending money to feed, clothe or pay the basic
wages of their troops when central funds and provisioning proved inad-
equate. This could take a number of forms. In some cases the senior
officers were expected or encouraged, as in the past, to lend directly to
the ruler. In the 1670s when it proved necessary to quarter the Electoral
army on Brandenburg territory over the winter months, the colonels were
expected to lend up to 10,000 talers each to sustain the costs of their
regiments.98 This was a common phenomenon in the 1670s and 1680s
when the armies of the smaller states frequently grew beyond the capacity
of tax revenues to sustain even their basic expenses. In fact, such direct
loans or voluntary contributions to military expenses continued far later
into the ancien régime. Field Marshal Ludwig Johann, count of Bussy-
Rabutin, claimed that he had advanced more than 300,000 florins on the
Emperor’s behalf from 1705 to 1707.99 Continuing the traditions of his
forebears, who had provided loans to fund Habsburg military operations
in both the Long Turkish War and the early years of the Thirty Years War,
Field Marshal Joseph Wenzel, prince of Liechtenstein, carried out his
reform of the Austrian artillery in the 1740s in significant part on the
back of private funds that he was prepared to invest in new developments
and better field guns.100
At its highest level this sort of ‘investment’ in the ruler’s military
activities of course was a traditional aristocratic or courtly gambit: large,
one-off financial commitments to military expenses, such as that of
Liechtenstein, were aimed at gaining political favour or some later advant-
age. Lesser but probably more frequent loans, provided by colonels and
senior officers in order to keep the army operational and the troops fed,
would not be ‘gifts’ in this respect, and they would expect, and in some
cases need, to receive reimbursement. Here we see a familiar pattern
reasserting itself the moment that war can be waged outside the immedi-
ate territory of the ruler, as the officers who had provided loans continued
to see themselves as shareholder-investors in the army, and looked to
contributions or other means to recover their investment. Often this led to

the straightforward imposition of Brandschatzen by the officers them-
selves: the Great Elector notified the Emperor in 1676 that the generals
of the Imperial army had each extorted some 30,000–80,000 talers via
local contributions on German territory during the previous two cam-
paigns against France.101 There was a persistent tension, just as there had
been in the Thirty Years War, between the collection of contributions as a
means to meet the global expenses of military activities, and the assump-
tion of individual senior officers that their own financial contributions to
the costs of running their regiments and making good financial shortfalls
would entitle them to a cut from the contributions being collected. While
such individual reimbursement was increasingly resisted by state author-
ities as they tended to take over the management of contributions, it
remained an obvious consequence of a military context in which senior
officers were expected to make use of their resources to meet the burden of
military expenses.102 More traditionally still, in some cases rulers were
prepared to cut the knot of these conflicting expectations, and officially to
sanction mechanisms for the reimbursement of loans and expenses by the
officers. Senior Imperial officers operating in Hungary and further south
up to the 1720s were granted licences by the Emperor to recoup their
debts and pay themselves interest through the direct collection of local
customs and sales taxes.103
A willingness to deploy the funds of these senior officers as enterprisers
on an ad hoc basis was one way of meeting some of the spiralling costs of
later seventeenth-century warfare. However, it was matched by a series of
developments that were akin to the French model of recognizing a legit-
imate financial interest by the colonel-proprietor, recoverable on the
transfer of the unit to another commander. As Fritz Redlich neatly defined
the change, regiments were no longer large-scale business concerns in
many European states after 1650, but they were certainly still investments
from which the colonel would hope to recoup his capital with benefit.
They did not offer opportunities to generate large profits over and above
the initial and subsequent investment in upkeep, but they were much
more than administrative appointments.104
Although regiments were in theory the direct property of the ruler,
established as part of the permanent army, there were many variations
on the theme of French-style venality: substantial sums paid to an out-
going colonel by his successor would amortize some of the expenses
incurred in the unit’s upkeep, and provide an incentive for maintaining
the unit in good condition by determining to some extent its ultimate
transfer price. In some cases these arrangements, as in France, were
explicit and formal, and in others they were given tacit approval by an
administration as a means to encourage financial investment in military

activity.105 In 1668, for example, Count Vitaliano Borromeo and Marquis
Daniele Ala both contributed substantially to the costs of recruiting and
equipping two newly formed tercios in Lombardy, which they then com-
manded for the Spanish crown.106 In the Austrian army, the regimental
owner (as elsewhere in the German-speaking lands, bearing the explicit
title of Obrist-Inhaber) would nominate an acting colonel, and could
appoint directly all the officers up to the level of captain.107 In the
British army of the early eighteenth century a full list of prices was
published in an attempt to regulate sales, from £9,000 for the colonelcy
of a regiment of dragoon guards down to £170 for the ensignship of an
infantry regiment serving abroad.108 But if the regiment had a marketable
value on being sold to a successor, it was also intended to provide a means
for the colonel to recover at least a part of the money that he may have
invested in equipping the troops, making good shortfalls of pay or provi-
sioning, and indeed meeting the costly expectations of a regimental
commander.
As in the Thirty Years War, the structured ‘business of a regiment’ was
a means by which initial cash payments to recruit and equip the regiment,
providing clothing and weapons to the soldiers, could be recovered at a
profit by deductions from the soldiers’ subsequent wages and the overall
pay provided to manage the unit. In addition the regimental commander,
through a series of opportunities connected with the collection of ‘admin-
istrative charges’ – the sale of subordinate commissions, of rights such as
leaves of absence, and gratuities for internal appointments and promo-
tions – could generate a significant annual income. In the 1690s an
established Austrian regiment could generate some 10,000–12,000 florins
per annum for its proprietor, a Prussian regiment of the same period
around 3,000 talers in such benefits.109 Regiments could even be leased
out by their owners: after his death in 1697, the daughter of Maximilian
von Degenfeld rented out her father’s regiment to an acting colonel for
2,000 ducats per annum, since the colonel would be able to make a more
substantial profit from the regimental business while also leading the unit
militarily.110 One of the most conspicuous, and most thoroughly exam-
ined, examples of such regimental management is provided by the
English, then British, army of the later seventeenth and the eighteenth
century. This is an especially striking case in that England experienced
little of the variety and extent of military contracting seen in the Thirty
Years War period in Europe, and the establishment of regimental pro-
prietorship as a structured investment opportunity would seem to have
grown up largely without reference to the European precedents that have
been explored in previous chapters.111
Although the opportunities for windfall profits may have declined,

regimental proprietorship remained highly prestigious, and in many
armies senior officers continued to hold the titular colonelcies of more
than one regiment. When the Great Elector died, Field Marshal
Derfflinger had three regiments under his command – one each of infan-
try, cavalry and dragoons – together with control of the garrison of
Küstrin.112 For Austrian commanders social prestige seems to have
accrued more from the rank and number of regiments they held as titular
colonels than from their title as general.113
Yet despite this prestige and the opportunities for recovering invest-
ment and making profit, the substantial change towards the end of the
seventeenth and into the eighteenth century was that the economic/finan-
cial unit in the armies of the ancien régime became the company, not the
regiment, and the rank which became the organizational and entrepre-
neurial linchpin was that of the captain. The first half of the eighteenth
century saw the flourishing of the ‘company business’, with the captain as
businessman-investor, whose activities – keeping the men clothed, keep-
ing the equipment in good order and providing replacements, and main-
taining the company at its established strength – offered a traditional style
of military proprietorship, in which capital investment and good manage-
ment were a means to a decent profit over the life of the unit or the
command.114 As would be expected, not all captains were serving heads
of companies: every general, senior officer and colonel had a company
which he ran for profit, and would appoint a lieutenant captain to com-
mand the unit. In the early eighteenth century under Friedrich Wilhelm I
of Brandenburg-Prussia, the capital value of a company is reported to have
been 2,000 talers, while in addition the incoming captain would have to
‘buy’ company equipment – arms, standards, drums, etc. – from his
predecessor, for a price set at 600 talers.115 In almost all cases the major
profits from managing a company came from having direct control of
recruitment – both of the ordinary soldiers and the NCOs and subaltern
officers. Profit and patronage came together in the hands of the
landowner-captain, who used his influence and standing both to raise
recruits more cheaply than on the open market and to reward local clients
with junior officerships. The high-point of this process was reached in the
Prussian army where almost all the captains were from estate-owning
families controlling unfree peasants who could be recruited at profit,
and from the time of Friedrich Wilhelm I returned to their estates for a
large part of the year to assist in the agricultural cycle.116
At one level this shift of enterprise down one rung of the command
ladder might be seen as a step towards the state-controlled army: reducing
the danger posed by independent commander-proprietors by fragmenting
their activities into smaller units. From another perspective, it can be seen
as an efficient version of the French mechanism for maintaining and
widening the extent of recognized investment by the elites in military
service: now every officer from captain upwards was a direct financial
stakeholder in the organization and the effectiveness of the army. In the
case of the British military administration, it seems that the playing-off of
colonels against captains in their respective fiscal and military responsi-
bilities and benefits allowed the government to strike a considerably
tougher bargain when offering remuneration to the captains for their
company expenses, while maintaining the goodwill of the colonels by
tolerating a higher level of perquisites and benefits at this senior level.117
Such mechanisms were not restricted to land forces: the Dutch Navy
Board continued the practice of paying the captains ‘provisioning pennies’
in return for the captains’ requirement to furnish the supplies for their
crews until 1808.118
The persistence of entrepreneurship across the armies of the later
seventeenth century had the same benefits and costs as in the French
case. The prestige and status of officer service continued to grow, and with
it the competition to obtain commands. The structure of all of these
armies ensured that the vast majority of posts would be filled by those
whose wealth would be channelled into the upkeep of their units, offering
in return official recognition of this commitment through marketability of
the office and some potential for investment return. One obvious cost of
this system was in the blocking of military promotion to those who lacked
the capital resources to purchase a company or regiment, and the very
rapid promotion of those whose financial resources, rather than military
skill and experience, gave them the wherewithal to purchase the unit and
to sustain the subsequent financial burdens of its management. This did
not necessarily mean that the regiment or company was badly led and run:
large numbers of units were run by competent and experienced lieutenant
colonels and company lieutenants acting as captains. But it generated the
tensions and resentments that non-professional barriers to promotion
would inevitably establish. The other cost was that the much-vaunted
administrative initiatives and controls identified with these standing
armies – the commissioners, inspectors, intendants – were in reality prag-
matic and limited agents of central authorities; these in turn recognized
that the military officers were engaged in the financing of the war machine
and that the administrators needed to tread carefully around issues of
discipline, moderate levels of financial misappropriation and proprietary
interest.119 Above all, the system turned proprietary officer corps across
Europe into a distinct caste, increasingly professional as the length of their
service increased, but acutely aware of points of social status within the
hierarchy, and easily capable of mirroring factional and dynastic rivalries

through insubordinate, disruptive and assertive behaviour.120 The prob-
lem of socially motivated military insubordination was universal from
Lisbon to Moscow throughout the ancien régime, but seems to have
reached its height at the princely level in the Empire.121
The contractor state

Regimental and company ownership was an important aspect of continu-
ity in the management of armies long after any supposed mid-
seventeenth-century watershed, and because it raises issues of control,
of discipline and regulation of soldiers, as well as, ultimately, debates
about the conflict between nobility and wealth, merit and service, it
deserves attention.122 But by far the largest and most significant continu-
ity between army organization before and after 1650 was the extensive
structure of provisioning, clothing, arms and munitions manufacturing,
army transportation and contracts to carry out maintenance, repairs and
construction of fortresses, siege-works or barracks. In all matters con-
nected with the supply and maintenance of armies and of military support
systems, private contracting remained unchallenged. Down to the 1780s
in France the basic bread rations for all of the armies continued to be
provided by major contractors, munitionnaires, often operating as consor-
tia, who negotiated the terms for supply with the central authorities, then
organized the amassing of grain, milling, baking, and distribution of bread
through their financial contacts, networks of producers, and their exten-
sive webs of agents and employees. Other food supplies over and above
the basic pain de munition were more often provided by local contractors
operating with the individual armies and, in many cases when opportunity
permitted, purchasing their supplies from cross-border sources.123 Only
the amassing and distribution of forage for the cavalry was handled
directly by state administrators, an area of the supply service that the
historian of the Seven Years War, Lee Kennett, singles out for particular
criticism on grounds of negligence, administrative incompetence and
fraud.124 More characteristically, the provision of weaponry and the trans-
port of goods to the armies were systematically outsourced to private
contractors.125
Such contractual systems of army supply were replicated across
Europe, in particular the widespread tendency to negotiate large-scale
provisioning contracts from the centre with individuals or consortia who
were strongly placed in their access to money, supplies and distribution
facilities.126 Foremost amongst the Kriegsfaktoren who supplied the
Imperial armies from the later seventeenth century was the powerful and
The contractor state 301
influential Vienna-based financier and munitions contractor, Samuel

Oppenheimer.127 In 1702, for example, Oppenheimer received a com-
mission to provide 21,000 new flintlock muskets for the Imperial infantry
in addition to his already substantial roles in provisioning and supplying
munitions.128 The advantage for the central government, as in France,
was that it allowed these large supply and equipment contracts to be
negotiated within the complex, tight-knit and overlapping milieu of gov-
ernment ministers, private financiers and officials concerned with the
collection and distribution of tax revenues.
The focus on large-scale contracts negotiated at the centre could be
dangerous. In comparison with the regular and sometimes open negotia-
tions in most states over the purchase of tax farms by consortia of finan-
ciers, it is striking just how little attempt was made to put military supply
contracts for army or navy out to competitive tender.129 The rationale of
relying on known, reliable contractors rather than whoever offered to meet
the contract most cheaply, perhaps by skimping on quality of goods
purchased or the distribution infrastructure, was obvious and universally
acknowledged. But dependence on known and reliable contractors could
become self-defeating, overly focusing activities through a handful of men
known to the court.130 Oppenheimer’s supply contracts were supple-
mented by massive loans to the Habsburg monarchy which overstretched
even his extensive network of financial resources and connections.131 His
sudden death in 1703 precipitated the bankruptcy of his firm, and threat-
ened to undermine the entire financial/logistical base of the Habsburg war
effort.132 In 1709 the imminent bankruptcy of Samuel Bernard was to
present the same threat to the already desperate military situation of the
French armies. The problem of concentrating so much of the financial
and military-supply operations in few hands was compounded when these
turned out to be lacking in precisely the experience and skills that reliance
on the private sector was supposed to supply. Marc-René, marquis de
Montalembert, used his court connections to obtain a large-scale contract
to supply iron cannon to the French navy in the 1750s, and then both
completely failed to meet the terms of the contract and managed to
obstruct any attempt to replace him with a more effective entrepreneur.133
It is easy to construct a patchwork using selective examples of contrac-
tors’ fraud, incompetence and poor performance to validate the assump-
tion that state-controlled and government-managed logistical systems
represented an obvious and uncontroversial improvement, a necessary
step forward into a modern military organization. Yet failures and dangers
amongst contractors need to be kept in proportion. The governments of
the ancien régime persisted in using contractors to supply their armies not
through self-delusion or collusion in fraudulent practice, but because they
had no doubt that the system worked better, more flexibly and more
cheaply than the creation of a state-run and -financed supply corps. On
the one hand, there was a widely shared awareness that any specifically
created government system would suffer from a comparative lack of the
skills, experience and flexibility possessed by networks of established
merchants and producers.134 On the other, setting aside an extravagant
public rhetoric and a few egregious examples, in reality corruption was far
from endemic amongst contractors, and state employees operating a
supply corps would be quite capable of exceeding systematically any
graft and fraud practised by their private counterparts. Even apparently
model ‘bureaucracies’, such as the British excise administration and the
militarized officials who collected the excise and the contributions from
the Prussian territories, have been subject to substantial historical revi-
sionism as their inefficiencies, inflexibility and compromises with estab-
lished interests have been given more attention.135
Recent work on the supply of the British armies and fleet in the eight-
eenth century has made the same point on the basis of substantial and
persuasive evidence: ‘the remarkable feature of contracting in eighteenth-
century Britain was its efficiency . . . One can see a glaring double standard
in historical studies relating to contractors.’136 The success of contracting,
and its ability to satisfy the operational needs of army and navy, under-
pinned a substantial growth in the use of contracting through the eight-
eenth century. By 1763, as Gordon Bannerman illustrates in his study of
British army contractors, government had expanded its use of contracting
for all aspects of military supply and had tested its capacities through a
series of conflicts culminating in the operations of the Seven Years War.
The duties of military commissaries were almost entirely confined to
monitoring the activities of contractors; as in France, only the collection
of forage typically remained a concern for military officials.137 The expan-
sion of contracting was just as marked in the administration of the navy.
Shipbuilding itself, gun and cannon-ball founding, copper and lead min-
ing and manufacturing, rope making, manufacture of equipment and
uniforms, all drew upon the resources of the private manufacturers and
supplies. The Victualling Board served to coordinate the vast mass of
contracts by which the navy was fed and supplied with munitions.138
Despite the royal shipyards at Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth, the
Navy Board considered it essential throughout the eighteenth century to
turn to private shipyards to build and maintain part of the fleet, and
especially to respond to war-driven surges in demand.139 Between 1793
and 1815 some 71 per cent of naval tonnage was the product of private
shipyards, and only the very largest ninety- or one hundred-gun ships
were always built in royal dockyards.140 Where the contracting differed
The contractor state 303
from that of Continental states was in the greater willingness of both army
and navy officials to make use of large numbers of smaller manufacturers,
merchants and suppliers to meet their needs.141 The Victualling Board,
for example, was willing to sacrifice the potential convenience of handling
contracting through large-scale suppliers in order to maintain a more
flexible and perhaps more secure system of small-scale contracts. It
remained the case here that reliability and efficiency weighed heavily in
decisions about making and renewing contracts.142 Use of smaller-scale
contractors was not an attempt to stimulate cost-cutting, and contractors
were more likely to be appointed on the basis of their known reputation,
reliability and experience, while the outsider offering a deceptively cheap
tender would be rejected.
The developing system of contracting for military and naval supply was
undertaken not primarily to save money, but because it did the job better
than a state-run alternative. Private contracting offered, as it had done at
the time of the Thirty Years War, access to a much wider range of markets,
both domestic and foreign, in which a supply administration of govern-
ment officials would have found it difficult or impossible to deal – whether
for organizational or political reasons. It offered specialized expertise in
the face of complex and often diffuse markets: as in an earlier age, private
contractors were better at gathering together the relatively small-scale
production from many different locations or markets and concentrating
its delivery to meet the needs of the armed forces. Behind this lay the
enduring problems of gaining technical expertise and specialist skills in
manufacturing, supply and transport, of bringing together diffuse local
and regional markets to meet military demand, reducing costs and obtain-
ing credit.143 Moreover, the state could make use of a large-scale, diverse
and efficient system of manufacturing and supply without having to
capitalize its structure and operations on any significant scale, as would
have been the case if the decision was taken to set up a supply corps. While
it was accepted by all those directly involved in negotiations that contracts
would – and should – incorporate a reasonable level of profitability, as
with the figures cited in Chapter 5 for the purchase and transport of
gunpowder in the United Provinces for Genoese military needs in the
1620s, the profits were by no means outrageous or unreasonable given the
levels of risk run by the contractors.144 For the majority of states, and in
comparison with the extortionate costs of anticipating tax revenues via
short-term loans, military provisioning under contract was good value.
This was especially true given that contracting was much more adaptable
to the rhythms of war and peace; the contractor bore the risk of over-
stocking with military goods which might then need to be sold in a glutted,
post-war market. He took the risks of building up an infrastructure of
agents, negotiating transport contracts and dealing with the security or

decay of his supplies. And if the contractors had to absorb the risk of rapid
demobilizations from war to peace, they were no less the active parties in
using their networks, connections and access to resources to meet surges
of demand, whether for shipbuilding, fortress repairs or the equipping and
feeding of an army that had multiplied in size with the beginning of war.
As long as the fiscal-military state still drew a distinction between peace-
time establishments and wartime military mobilization, and needed to
move rapidly between the two, contractors provided them with a better
and more efficient means to achieve this than any obvious alternative.
Nor was the logic of enlisting private resources and expertise restricted
to the states of ancien régime Europe. Chinese Qing armies of the later
seventeenth and the eighteenth century were supplied in wartime through
a combination of a state-managed logistical system for procurement and,
in a new departure, extensive contracts with private suppliers and trans-
port operatives. This deployment of shangyun (transport by merchants) by
common agreement worked well, and facilitated a series of eighteenth-
century military campaigns on the Mongolian steppe and other far-flung
campaign theatres.145 Far from being dispensable grit in the state
machine, some hangover from a dark age of unrestricted profiteering
based on weak and underdeveloped state administration, supply and
manufacturing contractors were a central and growing element of early
modern military organization.
Conclusion
The most extensive and wide-ranging study of military enterprise as an
economic system is provided in Fritz Redlich’s monumental German
Military Enterpriser and his Work Force. The subtitle to the third and final
section gives an unambiguous indication of the approach to the subject
after 1650: ‘The Decay and Demise of Military Entrepreneurship’. After
nearly half a century, Redlich’s work still offers by far the most detailed
account of German military proprietorship. His approach therefore con-
tributes powerfully to the general perception that after 1650 a process of
inexorable decline occurred, each stage representing a further enfeeble-
ment of a system which had lost its raison d’être by the end of the Thirty
Years War.
Yet an alternative interpretation can be taken from the evidence. Military
organization after 1650 was characterized by a new series of private–public
partnerships between rulers, their administrations and various types of
military contractors, partnerships which were of themselves no more inher-
ently unstable and unworkable than their predecessors. As before, rulers
Conclusion 305
confronted the essential reality that military force on the scale that they
deemed necessary to secure their political objectives could only be mobi-
lized and maintained through the financial and organizational support of
their own elites or other, external sources of military force and funding. The
benefits for the ruler came through mobilizing otherwise unattainable
financial resources to raise more, better-equipped and better-provisioned
armed forces, and increasing levels of organizational competence and
flexibility in negotiating supply, manufacturing and transport of support
services. Early modern rulers, despite the implicit assumptions of Redlich
and other historians writing about military enterprise, held no a priori
assumptions about the practical superiority of state-controlled military
organization, even if in a few documented cases they may have expressed,
as did successive kings of Spain, an ideological preference for such central
administración. Indeed, the working knowledge that the latter would not
deliver comparable results in terms of efficiency and flexibility was the
strongest inducement to pursue the range of partnerships with private
capital and organization that have been examined in this chapter.
Moreover it should not be assumed that the direction in which these
state–private partnerships would move was inevitably further down the
path towards a preponderant state interest in the control of armies and
navies, albeit still underpinned with massive levels of private investment,
organization and support. Even in the later seventeenth century, it was still
possible to return to altogether more autonomous military activity. Under
the overwhelming fiscal pressure of the War of the League of Augsburg
(1689–97), the French Atlantic navy provides an example of how a radical
redrafting of the public–private partnership was still possible, turning the
clock back to an earlier style of military organization. Despite the success
of the Colbertian navy at the battle of Béveziers in July 1690, the inability
of the state to maintain even partial funding for both army and navy led to
a series of decisions by which the main Atlantic fleet was effectively
dissolved in 1694/5. The great majority of the larger-rated vessels were
simply laid up in the ports. The individual captains were offered letters of
marque, and encouraged to pursue their own financial interests via a
guerre de course to be sustained as long as the war lasted. Many of those
financiers and merchants who under Colbert’s aegis had been granted
lucrative contracts for building, maintaining and provisioning the navy
shifted their activities across to funding this wholesale privateering activ-
ity. They joined forces with a substantial number of merchant-skippers
who either had been involved in privateering previously or now saw in the
collapse of the navy the end of any chance of protection for legitimate
maritime activity. All of this was now organized at a local, sometimes
individual level, in business association with the venture capital of the
same fiscal-mercantile interests who under Colbert had previously funded

the ‘royal’ navy.146 The bottom line for the king’s government, hopelessly
overstrained by the costs of warfare, was not to try to constrain the naval
captains and the financial cartels to fund a conventional naval force
compatible with the crown’s direct control of military resources. The
financial and strategic case was put with absolute clarity by Marshal
Vauban in his Mémoire concernant la course: the only option that would
keep the captains and officers in service, and would allow France to retain
some naval presence, was total decentralization and the return to full-scale
contracting on the basis of privateering.147
A similar crisis and response was to overwhelm the French navy during
the War of the Spanish Succession, with an equally deliberate decision to
rely on privateering in place of maintaining a state-controlled navy of rated
warships.148 In the decades following the Peace of Utrecht (1713) a state-
controlled French navy based on rated ships of the line was re-established.
Vauban’s advocacy of privateering had not minced words in insisting that
there was a strategic price to be paid in abandoning a high seas fleet by a
nation with colonial and trading networks and an extensive and poten-
tially vulnerable coastline. Linking these strategic concerns to the dynastic
priorities and perceptions involved in waging war ensured that the
rebuilding of the king’s navy was a foregone conclusion. Yet the price
was equally predictable: as the French crown struggled through the eight-
eenth century to sustain the exorbitant costs of major armed forces on
land and at sea, the navy inevitably bore the brunt of a struggle for
resources which failed to match military needs.149 As long as an assertive
rhetoric of state control outran the capacity of the state itself either to
provide adequate support for its armed forces or to tailor its strategic and
operational perspectives to the limits of this support, private investment
and organization still had the potential to expand its remit and activities in
order to fill the gap. When the role of private enterprise in warfare came
under threat and finally disappeared in the late eighteenth century, it was
for reasons that owed nothing to an assessment of its actual effectiveness.
7 Conclusion
To win a war you do not need to score a ‘perfect ten’ in military

excellence, you just have to perform better, perhaps less badly, than the
enemy.1
What has been insufficiently discussed . . . is the crucial evidence of the
inefficiency, waste and the clear and straightforward corruption that for
centuries has accompanied the preparations for war, to the point where it
would perhaps be possible to write a ‘history of peculation’.2
The traditional depiction of early modern military contracting bears some

resemblance to accounts of the age of the dinosaurs which my generation
encountered as children in the 1960s. Dinosaurs (then treated as a single
generic life-form, like mercenaries and military contracting) were slow,
lumbering and ineffectual. They survived essentially because at the outset
they faced no serious competition, and by sheer size could dominate a
given environment. But they were ‘obviously’ doomed to extinction when
set against warm-blooded mammals with their adaptability, speed and
evolutionary potential, and the story of the dinosaurs was presented as one
of increasingly unsustainable developments in size, in ever-more elaborate
defensive carapaces, horns and spikes, and ever-greater dependence on
very specific conditions from which they could derive enough food for
survival. The obvious question of why such self-evident evolutionary
losers should have managed to dominate life on earth for 140 million
years was just beginning to be asked at a popular level in the 1960s, but
had not yet challenged the general assumptions which suggested that the
story was one of physiological and adaptive failure.
Yet in subsequent decades understanding of dinosaurs has undergone a
revolution. Lazy habits of speech ensure that the traditional associations
and assumptions have not entirely vanished, but they coexist with a
scientific consensus that the dinosaurs were extraordinarily adaptable,
307
308 Conclusion
resilient forms of vertebrate life, able to dominate different environments,

climates and competitors over unimaginably long periods of time.
Military contracting, easily dismissed under the generalized and unspe-
cific category of ‘(hiring) mercenaries’, is in need of a similar, more
thoughtful evaluation. The devolution of military organization and con-
trol into the hands of private contractors was hugely more diverse, effec-
tive and adaptable as a means to organize and deploy military force than
previous historical accounts have indicated. Far from being a marginal
and transient phenomenon in the history of European warfare, it was a
lasting and successful set of mechanisms which, in various relations with
rulers and their authority, lay at the heart of war-waging for centuries. This
was no self-defeating and wilful adoption of what was self-evidently a
historical dead-end, but a system capable of adapting to meet rapidly
changing military and political requirements and challenges, retaining
those elements which could ensure resilience and effectiveness and adapt-
ing or jettisoning others as political or military circumstances dictated.
The previous chapters have sought to demonstrate that almost none of
the systems of private enterprise adopted by early modern rulers involved
a total capitulation of control and responsibility by the warlord, with the
implication that the ultimate aims and objectives of rulers and their states
were simply abandoned to the financial and personal self-interest of the
contractors and their workforce. There are remarkably few Wallensteins
in the story of military contracting, and most respectable historiography
doubts that Wallenstein’s own action – his ‘treason’ in apparently defying
the Emperor in early 1634 – was at root more than a dispute over the
militarily practical in a situation where the preservation of his army was
the key imperative for both political and military authorities. The often
subtle balance of public and private involvement in military activity, with
the same senior officers acknowledging their position as both private
investors and subjects of a ruler with considerable interests in the political
and social status quo, militated against disloyalty. When Wallenstein’s
enemies persuaded the Emperor to move against him, it was striking how
few of the Generalissimo’s senior officers were prepared to waver in their
loyalty to the Emperor.3
Military enterprise was not a recklessly deployed double-edged sword
placed in the hands of inherently disloyal condottieri. Nor was it a crude
and ineffectual bludgeon, as damaging to subjects as to enemies, and
incapable of achieving decisive military results. Enough has been said
about the ways in which force deployed by those who saw themselves as
shareholders in both the military effectiveness of their forces, and also
their long-term sustainability, was, by the standards of the period, flexible,
adaptable and cost-efficient. It was not enough to preserve an army, or
Conclusion 309
indeed a force of experienced privateers like Colaert’s Dunkirkers, by

passivity or small-scale raiding; success meant a level of risk, achieving
operational advantages which could be built upon over entire campaigns,
and involved systematically damaging both the territory and the military
resources of enemy powers. These goals were best secured by delegating
most operational responsibility to commanders of forces with an invest-
ment in one or more units and to their shareholder-officers, and counting
on them to pursue the goal of deploying limited resources in a way that
combined maximum striking power with the imperative of preventing the
dissolution of the force through ill-conceived and logistically ill-supported
operations. While this would by no means always bring success, and some
commanders mastered this art of warfare better than others, it achieved
vastly more than cursory and prejudiced overviews of the Thirty Years
War would suggest.
After the Thirty Years War and into the eighteenth century the imper-
atives behind the organization and control of military force changed again
in various distinct ways, and with them the broad character of military
enterprise. These imperatives included the assertion of the direct author-
ity of the ruler over the armed forces as a crucial mark of sovereignty; the
fashion for establishing a core of permanent troops (‘standing armies’)
directly under the financial and administrative control of the state; various
factors and influences in European politics which exponentially ratcheted
up the overall size of armies. The model of military proprietorship
changed from one of operational control delegated to armies that were
largely made up of colonels who owned their regiments directly and whose
ownership was a crucial factor in the conduct of campaigning, to one in
which the financial and proprietary interests of unit commanders were
harnessed within a military structure in which the authority and control of
the ruler and his agents was far more assertively maintained. In some cases
the proprietary interest was expressed through a straightforward system of
venality, emphasizing that the office itself, and not the unit of soldiers, was
the property of the officer. In other cases, the colonel, or latterly the
captain, was encouraged to engage in the ‘business of the unit’ – investing
and recouping profit from equipping, clothing and sometimes feeding his
soldiers, or in the case of the Dutch navy, his sailors – but as a sideline to
his duties as an employee of the crown, beholden to the military instruc-
tions of senior officers. These commanding officers made their military
decisions less as commander-proprietors with delegated authority and
aware that their unit officers were shareholders in the military enterprise,
than as the agents of the crown and its military advisers, who would almost
invariably maintain more control over military operations, allocation of
resources and strategic priorities.
310 Conclusion
Yet if the traditional role of the military enterpriser was overshadowed

in the decades from 1650 to 1750, this was not in order to create armed
forces which were comprehensively under the direct administration of the
state. The shift of the role of the army and unit commanders away from
being self-financing enterprisers with a strong private interest in the
effective conduct of warfare was accompanied by the spectacular rise of
the military contractor. As armies grew dramatically larger in the later
seventeenth century, so opportunities for equipping, supplying, trans-
porting and in the short-term, financing them grew to match. The con-
tracts might be made by the central government, or by its agents in the
field, and on occasions by army commanders delegated or driven into the
role, but the response of the ancien régime state to the entire panoply of
logistical and operational needs for its armed forces was overwhelmingly
to delegate the organization into the hands of private manufacturers,
suppliers, merchants and transporters. A concern to assert the principle
of the ruler’s sovereignty over the military hierarchy and the control of
military operations was not accompanied by any similar concern to con-
trol directly the supply and service infrastructure of the armed forces.
The ‘fiscal-military’ state and military enterprise

The issues of direct versus contractual control of armed force can under-
score the extent to which the present book is part of a broader historical
debate about the role of war and military organization in state-formation.
The arguments presented in successive chapters are intended as a chal-
lenge to the pervasive notion that one of the fundamental indicators of
modernity and the rise of the state in Europe is the direct – political and
administrative – control of armed force. As noted in the introduction,
Charles Tilly’s adage that war made the state and the state made war
encapsulates a central strand in thinking about political transformations
and power, from the essays of Otto Hintze through successive generations
of historians of state-building. Implicit in that thinking is the assumption
that the only effective way in which the state’s ‘monopoly over the means
of violence’ could be asserted was through the direct control of those
means of violence, a process which parallels the bureaucratization of
systems of revenue-raising. Instead, we have encountered a picture of
mediated or delegated military authority and organization persisting,
and in some cases growing, throughout the early modern period. Yet in
the context of recent early modern historiography, this alternative picture
is perhaps less surprising.
The traditional historical picture of the ‘absolutist state’, with its
assumed concentration of coercive power and authority in the hands of
The ‘fiscal-military’ state and military enterprise 311
the ruler and a bureaucratic, accountable and professional administration,

has been under attack for the past three or four decades. The hallmark of
most recent monographic and generalizing/synthetic studies of early mod-
ern European government, the character of its administration and the
dynamics of central–local relations, has been scepticism about the grow-
ing power and capabilities of the state. Traditional accounts of absolutist
regimes drew little distinction between the legislative intentions of gov-
ernment and its capacity for practical enforcement, and took the rhetoric
of monarchs and their ministers as an account of a successful transforma-
tion of relations between rulers and the ruled. In contrast, recent works
have emphasized the persistent weakness and limited reach of the early
modern state, even in the hands of an unchallenged ruler or a closely
cooperating ruling elite. In matters such as the imposition of religious
uniformity, policing and social order, economic regulation, censorship
and control of opinion, governments either compromised and negotiated
local support for their initiatives, or failed to achieve more than a fraction
of their declared objectives.4
This failure was unsurprising. The scale, competence and resources of
early modern governments have been greatly overestimated, and their
capacity to achieve objectives correspondingly exaggerated. This was
true of the sixteenth century and remained the case through the seven-
teenth and, in many cases, beyond. Where a central regime acquired a
large number of administrators on the ground, as was the case in France,
the driving motivation was fiscal, not administrative: selling offices with
the explicit purpose of raising funds from a wealthy elite who became in
turn proprietors of the offices and their functions. In so far as they could
be threatened for non-cooperation, it was more through challenges to
proprietary rights implied by the creation of new office-holders than by
any attempts to impose norms of performance or effectiveness in enforc-
ing the decrees of central government. Elsewhere administrations where
the agents were directly employees of the crown typically remained small,
overburdened, and staffed by favour and established influence or direct
patronage. Seeing in these structures an embryonic bureaucracy of moti-
vated and specialized officials, cooperating closely and independently of
external influences to enforce the directives of an ever-more exigent
central state authority, is an anachronistic imposition of what, even in
the nineteenth century, may have been an idealized view of the capabilities
of government.5
In most areas where it sought to influence the lives of subjects, the
capacity of early modern central government to achieve goals was con-
strained, whether by small numbers of officials, or by inefficient and
overlapping layers of responsibility and accountability established for
312 Conclusion
financial rather than administrative motives. Officials worked within the

constraints of fiscal, legal and territorial privilege at almost every level of
early modern society, and encountered provincial, institutional and indi-
vidual autonomy, influence and obstructionism just as inevitably. Far
from embodying the cutting edge of nascent absolutism and the ‘well-
ordered police-state’, government and its administrators in early modern
Europe remained emphatically small – whether absolutely or function-
ally – and limited in range, capacity and aspiration. Studies of supposed
‘confessionalization’ within the state, control of criminality and social
deviance, enforcement of economic and social regulation, increasingly
work from an assumption of the weakness and ineffectiveness of the state’s
administrative power, rather than its capacity directly to shape the lives of
its subjects.
That government initiatives and policies pursued by early modern
European rulers were not a stark litany of failure, inertia and confrontation
has been widely attributed to an alternative model, that of government
consensus, concession and collaboration which since the 1980s has
formed an ever-more explicit presence in early modern political history.
European rulers and their governments worked within existing structures
of elite power and influence, not against them. This might entail taking
policies in directions that satisfied the aspirations of these elites – whether
these were social, fiscal, religious or cultural. Or it could involve guaran-
teeing and upholding elite interests as the price of gaining cooperation and
active support for enforcing policies – whether heavier fiscal demands,
the pursuit of unpopular war, or the enforcement of outward religious
compliance, for example – upon the rest of the ruler’s subjects. Such
compromises raise fundamental questions about the autonomy and effec-
tiveness of state administration, but they have been used as a convincing
tool to explain how potentially disastrous confrontations between high-
handed government policies and entrenched elites in the first half of the
seventeenth century – the central European Habsburg lands, France,
England, the Spanish monarchy, numerous smaller Germanic and
Italian states – may have been avoided later in the century and beyond.
However, such explanations in terms of working with, rather than
against, the wider interests of established political and social elites pose
no fewer problems. Such arguments assume that early modern rulers,
recognizing the administrative and coercive weakness of their govern-
ment, explicitly or tacitly conceded that they needed to cooperate with
their elites in policy-making and enforcement. This certainly implies
respect for embedded fiscal, judicial and institutional privilege, and may
involve potentially substantial elite involvement in a non-professional and
self-serving administration. Yet such a recognition that compromise and
respect for established interests are the price of support for policies sits
awkwardly with the knowledge that many European states by the later
seventeenth century had achieved an exponential increase in their ability
to tap their subjects’ financial resources and to spend these on raising and
maintaining unprecedented military forces.
As noted earlier in the book, the first clear and permanent increase in
the scale of military resources maintained by the major powers after the
mid-sixteenth century comes in the decades from the 1670s. The long-
term increase in military establishments in the later seventeenth century,
above all when the hugely increased costs of navies are added to land
forces, is unprecedented until the armies of the French Revolutionary
Wars. Yet the costs and the burdens of raising and maintaining these
forces were sustained on the back of societies and economies that experi-
enced, in most cases, limited or no economic growth and demographic
stagnation or decline. Confrontational and aggressive fiscal policies in
France during the 1630s and 1640s had failed to provide sufficient
resources to raise and maintain an army that was around a quarter of the
size of the forces maintained by Louis XIV in the Nine Years War. It is
therefore hard to see how this supposedly ‘consensual’ later regime,
respecting the privileges of the French elites and allowing the full burden
of taxation to rest on the impoverished and unprivileged, would find the
wherewithal to sustain its unprecedented war effort. The case for the
French state in the 1690s could equally be applied to the Spanish mon-
archy a generation earlier, or the Swedish state of the Vasas: how did
regimes with such apparently restricted access to fiscal and material
resources and without the capacity for coercion of their privileged subjects
manage to raise and maintain these massively increased military
establishments?
This challenge underpins a major shift in thinking about the nature of
early modern state power, and can be summarized in the shift of nomen-
clature from the ‘absolutist state’, with its assumptions about a general
level of unconditional authority and coercive power in the hands of the
ruler, to the ever-more widespread use of the term ‘fiscal-military state’ in
an early modern context. The concept of the ‘fiscal-military state’ gets to
the heart of a system of government whose priorities were focused on a
primary objective: the efficient raising – and spending – of money to
achieve the state’s military objectives in a competitive environment in
which the capacity to mobilize ever-larger military resources appeared
crucial to political success and failure. It is because the raising and main-
tenance of military force is identified as the fundamental concern and key
priority of the government and its administrators that political systems
which seem riddled with fiscal exemptions, institutional and individual
314 Conclusion
interests, corruption and patrimonialism, can support what seem like

unsustainably heavy and extensive military burdens. The concept has
none of the broad reach and supposed political aims implied by the
‘absolutist state’, and carries few implications of a more general ‘passage
to modernity’. What it offers is a synthesis of ideas about the role – and
crucially the limitations – of state power in early modern Europe.
The original use of the concept, first disseminated by John Brewer in his
account of the war-driven development of the fiscal apparatus of the late
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English state, did postulate a
remarkable transformation of fiscal administration. Brewer used the par-
liamentary monarchy of England, and its development of a highly effec-
tive, proto-bureaucratic administration for the imposition and collection
of the excise taxes, to challenge the frequently assumed link between the
European absolutist monarchies and a more effective mobilization of
military capacity.6 Raising substantial resources to finance war need not
be about military coercion and militarized fiscal administration, and
efficient systems of tax extraction could develop in states dependent
upon elite consensus in political and fiscal policies. The English system
was driven from the 1690s by the needs of financing warfare, waged on an
unprecedented scale. Subsequent historians have raised questions about
the extent to which Brewer’s model overestimates the bureaucratic effi-
ciency and modernity of the excise administration, but this has been in
order to stress still further the dependence on compromise and coopera-
tion with established groups and interests within the state.7 The effect of
this has been to diminish the argument for English exceptionalism, and to
spread the concept of the fiscal-military state much more widely across
early modern Europe; a means to explain the general phenomenon of
states with apparently limited governmental and fiscal ‘reach’ into their
societies nonetheless achieving high levels of military mobilization.
To date, the majority of detailed studies related to the fiscal-military
state have sought to examine the ways in which rulers could focus their
limited political and administrative authority on maximizing the financial
resources that could be made available for military activity. Recent stud-
ies, for example, have risen to the challenge of explaining how the French
monarchy in the last three decades of Louis XIV’s reign managed, despite
its apparent dependence on the cooperation of local and institutional
elites, to squeeze huge sums out of the kingdom for the support of the
war effort. It did so precisely from these elites, whose wealth, untapped by
direct taxation until 1695, represented a vast reservoir of immediate
financial support and potential collateral for loans. In innumerable cases
the price of gaining these financial resources was the permanent reinforce-
ment and stabilization of the office-holding and political rights of these
elites. The magistrates of the Parlement of Dijon, who paid over huge sums
to the crown, gained ever-tighter legal guarantees of the property rights in
their own offices so that they could use their value as collateral in raising
loans.8 In general the exploitation of venality of office, and the raising of
massive loans from institutions and their individual members, was bought
at the price of permanently reinforcing their privileges and autonomy
within the political system. But as the aim was the maximizing of fiscal
resources for the war effort, not the creation of some model of unimpeded
central authority exercised by an ‘absolutist’ crown, the bartering contin-
ued down to and beyond the end of the Sun King’s reign.
Whether seen in the relationship of the French crown with its ‘Fourth
Estate’, or the relationship of the Spanish crown with the great aristocratic
families whose financial and military support helped to sustain the war
effort down to 1659, the impact was the same: resources to boost the war
effort were bought through selling out on conventional notions of state-
formation through the centralization and concentration of authority and
the erosion of autonomous rights and privileges.9 In most respects an
autonomous state administration continued relatively weak and under-
developed, except in its ability to mobilize military resources.
If discussions of the fiscal-military state have focused on the fiscal,
rather than the military, side of its operations, there is certainly scope
to consider the latter as part of the explanation for the remarkable and
growing military capacity of the European state-system after 1670.
Raising unprecedented revenues from taxation and other sources,
expanding access to credit, and tapping wealth which lay well outside
the normal reach of government, was one key to sustaining unprecedented
military resources. Equally important is the effectiveness or otherwise with
which that money was spent on waging and sustaining war. A state like
Sweden, if forced to rely on its own modest fiscal resources to wage
warfare, could only hope to sustain its armies and navies through greater
efficiencies and more careful management than might be the case for
France or Russia. But in all cases the question of how effectively these
financial resources were used deserves some of the attention that has
previously been devoted to obtaining them in the first place.10 In this
context military enterprise and military outsourcing to private contractors
occupy far more than the marginal historical role to which conventional
accounts of European state-formation would consign them. Instead of
being unimportant throwbacks to a pre-modern world of uncontrolled
condottiere and militarized ‘overmighty’ subjects, the implications of rely-
ing in whole or part on contracted military force become central to the
mobilization capacity of the fiscal-military state. Indeed the debate about
whether historians should discuss ‘fiscal-military’ or ‘military-fiscal’ states
316 Conclusion
would seem to have particular relevance to a discussion in which the

manner in which troops were raised and maintained might have as many
implications for the military capacity of the belligerent state as the fiscal
resources that it was able to mobilize for immediate war-waging.11
On this basis, the development and subsequent evolution of military
enterprise lies at the heart of the formation of the military-fiscal state, for it
represents a vital and enduring set of mechanisms by which European
rulers could achieve a more extensive and effective mobilization of private
resources than would otherwise have been possible from their own fiscal
and administrative capacities.
This is most obviously true of the period from 1550 to 1650, when most
European rulers faced major domestic or external threats to their terri-
torial authority, and possessed a very limited, and in some cases diminish-
ing, capacity to tax or otherwise extract the financial resources of their
subjects to face these threats. The flourishing of military enterprise as the
optimal means to mobilize military resources comes as no great surprise in
this context, indeed can be seen as the ‘first phase’ of the formation of
the military-fiscal state. Access to the financial resources, organizational
expertise, and networks of recruitment, manufacturing and distribution of
enterpriser-colonels and commanders was the obvious response of embat-
tled rulers, aware that without this they could neither raise nor maintain
more than a fraction of the military forces that their engagement with the
resources and organization of enterprisers made possible. On the other
side, enterprise had the additional advantage of satisfying the financial,
social, and to some extent political aspirations amongst the military enter-
prisers. Enterprisers were invited to contribute to the costs of raising and
maintaining military resources as active shareholders in warfare which
might bring them financial profits, certainly brought them enhanced or
confirmed social status, and in many cases reinforced their political stand-
ing and aspirations in their relations with the ruler. If the ruler sacrificed
direct authority of the sort that he may have possessed over earlier forces of
directly recruited troops and hired mercenaries, the benefit lay in forging
military systems that were, in the face of the financial, organizational
and administrative weaknesses of the century down to 1650, the best
available. In the face of the weaknesses, limitations, incoherence and
corruption of state administration, this was the most effective means of
mobilizing resources for rulers who pursued the priorities of the early
military-fiscal state.
After 1650 the ‘second phase’ of the development of the military-fiscal
state, seen through the mechanisms of military enterprise and outsourc-
ing, looks more familiar. As we have seen, most states moved away from
the earlier use of more or less autonomous military contracting as a means
The eclipse of military enterprise 317
to sideline inadequate, ineffective state administration and its compre-

hensive fiscal weakness. This was replaced in the later seventeenth century
with a more overtly collaborative model, in which a larger and more
regular element of state-distributed finance, greater administrative con-
trol, especially over military policy-making and overall military authority,
was combined with a continuing financial/organizational role for officers
and massive and growing reliance on the outsourcing of supply, manu-
facturing and support functions to private contractors. Public–private
partnership lay at the heart of the fiscal-military state, whether in the
form of venality that persuaded the elites to invest in their military units,
or in the dependence on armaments and supply contracting which
enlisted the connections, organization and resources of a commercial
elite for profit, but far more efficiently than a state administration would
have achieved. Seen in terms of states whose raison d’être was the optimi-
zation of military resources, the survival and flourishing of such partner-
ships throughout the ancien régime is unsurprising. Shorn of an ideology of
state-building, these mechanisms were simply better, more flexible and
more capable of maximizing the military capacity of the state than any
attempt to build up comprehensive direct control of military force would
have been. That they may also have maintained close ties between ruler
and elite subjects, creating vital shared interests in the sustainable financ-
ing, waging and supply of war, was another tangible benefit even if it was
not overtly recognized by the practitioners.
The eclipse of military enterprise?

It might thus seem that the persistence and evolving character of private
involvement in the organization and waging of warfare was a foregone
conclusion, sealed by increasing emphasis on the financial and organiza-
tional priorities of the fiscal-military state. Yet from the later eighteenth
century military enterprise all but disappears in Europe for a couple of
centuries. It is this that makes the argument for the durability and effec-
tiveness of military enterprise and the ‘business of war’ a necessary cor-
rective and challenge to assumptions about a more ‘natural’ direction for
state–military relations. How should the apparent anomaly of the rise of
armed forces that were fully financed and organized by state administra-
tors be explained? If the fiscal-military state was built on the opportunities
and benefits that private involvement in warfare offered, why should these
have been abandoned?
The age of Louis XIV unleashed a growth in armies and navies which
was never subsequently retrenched. This hugely increased the expense of
European warfare on both land and sea. Initially, as we have seen, the
318 Conclusion
financial and organizational burden of such unparalleled military forces

offered advantages to military enterprisers: there had never been more
foreign mercenaries in French service than in the last two wars of Louis
XIV’s reign, even if they represented a smaller proportion of the total
army; more than ever, rulers needed to encourage the financial support of
their militarized elites in their attempts to square the circle of paying for
war. Yet this military inflation was accompanied through the eighteenth
century by another development: a gradual but inexorable increase in the
killing-power of battlefield weaponry. If sieges and battles like Lille and
Malplaquet (1708/9) had raised the potential ‘butcher’s bill’ for close-
quarter engagements to unprecedented and horrific levels, by the time of
the Seven Years War (1756–63) this had been institutionalized as the
normal consequence of large-scale battles or set-piece sieges. When
close-range musket fire against tight-packed lines or columns of troops
was combined with the considerably more deadly impact of an ‘immense
profusion’ of mobile, better-deployed and, perhaps most significantly,
medium-weight artillery, the stakes even for a victorious army in battle
were raised to unsustainable levels.12 In T. C. W. Blanning’s words, the
Seven Years War was effectively over by 1760, as ‘all the combatants in
the continental war were suffering from exhaustion. By the close of the
following campaign they resembled boxers who had fought themselves
to a standstill . . .’13 What made this unsustainable was not this level of
casualties as a percentage of population or even of potential army size, but
the definitive shift over the previous century to a style of warfare which was
waged on the basis of highly trained infantry, subjected to many years of
military discipline in order to perform elaborate fire-drills and tactical
manoeuvres with mechanical precision. This was not the only way to fight
wars in the eighteenth century, but a huge investment had been made by
European states in organizing and waging war on these principles.
The resulting paradox was a style of positional warfare that if carried on
to the battlefield was guaranteed to inflict massive casualties on at least
one of the opposing armies, and if they were equally well drilled and
disciplined, on both. At the same time there was a general recognition
that the trained soldier was a precious commodity: in the words of the
Maréchal de Saxe: ‘it is better to put off an attack for several days than to
expose oneself to losing rashly a single grenadier: he has been twenty years
in the making’.14 The obvious response was to try to avoid the kind of
encounters that would lead to the mass slaughter of highly trained sol-
diers: hence one part of the typical arguments for the relatively ‘civilized’
nature of eighteenth-century warfare. Provided that all sides were pre-
pared to play the game of manoeuvre and territorial control/denial rather
than combat, using armies to seek diplomatic advantage rather than
attritional victories, the system could be sustained. Indeed huge changes

in the political map of Europe could be brought about by the threat rather
than the reality of military action. But when the stakes were raised and
powers made the decision to wage war through direct engagement in
battle and siege, their rivals had little choice but to do the same.
The Seven Years War brought this system close to collapse. By 1760
almost the entire stock of pre-war Prussian officers and soldiers had been
killed or disabled in a succession of victories and defeats whose one
common character was their terrifying cost in the lives of servicemen.15
Unsurprisingly, military theorists were brought to question many of the
assumptions about the way in which soldiers were recruited and trained;
the elaborate process of drill and disciplining which required years if not
decades to produce a professional soldier was incompatible with the first,
steely glint of industrialized warfare, in which cheaply produced iron
cannon and more accurate and reliable muskets could be mass produced
and deployed ever-more easily and cheaply. One response, discussed in
theory long before the French Revolution turned it into a practical
response to waging war, was the army composed of the citizens in arms,
whether serving as eager, ideologically committed volunteers, or as con-
scripts who would need ideological induction as much as traditional
military training. Belief that the élan of soldiers swayed by a strong sense
of country or political conviction could produce battlefield qualities that
would compensate for the drill and discipline of trained professionals was
a bold assumption. Underpinning it was the more cynical calculation that
such troops could be raised in vastly larger numbers, could sustain huge
casualties and be replaced with others more easily and quickly than tradi-
tional armies could replace their exhaustively trained professionals. Even
if the qualities of professional soldiers were superior, they would simply be
swept aside by the waves of semi-trained, patriotic enthusiasts who could
be unleashed by the ‘nation in arms’.16 The logic is similar to that of
Machiavelli and his fellow humanists, who had espoused the benefits of a
militia in which a virtuous citizenry would inevitably prove superior to
venal mercenaries. In both cases the incompatibility of these ideas with
military enterprise is self-evident.
All of this could have remained on the drawing board. Guibert, who
started as an enthusiastic exponent of a national militia, ideologically
motivated and aiming to concentrate overwhelming numbers against an
enemy, abandoned these ideas in his later writings, unconvinced that
these could replace the qualities and discipline of trained soldiers.17 Nor
were the first trials of the levée en masse a clear validation for the principles
of the citizen army. Many historians of late eighteenth-century warfare
would concede that had the duke of Brunswick possessed an extra 10,000
320 Conclusion
healthy troops on the field of Valmy in 1792, a different and altogether less
dramatic picture of change and continuity in European warfare might
have emerged.18 Events did, however, validate the national, citizen army,
whether in France, Prussia or eventually across the entire Continent.
Regardless of their initial military quality, the capacity of the French
Revolutionary state to deploy ideology and coercion to put 700,000 con-
scripts in the field by 1794 irrevocably altered the nature of European
warfare.19 This shift marked the real end of military enterprise. Once the
state regarded war as the duty of all citizens, it was inconceivable that it
could make additional use of hired mercenaries, that it could outsource
the organization and recruitment of troops, or even that it could rely on
private enterprise for the provisioning and supply of troops. By 1793 the
French state had abandoned contracting for the production and transport
of military supplies, and had guillotined several contractors as counter-
revolutionaries.20 Military service was now defined as a sacred duty to the
state, and in return the maintenance and well-being of the citizen-soldier
could only be organized and provided by the state. All that might remain
in the hands of private interests was the manufacturing and production of
armaments in cases where the state did not choose to assume direct
control of these or where, in wartime, continuous demand exceeded the
capacity of state-run facilities to supply military needs.21
The contingent outcome of military events in north-west Continental
Europe in the early 1790s could thus explain the disappearance of systems
of military enterprise that had hitherto proved a capable and adaptable
element of war-waging. But were there longer-term issues about the
privatization of military force that also require consideration? Was it
simply a straightforward consequence of the development of mass con-
scription and the political claims and reciprocal obligations implied by
building loyalty to the nation-state, or were there other issues relating
to the use of private military contractors in warfare waged by and for the
state?
It is fundamental to the argument of the present book that there is no
necessary incompatibility between the growth of the military power of the
state and the development of a substantial sphere of private military
activity; indeed, the latter made available a level of resources and robust-
ness of organization that would otherwise have been unattainable by
government authorities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This
is even more true of European military activity beyond the borders of the
Continent. An area of military privatization which has not been examined
in this work is in many respects the most visible example of such dele-
gation for the historian of early modern Europe. The establishment of
colonial trading companies, most notably but by no means exclusively the
English and Dutch East India (VOC) Companies in 1600 and 1602,
delivered a remarkable expansion of Europe’s military ‘reach’. The licens-
ing of private shareholder companies to engage in trading activity on their
own initiative, to use private military force to conquer territory which
would provide trading stations and organizational centres, to mobilize
troops and vessels in order to fight wars both against local populations and
against other European competitors, represented a huge level of delegated
military authority by European states. The most successful of these com-
panies grew continuously in scale and scope of activities throughout the
seventeenth century. In advancing their commercial interests on behalf of
their shareholders, the companies were virtually sovereign actors, with
powers to make war and to raise and command troops and warships, to
make treaties, to occupy territory, and to exercise rights of justice.
To some extent, however, the idea that these were purely private share-
holder companies was a fiction. It was no exaggeration of Hugo Grotius in
1613 to say that the directors of the VOC were to a large extent the men
who were responsible for the political affairs of the Dutch Republic.22 For
many of the ordinary investors, the early policies of the VOC, which
included heavy capital investment in colonial fortification programmes
and garrisoning, seemed a politically motivated evasion of the fiscal
responsibilities of the company to its shareholders. In the event, the
directors may have made the correct decision to commit capital to such
military projects, ensuring the longer-term success of the company’s
Asiatic ventures while also pursuing policies which could be seen to
serve the larger political interests of a Holland-dominated United
Provinces. In the medium and longer term, the VOC developed and
operated in ways that satisfied both the shareholders – whether these
were the bewindhebbers, the active investors with ships and merchandise
of their own serving the company, or the passive investors of capital, the
participanten – and the policy-makers in Holland. The dividends to VOC
shareholders climbed through the 1630s and 1640s, while the company
itself achieved its greatest military and commercial successes.23
In contrast, the Dutch West India Company (WIC), founded in 1621
with still stronger government intervention in the formulation of policy
through its board of directors and its deployment of resources, was
altogether less successful.24 Committed as its primary objective to acquir-
ing and establishing colonies at the expense of Portugal and Castile, rather
than building up trade networks or engaging in privateering against the
Spanish treasure and merchant fleets, the investment policy of the com-
pany was skewed against the wishes of the majority of its shareholders.
First attempts at this policy of colonization, including the bid to consol-
idate control of Bahia, captured from the Portuguese in 1624, proved
Fig. 7.1 Dutch East India Company magazine and dockyard
expensive failures. By the end of the first decade of its life, the WIC had
bought or built 220 ships and spent more than 18 million guilders on
wages for its soldiers, sailors, agents and officials.25 Pushed towards these
overtly political-military objectives by the directors, the company was
instrumental in establishing Johann Maurice of Nassau-Siegen as gover-
nor general of newly conquered ‘Dutch’ Brazil. The costs of a major
colonial military policy were being borne by the company throughout
the early 1640s. Only in 1646, with the collapse in the value of WIC
shares and threatened bankruptcy, did the directors accept ‘the trans-
formation of the Company from a trading war-machine into a non-
belligerent commercial organization, content to supply the colonies of
other powers and relying for protection of its own modest assortment of
territories on the States General’.26
This experience of some of the shareholder companies in their overly
close or at least ambiguous relations with government and government
priorities to some extent foreshadows a much larger problem in the
relations between military contracting and the military and political claims
of the state. As the scale of military operations grew larger under the aegis
of the fiscal-military state and its beneficial public–private partnerships, so
the relations between the ruler, his government and key figures in the
private sector, above all that concerned with manufacturing, supply and
distribution of food and matériel, became closer. There was certainly a
tension in the seventeenth, as in the twenty-first, century between the
temptation to rely on a safe pair of hands in matters as important as
military supply, and promoting competition by putting contracts out to
tender. United States’ governments in the past two decades provide
numerous examples of contracts made with logistical support companies,
not because they offer the lowest price, but because they have a proven
track record of successful contracts, and therefore seem to offer greater
reliability. Brown and Root Services, particularly after its contracts in
Bosnia and Kosovo in the late 1990s, had the reputation with the
Pentagon of a military company whose strongest selling point was speed
of deployment and response to rapidly changing circumstances, which
none of its other competitors looked likely to match, even if they could
undercut on price.27 And as the examples in Chapters 5 and 6 indicated,
early modern governments reacted to similar concerns in similar ways.
Yet such close relations between government and the highest strata of
military enterprisers and contractors had significant repercussions. They
could easily – and increasingly did – mean a reliance on those with strong
court or government influence and patrons, those who were such patrons
themselves, or those whose financial dealings and interests overlapped
significantly with the court and government.28 Reliability or resources
324 Conclusion
could easily slide into influence and favour when it came to choosing
contractors. Brown and Root won US military contracts on the basis of its
known resources and flexibility, but this was in part because the company
was a major subsidiary of another and better-known corporate giant,
Halliburton, whose links with senior government ministers under
President George W. Bush were exceptionally strong.29 To take just one
early modern state, similar doubts could be raised about the French
government’s munitions contracts with Cardinal Mazarin and his finan-
cial associates in the 1640s and 1650s, about the networks that linked the
building and supply of the navy in the 1670s and 1680s to a Colbertian
clientele of contractors, or the extraordinary hold exercised by the Pâris
brothers over the financial and munitions contracts drawn up for the
French armies under Louis XV.30 Large-scale, often monopolistic con-
tracts with well-connected military contractors became more common,
and were easy targets for the criticism of those who set themselves in
opposition to particular court and government factions, or who took the
line of general public concern against corrupt court interests and favour.
The increasingly large scale of military activity which had originally
served as the spur to private enterprise, making substantial capital invest-
ment in the business of war viable and financially attractive, thus had a
paradoxical consequence. When contracts started to draw upon those
directly involved in – or closely linked to – government as contractors,
organizers and suppliers, the ability to offer a military option that was
responsive, flexible and tailored to a particular set of circumstances was no
longer a recognized priority. A process of institutionalization took place
which did not lead to a conventionally understood ‘monopoly over the
means of violence’, but involved a private sector which was heavily infil-
trated by the capital and interests of members of government and other
established political elites; this is only a few steps away from the institu-
tional ‘military-industrial complex’ of the late nineteenth and twentieth
century.31
The obvious consequence was a very public association of private and
public interest in the waging of war, especially as the most prominent
aspect of enterpriser involvement was not now the recruitment and mili-
tary operations of privately funded regiments and companies, but the
outsourcing of military supply and other logistical operations. Military
failure could very easily lead to a public backlash against private interests
who occupied the profitable role of supplier and contractor and could
more easily be made the scapegoat for military setbacks than the officers,
soldiers and sailors. As they were separated from active and more hon-
ourable military roles, and heavily linked to government policy-making
from which they appeared to be the prime beneficiaries, the way was
opened to a language of public vilification and hostility in which such

private interests would gain no credit for their role in military success, but
easy condemnation when armies or navies encountered setbacks.32 Held
responsible for their supposed exploitation and rapaciousness, govern-
ment connections provided limited protection when, as in the Seven
Years War, the French public sought a scapegoat for military failure, or
the British for the military failures of the American War of Independence
and the later wars with France.33 Reinforcing this was a further public
concern with financial profiteering from warfare, seen in the growing
public criticism of the ‘soldier trade’, dealing in mercenary contracts
that had hitherto been seen as a normal part of warfare. This was clearly
evident in widespread British hostility to the hiring of mercenaries to fight
for the crown against the American colonies, but had already become a
significant part of public discourse about raising and hiring troops in the
German lands.34
If contractors would bear the specific brunt of the blame for military
failure and setbacks, they were no less implicated in the more general shift
of political opinion and discussion towards the desirability of separating
private interest and public service more effectively. By the later eighteenth
century a lively discourse was openly critical of the intermingling of
private and public resources amongst those exercising authority on behalf
of government. There was more critical awareness of the conflicts of
interest that stemmed from proprietary rights in office-holding and from
traditional assumptions about the private profitability of pursuing public
policy. In England it was in this climate of a greater concern for account-
ability and separation of interests, and following the failure of the War of
Independence, that Clerke’s Act of 1782 sought to exclude all those who
held military contracts from sitting in Parliament.35 Military contracting
was drawn into a much larger sphere of hostility to private corruption
in government, in which sinecures, profiteering and patronage were the
subjects of ever-more virulent attacks from within and outside Parliament.
A language of public accountability and the unacceptability of pursuing
private interests while in the service of the state was by no means an
exclusively British political discourse. Indeed much of it arose from a
larger Enlightenment concern with ‘interests’ and ‘good government’,
and it was unsurprising that it was enlisted in opposition to the private
management of the state’s military activities.
Public perceptions of private involvement in warfare were thus focused
on high-profile munitions and supply contractors, too closely connected
with the court, too visible, and easily blamed for military failure. They
embodied in a particularly rebarbative way the conflict between private
profit and the performance of public functions which was increasingly the
326 Conclusion
object of hostile scrutiny in political discourse. Simultaneously, however,

it could be suggested that the more general ways in which governments
perceived resources and political/military objectives were changing in the
eighteenth century. This might be described as putting the ‘fiscality’ back
into the military-fiscal state. The precise calculation of financial resources,
a concern with accurate budgeting and an attempt to relate income
streams to expenditure became far more prominent in thinking about
the nature and priorities of effective government. Hitherto the financial
operations of governments had been underpinned by massive and system-
atic access to private credit to make good revenue shortfalls, to speed
distribution of revenues and to maintain liquidity. But a new and wide-
spread rhetoric of government was increasingly concerned with maintain-
ing a healthy and virtuous balance between economic resources, taxation
yields, expenditure and public debt.36 As Hamish Scott has recently
argued, the view that ‘the science of government was the condition of
the finances, on which everything else depends’ underpinned more rig-
orous thinking about the longer-term impact of public debt, and the need
to make funding decisions based on assessments of their impact upon the
revenue-generating capacity of the economy.37 This had a considerable
impact on the ways in which decisions about the funding and budgeting of
military resources were made. State administrators, seeking more orderly
and predictable means of funding warfare, would prove increasingly
hostile to the long-term budgetary unpredictability of relying on private
contracting. Even if less flexible and potentially more expensive, govern-
ments would favour direct control of all aspects of the organization and
management of the war effort because it allowed for more predictable
year-on-year financial planning and budgeting, and it integrated the mili-
tary more effectively into an all-important fiscal system.
In practice, such ideas struggled against the hand-to-mouth financial
realities of most European states down to the end of the ancien regime. But
the impulse was there; the notion that the overall control of the state
offered a more accountable and financially predictable approach to sup-
porting permanent military force had taken root in the thinking of rulers
and their governments. The ‘fiscal-military’ state, with its overwhelming
emphasis on the ‘fiscal’, did have the potential to undermine and make
redundant the various adaptable and effective ways in which states had
utilized public–private partnerships in the preceding centuries. Together
with a developing practical and moral concern about the overlap in roles
between government officials and military enterprisers, it may go some
way to explain, even without the transformation following the French
Revolution, why the business of war was to become, for a couple of
hundred years from the late eighteenth century, the business of the
state. Only following the disappearance of mass conscripted armies, the

relative marginalization of the military in the public life of most European
nations, and the huge decline in the percentage of state budgets devoted to
military expenditure, have these assumptions been seriously re-examined.
The response of contemporary governments has been a widespread and
comprehensive return to military outsourcing and the military contractor-
state, embraced with all the political, financial and organizational prag-
matism of the states that moved in this direction from the sixteenth to the
late eighteenth century.
Notes
NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
1. Michael Roberts, ‘The Military Revolution, 1560–1660’ (Belfast, 1956), repr.
in Roberts, Essays in Swedish History (London, 1967), pp. 195–225.
2. For the extensive bibliography on the ‘military revolution’, see notes 36, 38,
39, 43 and 45.
3. Jacques de Guibert, Essai général de tactique (1772), ed. Jean-Pierre Bois
(Paris, 2004).
4. See introduction and chapters by Whitby, Hornblower and Roy in R. Lane-
Fox (ed.), The Long March. Xenophon and the Ten Thousand (New Haven and
London, 2004).
5. A. Goldsworthy, The Roman Army at War, 100BC–AD200 (Oxford, 1996),
pp. 19–24, 35–7.
6. K. Fowler, Medieval Mercenaries, Vol. I: The Great Companies (Oxford, 2001).
7. P.W. Singer, Corporate Warriors. The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry
(Ithaca, 2003).
8. A very recent volume of essays published under the aegis of the
Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Potsdam, suggests that this situation
may be changing: S. Förster, C. Jansen and G. Kronenbitter (eds.), Rückkehr
der Condottieri? Krieg und Militär zwischen staatlichem Monopol und
Privatisierung: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Paderborn, 2010).
9. A. Mockler, Mercenaries (London, 1969); G. Trease, The Condottieri. Soldiers
of Fortune (London, 1970); W. Urban, Medieval Mercenaries. The Business
of War (London, 2006); Urban, Bayonets for Hire: Mercenaries at War,
1550–1789 (London, 2007).
10. D. Avant, The Market for Force. The Consequences of Privatizing Security
(Cambridge, 2005); D. Isenberg, A Fistful of Contractors. The Case for a
Pragmatic Assessment of Private Military Companies in Iraq (London, 2004).
11. C. Kinsey, Corporate Soldiers and International Security. The Rise of Private
Military Companies (London, 2006); Singer, Corporate Warriers, pp. 49–70,
who argues for the importance of the end of the Cold War for the establish-
ment of private military companies (PMCs), though also considers that future
growth lies with multi-functioned private security companies (PSCs); see also
S. Percy, Mercenaries. The History of a Norm in International Relations (Oxford,
2007), pp. 206–43.
328
Notes to pages 4–10 329
12. J. Scahill, Blackwater. The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army
(London, 2007); for an account of non-Blackwater PSC activity in Iraq,
G. Schumacher, A Bloody Business. America’s War Zone Contractors and the
Occupation of Iraq (St Paul, MN, 2006).
13. D. Avant, ‘Mercenaries’, Foreign Policy, 143 (2004), 20–8.
14. Percy, Mercenaries, pp. 49–67.
15. J. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns (Princeton, 1994),
pp. 69–142.
17. S. Percy, ‘Mercenaries: Strong Norm, Weak Law’, International Organization,
61 (2007), 367–97.
18. Percy, Mercenaries, pp. 212–18, on the overwhelming political and moral
consensus against using PMCs in Angola, Sierra Leone and Papua New
Guinea in the late 1990s.
19. Recent examples would include: R. Bean, ‘War and the Birth of the Nation
State’, Journal of Economic History, 33 (1973), 203–21; B. Porter, War and the
Rise of the State. The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New York, 1994),
pp. 23–61; M. Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge,
1999), pp. 59–125.
20. F. Lane, ‘Economic Consequences of Organized Violence’, Journal of
Economic History, 18 (1958), 401–17; Lane, ‘The Economic Meaning of
War and Protection’, in Lane, Venice and History (Baltimore, MD, 1966);
C. Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime’, in P. Evans,
D. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In
(Cambridge, 1985), pp. 169–91, pp. 175–80 criticizes the underlying
assumptions of Lane that a monopoly of force will prevail because it is able
to provide protection more cheaply: ‘the very activity of producing and con-
trolling violence favoured monopoly, because competition within that realm
generally raised costs . . . The production of violence, he suggested, enjoyed
large economies of scale.’
21. For a succinct account, see R. Gothelf, ‘Frederick William I and the
Beginnings of Prussian Absolutism’, pp. 47–67, and H. Scott ‘Prussia’s
Emergence as a European Great Power, 1740–1763’, pp. 153–76, in
P. Dwyer (ed.), The Rise of Prussia, 1700–1830 (London, 2000).
22. P. Wilson, ‘The German “Soldier Trade” of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries: a Reassessment’, The International History Review, 18 (1996),
757–92.
23. For example: A. Dareste de La Chavanne, Histoire de l’administration en France
(4 vols., Paris, 1848).
24. A. Forrest, ‘La Patrie en Danger. The French Revolution and the First Levée en
Masse’, in D. Moran and A. Waldron (eds.), The People in Arms. Military Myth
and National Mobilization since the French Revolution (Cambridge, 2003),
pp. 8–32.
25. M. Weber, ‘The Presuppositions and Causes of Bureaucracy’, in R. Merton
(ed.), A Reader in Bureaucracy (New York, 1960), pp. 66–7.
26. Otto Hintze, Historical Essays, ed. F. Gilbert (Oxford, 1975), see ‘The
Hohenzollern and the Nobility’, pp. 33–63; ‘Military Organization and the
330 Notes to pages 10–14
Organization of the State’, pp. 178–215; ‘The Commissary and his Significance
in General Administrative History: a Comparative Study’, pp. 267–301.
Hintze, Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur allgemeinen Verfassungsgeschichte, ed.
G. Oestreich (3 vols., Göttingen, 1962–7), see esp. ‘Der österreichische und
der preußische Beamtenstaat im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert; Eine vergleichende
Betrachtung’ (1901), I, 321–58; ‘Machtpolitik und Regierungsverfassung’
(1913), I, 424–56; ‘Der Ursprung des preußischen Landratsamts in der Mark
Brandenburg’ (1915), III, 164–203.
27. ‘Machtpolitik und Regierungsverfassung’, III, 429.
28. ‘This [standing army] was not a product of princely caprice and arbitrariness,
but was a European necessity from which no state could escape . . .’,
‘Hohenzollern’, p. 45.
29. H. Scott (ed.), The European Nobilities of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries (2 vols., London, 1995), I, pp. 35–52.
30. P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Economic Change and
Military Conflict from 1500–2000 (London, 1988), pp. 89–91; D. Kaiser,
Politics and War. European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler (London, 1990),
pp. 7–137; Porter, Rise of the State, pp. xiii–147.
31. W. Reinhard, ‘Power Elites, State Servants, Ruling Classes and the Growth of
State Power’, pp. 1–18, and R. Braun, ‘Staying on Top: Socio-cultural
Reproduction of European Power Elites’, pp. 235–59, in W. Reinhard (ed.),
Power Elites and State Building (Oxford, 1996); T. Skocpol, ‘Introduction’,
pp. 3–37, pp. 3–11, and C. Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making as
Organized Crime’, pp. 169–91, pp. 175–7, in Evans, Rueschemeyer and
Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In.
32. P. Contamine, ‘Introduction’, in Contamine (ed.), War and Competition
between States (Oxford, 2000), pp. 1–7. For an excellent survey of recent
trends in this area of research, see B. Kroener, ‘Vom “extraordinari
Kriegsvolck” zum “miles perpetuus”. Zur Rolle der bewaffneten Macht in
der europäischen Gesellschaft der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Kroener, Kriegerische
Gewalt und militärische Pråsenz in der Neuzeit (Paderborn, 2008), pp. 3–63;
Kroener, ‘“Das Schwungrad an der Staatsmaschine?” Die Bedeutung der
bewaffneten Macht in der europäischen Geschichte der Frühen Neuzeit’, in
B. Kroener and R. Pröve (eds.), Krieg und Frieden. Militär und Gesellschaft in
der Frühen Neuzeit (Paderborn, 1996), pp. 1–23.
33. W. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force and Society since AD
1000 (Chicago, 1982), pp. 117–84.
34. For example, C. Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States AD 990–1990
(Oxford, 1990); B. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change.
Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, 1992);
T. Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan. Building States and Regimes in Early Modern
Europe (Cambridge, 1997).
35. D. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy. The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour
Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 32–116;
J. Gommans, Mughal Warfare (London, 2002), pp. 67–97. Another
good example is provided by medieval Japan: ‘law enforcement and
defence, like most operations of government during the Heian era, simply
became privatized, contracted out to professionals’; K. Friday, Hired

Swords. The Rise of Private Warrior Power in Early Japan (Stanford, CA,
1992), p. 171.
36. Roberts, ‘Military Revolution’; M. Roberts, ‘Gustav Adolf and the Art of
War’, in Roberts, Essays, pp. 56–81; Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus. A History
of Sweden, 1611–1632 (2 vols., London, 1958), II, pp. 169–271.
37. N. Machiavelli, The Art of War, trans. E. Farneworth (1521; repr. New York,
1965), Book One.
38. J.W. Wijn, Het krijgswezen in den tijd van Prins Maurits (Utrecht, 1934);
H. Hahlweg, Die Heeresreform der Oranier und die Antike (Berlin, 1941);
Hahlweg (ed.), Die Heeresreform der Oranier: das Kriegsbuch des Grafen
Johann von Nassau-Siegen (Wiesbaden, 1973).
39. M. Feld, ‘Middle Class Society and the Rise of Military Professionalism:
the Dutch Army, 1589–1609’, Armed Forces and Society, 1 (1975), 419–42,
p. 421; see the much more positive interpretation of the widespread dis-
semination of Dutch military theory in G. Parker, ‘The Limits to
Revolutions in Military Affairs: Maurice of Nassau, the battle of
Nieuwpoort (1600) and the Legacy’, Journal of Military History,
71 (2007), 331–72, pp. 366–9.
40. Feld, ‘Middle Class Society’; J.P. Puype, ‘Victory at Nieuwpoort, 2 July
1600’, in M. van der Hoeven (ed.), Exercise of Arms. Warfare in the
Netherlands (1568–1648) (Leiden, 1998), pp. 76–102.
41. O. van Nimwegen, ‘Maurits van Nassau and Siege Warfare, 1590–97’, in van
der Hoeven (ed.), Exercise, pp. 113–31.
42. That at least would seem to be the conclusion from comparing Parker,
‘Nieuwpoort’, pp. 351–4, with Puype, ‘Nieuwpoort’, pp. 104–5. For the
impact of the battle on strategy and politics, see the excellent analysis of
Parker, ‘Nieuwpoort’, pp. 354–8.
43. The military academy founded by Johann von Nassau at Siegen survived only
until 1623 and attracted a total of twenty students: G. Parker, The Military
Revolution. Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (2nd edn,
Cambridge, 1996), p. 185, n. 44.
44. Roberts, ‘Military Revolution’, p. 195.
45. See particularly McNeill, Pursuit of Power, pp. 117–43; Downing, Military
Revolution; J. Cornette, ‘La révolution militaire et l’état moderne’, Revue
d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 41 (1994), 698–709.
46. A case made explicitly in Feld, ‘Middle Class Society’.
47. H. Zwicker, ‘De militie van den staat’. Het leger van de republiek der Verenigde
Nederlanden (Amsterdam, 1991), pp. 45–6.
48. R. Monro, Monro, His Expedition with the worthy Scots regiment called Mac-keys,
ed. W. Brocklington (Westport, CT, 1999), p. 126.
49. Porter, Rise of the State, pp. 70–1: historians, we are told, have devoted
‘inordinate attention’ to studies of this colourful figure, whose irrelevance in
a changing political world should be self-evident.
50. J. Chagniot, Paris et l’armée au XVIIIe siècle. Étude politique et sociale (Paris,
1985), p. 255.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
1. N. Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, ed. and trans. L.F. and H.C. Mansfield,
(Princeton, 1988), pp. 226–7.
2. D. Le Fur, Marignan, 13–14 septembre 1515 (Paris, 2004), pp. 95–6.
3. Le Fur, Marignan, pp. 106–7.
4. E. von Frauenholz, Entwicklungsgeschichte des deutschen Heerwesens (5 vols.,
Munich, 1935–41), II, Pt 1, p. 114, cites a contemporary account of the battle:
‘das ist im namen des vaters, sohns und heiligen geists; das soll unser kilchhof
sin, frommen lieben Eydtgnossen’.
5. R.J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron. The Reign of Francis I
(Cambridge, 1994), pp. 71–7; F. Lot, Recherches sur les effectifs des armées
françaises des Guerres d’Italie aux Guerres de Religion, 1494–1562 (Paris,
1962), pp. 41–4; Le Fur, Marignan, p. 116.
6. M. Mallett, Mercenaries and their Masters. Warfare in Renaissance Italy (London,
1974), p. 197, indicates that some 900 soldiers were killed overall. The myth that
condottiere warfare was bloodless choreography was comprehensively challenged
by W. Block, Die Condottieri. Studien über die sogenannten ‘unblutigen Schlachten’
(Berlin, 1913), but remains an integral part of the case against mercenaries.
7. For sixteenth-century perceptions of the mercenary as exclusively motivated
by wages, see especially D. Trim, ‘Fighting “Jacob’s Wars”. The Employment
of English and Welsh Mercenaries in the European Wars of Religion: France
and the Netherlands, 1562–1610’ (Ph.D. thesis, King’s College London,
2002), pp. 74–81.
8. D. Potter, Renaissance France at War. Armies, Culture and Society, c. 1480–1560
(Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 76–7, based on a gendarmerie of 1,500 ‘lances’
funded through the ordinaire des guerres.
9. R. Quatrefages, La revolución militar moderna. El crisol espanol (Madrid, 1996).
10. For examples of this from the Netherlands, see S. Gunn, D. Grummitt and
H. Cools, War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477–1559
(Oxford, 2007), pp. 142–7, 151.
11. The terms are usefully deployed in J. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates and
Sovereigns (Princeton, 1994).
12. W.H. McNeill, Europe’s Steppe Frontier, 1500–1800 (Chicago, 1964), pp. 113–20.
13. H. von Zwiedineck-Südenhorst, Kriegsbilder aus der Zeit der Landsknechte
(Stuttgart, 1883), pp. 257–60, gives 16,700 troops in 1589, and identifies
six strongpoints with garrisons of 900 men or more.
14. G. Rothenberg, The Austrian Military Border in Croatia, 1522–1747 (Urbana,
IL, 1960), pp. 27–30.
15. The Hajduks further east in the Hungarian borderlands would have provided
an equally effective example of this co-opting of local interests: P.F. Sugar,
Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354–1804 (Seattle, 1977),
pp. 242–7; F. Szakály, ‘The Hungarian–Croatian Border Defence System
and its Collapse’, pp. 141–58, and F. Maksay, ‘Peasantry and Mercenary
Service in Sixteenth-Century Hungary’, pp. 261–74, in J. Bak and B. Király
(eds.), From Hunyadi to Rákóczi: War and Society in Late Medieval and Early
Modern Hungary (New York, 1982).
16. Rothenberg, Military Border, pp. 28–9; C.W. Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj.
Piracy, Banditry and Holy War in the Sixteenth-Century Adriatic (Ithaca and
London, 1992), p. 43.
17. Bracewell, Uskoks, p. 91.
18. Bracewell, Uskoks, pp. 130–1; A. Tenenti, Piracy and the Decline of Venice,
1580–1615 (London, 1967), pp. 5–11.
19. Rothenberg, Military Border, pp. 54–5.
20. Bracewell, Uskoks, pp. 148–50.
21. Bracewell, Uskoks, pp. 112–13, who maintains that few Uskok pirates died
wealthy men.
22. J. Glete (ed.), Naval History, 1500–1680 (Aldershot, 2005), pp. xi–xxvi.
23. K.R. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering. English Privateering during the Spanish
War, 1585–1603 (Cambridge, 1964), p. 5.
24. Thomson, Mercenaries, pp. 22–3; N. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea.
A Naval History of Britain, 660–1649 (London, 1997), pp. 199–202.
25. Thomson, Mercenaries, pp. 43–4.
26. A. James, Navy and Government in Early Modern France, 1572–1661 (London,
2004), pp. 14–15; M. Augeron, ‘Coligny et les Espagnols à travers la course’,
in M. Acerra and G. Martinière (eds.), Coligny, les Protestants et la mer (Paris,
1997), pp. 155–76; B. Dietz, ‘The Huguenot and English Corsairs during the
Third Civil War in France, 1568–70’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of
London, 19 (1952–8), 278–94.
27. E.O. Lana, Los corsarios espagñoles durante la decadencia de los Austrias. El corso
español del Atlántico peninsular en el siglo XVII (Madrid, 1992), pp. 97–155,
253–70.
28. In many cases the shipowners, armadores, would own multiple vessels and
therefore determine the collective policies of their hired captains: Lana, Los
corsarios, pp. 99–107.
29. R. Baetens, ‘The Organization and Effects of Flemish Privateering in the
Seventeenth Century’, in Glete (ed.), Naval History, pp. 453–80, pp. 461–3.
30. Thomson, Mercenaries, p. 43.
31. P. Rambeaud, ‘L’admiral à La Rochelle: l’union du ciel et de la mer’, in
Acerra and Martinière (eds.), Coligny, pp. 131–43; James, Navy and
Government, pp. 14–16.
32. Lana, Los corsarios, pp. 53–60; R. Stradling, The Armada of Flanders. Spanish
Maritime Policy and European War, 1568–1668 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 35–6.
33. R. Stradling, ‘The Spanish Dunkirkers, 1621–48: a Record of Plunder and
Destruction’, in Glete (ed.), Naval History, pp. 488–9; Stradling, Armada of
Flanders, pp. 80–9.
34. J. Heers, The Barbary Corsairs. Warfare in the Mediterranean, 1480–1580
(London, 2003), pp. 33–70; P. Williams, ‘Piracy and Naval conflict in the
Mediterranean, 1590–1610/20’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 2001),
pp. 50–62; P. Earle, Corsairs of Malta and Barbary (London, 1970),
pp. 23–36, 47.
35. G. Hanlon, The Twilight of a Military Tradition. Italian Aristocrats and European
Conflicts, 1560–1800 (London, 1998), pp. 30–6; U. Ubaldini, La marina del
sovrano militare ordine di San Giovanni di Gerusalemme di Rodi e di Malta
(Rome, 1971), pp. 46–56, 60–8.
36. Earle, Corsairs, pp. 180–1.

37. Ubaldini, La marina, pp. 121–9: the annual tribute offered by the Knights for
the islands of Malta and Gozo was, of course, the (living) ‘Maltese falcon’; the
reluctance of the Order to play the role of fleet auxiliaries was a source of
concern to Spanish ministers: Williams, ‘Piracy’, pp. 155–7.
38. Williams, ‘Piracy’, pp. 150–1.
39. G. Guarnieri, Cavalieri di Santo Stefano. Contributo alla storia della marina
militare italiana (1562–1589) (Pisa, 1928), pp. 69–77.
40. Hanlon, Twilight, pp. 38–9; Guarnieri, Cavalieri, pp. 97–106.
41. T. Kirk, Genoa and the Sea. Policy and Power in an Early Modern Maritime
Republic, 1559–1684 (Baltimore and London, 2005), pp. 41–50.
42. E. Baudson, Charles de Gonzague. Duc de Nevers, de Rethel et de Mantoue, 1580–
1637 (Paris, 1947), pp. 181–4; D. Parrott, ‘A Prince Souverain and the French
Crown: Charles de Nevers, 1580–1637’, in R. Oresko, G. Gibbs and H. Scott
(eds.), Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge,
1997), pp. 149–87, pp. 162–3.
43. Baudson, Nevers, p. 182.
44. Parrott, ‘Nevers’, p. 169.
45. James, Navy and Government, p. 28.
46. See, for example, Rodger, Safeguard, pp. 293–4 on the costs of the ambitious
privateering operations by the earl of Cumberland in the 1590s; G. Griffith,
‘An Account Book of Raleigh’s Voyage, 1592’, National Library of Wales
Journal, 7 (1951–2), 347–53.
47. A point made about the Dunkirk privateers in Stradling, Armada of Flanders,
pp. 221–8.
48. For the early use of mercenaries in a broader European context, see the
volume edited by J. France, Mercenaries and Paid Men. The Mercenary
Identity in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2008).
49. W. Caferro, Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena (Baltimore, 1998),
pp. 3–9, 62–75.
50. The company may have reached around 10,000 troops and a baggage train of
20,000 in the mid-1350s, but the logistical requirements and inflexibility of a
force on that scale were probably self-defeating: Mallet, Mercenaries, pp. 33–4.
51. K. Fowler, Medieval Mercenaries, Vol. I: The Great Companies (Oxford, 2001),
though concerned with the activities of the companies for the most part in
France and Spain, nonetheless points to the change in attitudes amongst the
company leaders after 1360: pp. 1–23; Caferro, Siena, pp. 13–14.
52. D. Showalter, ‘Caste, Skill and Training. The Evolution of Cohesion in
European Armies from the Middle Ages to the Sixteenth Century’, Journal
of Military History, 57 (1993), 407–30, pp. 418–20; Mallett, Mercenaries,
pp. 37–8.
53. W. Caferro, John Hawkwood. An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy
(Baltimore, 2006).
54. Showalter, ‘Caste’, pp. 408–11.
55. Mallett, Mercenaries, pp. 113–14; M. Covini, L’esercito del duca. Organizza-
zione militare e istitutioni al tempi degli Sforza (1450–1480) (Rome, 1998),
pp. 49–51, 374–80.
56. Covino, Esercito, pp. 285–351, examines the military policy of Galeazzo Maria
Sforza, duke of Milan, who wanted the flexibility of creating his own army but
also hired large numbers of condottiere to meet specific crises in the 1470s.
57. F. Cardini, ‘Condottiere e uomini d’arme nell’Italia del Renascimento’, in
M. Del Treppo (ed.), Condottiere e uomini d’arme nell’Italia del Renascimento
(Naples, 2001), pp. 1–10.
58. Peter Blastenbrei, Die Sforza und ihr Heer. Studien zur Strukture-, Wirtschafts-
und Sozialgeschichte des Söldnerwesens in der italienischen Frührenaissance
(Heidelberg, 1987), pp. 50–60.
59. Mallett, Mercenaries, pp. 82–3.
60. Mallett, Mercenaries, pp. 83–4. In the mid-fifteenth century Galeazzo Maria
Sforza was paying a typical prestanza of 40–60 florins per lance, and 4–6 florins
per footsoldier to his condottieri on a one-year contract: Blastenbrei, Sforza, p. 204.
61. M. Mallett and J. Hale, The Military Organization of a Renaissance State.
Venice, c.1400–1617 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 21–9 on the problems faced by
Venice in defending the Terraferma in the early years of the fifteenth century.
62. Mallett, Mercenaries, pp. 84–5, indicates one-third, rising in cases to half the
full pay.
63. Mallett and Hale, Venice, p. 319.
64. Blastenbrei, Sforza, p. 221.
65. Mallett and Hale, Venice, pp. 153–9, 284–312.
66. Covini, Esercito, pp. 285–328.
67. W. Caferro, ‘Continuity, Long-Term Service, and Permanent Forces: a
Reassessment of the Florentine Army in the Fourteenth Century’, Journal of
Modern History, 80 (2008), 219–51.
68. N. Labanca, ‘Clio, Mercurio e Marte: aspetti economici delle guerre in
Europa’, Ricerche storiche, 14 (1984), 645–72, p. 658.
69. I. Affò, Vita di Vespasiano Gonzaga (1780; repr. Mantua, 1975), pp. 12–47;
L. Amadè, Il duca di Sabbioneta (Milan, 1990), pp. 75–241; R. Tamalio,
‘Vespasiano Gonzaga al servizio del Re di Spagna’, in U. Bazzotti,
D. Ferrari and C. Mozzarelli (eds.), Vespasiano Gonzaga e il Ducato di
Sabbioneta (Mantua, 1993), pp. 121–51.
70. M. Brambilla, Ludovico Gonzaga, Duca di Nevers, 1539–1595 (Udine, 1905),
pp. 4–15.
71. C. von Elgger, Kriegswesen und Kriegskunst der schweizerischen Eidgenossen im
XIV, XV und XVI Jahrhundert (Lucerne, 1873), pp. 280–9; the Haufen
evolved gradually towards a rectangular formation with more depth than
breadth.
72. E. Dürr, ‘La principauté de Habsbourg et la formation de la Confédération
des VIII cantons, 1315–1379’, in M. Feldmann and H. Wirz (eds.), Histoire
militaire de la Suisse (4 vols., Berne, 1915–35), IV, pp. 23–64; C. Padrutt, Staat
und Krieg im Alten Bünden (Zurich, 1965), p. 29.
73. R. Durrer, ‘Premier combats de la Suisse primitive’, in Feldmann and Wirz,
Histoire militaire, I, pp. 60–1; R. Baumann, Landsknechte. Ihre Geschichte und
Kultur vom späten Mittelalter bis zum Dreißigjährigen Krieg (Munich, 1994), p. 23.
74. R. von Fischer, ‘Les Guerres de Bourgogne (1474–77)’, in Feldmann and
Wirz, Histoire militaire, II, pp. 155–201.
75. Fischer, ‘Les Guerres’, pp. 164–5: though the entire Burgundian artillery of
some four hundred guns fell into Swiss hands; M. Mallett, ‘Mercenaries’, in
M. Keen (ed.), Medieval Warfare. A History (Oxford, 1999), pp. 209–29.
76. J. Häne, ‘L’organisation militaire des anciens Suisses’, in Feldmann and
Wirz, Histoire militaire, III, pp. 16–19.
77. R. Baumann, Das Söldnerwesen im 16. Jahrhundert im bayerischen und
süddeutschen Beispiel. Eine gesellschaftsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Munich,
1978), p. 244.
78. Quatrefages, La revolución militar moderna, on the early evolution of the tercios.
79. Figures taken from contracts with the French crown from 1475 to the time of
François I. These were not the highest sums paid: a contract for service in Milan
in 1518 offered the ordinary soldier 5½ gulden: Elgger, Kriegswesen, p. 167.
80. W. Schaufelberger, Der Alte Schweizer und sein Krieg. Studien zur Kriegsführung
vornehmlich im 15. Jahrhundert (Zurich, 1952), pp. 165–85, devotes an entire
chapter to booty as an essential factor in understanding the motivation of the
Swiss troops, and as part of what he terms ‘the triumph of disorder’ in Swiss
military organization.
81. Schaufelberger, Alte Schweizer, pp. 146–7, gives an example of an order from
Zurich in 1422 which forbade any unauthorized military service, whether with
other cantons or abroad; but he recognizes that in practice these prohibitions
were a dead letter: pp. 149–50.
82. Elgger, Kriegswesen, pp. 78–80; M.H. Koerner ‘Der Einfluss der
Europäischen Kriege auf die Struktur der Schweizerischen Finanzen im 16
Jahrhundert’, in O. Pickl (ed.), Krieg, Militärausgaben und Wirtschaftlicher
Wandel (Graz, 1980), pp. 37–45; for the relations between the French mon-
archy and the cantonal authorities, see M. Burin de Roziers, Les capitulations
militaires entre la Suisse et la France (Doctoral thesis, University of Paris, 1902).
83. Elgger, Kriegswesen, pp. 75–8.
84. Frauenholz, Heerwesen, II, Pt 1, p. 58, taken from an estimate from 1481,
though adds that contemporaries considered little over one-third of this
number could actually be raised without creating insuperable problems of
subsistence.
85. Häne, ‘Organisation militaire’, 7–9; Schaufelberger, Alte Schweizer, p. 19.
86. Schaufelberger, Alte Schweizer, pp. 84–7, 98–102.
87. Elgger, Kriegswesen, pp. 56–7. Though the capacity of the authorities to
mobilize all those in theory subject to military service should not be over-
estimated: A. Sennhauser, Hauptmann und Führung im Schweizerkrieg des
Mittelalters (Zurich, 1965), p. 129.
88. Machiavelli had a high opinion of the Swiss system of collective obligation: The
Art of War, trans. E. Farneworth (1521; repr. New York, 1965), pp. 35, 61.
89. On seeking consensual decisions with subordinate officers via the Kriegsrat see
Padrutt, Staat und Krieg, pp. 133–5; all accounts of Swiss military organiza-
tion emphasize the extent to which the officers had limited power to compel or
discipline their troops.
90. Elgger, Kriegswesen, pp. 199–200. Where, in Berne and Zurich, for example,
the post-reformation political consensus opposed significant foreign military
service, the impact was overwhelmingly apparent in the military
deprofessionalization of the elites who would traditionally have led troop

formations: G. Grosjean, ‘Miliz und Kriegsgenügen als Problem im
Wehrwesen des alten Bern’, Archiv des Historischen Vereins des Kantons
Bern, 42 (1953), 131–71, pp. 147–50.
91. Sennhauser, Hauptmann und Führung, pp. 31–4, who cites the major military
role played by the Bernese noble families of Diesbach, Scharnachtal, Wabern
and Bubenberg from as early as the Burgundian Wars. Similar examples for
the Drei Bünde are provided by Padrutt, Staat und Krieg, pp. 36–9, who adds
that for those families with status and offices but without noble titles, such
military service was the obvious route to social and political promotion.
92. R. Walpen, ‘Das Wehrwesen in der landschaft Wallis des 17. Jahrhundert’,
in L. Carlem and G. Imboden (eds.), Kaspar Jodok von Stockalper und das
Wallis. Beiträge zur Geschichte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Brig, 1991), pp. 83–5.
93. E. de Courten, ‘Un régiment valaisan au service de la France dans la
campagne de Valteline de 1624–27’, Annales Valaisannes, 25 (1950), 253–
317.
94. Frauenholz, Heerwesen, II, Pt 1, p. 32, cites a French pension of 20,000
francs paid to the military commander Niklas von Diesbach of Berne;
numerous examples of other pensions and special payments are provided
in M.B. baron de Zurlauben, Histoire militaire des Suisses au service de la
France (8 vols., Paris, 1751–3), Volume IV examining the military role of
the Swiss from Charles VIII to Henri III.
95. Elgger, Kriegswesen, pp. 91–2; Schaufelberger, Alte Schweizer, p. 20.
96. Padrutt, Staat und Krieg, pp. 62–3; Sennhauser, Hauptmann und Führung,
p. 129.
97. Padrutt, Staat und Krieg, pp. 66–71; Elgger, Kriegswesen, pp. 46–50, 63.
98. F. Bächtiger, ‘Andreaskreuz und Schweizerkreuz: zur Feindschaft zwischen
Landsknechten und Eidgenossen’, Jahrbuch des Bernischen Historischen
Museums, 51/52 (1971–2), 205–70.
99. Frauenholz, Heerwesen, II, Pt 1, pp. 27–8.
100. Frauenholz, Heerwesen, II, Pt 1, p. 59.
101. S. Fiedler, Kriegswesen und Kriegführung im Zeitalter der Landsknechte
(Koblenz, 1985), p. 53.
102. R. Feller, ‘Alliances et service mercenaire, 1515–1798’, in Feldmann and
Wirz (eds.), Histoire militaire, III, p. 9.
103. Feller, ‘Alliances’, III, pp. 7–8.
104. Zurlauben, Histoire militaire des Suisses, IV, pp. 535–8; Burin de Roziers,
Capitulations, pp. 96–8. This remained the definitive form for French con-
tracts with the Swiss down to 1671.
105. Burin de Roziers, Capitulations, p. 93; Grosjean, ‘Miliz und Kriegsgenügen’,
p. 147.
106. M. Körner, ‘Zur eidgenössischen Solddienst- und Pensionendebatte im 16.
Jahrhundert’, in N. Furrer, L. Hubler, M. Stubenvoll and D. Tosato-Rigo
(eds.), Gente ferocissima. Mercenariat et société en Suisse (XV–XIX siècle) –
Festschrift für Alain Dubois (Zurich, 1997), pp. 193–203.
107. Elgger, Kriegswesen, p. 72; T. Müller-Wolfer, ‘Le siècle du schisme reli-
gieux’, in Feldmann and Wirz (eds.), Histoire militaire, III, pp. 81–5.
108. Sennhauser, Hauptmann und Führung, pp. 128–30.

109. Although the French crown was heavily in arrears in its payments to the
Swiss regiments in its service in 1582, Henri III throught it prudent to offer
their leader Ludwig Pfyffer a gift of 10,000 crowns for renewing the treaty:
Müller-Wolfer, ‘Siècle de schisme’, III, 89.
110. Sennhauser, Hauptmann und Führung, pp. 134–8.
111. Schaufelberger, Alte Schweizer, p. 149.
112. Padrutt, Staat und Krieg, p. 72: ‘circha cinquante compagni’.
113. Sennhauser, Hauptmann und Führung, p. 135.
114. Sennhauser, Hauptmann und Führung, pp. 136–7, provides a particular
example of a Zurich master craftsman who in 1495 lent one of his appren-
tices the money for arms and armour to join a free company.
115. Zurlauben, Histoire militaire des Suisses, IV, p. 103.
116. Sennhauser, Hauptmann und Führung, p. 88: ‘the more that the commanders
of the free companies took service with foreign lords, the more they devel-
oped their financial expertise’.
117. Fiedler, Kriegswesen, pp. 43–4.
118. Padrutt, Staat und Krieg, p. 144; Elgger, Kriegswesen, pp. 167–8.
119. R. Wohlfeil, ‘Adel und neues Heerwesen’, in H. Rössler (ed.), Deutscher
Adel, 1430–1555 (Darmstadt, 1965), pp. 214–16; W. Erben, ‘Maximilian I.
und die Landsknechte’, Historische Zeitschrift, 116 (1916), 48–68.
120. Fiedler, Kriegswesen, p. 66, citing Frauenholz, Heerwesen, II, Pt 1, p. 63.
121. Baumann, Landsknechte, pp. 48, 78.
122. Eugen von Frauenholz, Lazarus von Schwendi. Der Erste Deutsche Verkünder
der allgemeinen Wehrpflicht (Hamburg, 1939): a selection of Schwendi’s
military writings, though making the point that he was a realist about prac-
tical limits on any universal military service.
123. Zwiedineck-Südenhorst, Kriegsbilder, pp. 14–15.
124. J. Bérenger, ‘Fiscalité et économie en Autriche XVIe–XVIIe siècles’, in
J. Bouvier and J.C. Perrot, États, fiscalités, économies. Actes du cinquième
congrès de l’Association Française des Historiens Économistes (Paris, 1983),
pp. 13–25.
125. R. Baumann, Georg von Frundsberg. Vater der Landsknechte (Munich, 1991),
pp. 13–20.
126. Baumann, Landsknechte, pp. 166–7; G. Millar, Tudor Mercenaries and
Auxiliaries, 1485–1547 (Charlottesville, VA, 1980), pp. 32–3.
127. Redlich, I, pp. 37–8.
128. Baumann, Landsknechte, p. 62.
129. P. Burschel, Söldner im Nordwestdeutschland des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts.
Sozialgeschichtliche Studien (Göttingen, 1994), p. 97, quotes Sebastian
Franck in 1531 who claimed that the numbers of men offering themselves
for military service were scarcely fewer than the number of flies on a hot
summer’s day.
130. Burschel, Söldner, p. 98: this kind of over-recruitment was seen as highly
undesirable from a public order perspective.
131. Frauenholz, Heerwesen, II, Pt 2, pp. 104–16, two contemporary accounts of
the battle.
132. B.S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore and
London, 1997), pp. 192–9, who draws extensively on François de La
Noue’s accounts of pistolier cavalry.
133. F. de La Noue, ‘Premier paradoxe: qu’un escadron de reitres doit battre un
escadron de lances’, in Discours politiques et militaires (Geneva, 1967),
pp. 355–62.
134. Fiedler, Kriegswesen, pp. 216–17.
135. Fiedler, Kriegswesen, p. 96: fully armoured, often noble, Reiters received
double this pay: F. Lammert, ‘Von den deutschen Pistolenreitern und
ihrem Führer Graf Günter von Schwarzburg’, Zeitschrift für Historische
Waffen- und Kostümkunde, 12 (1931), 209–28.
136. Frauenholz, Heerwesen, II, Pt 2, pp. 50–3.
137. Lot, Recherches, pp. 41–2.
138. Lot, Recherches, pp. 62–3.
139. Lot, Recherches, pp. 131–2, 140, 176–85.
140. Millar, Tudor Mercenaries, pp. 65–95; 1,200–1,400 Landsknechte under
Conrad Pennink were in England in 1549 and assisted the earl of Warwick
in the suppression of Ket’s Rebellion: ibid., p. 176.
141. D. Potter, ‘The International Mercenary Market in the Sixteenth Century:
Anglo-French Competition in Germany, 1543–50’, English Historical
Review, 111 (1996), 24–58, pp. 27–8; Millar, Tudor Mercenaries, pp. 90–3;
Gunn et al., England and the Netherlands, pp. 147–50.
142. E. Hedegaard, Landsknaegtene i Danmark i det 16. århundrede. En kulturhis-
torisk studie (Helsingør, 1965), pp. 15–18. Hedegaard discusses both the
hiring of German Landsknechte and the evolution of a parallel military system
in Denmark.
143. H. Dihle, ‘Das Kriegstagebuch eines Deutschen Landsknechts um die
Wende des 15. Jahrhunderts’, Zeitschrift für Historische Waffen- und
Kostümkunde, n.s., 3 (12) (1929), 1–11.
144. Burschel, Söldner, pp. 145–65, who specifically rejects the assumption that
the recruitment of the Landsknechte had a homogeneity lost in the later
period of military enterprise.
145. Wohlfeil, ‘Adel und neues Heerwesen’, pp. 215–16; Burschel, Söldner,
pp. 60–72.
146. Baumann, Frundsberg, pp. 215–17; the topic is judiciously discussed in
H.M. Möller, Das Regiment der Landsknechte. Untersuchungen zu Verfassung,
Recht und Selbstverständnis in deutschen Söldnerheeren des 16. Jahrhunderts
(Wiesbaden, 1976), pp. 67–71, who identifies a degree of common identity
only in antipathy to non-Germans.
147. Baumann, Frundsberg, pp. 123–5, 272–5.
148. Frauenholz, Heerwesen, II, Pt 1, p. 114: ‘Aber sind mannlich und gedenckt
dheiner heimb’.
149. For the Swiss, see the article by W. Meyer, ‘Religiös-magisches Denken und
Verhalten im eidgenössisches Kriegertum des ausgehenden Mittelalters’, in
M. Kaiser and S. Kroll (eds.), Militär und Religiosität in der Frühen Neuzeit
(Münster, 2004), pp. 21–32; Landsknecht piety and practice in Möller,
Regiment des Landsknechte, pp. 112–13.
150. M. Kaiser and S. Kroll, ‘Introduction’, in Kaiser and Kroll (eds.), Militär
und Religiosität, pp. 11–19.
151. G. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567–1659 (2nd edn,
Cambridge, 2004), pp. 152–3.
152. Baumann, Landsknechte, pp. 131–45.
153. Baumann, Frundsberg, pp. 274–5.
154. Möller, Regiment der Landsknechte, pp. 77–80. The Swiss premium was one
of the many reasons for the mortal antagonism between Swiss and
Landsknechte: Bächtiger, ‘Andreaskreuz und Schweizerkreuz’, pp. 218–19;
Burschel, Söldner, pp. 170–8, cautions against simplistic wage-for-wage
comparisons with civilian life, but does not doubt that as an indication of
status through remuneration this wage of nearly 50 gulden per annum places
the soldier high amongst the ranks of skilled craftsmen (p. 173).
155. Though a full set of infantry armour would cost up to 16 gulden: Möller,
Regiment der Landsknechte, p. 76.
157. Zwiedineck-Südenhorst, Kriegsbilder, p. 9; Möller, Regiment der Landsknechte,
pp. 52, 58–67.
158. Burschel, Söldner, pp. 38–53, sums up the process in terms of the perceptions
of society: ‘vom “schlauen Landsknecht” zum “dummen Soldaten”’.
160. Or the customary address of the Provost to the assembled Landsknechte
before justifying to them the execution of a condemned soldier and asking
for their agreement to the sentence: ‘Einen guten Morgen, liebe, ehrliche
Landsknechte, edel und unedel, wie uns denn Gott zu einander gebracht
und versammelt hat!’: F. Blau, Die deutschen Landsknechte. Ein Kulturbild
(Görlitz, 1882), pp. 42–3.
161. M. Rogg, Landsknechte und Reisläufer: Bilder vom Soldaten. Ein Stand in der
Kunst des 16. Jahrhunderts (Paderborn, 2002), esp. pp. 148–210.
162. Baumann, Landsknechte, pp. 98–9; Möller, Regiment der Landsknechte,
pp. 95–9.
163. The system was paralleled in the Swiss companies, and indeed originated
with them: Frauenholz, Heerwesen, II, Pt 2, pp. 54–5.
164. For one of the best accounts of small-group dynamics written from imme-
diate experience, see S.L. Marshall, Men against Fire. The Problem of Battle
Command in Future War (New York, 1947), pp. 60–1, 138–56.
165. Parker, Army of Flanders, pp. 151–2; La Noue, Discours, pp. 340–7
(‘Seiziesme Discours’), praised the military virtues of the Spanish system
of camaradas and urged – unsuccessfully – its adoption by France.
167. Blau, Deutschen Landsknechte, pp. 36–42.
168. Ibid., p. 107, also describes cases where, for reasons which the texts do not
make clear, the colonel might choose to try the soldier before a tribunal of the
soldiers, where the verdict would be reached by popular vote; Frauenholz,
Heerwesen, II, Pt 2, pp. 38–9.
169. A detailed contemporary acount of the involvement of the company in the
administration of justice is given in L. Fronsperger, Kriegsordnung und
Regiment, sampt derselbigen befehl, statt und Ampter zu Roß und zu Fuß . . .
(Frankfurt, 1564), lxx recto–lxxv verso; all of this, whether by conscious
borrowing, or shared tradition, exactly reflected the Swiss procedures:
Sennhauser, Hauptmann und Führung, pp. 53–4.
170. The soldiers’ perception of their social status was reflected in this view of the
executioner, his assistants and guards as ‘dishonourable’, set outside the
‘regiment’/corporation by their performance of these roles: W. Danckert,
Unehrliche Leute. Die Verfemten Berufe (Berne and Munich, 1963), pp. 36–49;
K. Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts. Honour and Ritual Pollution in
Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 69–93.
171. See, for example, the case from Sennhauser of a Swiss captain killed by one
of his men for trying to restrain him from stealing goods from the collective
booty of the unit, and the soldier then being protected by his company:
Hauptmann und Führung, p. 86.
172. Möller, Regiment der Landsknechte, pp. 202–8.
174. Padrutt, Staat und Krieg, p. 136.
175. For the Swiss Kriegsrat see Elgger, Kriegswesen, pp. 195–6; Frauenholz,
Heerwesen, II, Pt 1, pp. 47–51.
176. See, for example, I. Clendinnen, ‘The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society’,
Past and Present, 94 (1982), 44–89.
177. B. Bei der Wieden, ‘Niederdeutsche Söldner vor dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg.
Geistige und mentale Grenzen eines sozialen Raums’, in B. Kroener and
R. Pröve (eds.), Krieg und Frieden. Militär und Gesellschaft in der Frühen
Neuzeit (Paderborn, 1996), pp. 85–107; Burschel, Söldner, pp. 27–53.
178. Rogg, Landsknechte, pp. 18–143; J.R. Hale, Artists and Warfare in the
Renaissance (New Haven and London, 1990), pp. 1–72; Hale, ‘The Soldier
in Germanic Graphic Art of the Renaissance’, in R. Rothberg and T. Rabb,
Art and History. Images and their Meanings (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 85–114.
179. For example, Hedegaard, Landsknaegtene, p. 28 for the strident condemna-
tion of Peder Palladius, bishop of Zealand, in 1555; Blau, Deutschen
Landsknechte, pp. 113–20 on the contemporary condemnation of the
Pluderhosen (fashionable, puffed-out breeches, often tied at the knee).
180. M. Rogg, ‘“Zerhauen und zerschnitten, nach adelichen Sitten”. Herkunft,
Entwicklung und Funktion soldatischer Tracht des 16 Jahrhundert im
Spiegel zeitgenössischer Kunst’, in Kroener and Pröve (eds.), Krieg und
Frieden, 109–35; M. Rogg, ‘“Wol auff mit mir, du schoenes weyb”.
Anmerkungen zur Konstruktion von Männlichkeit im Soldatenbild des 16.
Jahrhunderts’, in K. Hagemann and R. Pröve (eds.), Landsknechte,
Soldatenfrauen und Nationakrieger (Frankurt am Main, 1998), pp. 51–73.
181. J. Lipsius, Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine (London, 1594; facsimile
edn, Amsterdam and New York, 1970), p. 157.
182. Blau, Deutschen Landsknechte, pp. 98–104, from whose 1880s account all
mention of the Hurenwaibel and whores has been carefully excised; cf. also
pp. 27–9 on regimental officers.
183. Burschel, Söldner, pp. 248–52, 257–8: ‘Ohne Huren kein Krieg’.
185. Burschel, Söldner, pp. 129–45.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
1. F. Baumgartner, Henry II, King of France, 1547–1559 (Durham, NC and
London, 1988), p. 87.
2. A. Orlandi, Le Grand Parti. Fiorentini a Lione e il debito pubblico Francese nel
XVI secolo (Florence, 2002); R. Doucet, ‘Le Grand Parti de Lyon au XVIe
siècle’, Revue historique, 171 and 172 (1933 and 1934), pp. 473–513, 1–41;
R. Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger: Geldkapital und Creditverkehr im 16.
Jahrhundert (2 vols., Jena, 1896), II, pp. 93–107.
3. M.J. Rodríguez-Salgado, The Changing Face of Empire. Charles V, Philip II and
Habsburg Authority, 1551–59 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 139–40.
4. J. Tracy, A Financial Revolution in the Habsburg Netherlands. Renten and
Renteniers in the County of Holland, 1515–1565 (London, 1985), pp. 91–107;
Rodríguez-Salgado, Empire, pp. 55–9.
5. Ehrenberg, Fugger, II., pp. 91–3; Doucet suggests that the project for the
Grand Parti had its origins in the levels of military expenditure from 1542:
‘Grand Parti’, pp. 475–6.
6. Doucet, ‘Grand Parti’, p. 507.
7. Ehrenberg, Fugger, II, pp. 104–7.
8. H. Hauser, ‘The European Financial Crisis of 1559’, Journal of Economic and
Business History, 2 (1929–30), pp. 241–55; Ehrenberg, Fugger, II, pp. 159–69.
9. D. Potter, Renaissance France at War. Armies, Culture and Society, c.1480–1560
(Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 212–20, demonstrates this massively increasing
financial burden of the 1550s via a series of bar charts.
10. Rodríguez-Salgado, Empire, pp. 238–42; Ehrenberg, Fugger, II, pp. 147–59.
11. Rodríguez-Salgado, Empire, pp. 240–52.
12. The chancellor, Michel de L’Hôpital, announced to the Estates General of
1560 that the crown’s debt stood at 43 million livres, of which more than
15 million was contracted at ‘grands et insupportables intérêts’: Doucet,
‘Grand Parti’, 172, p. 9.
13. This statement contradicts the apparent evidence of a number of widely cited
tables showing comparative European army sizes from 1500 to 1700, which
indicate an apparently vast growth in military establishments during the 1620s
and 1630s. However, almost all of that projected growth is based on mislead-
ing documents and statements by contemporaries which need qualification: a
few short-term ‘surges’ in military strength are not evidence of a real and
permanent growth in military establishments. In practice the military mobi-
lization atttained in the 1550s was not significantly and lastingly surpassed
until the later seventeenth century.
14. A. Guéry, ‘La naissance financière de l’état moderne en France’, in J. Bouvier
and J.-C. Perrot, États, fiscalités, economies (Paris, 1985), pp. 53–62; Guéry,
‘Les finances de la monarchie française sous l’Ancien Régime’, Annales ESC,
33 (1978), 216–39, pp. 223–8.
15. J. Collins, Fiscal Limits of Absolutism. Direct Taxation in Early Seventeenth-
Century France (Berkeley, CA, 1988), pp. 48–64; P. Hamon, L’argent du roi.
Les finances sous François I (Paris, 1994), pp. 135–247; J. Tracy, Emperor
Charles V, Impresario of War (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 95–108, 249–303.
16. J.R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450–1620 (London, 1985),
pp. 232–52, is robustly dismissive of the extent to which the demands of war
could overcome these political limitations.
17. Figures from F. Lot, Recherches sur les effectifs des armées françaises des Guerres
d’Italie aux Guerres de Religion, 1494–1562 (Paris, 1962), pp. 125–88.
18. J. Glete, Navies and Nations. Warships, Navies and State-Building in Europe and
America, 1500–1860 (2 vols., Stockholm, 1993), II, pp. 504–6.
19. S. Gunn, D. Grummitt and H. Cools, War, State and Society in England and
the Netherlands, 1477–1559 (Oxford, 2007), p. 27.
20. S. Pepper and N. Adams, Firearms and Fortifications: Military Architecture and
Siege Warfare in Sixteenth-Century Siena (Chicago, 1986), pp. 3–31; C. Duffy,
Siege Warfare. The Fortress in the Early Modern World, 1494–1660 (London,
1979), pp. 1–105.
21. G. Parker, The Military Revolution. Military Innovation and the Rise of the West,
1500–1800 (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1996), p. 12.
22. N.A.M. Rodger, ‘The Development of Broadside Gunnery, 1450–1650’, The
Mariner’s Mirror, 82 (1996), 301–24.
23. G. Parker, ‘The Dreadnought Revolution of the Sixteenth Century’, The
Mariner’s Mirror, 82 (1996), 269–300, p. 286 gives the example of Philip II,
who by the end of 1588 had commissioned twelve new warships, each dis-
placing 1,500 tons.
24. Glete, Navies and Nations, I, pp. 36–7.
25. Even the Habsburg rulers of the Netherlands, for whom the availability of a
vast pool of merchant shipping had previously discouraged direct ship own-
ership, started to fit out purpose-built warships with substantially heavier
armaments from the 1550s: L. Sicking, Neptune and the Netherlands. State,
Economy and War at Sea in the Renaissance (Brill, 2004), pp. 376–90.
26. J. Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys. Changing Technology and Mediterranean
Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 194–220.
27. For France, it can be assumed for the period 1500–59 that the largest part of
the expenses of the extraordinaire des guerres was for foreign mercenaries (the
gendarmerie and heavy cavalry were funded from the ordinaire); the dramatic
rise in the costs of mercenaries is strongly evident: Potter, France at War,
pp. 215–18, 356–7.
28. R. Baumann, Landsknechte (Munich, 1994), p. 87.
29. An extensive literature on this subject reflects recent research and thinking
about the nature of the early modern state, and in particular the compromises
and negotiations at the heart of most early modern fiscal systems: see, for
example, Tracy, Financial Revolution; W. Beik, Absolutism and Society in
Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in
Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 245–78; M. Potter, Corps and Clienteles.
Public Finance and Political Change in France, 1688–1715 (Aldershot, 2003),
pp. 3–25; H. Root, The Fountain of Privilege. Political Foundations of Markets in
Old Regime France and England (Berkeley, CA, 1994), pp. 23–40.
30. M. Burin de Roziers, Les capitulations militaires entre la Suisse et la France
(doctoral thesis, University of Paris, 1902), pp. 97–8; Potter, France at War,
pp. 124–51; Redlich, I, p. 48.
31. G. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road (2nd edn, Cambridge,
2004), pp. 32–3; Redlich, I, pp. 56–7.
32. R. Baumann, Georg von Frundsberg. Der Vater der Landsknechte (Munich,
1984), shows how the most famous of all the Landsknecht commanders was
ruined by ‘irrational’ financial behaviour in the context of short-term merce-
nary contracts: see especially Frundsberg’s reported comments – p. 297.
33. For Blaise de Monluc, the Swiss were ‘vrais gens de guerre’, but had also been
the cause of great losses and damage to the king’s affairs by their rapacious
behaviour and demands ‘to be paid in money, not words’: Commentaires
(Paris, 1964), pp. 31–2, referring to the defeat at La Bicocca. For a passionate
contemporary denunciation of the use of foreign mercenaries in place of
native French troops see Guillaume du Bellay, Instructions sur le faict de la
Guerre, extraictes des livres de Polybe, Frontin, Vegece, Cornazan, Machiavelle, &
plusieurs autres bons autheurs (Paris, 1553), Book One, pp. 13–21r.
35. Glete, Navies and Nations, I, p. 14.
36. This latter problem is admittedly less pressing in the case of galleys, which are
simple and light enough to be deconstructed and laid up in store: P. Williams,
‘Piracy and Naval Conflict in the Mediterranean, 1590–1620’ (D.Phil. thesis,
Oxford University, 2001), pp. 17–18.
37. Williams, ‘Piracy’, pp. 11–16, 32–6.
38. J. Glete, Warfare at Sea, 1500–1650. Maritime Conflicts and the Transformation
of Europe (London, 2000), p. 66.
39. Glete, Navies and Nations, I, pp. 140–2.
40. I.A.A. Thompson, War and Government in Habsburg Spain, 1560–1620
(London, 1976), pp. 226–33. As Thompson points out, this was not always
a correct assumption, and the chronic financial weakness of early modern
states could lead to default even in areas where it was clear that the conse-
quences would undermine any military effectiveness.
41. C. Fusero, I Doria (Milan,1973), pp. 388–404.
42. G. Doria, ‘Conoscenza del mercato e sistema informativo: il know-how dei
mercanti-finanzieri genovesi nei secoli XVI e XVII’, in A. de Maddalena and
H. Kellenbenz (eds.), La republica internazionale del denaro tra XV e XVII
secolo. Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico 20 (Bologna, 1986),
pp. 57–121, pp. 66–7; Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys, pp. 25–6;
T. Kirk, Genoa and the Sea. Policy and Power in an Early Modern Maritime
Republic, 1559–1684 (Baltimore and London, 2005), p. 41.
43. Kirk, Genoa, p. 67, n. 37.
44. Kirk, Genoa, p. 42; Thompson, War and Government, p. 32; R. Savelli,
‘Giovanni (Gian) Andrea Doria’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani
(Rome, 1960–), XLI, pp. 361–75.
45. Kirk, Genoa, p. 44; Williams, ‘Piracy’, pp. 32–6.
46. Kirk, Genoa, pp. 112–16, though Kirk stresses the chimerical character of
most of these self-funding aspirations.
47. This had been the means to augment the very limited permanent naval
resources in the Habsburg Netherlands throughout the first half of the six-
teenth century: Sicking, Neptune and the Netherlands, pp. 370–8, 407–19.
48. Glete, Navies and Nations, I, pp. 53–5; J. Guilmartin, Galleons and Galleys
(London, 2002), pp. 158–81.
49. Glete, Navies and Nations, I, p. 141; F.W. Carter, Dubrovnik (Ragusa).
A Classic City State (London, 1972), pp. 308–13, 392–5.
50. Thompson, War and Government, pp. 193–9; D. Goodman, Spanish Naval
Power, 1589–1665. Reconstruction and Defeat (Cambridge, 1997), p. 30, gives
the later example of Jerónimo Masibradi, who served Philip IV from 1624
until his death in 1650 at the head of a squadron of six Ragusan galleons, after
which the contract was continued by his heirs.
51. V. Kostic, Ragusa and the Spanish Armada (Belgrade, 1972), pp. 205–7.
53. Kirk, Genoa, p. 45.
54. P.W. Klein, ‘The Trip Family in the Seventeenth Century: a Study of the
Behaviour of the Entrepreneur on the Dutch Staple Market’, Acta Historiae
Neerlandica, 1 (1966), 187–211, p. 201; J. Bruijn, The Dutch Navy of the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Columbia, SC, 1993), p. 24.
56. Klein, ‘Trip Family’, p. 201; A. James, Navy and Government in Early Modern
France, 1572–1661 (London, 2004), p. 73, gives five warships and a number of
lighter vessels, and, p. 113, emphasizes that these were the largest and most
heavily armed vessels in the navy in the 1620s. Four warships had been
ordered from the Dutch for French Mediterranean use back in 1618
(p. 94), and another six were to be delivered in the later 1630s (p. 116).
57. Klein, ‘Trip Family’, p. 198.
58. E. Dahlgren, Louis de Geer, 1587–1652, Hans lif och verk (2 vols., Uppsala,
1923), II, pp. 441–505; R.C. Anderson, Naval Wars in the Baltic, 1522–1850
(1910; repr. London, 1969), pp. 47–50; N. Probst, ‘Naval Operations during
the Torstensson War, 1643–45’, Revue internationale d’histoire militaire,
84 (2004); G. Edmundson, ‘Louis de Geer’, English Historical Review,
6 (1891), 685–712, pp. 702–9.
59. Dahlgren, De Geer, II, p. 491.
60. A large-scale example from the early 1630s involving the Genoese Centurión
family in R. Mackay, The Limits of Royal Authority. Resistance and Obedience in
Seventeenth-Century Castile (Cambridge, 1999), p. 51.
61. J. Wood, The King’s Army. Warfare, Soldiers and Society during the Wars of
Religion in France, 1562–1576 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 55–66.
62. M. Greengrass, ‘Pieces of the Jigsaw: Making Sense of French Taxation under the
Last Valois, 1574–1589’, in M. Ormrod, R. Bonney and M. Bonney (eds.), Crises,
Revolutions and Self-Sustained Growth. Essays in European Fiscal History, 1130–
1830 (Stamford, UK, 1999), pp. 138–69; Wood, King’s Army, pp. 275–86.
63. H. Koenigsberger, ‘The Organization of Revolutionary Parties in France and
the Netherlands during the Sixteenth Century’, in Koenigsberger, Estates and
Revolutions (Ithaca, 1971), pp. 224–52, pp. 227–30; R. Harding, Anatomy of a
Power Elite. The Provincial Governors of Early Modern France (New Haven,
1978), pp. 58–9.
64. J. de Pablo, ‘L’armée huguenote entre 1562 et 1573’, Archiv für
Reformationsgeschichte, 48 (1957), 192–216, pp. 198–201; M. Wolfe, The Fiscal
System of Renaissance France (New Haven, 1972), pp. 142–3; M. Greengrass,

‘Henri de Montmorency-Damville et l’administration des armées provinciales
de Languedoc’, in J. Perot and P. Tucoo-Chala (eds.), Provinces et Pays du Midi
au temps d’Henri de Navarre, 1555–1589 (Biarritz, 1989), pp. 103–23,
pp. 112–15 on how Damville used his personal authority to collect military taxes.
65. M. Greengrass, ‘Financing the Cause: Protestant Mobilization and
Accountability in France’, in P. Benedict, G. Marnef, H. van Nierop and
M. Venard (eds.), Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the
Netherlands, 1555–1585 (Amsterdam, 1999), pp. 233–54, pp. 240–1; Wolfe,
Fiscal System, pp. 143–53; Harding, Anatomy, pp. 99–107.
66. Greengrass, ‘Financing’, p. 244, gives examples where the Landsknechte and
Reiters were raised on the credit of Huguenot grandees; later in the wars the
German princes themselves on occasions funded part of the costs of levies of
German troops for the French Protestants, hoping to benefit from substan-
tially larger payments in the event of a Protestant victory: B. Vogler, ‘Le rôle
des Electeurs Palatins dans les guerres de religion en France (1559–1592)’,
Cahiers d’histoire, 10 (1965), 51–85, pp. 65–83.
67. Wolfe, Fiscal System, pp. 185–90.
68. And to use the troops themselves to collect these higher tax demands: Wolfe,
Fiscal System, pp. 195–203.
69. Wolfe, Fiscal System, pp. 203–5.
70. Greengrass, ‘Financing’, pp. 247–8 for the Huguenots.
71. J.-C. Arnould, ‘Pillage, Profit, Promotion: l’homme de guerre d’après les
Commentaires de Monluc’, in G.-A. Pérousse, A. Thierry and A. Tournon
(eds.), L’homme de guerre au XVIe siècle (St Etienne, 1992), pp. 167–76.
72. I. Aristide, La fortune de Sully (Paris, 1990), pp. 29–31.
73. Vogler, ‘Electeurs Palatins’, pp. 61–2, 66, 73–4; R. Bonney, The King’s Debts.
Finance and Politics in France, 1589–1661 (Oxford, 1981), pp. 55–6.
74. R. Quatrefages, Los tercios españoles (1567–1577) (Madrid, 1979), p. 83.
75. Parker, Army of Flanders, pp. 22–3.
76. G. Parker, The Dutch Revolt (London, 1977), pp. 169–78.
77. Parker, Army of Flanders, pp. 231–2; Thompson, War and Government, p. 119.
78. Parker, Army of Flanders, pp. 24, 231–2.
79. L. Welti, Graf Jakob Hannibal I. von Hohenems, 1530–1587. Ein Leben im
Dienste des Katholischen Abendlandes (Innsbruck, 1954), pp. 209–10, 300.
81. Welti, Hannibal von Hohenems, pp. 184–91.
82. Quatrefages, Los tercios, p. 180.
83. H. von Zwiedineck-Südenhorst, Kriegsbilder aus der Zeit der Landsknechte
(Stuttgart, 1883), p. 231.
84. G. Henry, The Irish Military Community in Spanish Flanders, 1586–1621
(Dublin, 1992), pp. 40–2, and comments by Walter de la Hyde, p. 51:
‘I have no means to liv but my company . . .’
85. Parker, Army of Flanders, p. 191, who also gives further examples of this
apparently complete disregard for these regimental debts.
86. Welti, Hannibal von Hohenems, pp. 300–4.

89. Redlich, I, p. 242.
90. Redlich, I, p. 33.
91. Zwiedineck-Südenhorst, Kriegsbilder, p. 231.
92. Zwiedineck-Südenhorst, Kriegsbilder, p. 234.
93. H. Lonchay (ed.), Commentario del Coronel Francisco Verdugo de la Guerra de
Frisa (Brussels, 1899), p. xxix.
94. Lonchay, Commentario, pp. xix–xxiii.
95. J. Lefèvre, Spinola et la Belgique (1601–1627) (Brussels, 1947), pp. 17–25.
96. A.E. Estríngana, Guerra y finanzas en los Países Bajos católicos. De Farnesio a
Spinola (1592–1630) (Madrid, 2002), pp. 129–204, though has disappoint-
ingly little on the extent to which Spinola’s private access to credit helped to
keep the army operational; Lefèvre, Spinola, pp. 45–51.
97. Parker, Army of Flanders, p. 212: ‘Spinola could always raise a personal loan
of 2 million escudos, and could do it for half as much as the king of Spain.’
Although by 1626 and the aftermath of the siege of Breda, even he was having
difficulties finding resources: Lefèvre, Spinola, pp. 89–90.
98. J.P. Niederkorn, Die europäische Mächte und der ‘Lange Türkenkrieg’ Kaiser
Rudolfs II. (1593–1606) (Vienna, 1993), pp. 55–7.
99. M. Hüther, ‘Der Dreißigjährige Krieg als fiskalisches Problem:
Lösungsversuche und ihre Konsequenzen’, Scripta Mercaturae, 21 (1987),
52–81, p. 66; K. Krüger, ‘Kriegsfinanzierung und Reichsrecht im 16. und
17. Jahrhundert’, in B. Kroener and R. Pröve (eds.), Krieg und Frieden. Militär
und Gesellschaft in der frühen Neuzeit (Paderborn, 1996), pp. 47–57, pp. 50–6.
100. Christoph von Rusworm, who ended as field marshal of the armies in
Hungary, saw an opportunity to advance himself in 1594 when he was able
to transfer his regiment from service in Flanders to Hungary: A. Stauffer,
Hermann Christoph Graf von Rusworm, kaiserliche Feldmarschall in den
Türkenkämpfen unter Rudolf II (Munich, 1884), p. 15.
102. R. Baumann, Das Söldnerwesen im 16. Jahrhundert im bayerischen und
süddeutschen Beispiel. Eine gesellschaftsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Munich,
1978), p. 66.
103. Campaign details and field army numbers are hard to ascertain, but some
detail is provided in A. Randa, Pro Republica Christiana. Die Walachei im
‘langen’ Türkenkrieg der Katholischen Universalmächte 1593–1606 (Monachii,
1964), which indicates that Christian field armies regularly achieved
strengths of 25,000–30,000 men at the start of campaigns from 1596
onwards.
104. I. Bog, ‘Türkenkrieg und Agrarwirtschaft. Einführung in die Probleme der
Heeresversorgung und der Kriegsfinanzierung vor allem in Österreich unter
der Enns und seinen Grenzlandschaften im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert’, in
O. Pickl (ed.), Die wirtschaftlichen Auswirkungen der Türkenkriege (Graz,
1971), pp. 13–26, pp. 18–20.
105. For the heavy involvement of the Liechtenstein family in army provisioning
from their estates in Moravia, see J. von Falke, Geschichte des fürstlichen
Hauses Liechtenstein (2 vols., Vienna, 1877), II, pp. 138–41.
106. Falke, Liechtenstein, II, pp. 246–7.

107. Goodman, Spanish Naval Power, pp. 29–30; Thompson, War and
Government, p. 271.
108. N. Machiavelli, The Art of War, trans. E. Farneworth (1521; repr. New York,
1965), pp. 14–43.
109. G. Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge, 1982),
pp. 13–27, 90–117.
111. W. Schulze, ‘Die Deutsche Landesdefensionen im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert’,
in B. Stolberg-Rilinger and J. Kunisch (eds.), Staatsverfassung und
Heeresverfassung in der europäischen Geschichte der frühen Neuzeit (Berlin,
1986), pp. 129–49, pp. 135–6; H. Schnitter, Volk und Landesdefension.
Volksaufgebote, Defensionswerke, Landmilizen in den Deutschen Territorien
vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1977), pp. 69–74.
112. J. Lipsius, Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine (London, 1594); (facsim-
ile edn, Amsterdam and New York, 1970), chapter 11 (pp. 144–7):
G. Baudart, Les guerres de Nassau (2 vols., Amsterdam, 1616), I, p. 249,
justifies the decision to demolish various Spanish citadels on grounds that
they were no more than ‘nids de voleurs et de muselieres aux bourgeois . . .’
113. Du Bellay, Instructions, Book One, esp. pp. 20–27v; J.J. von Wallhausen,
Defensio patriae oder Landrettung (Mainz, 1621), provides an extremely
detailed account of setting up a militia, dedicated, somewhat ironically in
the circumstances of 1621, to Emperor Ferdinand II. Wallhausen integrates
an account of the mechanisms to select and assemble a militia with the new
prescriptions for discipline and drill detailed in his other works.
114. H. Schnitter, ‘Söldnerheer und Landesdefension. Militärische Alternativ-
enentwicklungen im Verhältnis von Volk, Staat und Streitmacht im
spätfeudalen deutschen Reich in der Zeit des Übergangs vom Feudalismus
zum Kapitalismus (15 Jh. bis 1789)’, in H. Timmermann (ed.), Die Bildung
des frühmodernen Staates – Stände und Konfessionen (Saarbrücken, 1989),
pp. 405–20, pp. 409–10.
115. K. Krüger, ‘Dänische und schwedische Kriegfinanzierung im Dreißigjährigen
Krieg bis 1635’, in K. Repgen (ed.), Krieg und Politik, 1618–1648 (Munich,
1988), pp. 275–98, p. 283 gives Oxenstierna’s calculations for the 1623
campaign in Livonia that each hired infantryman cost 62 talers, each
Swedish militiaman 34 talers over a campaign calculated at nine monthly pays.
116. D. Potter, ‘The International Mercenary Market in the Sixteenth Century:
Anglo-French Competition in Germany, 1543–50’, English Historical
Review, 111 (1996), 24–58.
117. Lipsius, Politickes, Book 13, pp. 151–60; Oestreich, Neostoicism, pp. 76–86.
As Geoffrey Parker points out, Lipsius was embarrassingly antiquarian when
attempting to offer practical military prescriptions; ‘The Limits to
Revolutions in Military Affairs: Maurice of Nassau, the Battle of
Nieuwpoort (1600) and the Legacy’, Journal of Military History, 71 (2007),
331–72, pp. 334–5.
118. W. Hahlweg, Die Heeresreform der Oranien und die Antike (Berlin, 1941); see
the discussion in the Introduction to this volume, pp. 15–16; G. Papke,
Handbuch zur deutschen Militärgeschichte, 1648–1939), Vol. I: Von der Miliz

zum Stehenden Heer. Wehrwesen im Absolutismus (Munich, 1979), pp. 72–6.
119. W.H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time. Dance and Drill in Human History
(Cambridge, MA, 1995), pp. 127–32, supports this and speaks of ‘muscular
bonding’ through imposed drill and other enforced, collective excercises;
Papke, Miliz zum Stehenden Heer, p. 77.
120. E. von Frauenholz, Entwicklungsgeschichte des Deutschen Heerwesens (5 vols.,
Munich, 1935–41), III, Pt 2 (Die Landesdefension), pp. 11–14. A measure of
scepticism about this approach can be found in C. Schulten, ‘Une nouvelle
approche de Maurice de Nassau (1567–1625)’, in P. Chaunu (ed.), Le
soldat, la stratégie, la mort: mélanges André Corvisier (Paris, 1989), pp. 42–53.
121. Frauenholz, Heerwesen, III, Pt 2, pp. 9–10. Frauenholz remains by far the
most comprehensive account of this phenomenon of the early seventeenth-
century militias, though Papke, Miliz zum Stehenden Heer, pp. 83–114, offers
a good overview; see also Schnitter, Volk und Landesdefension, pp. 100–13.
122. Frauenholz, Heerwesen, III, Pt 2, pp. 17–28; Schulze, ‘Landesdefension’,
p. 138, cites the Imperial Pfennigmeister in 1604: ‘almost all the princes in the
Empire have drawn up excellent ordinances for territorial defence, and have
started to arm and train their populations . . .’
123. One established German account of this period, part of a multi-volumed
military history, makes the point explicitly, devoting more than sixty pages to
militias and the Orange-Nassau reforms, and around twenty to military
contracting from the Swiss to Wallenstein: Papke, Von der Miliz zum stehen-
den Heer [‘From Militia to Standing Army’]; see also the discussion
pp. 150–3.
124. W. Schulze, Landesdefension und Staatsbildung. Studien zum Kriegswesen des
innerösterreichischen Territorialstaates (1564–1619) (Vienna and Cologne,
1973), especially pp. 215–42 on the influence of militia defence on political
assertion and practice in the Inner Austrian territories.
125. Though an enthusiast for the ‘forward-looking’ potential of militia service,
Frauenholz does not seek to mitigate the extent of the military failure of the
initiative amongst the German states: Heerwesen, III, Pt 2, pp. 28–34;
Schnitter, Volk und Landesdefension, pp. 132–43, describes the ineffectual
role of the militias, though with more interest shown in the potentially
subversive role offered by Landesdefension organization in the ‘antifeudalen
Klassenkampf’ in Upper Austria and Bavaria.
126. M. Roberts, Gustavus Adolophus. A History of Sweden, 1611–32 (2 vols.,
London, 1958), II, pp. 207–19; J. Glete, War and the State in Early Modern
Europe. Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–
1660 (London, 2002), pp. 201–6; R. Frost, The Northern Wars, 1558–1721
(London, 2000), pp. 33–4, makes important points about the origins of the
system in the sixteenth century.
127. Glete, War, pp. 203–6; Muscovy attempted a similar system of permanent
conscription, but with limited success until the reign of Peter the Great:
J. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar. Army and Society in Russia, 1462–1874 (Oxford,
1985), pp. 84–5, 103–8; R. Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in
Muscovy (Chicago, 1971), pp. 190–9, 232–4.
128. Krüger, ‘Dänische and schwedische Kriegsfinanzierung’, p. 278.

129. Potter, France at War, pp. 112–17.
130. Monluc commented on the legions that they offered a means to draw on
native troops rather than foreigners, but that they had failed because the
original intention to create a permanent, trained force had been quickly
abandoned: Commentaires, p. 61.
131. Falke, Hauses Liechtenstein, II, p. 150: ‘ungeordnetes Bauernvolk’.
132. Frauenholz, Heerwesen, III, Pt 2, pp. 31–3, lists the more notable failures of
the militias; M. Kaiser, Politik und Kriegsführung. Maximilian von Bayern,
Tilly und die Katholische Liga im Dreißigjährigen Krieg (Münster, 1999), p. 62,
cites the Mandat of 10 December 1632 by which Elector Maximilian dis-
solved the militia in return for a cash commutation: ‘the militia has served
badly and has been entirely useless and without effect . . .’
133. Quoted in H. Drévillon, L’impôt du sang. Le métier des armes sous Louis XIV
(Paris, 2005), p. 365.
134. Frauenholz, Heerwesen, III, Pt 2, pp. 33–4.
135. Frauenholz, Heerwesen, III, Pt 2, pp. 140–4: documents related to the
incorporation of the remaining militia into regiments in the Liga army in
1632.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 3
1. Wallenstein contributed 40,000 florins of his own funds to the recruitment:
K. Koch, ‘Wallenstein 1583–1625’ (Dissertation, Düsseldorf, 1908–9), p. 12.
2. A. de Villermont, Ernest de Mansfeldt (2 vols., Brussels, 1865), I, pp. 77–80.
3. Villermont, Mansfeldt, I, pp. 104–5, 251–66.
4. O. Chaline, La bataille de la Montagne Blanche. Un mystique chez les guerriers
(Paris, 2000), pp. 82–4; Villermont, Mansfeldt, I, pp. 296–9.
5. C. Jarrys de La Roche, Die Dreißigjährige Krieg vom militärischen Standpunkte
aus beleuchtet (3 vols., Schaffhausen, 1848), I, pp. 77–82; Villermont,
Mansfeldt, II, pp. 395–8, letter from Mansfeld to Frederick, 19 May 1621.
6. Villermont, Mansfeldt, II, pp. 71–6.
7. An army which, including the forces of Christian of Halberstadt, totalled
around 21,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry: Villermont, Mansfeldt, II, p. 71.
8. Villermont, Mansfeldt, II, pp. 120–31. The hostile Villermont sees all of these
manoeuvres to gain subsidy treaties as pure opportunism by a cynical manip-
ulator, and details all the attempts by ‘le Bâtard’ to win similar deals with the
Catholic powers.
9. Villermont, Mansfeldt, II, pp. 240–6; P. Lockhart, Denmark in the Thirty Years
War, 1618–48 (Selinsgrove, 1996), pp. 129, 136.
10. The contemporary of Mansfeld, Christian of Brunswick, provided a very
similar model: see H. Wertheim, Der tolle Halberstädter, Herzog Christian von
Braunschweig (2 vols., Berlin, 1929). And at least one Catholic general con-
tractor, Charles IV of Lorraine, operated on the same terms after his duchy
had been occupied by the French from the 1630s.
11. G. Droysen, Bernhard von Weimar (2 vols., Leipzig, 1885), I, pp. 27–32.
12. Droysen, Weimar, I, pp. 150–60.

14. His own estimates for the cost of reconstructing the army in the aftermath of
the defeat, reforming units and carrying out recruitment, assumed costs of
600,000–700,000 talers; the most that he could expect on paper from the four
northern Kreise was 350,000 gulden (approximately 500,000 taler), but in
reality far less: Droysen, Weimar, II, pp. 26–7.
15. Droysen, Weimar, II, pp. 28–9.
16. Droysen, Weimar, II, pp. 151–2; D. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army. War, Govern-
ment and Society in France, 1624–42 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 293–4.
17. A.M.R.A. Noailles, Bernhard de Saxe-Weimar (Paris, 1908), pp. 481–6, prints
the terms of the treaty; rigorous control of numbers of troops implied that the
French crown had a commissariat present with Saxe-Weimar’s army which, at
least until French commanders took over its direction in 1639, was not the
case. Droysen, Weimar, II, pp. 176–8.
18. Noailles, Saxe-Weimar, pp. 395–417.
19. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, p. 205: strength in May 1638; Droysen, Weimar, II,
pp. 186–7.
20. Droysen, Weimar, II, p. 529.
21. A. von Gonzenbach, Der General Hans Ludwig von Erlach von Castelen (3 vols.,
Berne, 1880–2), I, pp. 350–85.
22. Gonzenbach, Erlach, I, pp. 385–519, 587–98 (exhaustively); A.M.R.A. de
Noailles, Le maréchal de Guébriant (Paris, 1913), pp. 126–66; Parrott,
Richelieu’s Army, pp. 295–7.
23. Gonzenbach, Erlach, II, pp. 546–79: a particular clause of the agreement with
Königsmark was that the soldiers should be incorporated into the Swedish
army as free-standing regiments (p. 574).
24. L. Jespersen, ‘The Machtstaat in Seventeenth-Century Denmark’,
Scandinavian Journal of History, 10 (1985), 271–304, p. 275; L. Petersen,
‘Defence, War and Finance: Christian IV and the Council of the Realm,
1596–1629’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 7 (1982), 277–313, pp. 291–4.
25. Lockhart, Denmark, pp. 64–5: the militia was specifically not to be used
outside Danish territories.
26. E. Hedegaard, Landsknaegtene i Danmark i det 16. århundrede. En kulturhistor-
isk studie (Helsingør, 1965), pp. 15–18.
27. S. Murdoch, ‘Scotland, Denmark-Norway and the House of Stuart, 1603–
1660: a Diplomatic and Military Analysis’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of
Aberdeen, 1998), pp. 213–14, draws attention to the ties which had embed-
ded numbers of Scottish officers in Danish society between 1580 and 1660.
28. Petersen, ‘Christian IV’, p. 304; J. Fallon, ‘Scottish Mercenaries in the Service
of Denmark and Sweden, 1626–1632’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Glasgow,
1972), pp. 34, 191–215. Murdoch, ‘Scotland, Denmark-Norway’, pp. 247–
66, who accepts Fallon’s figure that some 13,700 Scots were recruited for
Danish military service between 1620 and 1648 (p. 229), and stresses that the
Danes ‘had a policy of maintaining control of the higher echelons of their
armed forces’ (p. 263).
29. Petersen, ‘Christian IV’, p. 303.
30. Lockhart, Denmark, p. 151.
31. Murdoch, ‘Scotland, Denmark-Norway’, pp. 267–79. In fact Scottish senior

officers were mostly reluctant or unable to raise troops from their own
resources, and the majority who served in this war and subsequently did so
as professional officers commanding Danish troops.
32. Murdoch, ‘Scotland, Denmark-Norway’, pp. 280–6.
33. H. Zwicker, ‘De militie van den staat’. Het leger van de republiek der Verenigde
Nederlanden (Amsterdam, 1991), pp. 45–6. If the relatively small number of
entirely native cavalry units are added to the totals, the number of native
troops outweighs the foreign.
34. J. Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe. Spain, the Dutch Republic
and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660 (London, 2002), p. 158.
35. Both the Spanish conquest and the subsequent Dutch recapture of the city of
Breda in 1625–6 and 1637 provided tough lessons about the costs of large-
scale offensive siege warfare.
36. Glete, War, p. 161.
37. O. van Nimwegen, ‘Deser landen crijchsvolck’. Het Staatse leger en de militaire
revoluties, 1588–1688 (Amsterdam, 2006), pp. 67–70; Zwicker, ‘De militie’,
pp. 92–7. For delays and shortfalls of pay to the troops in Dutch service see
R. Manning, An Apprenticeship in Arms. The Origins of the British Army, 1585–
1702 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 35–6.
38. G. Parker, ‘The Limits to Revolutions in Military Affairs: Maurice of Nassau,
the Battle of Nieuwpoort (1600) and the Legacy’, Journal of Military History,
71 (2007), 331–72, pp. 354–8, makes clear the extent to which the States
General were unprepared to see military authority delegated outright to the
Stadholders, and how far they saw the army as subject to their political and
military priorities.
39. W. Ziegler, Dokumente zur Geschichte von Staat und Gesellschaft in Bayern (3
vols., Munich, 1992), III, pp. 732–45, 10 July 1609, 18 February 1610:
establishment of the Liga under the military direction of Maximilian as
Bundesoberst, and prescriptions for its military organization; D. Albrecht,
Maximilian I von Bayern, 1573–1651 (Munich, 1998), pp. 618–39.
40. Albrecht, Maximilian, pp. 186–205.
41. M. Kaiser, Politik und Kriegsführung. Maximilian von Bayern, Tilly und die
Katholische Liga im Dreißigjährigen Krieg (Münster, 1999), pp. 17–18;
O. Klopp, Tilly im Dreißigjährigen Kriege (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1861), I, pp. 67–9;
M. Junkelmann, ‘Feldherr Maximilians: Johann Tserclaes Graf von Tilly’, in
Um Glauben und Reich. Kurfürst Maximilian I (Exhibition catalogue, 3 vols.,
Munich, 1980), II (i), pp. 377–99.
42. Kaiser, Politik und Kriegsführung, pp. 31–5: Christoph Ruepp in particular
seems to have played a powerful intermediary role between Tilly and
Maximilian.
43. J. Heilmann, Kriegsgeschichte von Bayern, Franken, Pfalz und Schwaben von
1506–1651 (2 vols., Munich, 1868), II, pp. 1013–4.
44. Kaiser, Politik und Kriegsführung, pp. 84–5. Heilmann, Kriegsgeschichte von
Bayern, II, pp. 1094–104, for an example of a Bavarian commission for a
regiment of 3,000 (or if chosen, 4,000) infantry.
45. Kaiser, Politik und Kriegsführung, pp. 69–70; Redlich, I, p. 222.
46. Kaiser, Politik und Kriegsführung, p. 69.

47. Kaiser, Politik und Kriegsführung, p. 70 (December 1628).
48. For the presence of the colonels, see Ziegler, Dokumente, III, pp. 984–8, 16
October 1626, Tilly’s instructions to the disciplinary officers of the regiments.
49. A. Gindely, Waldstein, I, p. 128: pay for 1626.
50. Heilmann, Kriegsgeschichte von Bayern, II, p. 1002: Verpflegungsordnung of
27 November 1632. Much of this sum would be to help cover expenses of
re-recruiting and re-equipping the troops, and the infantry regiments were
substantially larger than their cavalry counterparts.
51. Ziegler, Dokumente, III, pp. 1095–6, 9 October 1635, Imperial edict
establishing an independent Bavarian army as part of the new military
system of the Reich; C. Kapser, Die bayerische Kriegsorganisation in der
zweiten Hälfte des Dreißigjährigen Krieges, 1635–1648/49 (Münster, 1997),
pp. 16–21.
52. Kapser, Bayerische Kriegsorganisation, pp. 56–8, 218–49.
53. Kapser, Bayerische Kriegsorganisation, pp. 139–54. This was to some extent
increased by subsidies from Spain and the Emperor and domain revenues
paid to the duke: pp. 154–65.
54. Kapser, Bayerische Kriegsorganisation, pp. 290–5. Though they are not without
their problems as sets of figures, Kapser transcribes a detailed breakdown of
the contributions paid in 1645 by individual cities and regions within the
Kreise, indicating both the sustainable level of these financial demands and the
relatively small overall levels of default.
55. Kapser, Bayerische Kriegsorganisation, p. 56.
56. Heilmann, Kriegsgeschichte von Bayern, II, pp. 902–6.
57. K. Oberleitner, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Krieges mit
besonderer Berücksichtigung des Österreichischen Finanz- und Kriegs-
wesens, 1618–34’, Archiv für Österreichischen Geschichte, 19 (1858), pp. 4–6:
the outstanding sums for military preparations amounted to 4.3 million
gulden by the end of June 1619.
52–81, p. 61.
59. DBB., IV, p. 53: Collalto to Wallenstein. 19 July 1625, Vienna.
60. Gindely, Waldstein, I, p. 76: note of letter from Nuncio, Carlo Caraffa, to
Antonio Barberini, 13 March 1626.
61. Krebs, Hatzfeld I, pp. 44–5; H. Diwald, Wallenstein (Munich, 1969), pp. 266–70.
62. Wallenstein was not the first to encourage multiple proprietorship, but he
developed it far beyond anything previously seen in the Imperial army. The
Liechtensteins had raised two regiments as early as 1620: J. von Falke,
Geschichte des Fürstlichen Hauses Liechtenstein (2 vols., Vienna, 1877), II,
pp. 192, 248–9.
63. H. Hallwich, Fünf Bücher Geschichte Wallensteins (3 vols., Leipzig, 1910),
I, p. 187, cites Privy Councillor Harrach’s report of a conversation with
Wallenstein on 29 April 1625.
64. Gindely, Waldstein, I, p. 55; the mechanism invoked was the financial arrange-
ment agreed at the 1570 Speyer Reichsabschied, which stipulated that the
German territories, in case of war, were to provide quarters and subsistence

for the Imperial army: Diwald, Wallenstein, pp. 274–81.
65. Gindely, Waldstein, I, pp. 66–7.
66. Krebs, Hatzfeld I, p. 46.
67. Krebs, Hatzfeld I, pp. 73–4, for the exactions on the principality of
Schweidnitz-Jauer in Silesia.
69. Gindely, Waldstein, I, p. 75, though he was shortly to retire from the army after
a rift with Wallenstein over the latter’s ‘excessively severe’ enforcement of
discipline.
70. Gindely, Waldstein, I, p. 183; Kaiser, Politik und Kriegsführung, pp. 272–3.
71. A. Ernstberger, Hans de Witte – Finanzmann Wallensteins (Wiesbaden, 1954),
p. 196.
72. Ernstberger, Hans de Witte, pp. 179–181.
73. A detailed account of the imposition of contributions on the city of Halle in
1626 emphasized specifically that there were to be ‘no exceptions’ in the
assessment of the inhabitants: Gindely, Waldstein, I, p. 140; Diwald,
Wallenstein, pp. 280–3, rightly urges caution in taking contemporary com-
plaints about contributions at face value.
74. Of all the money borrowed by de Witte for the army, 98 per cent was set
against anticipated contributions: Ernstberger, de Witte, p. 332.
75. Ernstberger, de Witte, pp. 368–70.
76. Gindely, Waldstein, I, p. 128.
77. Redlich, I, p. 255. To take individual cases, Pappenheim’s colonels in 1632
were each expected to contribute 10,000–12,000 talers to the recruitment of
their regiments, while Pappenheim had himself advanced some 300,000 talers
of credit for the army: B. Stadler, Pappenheim und die Zeit des Dreißigjährigen
Krieges (Winterthur, 1991), p. 605.
78. Gindely, Waldstein, I, p. 182.
79. L. Welti, Graf Kaspar von Hohenems, 1573–1640. Ein adeliges Leben im
Zwiespalte zwischen friedlichem Kulturideal und rauher Kriegswirklichkeit im
Frühbarock (Innsbruck, 1963), pp. 269–72: ‘die wallensteinischen Placker . . .’
81. Kaiser, Politik und Kriegsführung, pp. 316–17.
82. J. Heilmann, Das Kriegswesen der Kaiserlichen und Schweden zur Zeit des
Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Leipzig, 1850; repr. Krefeld, 1977), pp. 156–7.
83. G. Wagner, Wallenstein. Der Böhmische Condottiere (Vienna, 1958), pp. 99–101.
84. DBB., V, p. 64: Slavata to Adam Waldstein, 24 December 1631: winter
quartering and recruitment arrangements for the Imperial troops; notifies
him of orders for quartering fifty-six regiments in Bohemia, eleven in
Moravia and thirty in Silesia, five in Lower and ten in Upper Austria.
85. DBB., V, p. 64: Slavata to Adam Waldstein, 24 December 1631: king of Spain
has agreed to pay Wallenstein directly 100,000 florins per month, and in
addition he has agreed to provide 20,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry from
the Spanish Netherlands, which the Spanish crown will pay to maintain;
H. Ernst, ‘Spanische Subsidien für den Kaiser, 1632–42’, in K. Repgen
(ed.), Krieg und Politik (Munich, 1988), pp. 299–302.
86. F. Konze, ‘Die Stärke, Zusammensetzung und Verteilung der

Wallensteinischen Armee während des Jahres 1633. Ein Beitrag zur
Heeresgeschichte des 30 Jährigen Krieges’ (Dissertation, Frankfurt am
Main, 1906), pp. 19–22, 26–35; see Kriegsliste in DBB., IV and V.
87. Wallenstein to Ferdinand II, 17 December 1633; Ferdinand II to
Wallenstein, 24 December 1633, printed in DBB., V, pp. 217–20;
G. Mann, Wallenstein. His Life Narrated, trans. C. Kessler (London, 1976),
pp. 747–53.
88. Mann, Wallenstein, pp. 760–9; H. von Srbik, Wallensteins Ende. Ursachen,
Verlauf and Folgen der Katastrophe (Salzburg, 1952), pp. 104–6.
89. A recent contribution to this debate in J. Polišenský and J. Kollmann,
Wallenstein. Feldherr des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Cologne, 1997), pp. 240–57.
90. M. Ritter, ‘Das Kontributionssystem Wallensteins’, Historische Zeitschrift, 54
(1902–3), 193–249; F. Redlich, ‘Contributions in the Thirty Years War’,
Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 12 (1959–60), 247–54; Ernstberger, De
Witte, pp. 179–212.
91. Konze, Stärke, pp. 62–3.
92. H. Haan, Der Regensburger Kurfürstentag von 1636/1637 (Münster, 1967),
pp. 169–70; H. Salm, Armeefinanzierung im Dreißigjährigen Krieg.
Die Niederrheinisch-Westfälische Reichskreis, 1635–50 (Münster, 1990),
pp. 11–13.
93. There is good evidence that the issues were already being seriously recon-
sidered as early as 1634 – see J. Pohl, ‘Die Profiantirung der keyserlichen
Armaden ahnbelangendt’. Studien zur Versorgung der kaiserlichen Armee,
1634–35 (Vienna, 1994), pp. 19–29.
94. K.-L. Böhme, ‘Geld für die schwedischen Armeen nach 1640’, Scandia, 33
(1967), 54–95, pp. 62–3.
95. Salm, Armeefinanzierung, pp. 106–42.
96. Böhme, ‘Geld’, p. 91, on the need for money as well as provisions in kind.
97. Salm, Armeefinanzierung, pp. 122–39, and figures 12–13, 22–23.
98. The survival rate of the Imperial regiments created in Wallenstein’s first
generalship is appreciably lower than for those created in the 1630s and
1640s. Amongst the demands made at the Regensburg Electoral Diet of
1636 was that for the curtailing of the ‘überflüssigen Luxus bei den
Offizieren’, and that regiments needed to be amalgamated into the hands
of established colonels: Haan, Kurfürstentag, p. 169.
99. Gindely, Waldstein, I, p. 116, 9 September 1626, reported by Carlo Caraffa.
100. Pohl, ‘Profiantirung’, pp. 12, 18–19,
101. E. Höfer, Das Ende des Dreißigjährigen Krieges. Strategie und Kriegsbild
(Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 1997), pp. 44–9, gives a justifiably positive
appraisal of Hatzfeld’s successor, Peter Melander (Holzapfel), and some
examples of his plans being thrown off track by incoherent orders from the
Imperial court: cf. pp. 95–6, the Emperor’s insistence that vital campaigning
resources should be expended during the latter part of 1647 on the gesture of
driving the Swedes out of Iglau, in Moravia. For Wallenstein’s notorious
refusal to be fobbed off with the detritus of courtly petitioning, see, e.g.,
Mann, Wallenstein, p. 301.
102. A. von Wrede, Geschichte der K. und K. Wehrmacht. Die Regimenter, Corps,
Branchen und Anstalten von 1618 bis Ende des XIX Jahrhunderts (5 vols.,
Vienna, 1898–1903); vols. I and III (2) provide details of regiments of infantry
and cavalry in the Imperial army established and dissolved from 1618.
103. J. Glete, Swedish Naval Administration, 1521–1721 (Leiden, 2010), pp. 252,
663–4; M. Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus. A History of Sweden, 1611–32
(2 vols., London, 1958), II, pp. 272–94.
104. Glete, War, p. 203; R. Frost, The Northern Wars, 1558–1721 (London,
2000), pp. 127–8.
105. T. Lorentzen, Die Schwedische Armee im Dreißigjährigen Kriege (Leipzig,
1894), p. 8; Fallon, ‘Scottish Mercenaries’, pp. 261–301.
106. H. Landberg, L. Ekholm, R. Nordlund and S. Nilsson (eds.), Det kontinen-
tala krigets ekonomie. Studier i krigsfinansierung under svensk stormaktstid
(Kristianstad, 1971), p. 459.
107. Fallon, ‘Scottish Mercenaries’, pp. 43–5.
108. Landberg et al. (eds.), Krigets ekonomie, pp. 463–7.
109. S. Lundkvist, ‘Schwedische Kriegsfinanzierung, 1630–35’, in H. Rudolf
(ed.), Der Dreißigjährigen Krieg: Perspectiven and Strukturen (Darmstadt,
1977), pp. 298–303; Böhme, ‘Geld’, p. 54.
110. Lorentzen, Schwedische Armee, pp. 8–9. Pappenheim reported to Wallenstein
on 18 November 1630 that Knyphausen had commissions to raise six
regiments of troops for Gustavus, but instructions not to start recruitment
until early January: DBB, IV, p. 338.
111. Heilmann, Kriegswesen, p. 161; A. Grosjean ‘Scotland: Sweden’s Closest
Ally?’, in S. Murdoch (ed.), Scotland and the Thirty Years War, 1618–48
(Brill, 2001), pp. 143–71, pp. 145–51.
112. Lorentzen, Schwedische Armee, p. 36. This continued through the rest of the
war: see, for example, G. Björlin, Johan Banér (3 vols., Stockholm, 1908–
10), III, pp. 631–2 – Banér’s army at Stettin, 16 July 1638.
113. Redlich, I, pp. 255–6.
115. The system was also practised in central and north Germany under Swedish
occupation: Banér was granted a large part of the city and surrounding
territory of Magdeburg as a contribution to his military expenses:
Lorentzen, Schwedische Armee, p. 28.
116. H. Laber, ‘Die Schweden in Augsburg von 1632 bis 1635’, in Münchener
Historische Abhandlungen, 2nd ser. Kriegs- und Heeresgeschichte, Vol. I
(Munich, 1932), pp. 22–7.
117. R. Hildebrandt, ‘Handel und Kapitalverkehr um 1630. Außenwirtschaftliche
Beziehungen Deutschlands im Dreißigjährigen Krieg’, in J. Schneider (ed.),
Wirtschaftskräfte und Wirtschaftswege V. Festschrift für Hermann Kellenbenz
(Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 135–59, p. 146.
118. Hildebrandt, ‘Handel und Kapitalverkehr’, p. 140.
119. Laber, ‘Schweden in Augsburg’, pp. 37–8; F. Blendinger, ‘Augsburger
Handel im Dreißigjährigen Krieg’, in J. Schneider (ed.), Wirtschaftskräfte
und Wirtschaftswege II. Festschrift für Hermann Kellenbenz (Stuttgart, 1978),
pp. 287–323, pp. 335–6.
120. E. Friedlaender, ‘Protokoll über die Kontributionen und Kriegskosten des

Ober-Barnimschen Kreises aus den Jahren 1630–1634’, Märkische
Forschungen, 17 (1882), 139–428.
121. Redlich, I, pp. 255–6; Lorentzen, Schwedische Armee, p. 43.
122. Landberg et al. (eds.), Krigets ekonomie, pp. 467–9.
123. Lorentzen, Schwedische Armee, pp. 39–40.
124. Droysen, Weimar, I, pp. 151–9; Lorentzen, Schwedische Armee, p. 44;
Landberg et al. (eds.), Krigets ekonomie, pp. 467–9, 471–2.
125. Lorentzen, Schwedische Armee, pp. 44–5.
126. Landberg et al. (eds.), Krigets ekonomie, p. 468.
127. Lorentzen, Schwedische Armee, pp. 73–4; Böhme, ‘Geld’, pp. 60–1.
128. B.P. von Chemnitz, Königlichen Schwedischen in Teutschland geführten Kriegs
(4 vols., 2 only extant, Riderholm, 1855), III (i), p. 77.
129. M. Fieger, Der kriegerische Ereignisse in der Oberpfalz. Vom Einfalle Baners
1641 bis zum Westfälischen Frieden (Dillingen, 1909–10), pp. 19–20, for a
good example of this type of bargaining in the Upper Palatinate.
130. Böhme, ‘Geld’, pp. 59–60.
131. Père Griffet, Histoire du règne de Louis XIII (3 vols., Paris, 1758), III, p. 211.
Even in the apparently unfavourable conditions of 1636, this was being
attempted by Banér: Chemnitz, Königlichen Schwedischen, IV (iii), pp. 88–9:
punitive contributions levied on Dresden and Meissen.
132. For details of the Swedish approach to the German territories from 1639
onwards, see P. Englund, Der Verwüstung Deutschlands. Eine Geschichte des
Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Stuttgart, 1998), pp. 191–208.
133. Lorentzen, Schwedische Armee, p. 88.
134. Böhme, ‘Geld’, pp. 64–5 (Brandenburg), pp. 85–6 (Saxony). Böhme’s
article provides a good account of the detailed workings of this system of
financial support, especially how it provided both for garrisons and for the
field army.
135. Englund, Verwüstung Deutschlands, pp. 515–20, describes the plunder in
detail.
136. Johan Banér, fighting a largely defensive war in the later 1630s, still left some
200,000 talers on deposit in a Hamburg bank, and many accounts suggest
his profits from military enterprise were a great deal higher: Lorentzen,
Schwedische Armee, p. 15.
137. Böhme, ‘Geld’, p. 58.
138. Banér was proprietor of both an infantry and a cavalry regiment throughout
the later 1630s: Björlin, Banér, II, p. 631, III, pp. 631–2; the paradoxes of a
Swedish ‘royal’ army are emphasized in L. Höbelt, Ferdinand III (1608–
1657) (Graz, 2008), pp. 185–9.
139. For Banér, Noailles, Le maréchal de Guébriant, p. 148; Wrangel’s first lan-
guage was also German: A. Losman, Carl Gustaf Wrangel och Europa. Studier
I kulturförbindelser kring en 1600-talsmagnat (Stockholm, 1980), p. 236.
140. P. Sörensson, ‘Das Kriegswesen während der letzten Periode des
Dreißigjährigen Krieges’, in Rudolf (ed.), Dreißigjährige Kriege, pp. 431–57.
141. Chemnitz, Königlichen Schwedischen, IV (iii), p. 36.
142. Chemnitz, Königlichen Schwedischen, IV (i), p. 102.
143. Böhme, ‘Geld’, pp. 68–9; this visible partitioning of the financial allocations
had been started in 1632–4: Friedlaender, ‘Protokoll’.
144. Useful tables of regiments provided in W. Guthrie, The Later Thirty Years
War (Westport, CT, 2003), pp. 105–55.
145. F. von Geyso, ‘Beiträge zur Politik und Kriegsführung Hessens im Zeitalter
des Dreißigjährigen Krieges’, Zeitschrift für Hessische Geschichte, 53 (1921),
14–30.
146. C. Leestmans, Charles IV de Lorraine, 1604–75. Une errance baroque (Lasne,
2003), pp. 43–71.
147. See, for example, the blend of public–private arrangements detailed for the
Spanish recruitment of Irish soldiers in the 1640s and 1650s in R. Stradling,
The Spanish Monarchy and Irish Mercenaries. The Wild Geese in Spain,
1618–68 (Dublin, 1994), pp. 143–52.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 4
1. Comte Jacques de Guibert, Essai général de tactique (1772), ed. J.-P. Bois,
(Paris, 2004), p. 29: ‘Ce fut le temps des grands généraux, commandant de
petites armées et faisant de grandes choses . . .’
2. B. Stadler, Pappenheim und die Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Winterthur,
1991), p. 577.
3. Stadler, Pappenheim, p. 612: ‘auserlesen volck, starck und überaus begierig zu
fechten’.
4. Stadler, Pappenheim, pp. 591–4.
5. Stadler, Pappenheim, pp. 656–7, 692–3.
7. P. Villiers, Les corsaires du Littoral. Dunkerque, Calais, Boulogne de Philip II à
Louis XIV (1568–1713) (Lille, 2000), pp. 62–75; R. Stradling, The Armada of
Flanders (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 167–9.
8. H. Malo, Les corsaires dunkerquois et Jean Bart (2 vols., Paris, 1912/13), I, p. 298.
9. Malo, Corsaires, I, pp. 320–1; J. Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic
World, 1606–1661 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 264–5.
10. Account from Stradling, Armada, pp. 86–7, who cites eighty-nine trawlers
and five Dutch warships sunk.
11. Malo, Corsaires, I, pp. 322–3.
12. Stradling, Armada of Flanders, p. 87; Israel, Dutch Republic and Hispanic World,
p. 265.
13. J. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 134–40;
Malo, Corsaires, I, pp. 335–42.
14. M. Kaiser, ‘“Sed vincere sciebat Hanibal”. Pappenheim als empirischer
Theoretiker des Krieges’, in H. Neuhaus and B. Stollberg-Rilinger (eds.),
Menschen und Strukturen in der Geschichte Alteuropas (Berlin, 2002), pp. 201–27,
pp. 219–23.
15. Stradling, Armada of Flanders, pp. 96–7.
16. R. Weigley, The Age of Battles. The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to
Waterloo (Bloomington, IN, 1991), pp. 1–23. The perception that Breitenfeld
was ‘no ordinary victory’ probably derives from H. Delbrück, History of the Art
of War within the Framework of Political History, trans. W. Renfroe (4 vols.,

Westport, CT, 1975–85), IV, pp. 173–83, 202–7.
17. C.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (London, 1938), pp. 459–60; the
parallels between the two conflicts ‘which solved no problems’ were clearly in
mind in this work, first published in 1938.
18. D. Parrott, ‘Strategy and Tactics in the Thirty Years War: the “Military
Revolution”’, in C. Rogers (ed.), The Military Revolution Debate (Boulder,
CO, 1995), pp. 227–51, pp. 231–2.
19. B.S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore and
London, 1997), pp. 134–56, 176–200; and for scepticism over the longer
term: J. Luh, Kriegskunst in Europa, 1650–1800 (Cologne, 2004), pp. 129–49.
20. J. Cruso, Militarie Instructions for the Cavall’rie (1632; facsimile, Kineton,
1972), pp. 100–4, indicates the fluidity of tactical thinking about cavalry
deployment.
21. M. Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus. A History of Sweden, 1611–1632 (2 vols.,
London, 1958), II, p. 250.
22. There is an excellent, extensive account in M. Kaiser, Politik und Kriegsführung:
Maximilian von Bayern, Tilly und die Katholische Liga im Dreißigjährigen Krief
(Münster, 1999), pp. 446–61; for the Scottish role see A. Grosjean, ‘Scotland:
Sweden’s Closest Ally?’, in S. Murdoch (ed.), Scotland and the Thirty Years
War, 1618–48 (Brill, 2001), pp. 143–71, pp. 157–8.
23. Parrott, ‘Strategy and Tactics’, pp. 232–9.
24. G. Parker, ‘The Limits to Revolutions in Military Affairs: Maurice of Nassau,
the Battle of Nieuwpoort (1600) and the Legacy’, Journal of Military History,
71 (2007), 331–72, makes an extensive case for the significance of disciplined
volley-fire as put into practice by the Dutch army at the battle of Nieuwpoort.
Yet despite assertions about a ‘production-line of death’ (p. 353), measuring
the actual deadliness of infantry volley-fire depends on unavailable evidence
about how many Spanish troops died from gunshot wounds, and indeed more
generally whether the Spanish casualty figure of ‘4,000’ listed in this and other
accounts of the battle were the dead alone, or the dead and wounded.
25. And even the advent of flintlocks and bayonets changed less than has often
been assumed in developing infantry firepower as a battle-winning force: Luh,
Kriegskunst, pp. 131–54. See also the Memoirs of Captain Robert Parker, ed.
D. Chandler (London, 1968), pp. 88–9, on the remarkably low level of
casualties inflicted in an encounter at Malplaquet (1709) between British
and French infantry exchanging fire at 100 yards.
26. D. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 59–65 on the French
experience; R. Stradling, ‘Spain’s Military Failure and the Supply of Horses:
1600–1660’, History, 69 (1984), 208–21.
27. The limited number of artillery pieces was especially evident in the French
and Spanish armies: at Rocroi, the French had twelve guns against eighteen
for the Spanish: W. Guthrie, The Later Thirty Years War (Westport, CT,
2003), p. 176; Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, p. 66. When armies counted signifi-
cantly larger numbers of artillery pieces, these tended to be light regimental
guns, in contrast to the proliferation of medium-weight field pieces in the later
seventeenth and the eighteenth century.
28. J. Heilmann, Das Kriegswesen der Kaiserlichen und Schweden zur Zeit des
Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Leipzig, 1850; repr. Krefeld, 1977), p. 66, points out
that the great disadvantage of the light ‘leather guns’ pioneered then aban-
doned by Gustavus Adolphus was that they overheated after a few shots.
29. Heilmann, Kriegswesen, pp. 51–73.
30. Heilmann, Kriegswesen, pp. 279–85, prints an état of the French artillery
battery in 1646 showing guns of between six and twenty-four pound shot,
the six-pounders requiring six horses to move them; Parrott, Richelieu’s Army,
pp. 69–70.
31. For a detailed, modern battle history from which this seems the obvious
conclusion, see W. Guthrie, Battles of the Thirty Years War from White
Mountain to Nördlingen 1618–35 (Westport, CT, 2002) and Guthrie, Later
Thirty Years War. It is a view confirmed in P. Wilson’s magisterial new history,
Europe’s Tragedy. A History of the Thirty Years War (London, 2009), where
Wilson points explicitly to the tendency to denigrate the military flexibility
and capabilities of the Imperial armies: pp. 84–97.
32. Though even in the period supposedly dominated by choreographed siege
warfare, a recent work points out the frequency with which these methodical
approaches were overruled in favour of direct assault, which entailed high risk
and casualties but saved time and money: J. Ostwald, Vauban under Siege.
Engineering Efficiency and Martial Vigor in the War of the Spanish Succession
(Brill, 2007), pp. 215–321.
33. G. Parker, The Military Revolution. Military Innovation and the Rise of the West,
1500–1800 (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1996), pp. 7–16, 83–103, and Parker, ‘The
Dreadnought Revolution of the Sixteenth Century’, The Mariner’s Mirror,
82 (1996), 269–300.
34. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, pp. 127–61.
35. R. Manning, An Apprenticeship in Arms. The Origins of the British Army,
1585–1702 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 108–19; Israel, Dutch Republic and the
Hispanic World, pp. 280–1.
36. Israel, Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, pp. 269–71; M. Bellamy,
Christian IV and his Navy (Brill, 2006), p. 23.
37. Rheinfelden, in 1638, involved Saxe-Weimar’s extraordinary feat of reassem-
bling his army after an initial defeat at the hands of Jan de Werth, and
launching a surprise attack on the Imperial forces three days later which
gained him an overwhelming victory: G. Droysen, Bernhard von Weimar
(2 vols., Leipzig, 1885), II, pp. 336–46.
38. Guthrie, Later Thirty Years War, p. 121 (Breitenfeld II), pp. 140–1 (Jankow).
39. It is often the case that troops who have held their ground in a hard-fought
combat and are then expected to abandon these positions in what will be seen
as a retreat, even for the best of tactical reasons, are prone to demoralization
and disillusionment. A classic case was the 1645 Bavarian ‘defeat’ at
Nördlingen II/Allerheim, where the decision to retreat after inflicting massive
casualties on the French army led to the collapse of Bavarian morale and mass
surrenders: J. Heilmann, Die Feldzüge der Bayern in den Jahren 1643, 1644,
1645 unter den Befehlen des Feldmarschalls Franz Freiherrn von Mercy (Leipzig,
1851), pp. 270–303.
40. V. Kiernan, ‘Foreign Mercenaries and Absolute Monarchy’, Past and Present,
11 (1956–7), 66–86, p. 78.
41. H. d’Orleans, duc d’Aumale, Histoire des princes de Condé pendant les XVIe et
XVIIe siècles (7 vols., Paris, 1893–6), IV, pp. 139–77, esp. pp. 145–9.
42. B.P. von Chemnitz, Der Königlich Schwedische in Teutschland geführte Krieg
(4 vols., 2 only extant; Rideholm, 1855), IV (v), p. 33: on Torstensson’s
campaign plan to force a major battle and then press deep into the Habsburg
lands; L. Höbelt, Ferdinand III (Graz, 2008), pp. 231–5; P. Broucek, Der
Schwedenfeldzug nach Niederösterreich, 1645–46 (Vienna, 1967), pp. 6–8.
43. Monro, His Expedition with the worthy Scots Regiment called Mac-Keys, ed.
W. Brocklington (Westport, CT, 1999), p. 235.
44. O. van Nimwegen, ‘Deser landen crijchsvolck’. Het Staatse leger en de militaire
revoluties, 1588–1688 (Amsterdam, 2006), pp. 127–30; M. Gutmann, War
and Rural Life in the Early Modern Low Countries (Princeton, 1980), pp. 62–4
examines a later set of treaties between France and the Spanish Netherlands.
45. K.-R. Böhme, ‘Geld für die schwedischen Armeen nach 1640’, Scandia,
33 (1967), 54–95, p. 79, gives the example of Königsmarck ending the pay-
ment of protection money by the bishopric of Verden in 1647 by simply
overrunning the Imperial garrisons in Westphalia which had been making
the demands.
46. Heilmann, Feldzüge der Bayern, pp. 61–92.
47. Manning, Apprenticeship, pp. 44–7; it was state-coordinated military opera-
tions that were most likely to draw excessively heavily upon such low-quality
conscripts, and often for reasons that were overtly linked to social order and
removing a financial charge on local communities: see D. Trim, ‘Fighting
“Jacob’s Wars”. The Employment of English and Welsh Mercenaries in the
European Wars of Religion: France and the Netherlands, 1562–1610’ (Ph.D.
thesis, King’s College London, 2002), pp. 226–35.
48. Krebs, Hatzfeld I, pp. 245–6.
49. H. Salm, Armeefinanzierung im Dreißigjährigen Krieg (Münster, 1990), p. 35,
quoting Imperial Field Marshal Hatzfeld in 1644.
50. The inception and diffusion of this military theory amongst a narrow group of
Calvinist princely families and their in-laws deserves more sceptical attention,
in the same way that the later sixteenth-century campaigns in the Netherlands
have been given undue emphasis as a ‘school of war’ over the Hungarian
theatre of war from 1593 to 1606: Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, pp. 27–32.
51. R. Williams, A Briefe Discourse of Warre (London, 1590), p. 6.
Sozialgeschichtliche Studien (Göttingen, 1994), p. 79, n. 106; G. Parker, The
Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567–1659 (2nd edn, Cambridge,
2004), pp. 27–9; Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, pp. 44–6; C. Kapser, Die bayerische
Kriegsorganisation in der zweiten Hälfte des Dreißigjährigen Krieges, 1635–1648/
49 (Münster, 1997), pp. 68–70, 262–3.
53. One of the literary sources most frequently cited in this context,
Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, trans. S. Goodrich (Sawtry, 1989), cer-
tainly does not suggest that all soldiers are a feeble, duty-shirking rabble,
recruited at the lowest price by exploitative officers: see, for example, the
implicit view of ‘real’ soldiers in book IV, chapter 11, ‘Discourse of the Order
of the Marauder Brothers’ (Merode-brüder).
54. M. Duffy, ‘The Foundations of British Naval Power’, in Duffy (ed.), The
Military Revolution and the State (Exeter, 1980), pp. 49–85, pp. 67–72: though
of course when wages failed to attract enough of each group, impressment, at
least in the British navy, took its place.
55. G. Frachetta, Il Prencipe, nel quale si considera il Prencipe, & quanto al governo
dello Stato, & quanto al maneggio della Guerra (Venice, 1599), p. 208, places
inexperienced recruits into three categories in terms of their exposure to
campaigning.
56. Kaiser, Politik und Kriegsführung, pp. 272–3, who argues that this was encour-
aged by Wallenstein, who saw it as useful in both strengthening his own army
and weakening the independence of the Liga.
57. B. Kroener, ‘Der Soldat als Ware. Kriegsgefangenenschicksale im 16.
und 17. Jahrhundert’, in H. Duchhardt and P. Veit (eds.), Krieg und
Frieden im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Mainz, 2000),
pp. 271–95, pp. 282–3, though Kroener is sceptical about the real extent
of such incorporation.
58. J. Peters (ed.), Ein Söldnerleben im Dreißigjährigen Krieg (Berlin, 1993),
pp. 143–6. For the identity of the soldier, taken from what is an anonymous
manuscript, see P. Burschel, ‘Himmelreich und Hölle. Ein Söldner, sein
Tagebuch und die Ordnungen des Krieges’, in B. von Krusenstjern and
H. Medick (eds.), Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe. Der Dreißigjährige Krieg
aus der Nähe (Göttingen, 2001), pp. 181–94, pp. 184–5.
59. Williams, Discourse, pp. 12–13.
60. For example, Frachetta, Il Prencipe, pp. 207–8.
61. DBB, IV, p. 143: Wallenstein to the Emperor, 2 September 1626 (Olmütz):
‘erfahren, kriegstüchtig Soldaten’. Jan de Werth drew heavily on experienced
Italian recruits in raising a new cavalry regiment for Bavarian service in 1644:
H. Lahrkamp, Jan von Werth (Cologne, 1962), p. 209.
62. P. Burschel, Söldner, pp. 145–65.
63. B. Kroener, ‘Soldat oder Soldateska? Programmatischer Aufriß einer
Sozialgeschichte militärische Unterschichten in der Ersten Hälfte des 17.
Jahrhunderts’, in Kroener, Kriegerische Gewalt und militärische Präsenz in der
Neuzeit (Paderborn, 2008), pp. 125–51, p. 126, who points out that the word
only gained pejorative connotations through later seventeenth-century
French usage.
64. Redlich, I, p. 485. Pay for ordinary Reiter in the sixteenth century in S. Fiedler,
Kriegswesen und Kriegsführung im Zeitalter der Landsknechte (Koblenz. 1985),
p. 96, and corroborated in other texts.
65. Heilmann, Kriegswesen, p. 156: this sum (25 talers) was paid by Wallenstein’s
colonels for good infantry recruits. For the high wages paid by Christian IV to
his mercenaries compared with those in the United Provinces see J. Fallon,
‘Scottish Mercenaries in the Service of Denmark and Sweden, 1626–32’
(Ph.D. thesis, University of Glasgow, 1972), p. 200.
66. Gindely, Waldstein, I, pp. 131–3: ordinances for the payment of the army in the
Altmark and Schleswig-Holstein in 1627 stipulated wages of 1¼ talers per week
for the ordinary soldiers, roughly 7 florins per month, with wages between 1½
and 2½ talers for ‘double-pay men’ (Gefreiten and Landspassaten).
67. Heilman, Kriegswesen, pp. 190–3, indicates that the wages in the Swedish
army were consistently lower than those of the Imperial. If the average wage
of the Imperial musketeer in this period was 6 florins per month, in the
Swedish army it was just under 5 (3½ talers).
68. G. Freytag, Der Dreißigjährigen Krieg. Das Heer. Soldatenleben und Sitten (1859;
repr. Bad Langensalza, 2003), pp. 112–13; Heilmann, Kriegwesen,
pp. 169–79; Redlich, I, pp. 487–9; Pohl, ‘Die Profiantirung der keyserlichen
Armaden ahnbelangendt’. Studien zur Versorgung der kaiserlichen Armee,
1634–35 (Vienna, 1994), pp. 37–8, 63–5.
69. Burschel, Söldner, pp. 167–9; Fallon, ‘Scottish Mercenaries’, pp. 379–80.
71. The soldier Peter Hagendorf makes frequent reference to the quality of
accommodation and food in his Tagebuch: Peters, Söldnerleben, cf. pp. 136,
139, 141, 146, 149, 150, etc.; Redlich, I, p. 491, cites a Swedish soldiers’ song
praising Gustavus Adolphus for giving the soldiers good quarters and food,
even though he did not pay them much money; Fallon, ‘Scottish
Mercenaries’, pp. 380–2.
73. Jean de Werth was paying between 7 and 10 gulden in 1644 for troops
depending on whether they were experienced or new recruits, and up to 15
gulden for experienced troops recruited in Italy: Lahrkamp, Jan von Werth,
p. 209.
74. Peters (ed.), Söldnerleben, p. 136, citing Peter Hagendorf: ‘here (around
Stralsund) we weren’t interested in eating beef anymore, but only goose,
duck or chicken’; Burschel, Söldner, pp. 207–11; Fallon, ‘Scottish
Mercenaries’, pp. 351–5.
75. Especially as the sources for the recruitment and origins of soldiers in the
eighteenth century are much more extensive: Burschel, Söldner, pp. 57–8.
76. Very clear about the appeal of soldiering to craftsmen and journeymen, albeit
on the eve of the war, is H. Glümer, ‘Die Braunschweigischen
Söldnertruppen zu Fuß und Roß in den Jahren 1599–1615’, Jahrbuch des
Braunschweigischen Geschichtsvereins, 8 (1936), 47–76; Redlich, I, pp. 456–7.
This point about the appeal of soldiering to ‘respectable’ workers and farmers
is clearly evident in the work of those who have examined recruitment through
archival sources: Trim, ‘Fighting “Jacob’s Wars”’, pp. 67–71, 279–84; Fallon,
‘Scottish Mercenaries’, pp. 90–2.
77. Kapser, Bayerische Kriegsorganisation, pp. 68–73, 270–3: gives a particular
breakdown by previous employment of 1,069 soldiers recruited into the
Bavarian army between 1638 and 1648, of whom fewer than 5 per cent were
previously unemployed, but Kapser would take this as untypically low.
78. Grimmelshausen, Der Seltsame Springinsfeld, trans. as Tearaway by
M. Mitchell (Sawtry, 2003), provides a campaign-by-campaign fictional
account of the war, in which the military qualities – especially esprit de
corps – of the soldiers are at least as apparent as cowardice or evasion.
79. Peters (ed.), Söldnerwesen, pp. 133, 150.
80. Kapser, Bayerische Kriegsorganisation, p. 72.

81. L. Welti, Graf Kaspar von Hohenems, 1573–1640 (Innsbruck, 1963), p. 228.
82. Krebs, Hatzfeld I, p. 30: Lauenberg to Lt-Col. Hatzfeld, c. 5 July 1625.
83. B. Kroener, ‘“Der Krieg hat ein Loch . . .” Überlegungen zum Schicksal
demobilisierter Söldner nach dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg’, in H. Duchhardt
(ed.), Der Westfälische Friede (Munich, 1998), pp. 599–630.
84. Krebs, Hatzfeld I, p. 244, gives the high figure of 30 per cent in 1626;
J. Kraus, Das Militärwesen der Reichsstadt Augsburg, 1548–1806 (Augsburg,
1980), pp. 177–8, provides figures for the proportions of double-pay men in
companies contracted by the city in 1622–3, and gives an average of around
25 per cent.
85. K.A. Müller, Der Söldnerwesen in den ersten Zeiten des Dreißigjährigen Krieges –
nach handschriftlichen Quellen des Königlich Sächsischen Haupt-Staat-Archivs
(Dresden, 1838), pp. 23–4; see also Gindely, Waldstein, I, pp. 131–3: ordi-
nances which show various ranks of double-pay men receiving from
20 per cent extra up to double the pay of the ordinary enlistee.
86. R. Quatrefages, Los tercios españoles, 1567–1577 (Madrid, 1979), p. 182.
87. An infantry corporal in the Imperial army would receive 10–14 taler per month
compared with 6–8 for an ordinary soldier: Heilmann, Kriegswesen, pp. 190–1.
90. J. Lynn, Battle. A History of Combat and Culture from Ancient Greece to Modern
America (Cambridge, MA, 2003), pp. 116–18.
91. Redlich, I, pp. 467–9.
92. Even Count Tilly, the Bavarian field marshal, who was uncompromising in
punishing military offences against the civil population, was impatient and
evasive when ordered by Maximilian to impose standards of outward mor-
ality on his soldiers: Kaiser, Politik und Kriegsführung, pp. 71–8.
93. M. Kaiser, ‘Cuius exercitus, eius religio? Konfession und Heerwesen im
Zeitalter des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte
91 (2000), 316–53, pp. 331–52.
94. Fallon, ‘Scottish Mercenaries’, pp. 62–3.
95. Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus, I, pp. 369–72.
96. An excellent example of an officer embodying these strong convictions was
the Swedish Generalmajor Wilhelm von Kalchum, who respected diverse
Protestant opinions, but had a low opinion of those who served simply for
money: T. Lorentzen, Schwedische Armee im Dreißigjährigen Kriege (Leipzig,
1894), p. 52.
97. Kaiser, ‘Konfession und Heerwesen’, pp. 325–31.
98. For an attempt by Wallenstein to restrict the size of the baggage column:
DBB, V, pp. 87–8, 14 May 1632. J. Lynn, Women, Armies, and Warfare in
Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 33–47, 130–45.
99. Hermann Suter, Innerschweizerisches Militär-Unternehmertum im 18.
Jahrhundert (Zurich, 1971), p. ix.
100. Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus, Book One, chapter 16.
101. G. Mortimer, Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War, 1618–48
(Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 140–50.
102. Krebs, Hatzfeld I, pp. 20–8, 192–6.

103. S. L’Honoré Naber and I. Wright, Piet Heyn en de Zilvervloot. Bescheiden uit
Nederlandsche en Spaansche archieven bijennverzameld en uitgeven (Utrecht,
1928), pp. xlviii–cv; V. Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age
Netherlands (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 199–201.
104. In his Tagebuch, Peter Hagendorf records that he was himself sent to Worms
‘statt eines Proviantmeisters’ to collect 6,000 loaves from six different sup-
pliers who had agreed to make them ready: Peters (ed.), Söldnerleben, p. 151.
105. Peter Hagendorf’s Tagebuch records his military experiences over twenty-
five years of service, and from his account it can be calculated that he
marched at least 25,000 kilometres during his campaigning life: Burschel,
‘Himmelreich und Hölle’, p. 181.
Berne, 1880–2), II, pp. 545–76; J. Bérenger, Turenne (Paris, 1987), pp. 241–50.
107. Lahrkamp, Jan von Werth, pp. 169–81; W. Ziegler, Dokumente zur Geschichte
von Staat und Gesellschaft in Bayern (3 vols., Munich, 1992), III, pp. 1233–4,
9 July 1647: report on the refusal of the Bavarian troops to accept de Werth’s
offers to draw them into Imperial service.
108. A fatalism discussed in R. Asch, ‘“Wo der soldat hinkömbt, da ist alles sein”:
Military Violence and Atrocities in the Thirty Years War Re-examined’,
German History, 18 (2000), 291–309, pp. 295–6; M. Kaiser, ‘Die
Lebenswelt der Söldner und das Phänomen der Desertion im
Dreißigjährigen Krieg’, Osnabrücker Mitteilungen, 103 (1998), 105–24.
109. J. Heilmann, Kriegsgeschichte von Bayern, Franken, Pfalz und Schwaben von
1506–1651 (2 vols., Munich, 1868), II, pp. 902–6.
110. A. von Wrede, Geschichte der K. und K. Wehrmacht. Die Regimenter, Corps,
Vienna, 1898–1903), see esp. II, pp. 5–96, III (2), pp. 371–409, 413–524,
609–40.
111. Redlich, I, p. 226, largely taken from Wrede, K. und K. Wehrmacht.
112. Manning, Apprenticeship, pp. 180–204.
113. Kapser, Bayerische Kriegsorganisation, pp. 68–70; N. Rodger, Command of the
Ocean. A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (London, 2004), pp. 51–5.
114. J. Lindegren, ‘The Swedish Military State, 1560–1720’, Scandinavian
Journal of History, 10 (1985), 305–36, p. 317.
115. Kroener, ‘Soldat oder Soldateska?’, p. 147.
116. Kapser, Bayerische Kriegsorganisation, pp. 262–4. The total sample of recruits
amounts to 1,250 soldiers, and in some areas the total numbers recruited are
considerably smaller than in others. The results are nonetheless suggestive of
a bid to create a strong military identity based on preferential recruitment of
experienced soldiers.
117. For a summary of the theme of contributions, discussed in context in the
preceding chapter, see F. Redlich, ‘Contributions in the Thirty Years War’,
Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 12 (1959–60), 247–54; G. Mortimer,
‘War by Contract, Credit and Contribution: the Thirty Years War’, in
Mortimer (ed.), Early Modern Military History (Basingstoke, 2004),
pp. 108–13.
118. Kaiser, Politik und Kriegsführung, pp. 105–51; Heilmann, Feldzüge der
Bayern, pp. v–xi.
119. R. Rebitsch, Matthias Gallas (1588–1647). Generalleutnant des Kaisers zur
Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Münster, 2006), pp. 264–71. Much of the
provisioning for the army on its 650 kilometre advance from Bohemia to Kiel
was provided from Saxony, and shipped along the Elbe.
120. Rebitsch, Gallas, pp. 274–7.
121. Rebitsch, Gallas, pp. 277–8; despite his reputation as an inept drunkard,
Gallas had given orders for 200,000 lb of bread to be baked in Hamburg
prior to the retreat and distributed to the army, enough to feed the troops for
thirteen days’ full rations, and distributed in much more meagre portions to
get the troops back to the Bohemian frontier: Salm, Armeefinanzierung, p. 45.
123. Pohl, ‘Profiantirung’, pp. 155–6.
124. Pohl, Profiantirung, p. 151 – examples from supplying troops in the Balkans.
125. E. Leupold, ‘Journal der Armee des Herzogs Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar
aus den Jahren 1637 und 1638’, Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und
Altertumskunde, 11 (1912), 253–362, pp. 297–9.
126. R. Hildebrandt (ed.), Quellen und Regesten zu den Augsburger Handelshäusern
Paler und Rehlinger, 1539–1642 (2 vols., Stuttgart, 2004), II, pp. 222–34.
Characteristic of their epoch of military history, neither the study of Saxe-
Weimar by Droysen nor that by Noailles makes any mention of this vital
supply operation and the accompanying provision of financial credit from
Rehlinger, without which the siege could never have been sustained.
127. Hildebrandt (ed.), Rehlinger, II, pp. 225, 227, 234.
128. A. Ernstberger, Hans de Witte – Finanzmann Wallensteins (Wiesbaden, 1954),
p. 217.
129. DBB, V, p. 97: Wallenstein to Cardinal Dietrichstein, 10 September
1632, concerning grain shipments from Moravia to the army outside
Nuremberg.
130. Banér uses the term ‘vohrmauer’: Rebitsch, Gallas, p. 193.
131. Heilmann, Kriegsgeschichte von Bayern, II, p. 999.
132. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, pp. 265–6; F. Gonzalez de León, The Road to
Rocroi. Class, Culture and Command in the Spanish Army of Flanders (Brill,
2009), pp. 183–96, 233–4.
133. Lahrkamp, Jan von Werth, pp. 52–8; W. Schulze, ‘Der Sommerfeldzug
Johann von Werths in Nordostfrankreich im Jahre 1636’, in Münchener
Historische Abhandlungen, 2nd ser., Kriegs- und Heeresgeschichte, Vol. VI
(Munich, 1934), pp. 25–66; A. Baran and G. Gajecky, The Cossacks in the
Thirty Years War (2 vols., Rome, 1983), II, p. 44.
135. Stadler, Pappenheim, p. 610.
136. Krebs, Hatzfeld I, p. 60, on Wallenstein’s reluctance to move into Hungary
in 1626 in pursuit of Bethlen Gabor: Gindely, Waldstein, I, pp. 124–6;
G. Mann, Wallenstein. His Life Narrated, trans. C. Kessler (London, 1976)
pp. 290–3.
137. Lahrkamp, Jan von Werth, p. 54.
138. Guthrie, White Mountain to Nördlingen, pp. 20–3; Breitenfeld was the largest
battle of the Thirty Years War, and these numbers were not to be surpassed
on land in the West until Seneffe in 1674.
139. Pohl, Profiantirung, pp. 23–32; Lorentzen, Schwedische Armee, p. 39, esti-
mates the Swedish/allied forces to be ‘more than 50,000’.
142. DBB, IV, pp. 16–17.
143. Kaiser, Politik und Kriegsführung, pp. 258–60.
144. Stadler, Pappenheim, p. 613: ‘nichtswürdige Buben’, as opposed to the ‘alten
Knechte’.
146. Guthrie, Later Thirty Years War, pp. 48–74.
147. Salm, Armeefinanzierung, pp. 63–8.
148. The most comprehensive account of the Troß and its operational burden is
still Freytag, Der Dreißigjährige Krieg, 1618–1648 – (3 vols.; reprinted Bad
Langensalza, 2003), I, pp. 120–31.
149. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, p. 282.
150. It received attention in a thoughtful article by P. Sörensson first published in
1932: ‘Das Kriegswesen wahrend der letzten Periode des Dreißigjährigen
Krieges’, in H. Rudolf (ed.), Der Dreißigjährige Krieg. Perspectiven und
Strukturen (Darmstadt, 1977), pp. 431–57.
151. Broucek, Schwedenfeldzug, p. 5; Guthrie, Later Thirty Years War, pp. 152,
201–2. Torstensson’s figure for the Swedish army does not include the 900
officers in the army.
154. Guthrie, Later Thirty Years War, pp. 219–21.
155. K. Ruppert, Die kaiserliche Politik auf dem Westfälischen Friedenskongreß,
1643–48 (Münster, 1979), pp. 72–85; E. Höfer, Das Ende des
Dreißigjährigen Krieges. Strategie und Kriegsbild (Cologne, Weimar and
Vienna 1997), pp. 175–7.
156. Heilmann, Feldzüge der Bayern, pp. 219–24, 270–3.
159. Heilmann, Feldzüge der Bayern, pp. 157–60; Berenger, Turenne, pp. 200–11.
160. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, pp. 117–18, for the immense difficulties in getting
French commanders to begin campaigning early; despite draconian threats,
Wallenstein found it no less difficult to get his armies assembled and ready
for action before late spring: DBB, V, pp. 87–8, 14 May 1632 (Pilsen).
162. M. Fieger, Der kriegerische Ereignisse in der Oberpfalz. Vom Einfalle Baners
1641 bis zum Westfälischen Frieden (Dillingen, 1909–10), pp. 14–16.
163. Rebitsch, Gallas, pp. 184–203; F. Barthold, Geschichte des großen deutschen
Krieges, vom Tode Gustav Adolfs ab (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1842/3), II,
pp. 129–32, 163–81.
164. See Salm, Armeefinanzierung, pp. 42–6.
165. William Guthrie’s two volumes on the battles of the Thirty Years War,
despite their implicit organizing principle, provide additional material
about the campaigning context between these battles. The near-
contemporaneous major works by Barthold, Geschichte des großen deutschen
Krieges, and Carl du Jarrys, Freiherr von La Roche, Der Dreißigjährige Krieg
vom militärischen Standpunkte aus beleuchtet (3 vols., Schaffhausen, 1848),
both argued back in the 1840s for the crucial importance of the second half of
the war and, by implication, the operational context, and provide abundant
detail of particular campaigns. The new study of the Thirty Years War by
Peter Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy, both focuses on the latter part of the war and
gives fuller detail about the pursuit of campaign objectives.
166. This description of the 1646 campaign is largely taken from the detailed
account in D. Croxton, Peacemaking in Early Modern Europe. Cardinal
Mazarin and the Congress of Westphalia, 1643–48 (Selinsgrove, 1999),
pp. 227–49; see also Croxton, ‘A Territorial Imperative? The Military
Revolution, Strategy and Peacemaking in the Thirty Years War’, War in
History, 5 (1998), 253–79; E. Gyllenstierna, ‘Henri de Turenne et Charles
Gustave Wrangel’, in Turenne et l’art militaire. Actes de Colloque International,
2/3 Oct. 1975 (Paris, 1975), pp. 201–6.
167. See the account of the disputes between Maurice of Nassau and the States
General after the 1600 victory at Nieuwpoort, in G. Parker, ‘The Limits to
Revolutions in Military Affairs’, 354–8.
168. Richelieu to Louis XIII, cited in Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, pp. 155–6.
169. Cited in Höfer, Ende, p. 53; F. Gambiez, ‘Turenne et la Renaissance du style
indirect’, in Turenne et l’art militaire, pp. 15–21; J. Revol, Turenne. Essai de
psychologie militaire (Paris, 1910), pp. 260–1.
170. Louis XIV, Memoirs for the Instruction of the Dauphin, ed. P. Sonnino
(London, 1970), pp. 180–1, 230–4.
171. Cornette, Le roi de guerre. Essai sur la souveraineté dans la France du Grand
Siècle (Paris, 1993), pp. 255–61.
172. Guibert, Essai général de tactique, pp. 30, 217–18; G. Perjés ‘Army
Provisioning, Logistics and Strategy in the Second Half of the Seventeenth
Century’, Acta Historica Academiae Scientarium Hungaricae, 16 (1970), 1–51.
173. See, for example, the excellent study of the 1706 campaign following
Ramillies: J. Ostwald, ‘The “Decisive” Battle of Ramillies, 1706:
Prerequisites for Decisiveness in Early Modern Warfare’, Journal of
Military History, 64 (2000), 649–77.
174. W. Gembruch, Staat und Heer. Ausgwählte historische Studien zum ancien
régime, zur Französischen Revolution und zu den Befreiungskriegen. Historische
Forschungen 40 (Berlin, 1990), p. 158.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 5
1. On Wallenstein’s assumed prescience in prioritizing logistics, see, for example,
W. Hummelsberger, ‘Kriegswirtschaft und Versorgungswesen von Wall-
enstein bis Prinz Eugen’, in Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (ed.),
Die Bedeutung der Logistik für die militärische Führung von der Antike bis in die
neueste Zeit (Bonn, 1986), pp. 61–85, p. 62.
2. J. Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe (London, 2002), pp. 200–1.
3. R. Romano, ‘Economic Aspects of the Construction of Warships in Venice in
the Sixteenth Century’, in J. Glete (ed.), Naval History, 1500–1680
(Aldershot, 2005), pp. 129–57; E. Concina, L’Arsenale della Repubblica di
Venezia (Milan, 1984), pp. 135–53; F.C. Lane, Venetian Ships and
Shipbuilders of the Renaissance (Baltimore and London, 1992), pp. 133–43;
R.C. Davis, Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal: Workers and Workplace in the
Pre-industrial City (Baltimore, 1991), pp. 19–36.
(London, 1976), p. 192; D. Goodman, Spanish Naval Power, 1589–1665.
Reconstruction and Defeat (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 29–32.
5. G. Parker, ‘The Dreadnought Revolution of the Sixteenth Century’, The
Mariner’s Mirror, 82 (1996), 269–300, p. 273; N. Rodger, The Safeguard of
the Sea. A Naval History of Britain, 660–1649 (London, 1997), pp. 331–8;
A. James, Navy and Government in Early Modern France, 1572–1661 (London,
2004), pp. 112–14.
6. N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean. A Naval History of Britain, 1649–
1815 (London, 2004), pp. 41–3, 109, 192–4.
7. J.R. Hale, ‘Renaissance Armies and Political Control: the Venetian
Proveditorial System, 1509–1529’, Journal of Italian Studies, 2 (1979), 11–
31, pp. 16–17; M. Mallett and J. Hale, The Military Organization of a
Renaissance State. Venice, c. 1400–1617 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 279–81.
8. C.S.L. Davies, ‘Provisions for Armies, 1509–50: a Study in the Effectiveness
of Early Tudor Government’, Economic History Review, 17 (1964–5), 234–48,
pp. 238–40.
9. Thompson, War and Government, pp. 254–5.
10. J. Zunckel, Rüstungsgeschäfte im Dreißigjährigen Krieg: Unternehmerkräfte,
Militärgüter und Marktstrategien im Handel zwischen Genua, Amsterdam und
Hamburg (Berlin, 1997), p. 86.
11. Thompson, War and Government, pp. 174–5; Goodman, Spanish Naval
Power, pp. 141–2, on concern that Dutch merchants would supply faulty
rigging to Spanish ships.
12. Hummelsberger, ‘Kriegswirtschaft und Versorgungswesen’; F. Redlich, ‘Plan
for the Establishment of a War Industry in the Imperial Dominions during the
Thirty Years War’, Business History Review 38 (1964), pp. 123–6.
13. R. Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 1500–1700 (London, 1999), esp. pp. 65–103;
C. Finkel, The Administration of Warfare. The Ottoman Military Campaigns
in Hungary, 1593–1606 (Vienna, 1988), pp. 130–203 on state organization of
food provisions. For the Ottoman administration’s direct control of arms
manufacture and munitions supply, see G. Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan.
Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge,
2005), pp. 96–189.
14. I.A.A. Thompson, ‘The Impact of War’, in P. Clark (ed.), The European Crisis
of the 1590s (London, 1985), pp. 261–84, p. 269; I. Bog, ‘Krieg und
Wirtschaft im 16 Jahrhundert: ein Essay über Kriegswirkungen and
Kriegsfolgen’, in O. Pickl (ed.), Krieg, Militärausgaben und Wirtschaftlicher

Wandel (Graz, 1980), pp. 11–36, pp. 26–8.
15. Lane, Venetian Ships, pp. 130–45; Concina, L’Arsenale, pp. 108–34.
16. Davis, Shipbuilders, pp. 14–22, 28–32; Lane, Venetian Ships, points out that in
times of emergency the authorities at the Arsenale hired in large numbers of
temporary private shipbuilders, and were prepared as well to put the building
of the galleys out to private contract: pp. 200–10.
17. Awed comments about the Arsenale cited in Davis, Shipbuilders, pp. 3–4, could
be replicated by visitors to almost any of the arsenals of the ruling dynasties of
Europe in this period, and some of those maintained by great magnates.
18. In the late 1620s Wallenstein appears to have taken the view that the war
would continue for the forseeable future, evidenced in his apparently pro-
phetic remark: ‘drumb müste der Krieg . . . etwan ein dreißig Jar continuert
werden, alls dann köndte etwas ersprieslichs daraus erfolgen’ [‘Therefore the
war . . . must continue perhaps another thirty years in order that something
worthwhile should be gained from it’]: quoted in A.L. Ernstberger, Hans de
Witte – Finanzmann Wallensteins (Wiesbaden, 1954), p. 165.
19. P. Edwards, Dealing in Death. The Arms Trade and the British Civil Wars,
1638–52 (Thrupp, 2000), pp. 92–5; C. Ffoulkes, The Gun Founders of
England (London, 1969), pp. 40–57, 71–81.
20. P.W. Klein, ‘The Trip Family in the Seventeenth Century: a Study of the
Behaviour of the Entrepreneur on the Dutch Staple Market’, in Acta Historiae
Neerlandica, 1 (1966), 187–211, p. 196.
21. Klein, ‘Trip Family’, p. 196, on concerns about further strengthening the
Dutch navy by allowing access to English iron cannon.
22. Klein, ‘Trip Family’, pp. 197–8; C. Gaier, Four Centuries of Liège Gunmaking,
trans. F.J. Norris (Liège, 1976), p. 60; J. Glete, Swedish Naval Administration,
1521–1721 (Leiden, 2010), pp. 523–4.
23. Klein, ‘Trip Family’, p. 199: the Trips bought the rights back at the price of
paying a huge compensation – passed on in the form of higher prices for the
guns – to the Swedish noble, Cronberg, who had been awarded the monopoly.
24. F. Redlich, ‘Die Marketender’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsge-
schichte, 41 (1954), 227–52: the contemporary term Marketender was a deriva-
tion from the Italian mercatante, probably brought back to Germany by
Landsknechte; P. Engerisser, Von Kronach nach Nördlingen (Weißenstadt,
2004), pp. 505–15.
25. W. Schaufelberger, Der Alte Schweizer und sein Krieg (Zurich, 1952), pp. 97–106.
26. D. Potter, Renaissance France at War. Armies, Culture and Society, c. 1480–1560
(Woodbridge, 2008), p. 242.
27. Redlich, ‘Marketender’, pp. 240–1. A point extensively developed by
G. Perjes in his argument about the crippling limitations of all early modern
supply systems: ‘Army Provisioning, Logistics and Strategy in the Second
Half of the Seventeenth Century’, Acta Historica Scientiarum Hungaricae,
16 (1970), 1–51.
28. A point made explicitly in Raimondo Montecuccoli’s Trattato della guerra of
1641 – see A. Veltzé, Ausgewählte Schriften des Raimond Fürsten Montecuccoli
(4 vols., Vienna, 1899–1901), I, p. 210.
29. DBB, IV, 324: Christoph Lode, secretary to the king of Poland, to
Wallenstein, 5 October 1629.
30. Originally appearing as an anti-hero of one of Grimmelshausen’s novels, and
better known through Bertold Brecht’s play of the 1940s.
31. J. Lynn, Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge,
2008), pp. 130–50.
32. Redlich, ‘Marketender’, pp. 242–4.
33. An article on Muscovite logistics suggests that the sixteenth-century army was
mostly supplied by the private activity of sutlers and merchants supplemented
by the requisitioning or occasional purchase of bulk foodstuffs by military
officials: D. Smith, ‘Muscovite Logistics, 1462–1598’, Slavonic and East
European Review, 71 (1993), 35–65, pp. 50–1.
34. M. Burin de Roziers, ‘Les capitulations militaires entre la Suisse et la France’
(Doctorate, Paris, 1902), pp. 96–7 gives details of the agreement specified
between Henri II and the cantons in 1553, in which these terms were established.
35. G. Doria, ‘Conoscenza del mercato e sistema informativo: il know-how dei
mercanti-finanzieri genovesi nei secoli XVI e XVII’, in A. de Maddalena and
H. Kellenbenz (eds.), La republica internazionale del denaro tra XV e XVII secolo.
Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico 20 (Bologna, 1986), pp. 57–121,
p. 67, n. 37.
37. J. Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys (Cambridge, 1974), p. 29.
38. T.A. Kirk, Genoa and the Sea. Policy and Power in an Early Modern Maritime
Republic, 1559–1684 (Baltimore and London, 2005), pp. 43–4: Centurión’s
proposal was rejected as the crown refused to concentrate so many galleys in
the hands of one contractor, but a contract to run nine of these Spanish galleys
was awarded to the Centurión family in 1608.
39. Kirk, Genoa, p. 43; Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys, pp. 30–2.
40. Kirk, Genoa, p. 44.
41. Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys, p. 34.
42. Such strictly speaking illegal income-supplementing activity continued well
into the eighteenth century: N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World. An Anatomy
of the Georgian Navy (London, 1986), pp. 318–21.
43. J.R. Bruijn, The Dutch Navy of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
(Columbia, SC, 1993), pp. 50–1; Bruijn gives examples of very substantial
kostpenningen profits to be made by commanders in the 1670s, pp. 116–17.
44. Krebs, Hatzfeld I, p. 82. Like many other colonels, Franz Albrecht relied
heavily for this contracting on the assistance of his lieutenant colonel, in this
case the future Imperial Field Marshal, Hatzfeld.
45. DBB, V, p. 120; Wallenstein to Gallas, 3 January 1633, concerning the
decision about the cavalry; Krebs, Hatzfeld I, p. 120, for the charcoal mills;
Hatzfeld II, p. 5, for the colonels’ search for hand mills for grain.
Sozialgeschichtliche Studien (Göttingen, 1994), pp. 178–9.
47. The potential for officer profiteering in this new system was held by Sir John
Smythe to have been the ruin of later sixteenth-century armies such as that led
to the Netherlands by Leicester: Certain Discourses Military (London, 1590;
edited and republished by J. Hale, 1964), but the previous system was no less
disadvantageous to the soldiers.
48. J. Pohl,‘Die Profiantirung der keyserlichen Armaden ahnbelangendt’. Studien zur
Versorgung der kaiserlichen Armee, 1634/35 (Vienna, 1994), pp. 37–8, 63–5,
gives a monthly wage of 2 florins 6 kreuzer for an ordinary Imperial footsoldier
in 1634, but this was in addition to rations of bread, meat and wine, which
more than doubled the real value of the wage. See examples of
Verpflegungsordonnanzen, specifying the quantities of food and drink to be
supplied per day: J. Heilmann, Das Kriegswesen der Kaiserlichen und Schweden
zur Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Leipzig, 1850; repr. Krefeld, 1977),
pp. 167–9, 185–6, for the Liga army in 1623 and the Swedish army in 1632.
Heilmann, Kriegsgeschichte von Bayern, Franken, Pfalz und Schwaben von
1506–1651 (2 vols., Munich, 1868), II, 1002: Bavarian army in the winter of
1632 (27 November 1632) specifies each infantryman is to receive 5 florins
per month, or 2 pounds of bread a day and 1 florin per week (i.e. a basic bread
ration and 4 florins per month).
49. Redlich, I, p. 484, gives a case in 1620 when Saxon recruits were paid a daily
subsistence (Liefergeld) of 6 groschen per day, double-pay men receiving
8 groschen. When the meat ration was suspended in the Imperial army,
additional monthly wages of 1.5–2 florins a month were paid to the ordinary
soldiers: Pohl, Profiantirung, p. 64.
50. Redlich, I, p. 484.
51. Krebs, Hatzfeld I, pp. 281–4: regulation for the delivery of foodstuffs as
contributions directly to Franz Albrecht von Sachsen-Lauenberg for the
supply of his three regiments.
52. Wallenstein himself had to provide an extra 1,000 gulden per company for
arming and equipping his regiment of cuirassiers in January 1620:
K. Oberleitner, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Krieges mit
besonderer Berücksichtigung des Österreichischen Finanz- und
Kriegswesens’, Archiv für Österreichischen Geschichte, 19 (1858), pp. 25–6.
53. Krebs, Hatzfeld I, pp. 29–30: Hatzfeld raised a further 3,000 talers from the
merchant company of Hermann Heffing in Cologne and the bankers Anton
and Tobias Geiger in Nuremberg to supplement sums that Franz Albrecht
had already borrowed from Geiger to pay for weapons and armour.
54. Krebs, Hatzfeld II, p. 5.
55. H. Lahrkamp, Jan von Werth (Cologne, 1962), p. 206.
57. Krebs, Hatzfeld I, p. 84, gives the particular example of Colonel Hebron
(Hepburn); Krebs, Hatzfeld II, p. 2.
58. Krebs, Hatzfeld, I, pp. 89–90.
59. D. Maffi, ‘Milano in guerra. La mobilitazione delle risorse in una provincia
della monarchia, 1640–59’, in M. Rizzo, J. Ibáñez and G. Sabatini (eds.), Le
forze del principe (2 vols., Murcia, 2004), I, pp. 345–408, pp. 366–71.
61. DBB, V, pp. 87–8: Wallenstein to all regimental commanders, 14 May 1632,
Pilsen: order to ensure that all soldiers carry a full week’s worth of provisions
before setting out.
62. This was the case even in the urbanized United Provinces: H. Vogel, ‘Arms
Production and Exports in the Dutch Republic, 1600–1650’, in M. van der
Hoeven (ed.), Exercise of Arms. Warfare in the Netherlands (1568–1648) (Brill,
1998), pp. 197–210, pp. 197–204.
63. Zunckel, Rüstungsgeschäfte, p. 67; W. Maeßer, ‘Suhl und Lüttich als
Großzeuger von Schußwaffen’, Zeitschrift für Historische Waffenkunde,
7 (1915–17), 254–61, p. 255; H. Valentinitisch, ‘Suhler Waffenhändler in
den Habsburgischen Erbländern in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in H. Edner,
W. Höflechner, H.J. Mezler-Andelberg, P. Roth et al., Festschrift Othmar
Pickl zum 60. Geburtstag (Graz and Vienna, 1987), pp. 683–8; H. Langer,
‘Army Finances, Production and Commerce’, in K. Bussmann and
H. Schilling (eds.), 1648. War and Peace in Europe (3 vols., Munich, 1998),
I, pp. 293–9; Gaier, Liège Gunmaking, pp. 29–40.
64. Zunckel, Rüstingsgeschäfte, pp. 30–53; C. Kapser, ‘Handel und Militär in
Frankfurt zur Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges’, in R. Koch (ed.), Brücke
zwischen den Völkern – Zur Geschichte der Frankfurter Messe (3 vols., Frankurt
am Main, 1991), II, pp. 140–6.
65. The Hamburg firm of Berns-Marselis also dealt extensively with the military
needs of the Danish crown: J. Jorgensen, ‘Denmark’s Relations with Lübeck
and Hamburg in the Seventeenth Century’, Scandinavian Economic History
Review, 11 (1963), 73–116, pp. 97–100.
66. Zunckel, Rüstungsgeschäfte, p. 118.
67. Klein, ‘Trip Family’, pp. 196–8; H. Kellenbenz, Unternehmerkräfte im
Hamburger Portugal- und Spanienhandel, 1590–1625 (Hamburg, 1954),
pp. 224–5 for more attempts to control Swedish war materials in early 1630s.
68. Klein, ‘Trip Family’, p. 200; Zunckel, Rüstungsgeschäfte, pp. 105–7.
69. M. Bogucka, ‘Saltpeter Production and Saltpeter Trade between Gdansk and
Amsterdam in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century’, in W.G. Heeres
(ed.), From Dunkirk to Danzig. Shipping and Trade in the North Sea and the
Baltic (Amsterdam, 1988), pp. 167–70.
70. Zunckel, Rüstungsgeschäfte, p. 107.
71. Zunckel, Rüstungsgeschäfte, pp. 132–3, 166–8.
72. Zunckel, Rüstungsgeschäfte, p. 159. This had been true of naval provisioning
companies much earlier: see Doria, ‘Conoscenza del mercato’.
73. Ernstberger, Hans de Witte, pp. 213–24: the list of Hauptfaktor, Nebenfaktor
and other business associates runs to several hundred names and several
scores of European centres.
74. Zunckel, Rüstungsgeschäfte, p. 233, n. 111; Kellenbenz, Unternehmerkräfte,
pp. 182–240.
75. J. Zunckel, ‘Rüstungshandel im Zeitalter des Dreißigjährigen Krieges.
“Militärische Revolution”, internationale Strategien und Hamburger
Perspektiven’, in B. von Krusenstjern and H. Medick (eds.), Zwischen Alltag
und Katastrophe (Göttingen, 2001), pp. 83–112; Zunckel, Rüstungsgeschäfte,
pp. 208–24 (Dorchi).
76. A. Nusbacher, ‘Civil Supply in the Civil War: Supply of Victuals to the New
Model Army on the Naseby Campaign, 1–14 June 1645’, English Historical
Review, 115 (2000), 145–60, esp. pp. 156–9.
77. Thompson, War and Government, passim.

78. I.A.A. Thompson, ‘Aspects of Spanish Military and Naval Organization
during the Ministry of Olivares’, in Thompson, War and Society in Habsburg
Spain (London, 1992), p. 21.
79. Thompson, War and Government, p. 228.
80. G. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567–1659 (2nd edn,
Cambridge, 2004), pp. 136–7, 251.
81. A. Estríngana, ‘La ejecución del gasto militar y la gestión de los suministros.
El abastecimiento de pan de munición en el ejército de Flandes durante la
primera mitad des siglo XVII’, in Rizzo et al. (eds.), Le forze del principe,
I, pp. 411–68, pp. 447–63.
82. Thompson, ‘Military and Naval Organization’, p. 6.
83. Goodman, Spanish Naval Power, pp. 146–49; Thompson, ‘Military and Naval
Organization’, p. 5; Gaier, Liège Gunmaking, p. 29.
Berne, 1880–2), II, (appendix), pp. 4–5: text of patent, 19 March 1640.
86. J. Chastenet de Puységur, Les guerres de Louis XIII et Louis XIV (Amsterdam,
1690), pp. 168–9.
87. Gaier, Liège Gunmaking, p. 57.
89. C. Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain (Baltimore, 1986), p. 78.
90. Phillips, Six Galleons, pp. 86–9. Phillips provides a plausible picture of an
effective private–public partnership in which claims and expectations on both
sides are arbitrated effectively, and the advantages of building under contract
are appreciated on the side of the government.
91. M. Bellamy, Christian IV and his Navy (Brill, 2006), pp. 36–40.
92. Bellamy cites examples of both types of contract negotiated with the Scottish
naval entrepreneur David Balfour between 1599 and 1628: Christian IV,
pp. 105–11. The contractors might, in due course, receive the title and
modest salary of Royal Master Shipwright, but continued to make their living
through carrying out specific building contracts. See also S. Murdoch,
‘Scotland and Denmark-Norway and the House of Stuart, 1603–1660: a
Diplomatic and Military Analysis’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Aberdeen,
1998), pp. 221–3.
93. Bellamy, Christian IV, pp. 118–21: a large portion of the contracts went to the
partnership of Albert Berns and the Hamburg-based Dutch merchant-
financier Gabriel Marselis, who provided the capital for the private shipyards
at Glückstadt, then Neustadt.
94. Bellamy, Christian IV, p. 121, and see Christian IV’s comment cited on p. 89.
95. This led to the substantial development of the private dockyards at Itzehøe,
close to Glückstadt on the Elbe: Bellamy, Christian IV, pp. 180–1.
96. J. Heilmann, Kriegsgeschichte von Bayern, II, pp. 996–7: the post was held by
Georg Pfliegl from 1620.
97. Heilmann, Kriegsgeschichte von Bayern, II, p. 999.
98. Vogel, ‘Arms Production’, pp. 200–10; O. van Nimwegen, ‘Deser landen crijchs-
volck’. Het Staatse leger en de militaire revoluties, 1588–1688 (Amsterdam, 2006),
pp. 304–12, on the supply contractors Antonio Machado and Jacob Pereira in
the 1670s; in the English case, as early as the Civil War, see C. Holmes, The
Eastern Association in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 155–6, and
A. Nusbacher, ‘The Triple Thread: Supply of Victuals to the Army under
Sir Thomas Fairfax, 1645–46’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 2001),
pp. 99–201.
99. Kroener, B. Les routes et les étapes. Die Versorgung die französischen Armeen in
Nordostfrankreich (1635–61) (Münster, 1980), pp. 7–11, 183–7; B. Kroener,
‘Rechtstellung und Profite französicher Heereslieferanten in der ersten
Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschafts-
geschichte, 76 (1989), pp. 457–93; D. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army,
(Cambridge, 2001), pp. 381–90.
100. Estríngana, ‘La ejecución del gasto militar’, examines in detail the contracts
with suppliers for the Army of Flanders from the 1620s to 1640s.
101. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, pp. 256–8; Kroener, ‘Heereslieferanten’, p. 469
makes the point that supplying daily rations for 30,000 requires a minimum
of 1,000 horses and 250 wagons.
102. Goodman, Spanish Naval Power, pp. 151–8, though Goodman emphasizes
the extent that gathering and transporting naval supplies was also potentially
subject to crippling difficulties and delay.
103. For examples of the former, see Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, pp. 413–14.
104. C. Kapser, Die bayerische Kriegsorganisation in der zweiten Hälfte des
Dreißigjährigen Kneges, 1635–1648/49 (Münster, 1997), pp. 83, 88.
105. J. Lefèvre, Spinola et la Belgique (1601–1627) (Brussels, 1947), pp. 20–4;
Parker, Army of Flanders, p. 212.
107. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, pp. 234–5, 389–90; R. Bonney, The King’s Debts.
Finance and Politics in France, 1589–1661 (Oxford, 1981), pp. 186–8; Elias
Trip achieved a similar position in respect to the export of copper from
Sweden by the late 1620s, largely because the Swedish crown and its agents
found it convenient to acquiesce in Trip’s virtual control of copper sales, to
the extent that his dominance of the copper trade could block any attempt by
the Swedish crown to manage the price of copper against his interests: Klein,
‘Trip Family’, pp. 204–5.
108. Bruijn, Dutch Navy, pp. 34–7.
109. Pohl, ‘Profiantirung’, pp. 146–7.
52–81, pp. 54–5; see as well the detailed breakdown of the parlous state of
the Habsburg finances from 1618 to 1634 in Oberleitner, ‘Beiträge zur
Geschichte’, pp. 1–13.
111. On the French fiscal system, see Bonney, The King’s Debts, and J. Dent, Crisis
in Finance. Crown, Financiers and Society in Seventeenth-Century France
(Newton Abbot, 1973).
112. Thompson, War and Government, p. 96; Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, pp. 262–6.
113. A. Judges, ‘Philip Burlamachi: a Financier of the Thirty Years War’,
Economica, 16 (1926), 285–300.
114. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, pp. 258–9; for corruption in the quantity and
quality of bread provisioning in the Netherlands, see Parker, Army of
Flanders, pp. 137–8.
115. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, p. 257; Kroener, ‘Heereslieferanten’, pp. 481–4.
116. B. Stadler, Pappenheim und die Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Winterthur,
1991), p. 693.
118. Ernstberger, Hans de Witte, pp. 160–212: ‘Europas Krieg, Europas Geld’;
see F. Redlich, ‘Military Entrepreneurship and the Credit System in the
sixteenth and seventeenth Centuries’, Kyklos, 10 (1957), 186–93,
pp. 189–91 for a more sceptical view of de Witte’s achievements.
120. Redlich, I, pp. 247–8; F.J. Schöningh, Die Rehlinger von Augsburg. Ein
Beitrag zur deutschen Wirtschaftsgeschichte des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts
(Paderborn, 1927), pp. 43–54, 92–6.
121. C. Badalo-Dulong, Banquier du roi, Barthélemi Hervart, 1606–76 (Paris,
1951), pp. 11–18.
122. Gonzenbach, Erlach, III, 362–8; Badalo-Dulong, Hervart, pp. 28–32.
123. H. L. Landberg, Ekholm, R. Nordlund and S. Nilsson (eds.), Det kontinen-
tala krigets ekonomie. Studier i krigsfinansierung under svensk stormaktstid
(Kristianstad, 1971), 470–71.
124. For dealings with Heffing: Krebs, Hatzfeld I, p. 213; H. Salm,
Armeefinanzierung im Dreißigjährigen Krieg (Münster, 1990), pp. 115–16.
125. Accounts of campaigns make this evident time and again: for military
commanders deploying their capital to keep their troops supplied, see, for
one example, the report that Holzapfel had dispensed 20,000 talers to the
troops under his command in 1645 to make good provisioning shortfalls:
E. Höfer, Das Ende des Dreißigjährigen Krieges. Strategie und Kriegsbild
(Cologne-Weimar and Vienna, 1997), pp. 47–8; for support given by finan-
ciers/suppliers, see Ernstberger, Hans de Witte, passim.
126. Ernstberger, Hans de Witte, p. 237; Valentinitisch, ‘Suhler Waffenhändler’,
pp. 684–5, 687.
128. The well-supported view of Ernstberger, Hans de Witte, pp. 231–6.
130. Ernstberger, Hans de Witte, p. 246 – see table.
131. J. Kunisch, ‘Wallenstein als Kriegsunternehmer. Auf dem Wege zum abso-
lutischen Steuerstaat’, in U. Schultz (ed.), Mit dem Zehnten fing es an. Eine
Kulturgeschichte der Steuer (Munich, 1986), pp. 153–61, p. 157;
Hummelsberger, ‘Kriegswirtschaft und Versorgungswesen’, p. 63.
132. A. Ernstberger, Wallenstein als Volkswirt im Herzogtum Friedland
(Reichenberg, 1929), passim; Ernstberger, ‘Wallenstein’s Heeressabotage’,
in Ernstberger, Franken – Böhmen – Europa: Gesammelte Aufsätze (2 vols.,
Kallmünz, 1959), I, pp. 269–85; G. Mann, Wallenstein. His Life Narrated,
trans. C. Kessler (London, 1976), pp. 226–52.
133. In 1627–8 the duchy of Friedland was to produce the colossal total of
60,000–70,000 strich of grain to support the army’s needs in return for not
quartering Imperial troops over the winter. The target was only met by
squeezing the productive capacity of the duchy to the utmost: Ernstberger,
Wallenstein, pp. 32–3.
134. On the planning of Reichenberg as a ‘model’ town, see J. Mohr,
‘Bauaktivitäten in Reichenberg unter Albrecht von Waldstein: Das erste
planmäßig errichtete Stadtviertel’, in E. Fučiková and L. Čepička (eds.),
Albrecht von Waldstein. Inter arma silent musae? (Exhibition catalogue;
Prague, 2007), pp. 249–53.
135. Ernstberger, Wallenstein, pp. 67–83.
136. Ernstberger, Wallenstein, pp. 67–73, 75–7.
137. M. Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus. A History of Sweden, 1611–1632 (2 vols.,
London, 1958), II, pp. 109–11; E. Dahlgren, Louis de Geer, 1587–1652. Hans
lif och verk (2 vols., Uppsala, 1923), I, pp. 108–16.
138. Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus, II, pp. 111–13; Dahlgren, Louis de Geer,
I, pp. 190–2.
139. Klein, ‘Trip Family’, p. 197.
140. Dahlgren, Louis de Geer, I, pp. 143–4.
141. Dahlgren, Louis de Geer, I, pp. 134–43; F. Breedevelt van Veen, Louis de
Geer, 1587–1652 (Amsterdam, 1935).
142. Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus, II, pp. 113–17.
143. Klein, ‘Trip Family’, p. 198; useful information on the activities of the two
families and cannon production in Sweden in C. Cipolla, Guns and Sails in
the Early Phase of European Expansion, 1400–1700 (London, 1965), pp. 55–8,
154–8.
144. Klein, ‘Trip Family’, pp. 198–9.
145. A painting by Allart van Everdingen, now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
146. W. Großhaupt, ‘Kaufleute, Waren, Geldhandel und Nachrichtenübermittlung
in der Neuzeit’, in A. Dietz (ed.), Frankfurter Handelsgeschichte (4 vols.,
Frankfurt am Main, 1910–25; repr. 1970), I, pp. 219–47, p. 234.
147. J. Schneider, ‘The Significance of Large Fairs, Money Markets and Precious
Metals in the Evolution of a World Market’, in H. Kellenbenz and
E. Schmitt (eds.), The Emergence of a World Economy, 1500–1914 (2 vols.,
Wiesbaden, 1986), I, pp. 15–36, pp. 18–20.
148. Landberg et al. (eds.), Krigets ekonomie, p. 470.
149. S. Schröder, ‘Hamburg und Schweden im Dreißigjährigen Krieg – vom
potentiellen Bündnispartner zum Zentrum der Kriegsfinanzierung’,
Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 79 (1989), 305–31,
pp. 318–27; Landberg et al. (eds.), Krigets ekonomie, p. 477.
150. In the context of financing the Thirty Years War, the most important of these
was Frankfurt am Main: R. Hildebrandt, ‘Handel und Kapitalverkehr um
1630. Außenwirtschaftliche Beziehungen Deutschlands im Dreißigjährigen
Krieg’, in J. Schneider (ed.), Wirtschaftskräfte und Wirtschaftswege V
(Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 135–59, p. 140.
152. Höfer, Ende, pp. 2–3. The view is echoed for the French economy by the
work of Daniel Dessert, who points to the staggeringly high percentage of
specie held by a narrow group of financiers/merchants: Argent, pouvoir et
société au Grand Siècle (Paris, 1984), pp. 172–8. The entire Spanish credit
system down to the 1630s was dominated by the Genoese – Kirk, Genoa,
p. 88: from seventy financial contracts made by Philip III between 1598 and
1609, nearly 33 million ducats (88 per cent of all loans) were borrowed from
Genoese financiers.
153. Ernstberger, Hans de Witte, p. 227.
154. Redlich, I, p. 242.
155. Redlich, I, pp. 74–5, 88–9; R. Baumann, Georg von Frundsberg (Munich,
1991), pp. 260–1.
156. Redlich, I, p. 408.
157. Redlich, I, p. 409.
158. G. Droysen, Bernhard von Weimar (2 vols., Leipzig, 1885), I, pp. 22–3.
159. T. Lorentzen, Die Schwedische Armee im Dreißigjährigen Kriege (Leipzig,
1894), p. 15.
161. Redlich, I, p. 408.
162. Krebs, Hatzfeld I, pp. 111–12: Krebs points out that these substantial profits
did not stop Hatzfeld asking for a loan from his colonel a few months later in
1629 to meet some of the expenses of the regiment.
163. Heilmann, Kriegswesen, pp. 190–7.
164. Redlich, I, p. 361; Redlich, De Praede Militare. Looting and Booty, 1500–1815.
Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 39 (Wiesbaden,1956),
pp. 38–57.
165. R. Rebitsch, Matthias Gallas (1588–1647) (Munster, 2006), pp. 399–401;
for a detailed account of the booty from the sack, see R. Quazza, La guerra
per la successione di Mantova e del Monferrato (2 vols., Mantua, 1926), II,
pp. 146–62.
167. P. Broucek, Die Eroberung von Bregenz am 4. Jänner 1647 (Vienna, 1971),
pp. 9–12.
168. Redlich, Looting and Booty, pp. 55–7.
169. Redlich, I, pp. 402–8. An especially interesting section in E. Lund, War for
the Every Day. Generals, Knowledge, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe,
1680–1740 (Westport, CT and London, 1999), p. 41, draws attention to the
close links established between credit, wealth, honour and nobility in these
military societies, and the extent to which ‘creditworthiness’ could be based
on this mixture of interlocking aspects of the military commander’s role.
170. Lorentzen, Schwedische Armee, pp. 117–31: the final figure was whittled down
to 5 million, but at the price of territorial concessions in north Germany which
left a large number of the senior officers as permanent beneficiaries of lands
and revenues in Pomerania, Bremen, Verden and Wismar.
171. R. Stradling, Th Armada of Flanders. Spanish Maritime Policy and European
War, 1568–1668 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 227; H. Malo, Les corsaires dunker-
quois et Jean Bart (2 vols., Paris, 1912/13), I, pp. 333–5.
172. Stradling, Armada of Flanders, pp. 205–9.
173. P. Villiers, Les corsaires du Littoral. Dunkerque, Calais, Boulogne de Philip II à
Louis XIV (1568–1713) (Lille, 2000), p. 131.
174. Villiers, Les corsaires, pp. 132–3; see also J.S. Bromley, ‘The Trade and
Privateering of Saint-Malo during the War of the Spanish Succession’, and
the detailed calculations in ‘Duguay Trouin: the Financial Background’, both
in Bromley, Corsairs and Navies, 1660–1760 (London, 1987), pp. 279–323.
175. L. Welti, Graf Kaspar von Hohenems, 1573–1640 (Innsbruck, 1963),
pp. 228–30.
176. A. de Villermont, Ernest de Mansfeldt (2 vols., Brussels, 1865), II, pp. 189–91.
The same arrangements were made by the French crown with Saxe-Weimar,
for whom a large pension and cash gratifications were part of the package:
A. de Noailles, Bernhard de Saxe-Weimar (Paris, 1908), pp. 481–6.
177. C. Leestmans, Charles IV de Lorraine. Une errance baroque (Lasne, 2003),
pp. 107–29.
179. See, for example, the arrangements made between Oxenstierna and
Lieutenant Colonel Douglas in 1631, in which Douglas agreed to raise 500
men at his own expense, but received 2,000 riksdalers in ready cash and was
promised the rest of the muster money when he arrived in the spring with the
new recruits: J. Fallon, ‘Scottish Mercenaries in the Service of Denmark and
Sweden, 1626–32’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Glasgow, 1972), p. 266.
Similar arrangement with Ludovick Leslie, p. 281, and throughout the
period 1637–40 – p. 302.
180. D. Stevenson, ‘Monro, Robert (d. 1675?)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (Oxford, 2004).
181. Ramsay is presented in Lorentzen, Schwedische Armee, p. 15, as one of the
great winners from Swedish military operations, but see article by
A. Grosjean in the new Dictionary of National Biography, and Fallon,
‘Scottish Mercenaries’, pp. 261–74.
182. The numbers of those killed in action are even more striking when second-
level corps commanders are added.
183. J. Peters (ed.), Ein Söldnerleben im Dreißigjährigen Krieg (Berlin, 1993),
pp. 187–8 for his disbandment and final pay.
184. Redlich, I, 228–9; the same question is asked explicitly of Václav Eusebius
Z. Lobkovic in T.M. Barker, ‘Military Entrepreneurship, Patronage and
Grace’, in Barker, Army, Aristocracy, Monarchy. Essays on War, Society and
Government in Austria, 1618–1780 (New York, 1982), pp. 118–19.
185. Wallenstein had at least one precedent in the Liechtenstein family, who
provided substantial levels of financial and military support for the
Habsburgs during the Long Turkish War for which they had received their
princely title and office of Landeshauptmann of Moravia in 1606: J. von Falke,
Geschichte des fürstlichen Hauses Liechtenstein (2 vols., Vienna, 1877), II,
pp. 138–54.
186. J. Polišenský and J. Kollmann, Wallenstein. Feldherr des Dreißigjährigen
Krieges (Cologne, 1997), pp. 146–9.
187. D. Maffi, Il Baluardo della Corona. Guerra, esercito, finanze e società nella
Lombardia seicentesca (1630–60) (Florence, 2007), pp. 176–91.
188. On Jan de Werth’s social ascent: Lahrkamp, Jan von Werth, pp. 3–13, 214–25;
on Holzapfel: W. Hofmann, Peter Melander, Reichsgraf zu Holzappel. Ein
Charakterbild aus der Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Munich, 1882); Salm,
Armeefinanzierung, pp. 69–72.
189. Villiers, Les corsaires, p. 77.
190. The general conclusion of G. Schmidt, ‘Voraussetzung oder Legitimation?
Kriegsdienst und Adel im Dreißigjährigen Krieg’, in G. Oexle and
W. Paravicini (eds.), Nobilitas. Funktion und Repräsentation des Adels in
Alteuropa (Göttingen, 1997), pp. 431–51.
192. Another excellent example is provided by the career of Raimondo
Montecuccoli, who drew on his military services in the last years of the
Thirty Years War to secure Imperial favour, a series of important diplomatic
missions and eventual promotion to field marshal and the presidency of the
Imperial War Council: see T. Barker, The Military Intellectual and Battle.
Raimondo Montecuccoli and the Thirty Years War (Albany, NY, 1975),
pp. 43–7.
193. Phillips, Six Galleons, p. 89.
195. J. Kraus, Das Militärwesen der Reichsstadt Augsburg, 1548–1806 (Augsburg,
1980), p. 236.
196. Redlich, I, p. 304.
197. The apparent incompatibility of ‘aristocratic’ military virtue and the trades-
man’s pursuit of financial gain is clearly emphasized in D. Trim, ‘Fighting
“Jacob’s Wars”. The Employment of English and Welsh Mercenaries in the
European Wars of Religion: France and the Netherlands, 1562–1610’
(Ph.D. thesis, King’s College London, 2002), pp. 81–6.
198. A. Devyver, Le sang épurée. Les préjugés de race chez les gentilshommes français de
l’Ancien Régime, 1560–1720 (Brussels, 1973), pp. 88–108; A. Jouanna, ‘La
noblesse et les valeurs guerrières au XVIe siècle’, in G.-A. Pérousse,
A. Thierry and A. Tournon (eds.), L’homme de guerre au XVIe siècle (Saint-
Etienne, 1992), pp. 205–17.
199. J.-P. Labatut, Les ducs et pairs de France au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1972), pp. 122–34.
200. G. Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge, 1982),
pp. 76–89.
201. D. Trim, ‘Chivalry and Professionalism in the French Armies of the
Renaissance’, in Trim (ed.), The Chivalric Ethos and the Development of
Military Professionalism (Brill, 2003), pp. 149–82; M. Fantoni, ‘Il “perfetto
capitano”: storia e mitografia’, in Fantoni (ed.), ‘Il perfetto capitano’.
Immagini e realtà (secoli XV–XVII) (Rome, 2001), pp. 15–66.
202. J. Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture. France,
1570–1715 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), pp. 45–68.
203. François de Betstein, Marshal Bassompierre, Mémoires (4 vols., Paris,
1870–7), I, pp. 98–9 (1603).
204. Fantoni (ed.), ‘Perfetto capitano’.
205. T. Barker, ‘Ottavio Piccolomini (1599–1659)’, in Barker, Army, Aristocracy,
Monarchy, pp. 72–3.

209. P. Litta, Famiglie celebri italiane (18 vols., Milan, 1819–82), Fasc. Gonzaga,
table xvii.
211. See perceptive comments of G. Hanlon, The Twilight of a Military Tradition.
Italian Aristocrats and European Conflicts, 1560–1800 (London, 1998),
pp. 261–8.
212. For example, Barker, ‘Ottavio Piccolomini’, pp. 73–6, who describes how
Piccolomini needed to have better-equipped and better-presented soldiers
in his units than any of his fellow officers.
213. See, for example, the illustration of the portrait of the Swiss Colonel Koenig,
and the discussion of its significance for his aspirations in V. Villiger,
J. Steinauer and D. Bitterli, Les chevauchées du colonel Koenig. Un aventurier
dans l’Europe en guerre (Fribourg, 2006), pp. 7–9, 208–27.
214. J. Cuvelier, ‘Peeter Snayers, peintre de batailles (1592–1667)’, Bulletin de
l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 23 (1944–6), 25–72, pp. 39–40.
215. H. Karner, ‘Unter dem Stern des Mars. Bildausstatung des Waldsteinspalais
zwischen Programm und Pragmatik’, pp. 127–43, and L. Konečnŷ, ‘Die
gemalte Ausstattung des Waldsteinpalais in Prag: Versuch einer (verfrühten)
Synthese’, pp. 144–57, in Fučiková and Čepička (eds.), Waldstein. The
ceiling fresco in the Trabantensaal was painted by Baccio del Bianco in
1623/4.
216. A. Losman, Carl Gustaf Wrangel och Europa. Studier I kulturförbindelser kring
en 1600-talsmagnat (Stockholm, 1980), pp. 235–8.
217. Lahrkamp, Jan von Werth, pp. 224–5, 245.
218. Malo, Les corsaires, I, p. 332, cites a contemporary source: ‘comme si c’eust
esté quelque personne de qualité dix fois plus relevée’. See also V.W.
Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherlands (Basingstoke,
2005), pp. 204–8, on the social elevation of Dutch privateer captains.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 6
1. Historia della Vita d’Alberto Valstain, Duca di Fritland (Lyon, 1643).
2. For a discussion of the characteristics of this genre, see M. Fantoni (ed.), Il
‘perfetto capitano’. Immagine e realtà (secoli XV–XVII) (Rome, 2001), and
F. González de León, ‘“Doctors of the Military Discipline”. Technical
Expertise and the Paradigm of the Spanish Soldier in the Early Modern
Period’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 27 (1996), pp. 61–85.
3. Comte G. Gualdo Priorato, Historia della Vita d’Alberto Valstain, Duca di
Fritland (Lyon, 1643), p. 11r.
4. The bibliography of printed manuals on the art of war is vast: a good starting
point is the handlist of mainly Italian and Spanish treatises printed in Fantoni,
‘Perfetto capitano’, pp. 491–508. Printed manuals would need to be set against
what is probably an even larger body of works existing only in manuscript and
spread across European libraries and archives. My reading of extensive printed
manuals indicates the very large degree of convention and consensus in what is
and is not discussed in military treatises.
5. A. Veltzé, Ausgewählte Schriften des Raimond Fürsten Montecuccoli (4 vols.,

Vienna, 1899–1901), I, pp. 3–387: Chapter 3, ‘von den Rüstungen’, pp. 73–91.
6. Il Prencipe, nel quale si considera il Prencipe, & quanto al governo dello Stato, &
quanto al maneggio della Guerra (Venice, 1599), pp. 163–5.
7. A representative sample of such tracts would be vast, but the dominance of the
themes of artillery and sieges are neatly demonstrated by G. Ruscelli, Precetti
della Militia Moderna, tanto per mare quanto per terra (Venice, 1583); D. de Alba y
Viamont, El Perfeto Capitan, instruido en la diciplina militar, y nueva ciencia de la
artilleria (Madrid, 1590); H. de Rohan, Le parfaict capitaine (Paris, 1636).
González de Leon, ‘Doctors Military’, p. 62, suggests that the earliest of these
circulated ‘scientific’ tracts was Niccolò Tartaglia’s Nuova Scienzia (1537).
8. De Re Militari et Bello Tractatus (Venice, 1563), p. 199.
9. R. Oresko, G. Gibbs and H. Scott (eds.), Royal and Republican Sovereignty in
Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 1–42; S. Hodson, ‘Sovereigns
and Subjects: the Princes of Sedan and the Dukes of Bouillon in Early
Modern France’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 2000), pp. 23–68;
J. Spangler, The Society of Princes. The Lorraine-Guise and the Conservation of
Power and Wealth in Seventeenth-Century France (Farnham, 2009), pp. 19–51.
10. P. Schröder, ‘The Constitution of the Holy Roman Empire after 1648:
Samuel Pufendorf’s Assessment in his Monzambano’, Historical Journal, 42
(1999), 961–83.
(London, 1976), p. 261.
12. D. Trim, ‘Fighting “Jacob’s Wars”. The Employment of English and Welsh
Mercenaries in the European Wars of Religion: France and the Netherlands,
1562–1610’ (Ph.D. thesis, King’s College London, 2002), pp. 87–90, on the
conventions – ‘more honoured in the breach’ – surrounding remuneration for
military service.
13. No one doubted the capacity of the provincial grandees to use their influence
and resources to raise thousands of troops: R. Harding, Anatomy of a Power Elite.
The Provincial Governors of Early Modern France (New Haven, 1978), pp. 68–9;
for examples of this capacity from 1627–8 see D. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army. War,
Government and Society in France, 1624–42 (Cambridge, 2001), p. 90.
14. D. Parrott, ‘Richelieu, the Grands and the French Army’, in J. Bergin and
L. Brockliss (eds.), Richelieu and his Age (Oxford, 1992), pp. 149–72.
15. Space does not permit an extensive account of the failures of prioritization and
the over-concentration of resources on these ‘royal’ campaigns, but more
detail in Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, pp. 127–63.
16. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, pp. 299–312; J. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle. The
French Army, 1610–1715 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 328–36; E. Fieffé, Histoire
des troupes étrangères au service de la France (2 vols., Paris, 1854), I, pp. 131–65.
17. This is discussed in detail in Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, pp. 331–65.
18. Fernández de Velasco y Tovar, Constable of Castile, quoted in R. Stradling,
Europe and the Decline of Spain, 1580–1720 (London, 1981), p. 183.
19. The contemporary Mémoires of Omer Talon speak specifically of the ‘révolte
des généraux’ in 1649 to denote what is usually described as the Fronde des
princes, or the ‘Fronde of the nobility’: A. Petitot and L. de Monmerqué (eds.),
Collection des mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de France (Vols. LX–LXIII (Paris,

1827), LXI, pp. 436–7, etc.
20. J. Inglis-Jones, ‘The Grand Condé in Exile: Power Politics in France, Spain
and the Spanish Netherlands’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, Oxford,
1994), pp. 45–59, 255–95.
21. The traditional account of army reform dates back to the study of Louvois by
Camille Rousset, Histoire de Louvois et de son administration politique et militaire
(4 vols., Paris, 1879); the one point of divergence in a familiar story based
largely on administrative documents and correspondence is whether Louvois
or his father, Michel Le Tellier, played the leading role in carrying through
military reform; a case for the latter is made by L. André, Michel Le Tellier et
l’organisation de l’armée monarchique (Paris, 1906).
22. G. Rowlands, The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV. Royal Service
and Private Interest, 1661–1701 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 88–108.
23. D. Dessert, La Royale. Vaisseaux et marins du Roi-Soleil (Paris, 1996), pp. 46–59.
24. Louis XIV, Memoirs for the Instruction of the Dauphin, ed. P. Sonnino (London,
1970), p. 24.
25. W. Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France. State Power and
Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 223–339; Beik,
‘Absolutism as Social Collaboration in Louis XIV’s France’, Past and Present,
188 (2005), pp. 195–224.
26. Politique tirées de propres paroles de l’Ecriture Sainte (Paris, 1709), book IV, art.
1, proposition III, cited in W. Gembruch, Staat und Heer. Ausgewählte histori-
sche Studien zum ancien régime, zur Französischen Revolution und zu den
Befreiungskriegen. Historische Forschungen 40 (Berlin, 1990), p. 131.
27. N. Ferrier-Caverivière, L’image de Louis XIV dans la littérature française, de
1660 à 1715 (Paris, 1981), pp. 27–38.
28. G. Sabatier, Versailles ou la figure du roi (Paris, 1999), pp. 334–429;
J. Cornette, Le roi de guerre. Essai sur la souveraineté dans la France du Grand
Siècle (Paris, 1993), pp. 215–83; Ferrier-Caverivière, Louis XIV, pp. 93–8.
29. Cornette, Roi de guerre, pp. 252–61.
30. In contrast, see the relatively small and amateurish scale of such royal propaganda
under the Renaissance monarchs: D. Potter, Renaissance France at War. Armies,
Culture and Society, c. 1480–1560 (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 255–84.
31. For a specific example of the use of the religious ceremony of the Te Deum,
see M. Fogel, Les cérémonies de l’information dans la France du XVI au milieu du
XVIII siècle (Paris, 1989).
32. M. Burin de Roziers, ‘Les capitulations militaires entre la Suisse et la France’
(Doctorate, Paris, 1902), p. 195 gives an example of a capitulation of 1672
where the Swiss captains of the new regiment of Colonel Stuppa were paid an
advance of 4,000 livres to carry out recruitment, but this is to be reclaimed
from the first six months of wages. The Swiss were now being treated as troops
hired on long-term contracts within a French standing army, on essentially the
same terms as the other troops.
33. André, Michel Le Tellier, pp. 178–9.
34. J.A. Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (London, 1999), pp. 144–5: the
troops under arms on paper in 1676 were listed at 280,000; Lynn, Giant, p. 53.
35. For example: M. Potter, Corps and Clienteles. Public Finance and Political Change
in France, 1688–1715, (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 3–25; Potter, ‘War Finance and
Absolutist State Development in Early Modern Europe. An Examination of
French Venality in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Early Modern History, 7
(2003), 120–47; D. Bien, ‘Property in Office under the Ancien Régime. The
Case of the Stockbrokers’, in J. Brewer and S. Staves (eds.), Early Modern
Conceptions of Property (London and New York, 1995), pp. 481–94.
36. Rowlands, Dynastic State, pp. 166–71; H. Drévillon, L’impôt du sang: Le métier
des armes sous Louis XIV (Paris, 2005), pp. 179–211; J. Chagniot, Paris et
l’armée au XVIIIe siècle. Étude politique et sociale (Paris, 1985), pp. 255–77;
C. Opitz-Belakhal, Militärreformen zwischen Bürokratisierung und Adelsreaktion
(Sigmaringen, 1994), pp. 30–41.
37. See, for example, Rousset, Louvois, I, pp. 179–81; L. André, Michel Le Tellier
et Louvois (Paris, 1942), pp. 315–17.
38. E. Léonard, L’armée et ses problèmes au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1958), pp. 163–76.
39. Louis XIV, Memoirs, p. 126.
40. J. Chagniot, ‘La rationalisation de l’armée française après 1660’, in Armées et
diplomatie dans l’Europe du XVIIe siècle. Actes du Colloque des Association des
Historiens Modernistes (Paris, 1991), p. 105; similar additional expenditure
was undertaken by Austrian colonel-proprietors: M. Hochedlinger, Austria’s
Wars of Emergence, 1683–1797 (London, 2003), p. 130.
41. Some excellent statistics, taken from Dangeau’s Journal, in Lynn, Giant,
pp. 230–1.
42. Chagniot, ‘L’armée française’, pp. 103–4; A. Corvisier, Louvois (Paris, 1983),
pp. 335–6.
43. Chagniot, Paris et l’Armée, p. 260; Redlich, II, p. 51.
44. Redlich, II, pp. 53–4.
45. Drévillon, L’impôt du sang, pp. 169–73.
46. Rowlands, Dynastic State, pp. 343–53; Drevillon, L’impôt du sang, pp. 68–79.
47. Drevillon, L’impôt du sang, pp. 117–41.
48. Corvisier, Louvois, pp. 78–94, 326–43; Lynn, Giant, pp. 241–7.
49. Chagniot, ‘L’armée française’, pp. 98–9.
50. Chagniot, Paris et l’armée, pp. 266–70; V. Belhomme, L’armée française en 1690
(Paris, 1895), pp. 154–6. For a short-lived and unsuccessful experiment with
direct administration of army supply in the crisis years of 1709–10, see chapter
10 of J. Iung, ‘Service de vivres et munitionnaires sous l’ancien régime: la
fourniture de pain de munition aux troupes de Flandre et d’Allemagne de
1701–1710’ (Thèse de l’École Nationale des Chartes, Paris, 1983).
51. Chagniot, Paris et l’armée, pp. 270–3; Drévillon, L’impôt du sang, pp. 112–16.
52. F.-M. le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois, Lettres de Louvois à Louis XIV, ed.
N. Salat and T. Sarmant (Paris, 2007); see, for example, pp. 119–21, letter
of 2 July 1682 concerning work on the fortifications of Valenciennes.
53. Dessert, La Royale, pp. 61–73.
54. Dessert, La Royale, p. 74.
55. A process which continued for the French royal navy through the eighteenth
century: J. Pritchard, Louis XV’s Navy, 1748–1762. A Study of Organization
and Administration (Kingston, Canada, 1987), pp. 143–205.
56. K. Staudinger, Geschichte des kurbayerischen Heeres insbesondere unter Kurfürst

Ferdinand Maria, 1651–1679 (Munich, 1901), pp. 113–19.
57. P. Wilson, German Armies. War and German Politics, 1648–1806 (London,
1998), p. 23.
58. G. Tessin, Die Deutschen Regimenter der Krone Schweden (2 vols., Cologne,
1965), I, pp. 2–3.
59. J. Kunisch, ‘Der Nordische Krieg von 1655–1660 als Parabel frühneuzeitlicher
Staaten-konflikte’, in H. Duchhardt (ed.), Rahmenbedingungen und Hand-
lungsspielräume europäischer Außenpolitik im Zeitalter Louis XIV. Zeitschrift für
Historische Forschung 11 (Berlin, 1991), pp. 9–42, pp. 16–18.
60. H. Landberg, L. Ekholm, R. Nordlund and S. Nilsson (eds.), Det kontinentala
krigets ekonomie. Studier i krigsfinansierung under svensk stormaktstid (Kristianstad,
1971), p. 458.
61. Tessin, Deutschen Regimenter, I, pp. 8–10, 16–21.
62. Tessin, Deutschen Regimenter, I, pp. 96–117, 164–5, 301–2; Georg Friedrich
von Waldeck additionally raised a regiment of dragoons: I, pp. 255–6; for
Dohna see I, pp. 263–4, 313–14.
63. R. Frost, The Northern Wars, 1558–1721 (London, 2000), pp. 166–73.
64. T. Verspohl, Das Heerwesen des Münsterschen Fürstbischofs Christoph Bernhard
von Galen, 1650–1678 (Hildesheim, 1909), pp. 38–44, 120–1.
65. Verspohl, Galen, pp. 12–13, 31–4.
66. Wilson, German Armies, pp. 31–5; Redlich, II, pp. 8–12.
67. Redlich, II, p. 95; V. Vavoulis, ‘A Venetian World in Letters: the Massi
Correspondence at the Hauptstaatsarchiv in Hannover’, Quarterly Journal of
the Music Library Association, 59 (2003), 556–609, pp. 557–8 and letters, also
shows that Johann Friedrich was recruiting soldiers and officers for his own
forces in Italy by the 1670s. (I am most grateful to Julie Farguson for this
reference.)
68. M. Mallett and J. Hale, The Military Organization of a Renaissance State.
Venice, c. 1400–1617 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 326–7. On the other hand,
this episode could also present a case for the flexibility of hired troops, since
in the event the crisis passed without war, and the troops could be more
cheaply disbanded.
69. U. Kober, Eine Karriere im Krieg. Graf Adam von Schwarzenberg und die
kurbrandenburgische Politik von 1619 bis 1641 (Berlin, 2004), p. 381, shows
that from 1635 the Brandenburg Elector simply maintained the Wallenstein/
Swedish contributions systems to fund his own, post-Peace of Prague army;
Wilson, German Armies, pp. 27–31.
70. N. Winnige, ‘Von der Kontribution zur Akzise. Militärfinanzierung als Movens
staatlicher Steuerpolitik’, in B. Kroener and R. Pröve (eds.), Krieg und Frieden.
Militär und Gesellschaft in der frühen Neuzeit (Paderborn, 1996), pp. 59–83.
71. Winnige, ‘Kontribution’, p. 66, who emphasizes the importance of excise/
consumption taxes as the primary means to boost revenues from the 1660s.
72. Kunisch, ‘Nordische Krieg’, p. 28.
73. P. Wilson, ‘The Power to Defend, or the Defence of Power: the Conflict
between Duke and Estates over Defence Provision, Württemberg 1677–
1793’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 12 (1992), 25–45.
74. Staudinger, Kurbayerischen Heeres, pp. 169–75.

75. Wilson, German Armies, pp. 50–67.
76. The equivalent in the Osnabrück settlement is Article 8, section 2.
77. A point strongly made in Peter Wilson’s recent account of the Thirty Years
War, Europe’s Tragedy. A History of the Thirty Years War (London, 2009), pp.
622–3, 808.
78. G. Hanlon, The Twilight of a Military Tradition. Italian Aristocrats and European
Conflicts, 1560–1800 (London, 1998), pp. 283–7, who emphasizes Pied-
montese exceptionalism, and the extent that the costs of the small standing
force were partly met by leasing units to Louis XIV.
79. Redlich, II, p. 249: a similar figure of 2½ florins is prescribed in a 1697
Verpflegungsordonnanz for the Austrian army of Leopold I, though after deduc-
tions the infantryman received only 1 florin in cash. See also the table: II,
pp. 241–2.
80. Redlich, II, p. 240.
81. P. Burschel, Söldner im Nordwestdeutschland des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts
(Göttingen, 1994), pp. 51–3.
82. B. Kroener, ‘The Modern State and Military Society in the Eighteenth
Century’, in P. Contamine (ed.), War and Competition between States
(Oxford, 2000), pp. 195–220, pp. 215–16.
83. J. Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe, 1648–1789 (London, 1982), pp. 46–7.
84. P. Wilson, ‘The German “Soldier Trade” of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries: a Reassessment’, International History Review, 18 (1996), 757–92.
85. Redlich, II, pp. 97–8; Childs, Armies, pp. 48–9; C. Ingrao, The Hessian
Mercenary State. Ideas, Institutions and Reform under Frederick II, 1760–1785
(Cambridge, 1987), pp. 127–38.
86. Corvisier, Louvois, pp. 119, 143–4.
87. R. Gothelf, ‘Frederick William I and the Beginnings of Prussian Absolutism,
1713–1740’, in P. Dwyer (ed.), The Rise of Prussia, 1700–1830 (London,
2000), pp. 47–67, pp. 57–58; C. Duffy, Instrument of War. The Austrian
Army in the Seven Years War (Rosemont, IL, 2000), pp. 29–33.
88. M. Duffy, ‘Introduction’, in Duffy (ed.), The Military Revolution and the State,
1500–1800 (Exeter, 1980), pp. 5–7.
89. M. Bellamy, Christian IV and his Navy (Brill, 2006), pp. 243–4.
90. M. Palmer, ‘The “Military Revolution” Afloat. The Era of the Anglo-Dutch
Wars and the Transition to Modern Warfare at Sea’, War in History, 4 (1997),
123–49.
91. See table of third-rate warship growth in M. Duffy, ‘The Foundations of
British Naval Power’, in Duffy (ed.), Military Revolution, pp. 49–56, p. 51.
92. J. Glete, Swedish Naval Administration, 1521–1721 (Leiden, 2010), pp. 170–1;
G. Edmundson, ‘Louis de Geer’, English Historical Review, 6 (1891), 705–6.
93. J. Glete, Navies and Nations. Warships, Navies and State-Building in Europe and
America, 1500–1860 (2 vols., Stockholm, 1993), I, pp. 203–6.
94. Bellamy, Christian IV, pp. 170–5, 187–217.
95. Duffy, ‘Foundations’, pp. 56–60.
96. For a good example of this circularity see B. Sicken, ‘Der Dreißigjährige Krieg
als Wendepunkt: Kriegsführung und Heeresstruktur im Übergang zum miles
perpetuus’, in H. Duchhardt (ed.), Der Westfälische Friede. Diplomatie, politische
zäsur, kulturelles Umfeld, Rezeptionsgeschichte (Munich, 1998), pp. 581–98,

especially p. 598.
97. Sceptical discussion of armies used for internal coercion in R. McCullough,
Coercion, Conversion and Counterinsurgency in Louis XIV’s France (Leiden,
2007), esp. pp. 3–10, 243–51.
98. Redlich, II, p. 19: this included compensation for unpaid salaries.
99. E. Lund, War for the Every Day. Generals, Knowledge, and Warfare in Early
Modern Europe, 1680–1740 (Westport, CT and London, 1999), p. 40.
100. J.C. Allmayer-Beck, ‘Die Träger der staatlichen Macht: Adel, Armee und
Bürokratie’, in P. Broucek (ed.), Militär, Geschichte und Politsche Bildung
(Vienna, 2003), pp. 31–66, p. 35; Duffy, Instrument of War, pp. 270–1.
102. For the collection and distribution of contributions as a means to assist the
financing of the larger war effort, see J. Lynn ‘How War Fed War: the Tax of
Violence and Contributions during the Grand Siècle’, Journal of Military
History, 65 (1993), 286–310. Redlich, II, p. 61 gives the example of
Maréchal Villars, who levied a contribution of 75,000 florins on the neutral
bishopric of Eichstätt during the War of the Spanish Succession, and drew an
additional douceur of 7,000 florins for himself.
105. D. Maffi, La cittadella in armi. Esercito, società e finanza nella Lombardia di
Carlo II (1660–1700) (Milan, 2010), pp. 118–44, gives numerous examples
of Italian aristocrats who committed their own resources to military com-
mands in the army of Lombardy.
106. Maffi, Cittadella in armi, pp. 121–2.
107. C. Duffy, The Army of Maria Theresa (London, 1977), pp. 32–3, 127–8;
Duffy, Instrument of War, pp. 151–3; Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars,
pp. 115–16. For Bavaria, see Staudinger, Kurbayerischen Heeres, pp. 394–400.
108. A.P. Bruce, The Purchase System in the British Army, 1660–1871 (London,
1980), p. 25. Further attempts were made to regulate prices during the
eighteenth century: pp. 32–40.
109. Redlich, II, p. 56; Lund, War, p. 40, n. 88.
111. Two books, by Bruce, Purchase System, and A. Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline.
Officership and Administration in the British Army, 1714–63 (Manchester,
1985), provide a more detailed and extensive account of the ‘business of a
regiment’ and regimental proprietorship than anything for a European army
of this same period.
113. Lund, War, pp. 25–6.
114. Staudinger, Kurbayerischen Heeres, pp. 348–50, on provision of clothing.
116. O. Büsch, Military System and Social Life in Old Regime Prussia, 1713–1807,
trans. J. Gagliardo (New Jersey, 1997), pp. 2–9.
117. Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline, pp. 137–61.
118. J. Bruijn, The Dutch Navy of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
(Columbia, SC, 1993), pp. 116–17.
119. Redlich, II, p. 64, on the Great Elector; Duffy, Instrument of War, pp. 164,
179–80.
120. Redlich, II, pp. 154–5; H. Scott and C. Storrs, ‘The Military Revolution and
the European Nobility, c. 1600–1800’, War in History, 3 (1996), 1–41,
pp. 15–23; C. Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (London,
1987), pp. 35–42.
121. Redlich, II, pp. 114, 154–7.
122. The title of this section is borrowed from R. Knight and M. Wilcox,
Sustaining the Fleet, 1793–1815. War, the British Navy and the Contractor
State (Woodbridge, 2010), the latest in a series of works which has reap-
praised in far more positive terms the involvement and contribution of
supply contractors to the military operations of the early modern state.
123. L. Kennett, The French Armies in the Seven Years War (Durham, NC, 1967),
pp. 99–102.
124. Kennett, French Armies, pp. 100, 107: though sharing the typical assumption
that it should be the private, contractual area of supply that proved corrupt
and inefficient, Kennett elides this account of the comprehensive failure of
the direct administration of forage with a general criticism of the contract
system: p. 108.
125. Kennett, French Armies, pp. 121–8.
126. Redlich, II, p. 23, notes that the business of clothing the soldiers was
gradually removed from the individual colonels, then captains, in the later
seventeenth century, and placed in the hands of merchants operating on
much larger contracts.
127. J. Bérenger, Finances et absolutisme autrichienne dans la seconde moitié du
XVIIème siècle (2 vols., Lille, 1975), II, pp. 361–2, 571–5; Hochedlinger,
Austria’s Wars, p. 143.
128. Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars, p. 127.
129. Knight and Wilcox, Sustaining the Fleet, p. 6.
130. R.T. Sánchez, ‘The Triumph of the Fiscal-Military State in the Eighteenth
Century. War and Mercantilism’, in Sánchez (ed.), War, State and
Development. Fiscal-Military States in the Eighteenth Century (Pamplona,
2007), suggests that there may have been substantial benefits for the
Spanish military-fiscal state in deliberately reducing large numbers of mili-
tary contractors to a narrow monopoly made up of large-scale, native con-
tractors, pp. 30–1.
131. M. Grunwald, Samuel Oppenheimer und sein Kreis. Ein Kapitel aus der
Finanzgeschichte Österreichs (Vienna, 1913), pp. 137–42.
132. Grunwald, Oppenheimer, pp. 150–62.
133. Pritchard, Navy, pp. 150–4.
134. Knight and Wilcox, Sustaining the Fleet, pp. 37–43.
135. For scepticism about the efficiency of the British excise administration, see
L. Stone, ‘Introduction’, in Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War. Britain
from 1689–1815 (London, 1994), pp. 9–21; for challenges to the
Weberian model of Prussian military-fiscal bureaucracy, see R. Vierhaus
‘The Prussian Bureaucracy Reconsidered’, in J. Brewer and E. Hellmuth
(eds.), Rethinking Leviathan. The Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and
Germany (Oxford, 1999), pp. 152–62, and P. Wilson, ‘Prussia as a Fiscal-

Military State, 1640–1806’, in C. Storrs (ed.), The Fiscal Military State in
Eighteenth-Century Europe (Farnham, 2009), pp. 95–124.
136. G. Bannerman, Merchants and the Military in Eighteenth-Century Britain. British
Army Contracts and Domestic Supply, 1739–1763 (London, 2008), p. 150.
137. Bannerman, Merchants and the Military, pp. 25–9.
139. N. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean. A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815
(London, 2004), pp. 300–1; Glete, Navies and Nations, I, p. 288, table 23:22.
142. Bannerman, Merchants and the Military, p. 145; Knight and Wilcox,
Sustaining the Fleet, pp. 43–5.
143. For example, Pritchard, Navy, pp. 158–9, on the difficulties of coordinating
production within the localized structure of the French iron industry.
144. Bannerman, Merchants and the Military, pp. 144–5.
145. Y. Dai, ‘Military Finance of the High Qing Period – an Overview’, in N. di
Cosmo (ed.), Military Culture in Imperial China (Cambridge, MA, 2009),
pp. 296–316.
146. Dessert, La Royale, p. 77; G. Symcox, The Crisis of French Sea Power,
1688–1697. From the Guerre d’Escadre to the Guerre de Course (The Hague,
1974), pp. 143–220; J. Bromley, ‘The French Privateering War, 1702–13’,
in Bromley, Corsairs and Navies, 1660–1760 (London, 1987), pp. 213–41,
who dates the final shift across to the guerre de course to 1695, and hints at
heavy court financial involvement in privateering syndicates as an important
additional factor: pp. 218–19.
147. S. Le Prestre, sgr de Vauban, Les Oisivités de Monsieur de Vauban, ed.
M. Virol (Paris, 2007), pp. 323–77.
148. J. Bromley, ‘The Loan of French Naval Vessels to Privateering Enterprises,
1688–1713’, pp. 187–241, and ‘French Privateering’, in Bromley, Corsairs
and Navies.
149. For the fate of the navy in the Seven Years War see J. Dull, The French Navy
and the Seven Years War (Lincoln, NE, 2005); Pritchard, Navy, pp. 184–205.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION

1. C. Gray, Strategy for Chaos. Revolutions in Military Affairs and the Evidence of
History (London, 2002), p. 103, paraphrasing Clausewitz.
2. Conference intervention by J.H. Hale, cited by N. Labanca, ‘Clio, Mercurio e
Marte: aspetti economici delle guerre in Europa’, Ricerche storiche, 14 (1984),
645–72, pp. 669 (‘non ha visto sufficientemente trattato nelle comunicazioni il
dato important dell’inefficienza, dello spreco, se non della vera e propria frode,
che per secoli ha accompagnato la preparazione della guerra: al punto da
rendere forse possibile scriverne una ‘‘storia del peculato”’).
3. P. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy. A History of the Thirty Years War (London, 2009),
pp. 534–42, who also stresses that Wallenstein’s self-imposed isolation from
the Imperial court made his own position increasingly untenable. The same
view is taken in the most recent biography of Wallenstein, where Wallenstein’s

failure to manage his relations with the Habsburg court is seen as his fatal
error: R. Rebitsch, Wallenstein. Biografie eines Machtmenschen (Vienna, 2010),
pp. 202–8.
4. See, for example, the measured overview in M. Braddick, State Formation in
Early Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000), which consistently
stresses the social rather than administrative dimensions of political authority,
and emphasizes that areas in which innovations in government organization
and practice occurred were predominantly those in which there was an
aggregation of interest between dominant groups across society.
5. Recent literature on the limitations of the administrative power of the state is
voluminous, and cannot usefully be summarized here. A helpful and moder-
ate starting point in this discussion is P. Wilson, Absolutism in Central Europe
(London, 2000), which balances administrative weakness with a recognition
of the potential ideological and cultural strengths of monarchy and its claims.
6. J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power. War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783
(London, 1989).
7. Notably M. Braddick, The Nerves of State. Taxation and the Financing of the
English State, 1588–1714 (Manchester, 1996), pp. 180–201; Braddick, State
Formation, pp. 233–85.
8. M. Potter, Corps and Clienteles. Public Finance and Political Change in France,
1688–1715 (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 28–99; J. Swann, ‘War Finance in Burgundy
in the Reign of Louis XIV, 1661–1715’, in M. Ormrod, R. Bonney and
M. Bonney (eds.), Crises, Revolutions and Self-Sustained Growth. Essays in
European Fiscal History, 1130–1830 (Stamford, 1999), pp. 294–322.
9. C. Jago, ‘The “Crisis of the Aristocracy” in Seventeenth-Century Castile’,
Past and Present, 84 (1979), pp. 60–90; R. Mackay, The Limits of Royal
Authority. Resistance and Obedience in Seventeenth-Century Castile
(Cambridge, 1999), pp. 99–131.
10. A point strongly made by R. Knight and M. Wilcox, Sustaining the Fleet,
1793–1815. War, the British Navy and the Contractor State (Woodbridge,
2010), pp. 4–5. See also R. Sánchez (ed.), War, State and Development.
Fiscal-Military States in the Eighteenth Century (Pamplona, 2007), pp. 14–44.
11. C. Storrs, ‘Introduction’, in Storrs (ed.), The Fiscal-Military State in
Eighteenth-Century Europe (Farnham, 2009), p. 17. The distinction was orig-
inally made by John Brewer, and set the ‘fiscal-military’ state, where the
central preoccupation was with taxation, borrowing and fiscal accountability,
against those ‘military-fiscal’ states in which the state’s military capacity was
assessed primarily in terms of human and material resources.
12. Comte Jacques de Guibert, Essai général de tactique (1772), ed. J.-P. Bois
(Paris, 2004), p. 31, speaks of the impact of artillery, citing the Russian armies
of the Seven Years War which brought up to 600 guns into combat.
13. T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802 (London,
1996), p. 6.
14. Cited in C. Jones, ‘The Military Revolution and the Professionalization of the
French Army under the Ancien Régime’, in M. Duffy (ed.), The Military
Revolution and the State, 1500–1800 (Exeter, 1980), pp. 29–48, p. 36.
15. C. Duffy, The Army of Frederick the Great (Newton Abbot, 1974), pp. 189–91;
D. Showalter, The Wars of Frederick the Great (London, 1996), pp. 260–2.
16. T. Hippler, Citizen, Soldiers and National Armies. Military Service in France and
Germany, 1789–1830 (London, 2008), pp. 62–9.
17. P. Paret, ‘Conscription and the End of the Ancien Régime in France and
Prussia’, in Paret, Understanding War. Essays on Clausewitz and the History of
Military Power (Princeton, 1992), pp. 53–74, p. 58; S. Percy, Mercenaries. The
History of a Norm in International Relations (Oxford, 2007), p. 100.
18. See, for example, S.P. MacKenzie, Revolutionary Armies in the Modern Era.
A Revisionist Approach (London, 1997), pp. 41–2.
19. G. Rothenberg, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon (London, 1977),
p. 101.
22. N. Steensgard, ‘The Dutch East India Company as an Institutional
Innovation’, in M. Aymard (ed.), Dutch Capitalism and World Capitalism
(Cambridge, 1982), pp. 235–57, p. 246.
23. Steensgard, ‘Dutch East India Company’, pp. 247–51.
24. J. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford, 1989),
pp. 156–70.
25. Israel, Dutch Primacy, p. 162.
26. Israel, Dutch Primacy, p. 170.
27. P.W. Singer, Corporate Warriors. The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry
(Ithaca, 2003), pp. 136–48.
28. F. Bayard, Le monde des financiers au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1988), pp. 375–89;
J. Dent, Crisis in Finance. Crown, Financiers and Society in Seventeenth-Century
France (Newton Abbot, 1973), pp. 138–41.
29. Singer, Corporate Warriors, pp. 138–40.
30. For Mazarin’s opportunist provisioning of the armies and manipulation of the
military budget, see C. Dulong, La fortune de Mazarin (Paris, 1990), pp. 47–9,
67–70; D. Dessert, La Royale. Vaisseaux et marins du Roi-Soleil (Paris, 1996),
pp. 61–77; B. Pâris de Bollardière, Joseph Pâris Duverney et ses frères. Financiers
dauphinois à la cour de Louis XV (Toulon, 2006).
31. For Spain see R.T. Sánchez, ‘The Triumph of the Fiscal-Military State in the
Eighteenth Century. War and Mercantilism’, in Sánchez (ed.), War, State and
Development, pp. 30–1.
32. G. Bannerman, Merchants and the Military in Eighteenth-Century Britain
(London, 2008), p. 140.
34. Percy, Mercenaries, pp. 152–3; P. Wilson, ‘The German “Soldier Trade” of
the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: a Reassessment’, International
History Review, 18 (1996), 757–92, pp. 761–6, emphasizes the ambiguities
and vested interests involved in contemporary criticism of the hiring out of
mercenaries, but points to its more widespread and vocal character.
35. Knight and Wilcox, Sustaining the Fleet, pp. 1–2; Bannerman, Merchants and
the Military, p. 141.
392 Notes to page 326
36. H. Scott, ‘The Fiscal-Military State and International Rivalry during the Long
Eighteenth Century’, in Storrs (ed.), The Fiscal-Military State, pp. 23–33.
37. Remark by Isaac de Pinto in 1771, quoted in Scott, ‘Fiscal-Military State’,
p. 29. For an extended discussion of this transformation as seen by French
political theorists and commentators, see M. Sonenscher, Before the Deluge.
Public Debt, Inequality and the Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton,
2007).
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Index
Acosta, Manuel Gómez de, 221, 222 personalized networks, 214–19

administración, 197, 199, 263, 305 production of, 201, 210, 212, 222
admiralties (Dutch Republic), 208, 227 social status of contractors, 259
Admiralty Board (England), 293 state manufacture, 198–9
Aelian, Claudius, 15, 98 Arnim, Hans Georg von, 119
Albrecht Alkibiades, margrave of Arsenale (Venice), 198, 200–1, 293
Brandenburg-Kulmbach, 57 artillery, 47, 83, 118, 140, 147–8, 234, 295,
Aldringen, Johann, 244 302, 318
Alexander Farnese, duke of Parma, 15, 90, cast-iron cannon, 202, 212, 221, 237,
92 301, 319
Allerheim, battle of (1645), 181, 185, 186 and navies, 75, 83, 149, 290–1
Alsace, 106, 108, 190, 222 Aschaffenburg, 191
Altishofen, Ludwig Pfyffer von, 52 asiento (contracting), 220
Alva, Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, duke of, Spanish army and navy, 220–2, 263
89 Atlantic islands (Spanish), 211
Amsterdam, 85, 95, 126, 216, 236, 239 Augsburg, 128–9, 212
and military provisioning, 201, 213, 219, Aussig (Ústí nad Labem), 176, 235
232, 259
Anghiari, battle of, 27 Balbi (Genoese arms dealers), 213, 214,
Anglo-Dutch Wars, 291 219, 222
anti-mercenary norm, 6 See mercenaries: Baltic, 214, 239, 280
hostility towards Banér, Johan, 131, 139, 177, 189, 239, 249
Antwerp, 216, 221 campaigns of late 1630s, 184
sack of (1575), 90 and cavalry, 184
Arana, Martin de, 223, 251 fortune of, 243
Arboga, 202 winter campaigns, 188
Arenfeld, Axel, 111 Bannerman, Gordon, 302
armateurs, 141, 246, 259 Barbary corsairs, 37
armies. See contract armies; permanent Bartolotti, Guglielmo, 213, 214
armies Basle, 176, 231
field armies, 155, 181 Bassompierre, François de Betstein,
growth of, 73–4, 194, 294, 313, 315 marshal, 252
irregular forces, 31–3, 179 Bavaria, 106, 115, 187, 191, 224
optimal size, 184 Bavarian army, 113–16, 123, 168, 171, 179,
rhetoric of absolutism, 261, 286 186, 187
winter campaigning, 188–9 and Fugger family, 251
arms and munitions longevity of units, 171
concentrated distribution of, 214 military system of, 181, 280
international centres for, 212–13, 216, recruitment, 163
233–9 size of, 279, 284
irregular demand, 200–1 veterans in, 159
419
420 Index
Bellay, Guillaume du, 97 Cadiz, 149

Belli, Pierino, 263 Cardinal Infante, Fernando of Spain, 122,
Bergues, 143, 250 178, 193
Berlaymont, Florens von, 90, 92 Carlo Emanuele I, duke of Savoy-Piedmont,
Berlichingen, Götz von, 57 106
Bernard, Samuel, 301 Carlo Emanuele II, duke of Savoy-
Berthelot, François, 278 Piedmont, 286
Béveziers, battle of (1690), 305 Cateau-Cambrésis, Peace of (1559), 72, 87
Blackwater, 3, 4 Catholic League (France), 88
Blake, Robert, 145 cavalry, 16, 58–9, 146, 147
Blanning, T. C. W., 318 growing proportion of armies, 184–6
Blommaert, Abraham, 216, 233 and military operations, 186
Bocskai, Stefan, prince of Transylvania, 100 Centurión, 38, 207, 213
Bohemia, 118, 176, 250 Cosmo, 207
revolt of, 105, 106, 116–17 Marco, 82
Bongarten, Hannekin, 43, 105 Chagniot, Jean, 21
Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne de, 272 Chamlay, Jacques-Louis Bolé, marquis de,
Brandenburg, army of, 123, 131 100, 287
Brandenburg, electorate of, 280, Charles IV, duke of Lorraine
282, 284 army of, 134, 247, 280
Brandenburg, margraviat of, 129 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 29, 37,
Brandenburg-Prussia 57, 71, 73, 74, 80, 82, 93, 194
army of, 295, 298, 319, 320 Charles IX, king of France, 52, 87
cantonal system, 298 Charles IX, king of Sweden, 125
costs of war, 294 Charles X, king of Sweden, 280, 282
rise of, 9–10, 13 Charles de Gonzague, duc de Nevers, 38
Braunschweig-Lüneburg, Georg von, Chatham (dockyard), 293, 302
131, 253 Christian IV, king of Denmark, 99, 107,
Braunschweig-Lüneburg, Johann Friedrich 110, 182, 223, 293
von, 281 Christian Militia, 38
Brazil, 149, 323 Clausewitz, Carl von, 154, 307
Bregenz, sack of (1647), 244 Clerke’s Act (1782), 325
Breisach, 222, 269 Colaert, Jacques, 143–4, 169, 249, 250, 309
siege of (1638), 176, 231 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 271, 274
Breitenfeld, battle of (1631), 120, 127, 139, and navy, 278, 291, 305
145, 146, 180 Collalto, Rombaldo, 118
Breitenfeld, second battle of (1642), 151, Cologne, 210, 212, 232, 281
181, 184 colonel directors (Weimarians), 109
Bremerholm, 223, 293 combat motivation, 152, 169–70
Brescia, 210, 212 condotta
Brewer, John, 314 nature and types of, 43–5
British civil wars, 219, 248, 269 condottiere, 42–5, 57, 308, 315
Brown and Root Services, 3, 323, 324 Conrad of Landau, 41
Brunswick, Charles William Ferdinand, conscription, 2, 9, 18, 47–9, 55
duke of, 319 mass, 319, 320, 327
Bullion, Claude, 108 Swedish, 98, 172, 183, 189
Burgundy, kingdom of, 47 contract armies, 196
Burlamachi, Philip, 228 corporate identity of, 167–8, 171, 204–6
Burtenbach, Schertlin von, 57, 241 discipline, 167, 204
business of the company, 298–9, 309 international recruitment, 160, 283, 285
business of the regiment, 29, 188, 211, 248, military effectiveness of, 169–70, 173,
278, 297–8, 309 180, 280, 287, 308
Bussy-Rabutin, Ludwig Johann, count of, pay of, 161–2, 164, 209–10
295 post-1660, 279, 281
Bygdea, parish of (Sweden), 172, 184 propaganda against, 285
Index 421
recruitment of, 157–8, 160, 280 Dutch navy

size of, 180–1 captains as creditors, 208, 309
social status of soldiers, 162–3, 166 kostpenningen, 208, 299
soldiers’ clothing, 165 merchant ships, 291
state authority, 241, 264 supply contractors, 227
style of warfare, 191–3, 288 Dutch Republic, 15, 201, 224, 280, 303, 321
sustainability, 163–4, 171–2, 174 contributions, 154
wastage rates in, 158 and Flanders privateering, 143
contributions, 21, 94, 112, 154, 173, 175, shipyards, 85
211, 280, 284, 296 strategy of, 112
Army of Flanders, 91–2
Imperial army, 118–19, 121, 123, 140, East India Company (Dutch), 85, 111, 169,
182, 229, 231, 241, 245 321
Liga army, 114, 115–16, 181 Eggenberg, Ruprecht von, 91, 92
reimbursement of officers, 296 Eidgenossenschaft, 46–7
Swedish army, 128–9, 130, 131, 229, 243 Elbe, river, 131, 176, 180, 235
taxable capacity, 283 and logistics, 177
Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 38 Enghien, Louis II de Bourbon, duc d’
Cossacks, 32, 179 (prince de Condé from 1646), 153,
Coulster, Joost van, 227 185, 187, 270
Courten von Siders family, 49 England (Britain), 201, 224, 314
Créqui, François de Blanchefort, comte de, English (British) army
270 business of the regiment, 297
Croats, 179 and mercenaries, 59, 290
Curtius, Jean, 221 regimental venality, 297
supply of, 198, 220
Danish army, 110–11, 115, 126, 127 English (British) navy, 293
logistics, 111 artillery, 201
and mercenaries, 30, 59 operations in 1620s, 149
Danish navy, 291 shipbuilding, 198, 302
shipbuilding, 198, 223, 293 tonnage of, 12
Danish–Swedish War (1611–13), 125 Victualling Board, 198, 302, 303
Danube, river, 176, 177, 191 Erlach, Hans Ludwig von, 54, 222, 232, 243
Danzig, 214 Executive Outcomes, 3, 4
de Besche family, 236
de Marini, Giovanni Antonio, 207 Falkenberg, Dietrich von, 127
Degenfeld, Maximilian von, 297 Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor, 72
Degingk, Melchior von, 232 Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, 33,
Derfflinger, Georg von, 298 105, 229, 250, 262
desertion, 158, 159, 171, 246 Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor, 124,
Dessau Bridge, battle of (1626), 107 188, 251
Diesbach, Wilhelm von, 53 Ferdinand Maria, Elector of Bavaria, 284
directory ships (Dutch), 111 Fieschi family (Genoa), 85
disease, and soldiers, 172 Finland
Dohna, Christoffer, Graf von, 280 soldiers from, 30
Dorchi, Jan Paolo (Antwerp), 216 fiscal-military state, 304, 313
Doria, Andrea, 81, 207 and historians, 314, 315
Doria, Gian Andrea, 82 and military enterprise, 316–17
double-pay men, 50, 62, 164–5, and resource mobilization, 313–16
168, 287 Flanders, Army of, 15, 94, 164, 170, 178,
drill, 98, 158, 261, 287, 319 246, 254
Droysen, Johann Gustav, 9 financed by Spinola, 225
Dunkirk, 37, 140, 144, 245, 259 fluctuating size, 89
Duquesne, Abraham, 143 supply contracts for, 221
Dutch army, 17, 111–13 Florence, Republic of, 28, 40, 41, 45
422 Index
fortresses, 32, 74–5, 112, 148–9, 278, 290, fortune of, 244
304, 321 on Imperial garrisons, 189
prestige of capture, 195 and sack of Mantua, 244
provisioning of, 224 galleons, 75, 83, 85
Frachetta, Girolamo, 262 construction contracts, 222, 251
France galleys, 74, 75, 85
1636 invasion, 175, 179, 185 captains, 206
civil wars, 72, 87–8, 266, 269–70 contracting, 80–3
fiscal burdens on, 314 Genoese, 38, 206, 220, 229
military devolution, 22, 95, 266–7, 270 Order of St John, 37, 229
military underperformance, 1635–59, Order of Santo Stefano, 38
269 profits from management, 207–8
Revolutionary Wars, 10, 313, 319, 326 state administered, 80, 82, 83
rise of absolutism, 10, 271 Venetian Arsenale, 198, 200
François I, king of France, 27, 52, 57, 255 Venetian Republic, 74
Frankfurt am Main, 212, 240 Gardie, Magnus de La, 280
Frederick I, king of Prussia, 9 garrisons, 86, 112, 130, 139, 172
Frederick II (the Great), king of Prussia, 9 of captured places, 187
and mercenaries, 290 contracts for supply, 221–2
Frederick V, Palatine Elector, 106 feeding field armies, 184
Frederick Henry of Orange-Nassau, French, 179, 278
Stadholder, 112 negotiating supply contracts, 211
Freiburg, battle of (1644), 151, 187 in Silesia, 211
French army, 224–5, 285, 324 Swedish, 189, 229, 280
exploitation of officers, 268, 273 in Westphalia, 182
and central control, 269, 273 Gattamelata family, 43
of Germany, 186, 187, 189–91 Geer, Louis de, 86
lack of regimental longevity, 268 cannon manufacture, 201
and language of sovereignty, 271–2 and international arms trade, 213
and mercenaries, 87, 108–9, 247, 254, partnership with Trip family, 213
266, 267, 269, 273 saltpetre monopoly, 213–14
reforms of 1660s, 270–1, 286 Swedish interests, 236–9
size of, 12, 30, 74, 274, 276, 320 Geiger, Anton and Tobias (bankers), 210,
venality of military office, 275–7 232, 243
French navy, 278–9, 301, 306 general contractor, 23, 102, 105, 135,
and Colbert clientele, 271, 324 246–7
guerre de course, 305–6 Generalkriegskommissariat (Brandenburg),
shipbuilding, 198 290
size of, 274 Genoa, Republic of, 38, 85, 95, 212, 219,
Frey-Aldenhoven, Anton, 216 303
Friedland, duchy of, 176, 229, 233–6 defence in 1625, 214
Friedrich Wilhelm I, king in Prussia, 298 Great Council, 219
Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg, Gentile, Marco Antonio, 221
281, 283, 296, 298 Gevierthaufe. See Haufe
Fritsch, Augustin von, 168 Gonzaga, Alfonso, marquis of Pomaro, 254
Frundsberg, Georg von, 57, 60, 241 Gonzaga, Annibale, 254
Fürstenberg, Wilhelm von, 59 Gonzaga, dukes of Mantua, 38, 46
Fugger family, 92, 128, 225, 251 Gonzaga, Federigo, 254
Fugger, Franz, Graf von Kirchberg, 225 Gonzaga, Vespasiano, duke of Sabbioneta,
46, 254
Galen, Christoph Bernhard von, bishop of Götz, Johann, 176
Münster, 281 Graffior, Antonio, 221
Gallas, Matthias, 122, 191 Grand Parti (Lyon bankers), 71, 72, 240
campaign of 1644, 175 Grandson, battle of (1476), 47
career of, 175, 250–1 Gray, Colin, 307
Index 423
great companies, 3, 106, 107 Hervart, Barthélemi, 232, 243

in Italy, 104–5 Hesdin, 222
Griffet, Henri, 131 Hesse-Darmstadt, 189
Grillo, Agapito, 207 Hessen-Cassel von Amalie Elizabeth, 189
Grimmelshausen, Johann von, 168 Hessen-Kassel
Gronsfeld, Jobst Maximilian von, 182 army of, 134, 140, 280
Grote (banking house), 281 Heyn, Piet, 169, 248
Grotius, Hugo, 321 Hildesheim, 140, 187
Gonzaga, Ludovico, duc de Nevers, 46 Hintze, Otto, 10–11, 14, 310
Guastalla, Gonzaga dukes of, 46 Hocquincourt, Charles de Monchy,
Guébriant, Jean Baptiste Budes, comte de, maréchal d’, 270
109, 248 Hoeufft, Jan, 232, 242
guerre de course. See privateering Hofkriegsrath (Habsburg), 290
Guglielmo Gonzaga, duke of Mantua, 46 Hohenems, Jakob Hannibal von, 90,
Guibert, Jacques de, 2, 139, 194, 319 91, 246
Guise, François, duc de, 72 Hohenlohe, Prince Kraft von, 130
gunpowder, 198, 210, 212, 214, 221, 226, Holle, Georg von, 58
278, 303 Holstein, duchy of, 110, 131, 175, 181, 198,
Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, 107, 223, 235
111, 120, 125, 167, 176, 231, 248 Holstein-Gottorp, Adolf von, 119
and historians, 14, 145 Holy Roman Empire, 98
and military revolution, 16–17 and princely sovereignty, 265, 285
military system, 104 as recruitment ground, 55, 110, 127–8
raises troops under contract, 127 Holzapfel, Peter Melander, Reichsgraf von,
and strategy, 178 125, 175, 190, 248, 250
Honnecourt, battle of (1642), 179
Habsburg monarchy, 32, 93, 116, 121, 176, Horn, Gustav, 249
199, 227 Hornes, Armand de, 221
Hagendorf, Peter, 159, 163, 249 Huguenots
Halberstadt, Christian von, 249, 281 military recruitment, 87–8
Hale, John, 307 Hungary (Habsburg), 32, 93, 95, 211, 296
Hamburg, 126, 213, 219, 235, 240, 251 Hurenwaibel, 69
Harcourt, Henri de Guise-Lorraine,
comte d’, 269 Imperial army, 124–5, 152, 183, 190, 191,
Harrach, Karl von, 125 268
Hatzfeld, Melchior von, 57, 122, 124, 151, artillery, 295
175, 184, 186, 249 longevity of units, 171
and contractors, 210–11, 232 troop numbers, 181
early career, 168, 210, 243 in Westphalia, 123–4
military autonomy of, 192 Imperial knights, 57
professionalism, 246 Imperial Privy Council, 121, 175
tomb of, 255 financing war, 240
Haufe (Swiss infantry formation), 22, 46, 54, infantry, 54, 100
60, 66 tactics, 16, 50, 145–7, 288
Hawkwood, John, 41, 43, 105 Ireland
Heffing (Cologne bankers), 232 mercenaries from, 91, 247, 273
Heilbronn, 129
Heilbronn negotiations (1633), 177, 191 Jankow, battle of (1645), 151, 181, 184, 186
Henri II, king of France, 46, 57, 59, 71, 76, 87 Johann, prince von Nassau-Dillemberg,
Henri III, king of France, 88 15, 98
Henri IV, king of France, 88, 271 Johann Maurice, prince of Nassau-Siegen,
Henry VII, king of England, 57 323
Henry VIII, king of England, 74, 198 John II Casimir, king of Poland, 280, 282
Hepburn, John, 248 joint stock trading companies, 19, 320
Herthoge, Walter de, 213, 216 Julitha Bruk (Nyköping), 239
424 Index
Junta de Reformación (1632), 198 living off the land, 173

Jutland, 111, 175, 182 Ottoman Empire, 199
prioritization of, 174–7, 232
Kapser, Cordula, 163 and sieges, 176, 179, 195
Kennett, Lee, 300 state provision, 197
Khevenhüller, Paul, 128 Long Turkish War (1593–1606), 93–5, 105,
Kiel, 111, 175 252, 295
Kniephausen, Dodo von, 127, 191 Louis XIII, king of France, 38, 193, 222,
Koenig, François-Pierre, 381 261
Kolberger Heide (1644), 149 Louis XIV, king of France, 10, 74, 271, 274
Königsmarck, Johann Christoph von, 131, later wars of, 277, 313, 314, 318
243, 280 military devolution, 270
Kriegsgurgeln, 50, 52 and military inflation, 194, 294, 317
and military venality, 276
La Coruña, 37 as roi de guerre, 272, 278, 285
La Rochelle, 39 Louis XV, king of France, 324
siege of (1627–28), 228 Louvois, François-Michel Le Tellier,
Landsknechte, 22, 54–69 marquis de, 270, 275, 278, 290
and civil society, 67–70, 96 Lower Saxon Circle, 110, 139, 216
clothing, 67, 165 Lützen, battle of (1632), 129, 140, 148, 170,
corporate identity, 61–7, 164, 287 182, 209, 253
in French service, 28, 57–8, 59 Lyon, 71, 72, 240
justice, 63–6, 165
limited credit of officers, 247 Machiavelli, Niccolò
in Long Turkish War, 94 citizen armies, 6, 42, 96, 319
military authority over, 66, 288 critique of mercenaries, 28, 150
military effectiveness of, 20, 66, 158 Florentine Histories, 27
in Spanish service, 90–1 as military theorist, 15
and sutlers, 203 Madrid, 143, 216, 250
Larsson, Erik, 239 Magdeburg, 139
Laufgeld, 54 Maillé-Brézé, Armand de, 248
Lazagna, Vincenzo, 221 Mainz, 177
Le Tellier, Michel, 270, 271, 275 Malatesta family, 43
League of Augsburg, War of (1689–97), Malplaquet, battle of (1709), 318
305, 313 Mansfeld, Ernst von, 106–7, 118, 228, 229,
Leipzig, 210, 240 247, 249
Lens, battle of (1648), 152 as general contractor, 23, 102
Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor, 284, 296 Mantua, 244, 250, 251
Leopold Wilhelm, archduke of Austria, 124, Marburg, 189, 191
190 Marignano, battle of (1515), 27–8, 59, 60,
Lepanto, battle of (1571), 74 255
Liechtenstein Marketender. See sutlers
Joseph Wendel von, 295 Marselis brothers, 213, 214
Karl von, 99 Mary I, queen of England, 72
Maximilian von, 95 Matanzas Bay, 169
Liège, 90, 210, 212, 221, 222, 236 Mats, 50, 53, 160
Liérganes, 221 Matter, Jean, 53
Liga (Holy Roman Empire), 100, 181 Maurice of Orange-Nassau, Stadholder, 15,
army of, 106, 113–14, 118, 153, 223, 251 98, 112, 145
Lille, siege of (1708), 318 Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, 54,
Lipsius, Justus, 67, 96–7, 172 55, 61
Listerdyb (1644), 291 Maximilian I, duke of Bavaria, 113, 117,
logistics, 20, 21, 95, 111, 153, 175, 196, 230 139, 167, 171, 179, 191
and cavalry, 187 Mazarin, cardinal Jules, 109, 190, 267, 270,
ignored in manuals, 263 275, 324
Index 425
Mecklenburg, 130, 235, 250 Münster, Peace of (1648), 285

mediate armies, 123 Mughal Empire, 14, 30
Melander. See Holzapfel multiple proprietorship, 114, 117, 280
mercenaries munitionnaires (supply contractors), 224,
assumed military inferiority, 6–7, 18, 136, 225, 226, 228, 278, 300
152, 154, 263 Murten, battle of (1476), 47
constraints on, 5–6 mutiny, 170–1, 174
definitions of, 6, 29–30 Mutter Courage, 204
growth in demand, 77
hostility towards, 4–5, 6, 17, 79, 86, 96, Nancy, battle of (1477), 47
261, 285, 308 Naples, kingdom of, 71, 85
international market, 14, 40, 94, 161, 281 nation in arms, 10, 319
pay of, 48, 60 navies, 135, 149, 293
recruitment costs, 206, 289 competitive contracting, 207
as ‘soldier trade’, 289–90, 325 costs, 305, 313
status of, 79 merchant ships, use of, 83–5, 290, 305
traditional contracts after 1660, 273, 289 permanance of, 80
Mercy, Franz von, 174, 184, 186, 189, 248 provisioning of, 197, 225
after Freiburg, 187 shipbuilding, 223, 302, 304
Milan, 27, 41, 45, 160, 212 specialization, 75–6, 149, 159, 261, 290–1
military academies, 16 state control of, 291–3
military commissioners, 113, 220, 223, 299, state dockyards, 197
302 neostoicism, 98
military manuals, 14, 145, 148, 158, 160, Neustadt-Eberswalde (Brandenburg), 129
208, 253, 287 New Model Army (England), 172, 220
military revolution Nieuwpoort, battle of (1600), 16
army reforms of Louis XIV, 270–1 nobility and war, 54
drill and discipline, 98 cultural values, 252–4
historiography, 1, 14–17, 144–5 idealization of leadership, 253, 265
and mercenaries, 17–18 noble status, 252–3
overstates tactical change, 145–6 status rivalries, 300
military writings, 261–2, 263, 266, 319 writings on, 266
military-industrial complex, 201, 236, 324 younger sons in service, 253
militias, 96–100 Noirmoutier, Louis II de La Tremoïlle, duc
citizen, 319 de, 270
costing of, 97 Nördlingen, battle of (1634), 107, 122, 130,
Danish, 99, 110 148, 159, 231, 251
failures of, 99–100, 283 North Africa
France, 99 Spanish garrisons in, 211
and historians, 99 Nuremberg, 176, 210, 212, 213, 214, 240
Italian city-states, 42, 96 arms centre, 233
Swedish, 99, 126 financial centre, 243
Mohacs, battle of (1526), 32
Möller, Peter, 214 Oder, river, 176
money fairs, 240 operational capability, 152–4, 169–70, 173,
Monluc, Blaise de, 88 189–91, 192, 193
Monro, Robert, 153, 167, 248 battles subordinated to, 186
Montalembert, Marc-René, and mobility, 162, 184
marquis de, 301 and state control, 195
Montecuccoli, Raimondo, 184, 249, 262, 380 winter campaigning, 188–9
Montefeltro, Federigo de, duke of Urbino, 45 Oppenheimer, Samuel, 301
Moravia, 99, 176 Ostend, siege of (1601–4), 225
Morgarten, battle of (1315), 46 Ottoman Empire, 30, 32, 37, 45, 55, 73,
Moriale, Fra, 40 85, 199
Mühlberg, battle of (1547), 58 Oxenstierna, Axel, 107, 127, 129, 231
426 Index
Paderborn, 140 professionalism, military, 80, 115, 152, 158,

Pappenheim, Gottfried Heinrich von, 57, 252, 269, 287, 299, 319
175, 180, 183, 189, 248 Landsknechte, 61
1632 campaign, 139–40, 182, 187 navies, 159, 169
leadership qualities, 253 Swiss
logistical skills, 230 proprietorship, administrative, 226
military theory of, 143 proprietorship, military, 21, 94, 117,
Pâris brothers, 324 149–50, 169, 174, 308, 324
Parker, Geoffrey, 148 Bavarian colonels, 114–15, 174
Paul IV, Pope (Giovanni Pietro Carafa), 71 company level, 298–9
Pavia, battle of (1525), 49, 60 conflicts of interest, 323, 325
Peenemunde, 127 conspicuous consumption of senior
Percy, Sarah, 5, 6 officers, 166, 244, 254, 276
perfect captain (literary ideal of command), continuities post-1650, 260–1, 309
262, 264, 265 French exceptionalism, 267–8
permanent (standing) armies, 279, 283, Imperial colonels, 120, 121, 125, 163
284, 309 loyalty of proprietors, 308
and battle, 318 military rhetoric and, 262
declining status of soldiers, 166, 286, 288–9 profits from, 241–4, 297, 298
growth of administration, 286, 290 risks of, 119, 244–7, 248–9, 259
role of NCOs, 287 social ambition of proprietors, 249–50,
and state-formation, 30, 99, 113, 294 252, 254, 259, 265, 316
style of warfare, 318–19 subaltern officers, 168
technology and tactics, 288, 319 Swedish colonels, 127–8
uniforms, 166, 276 Swiss officers, 53–4
Pestalozzi (arms dealers), 216 proveditore, 113, 198
Philip II, king of Spain, 15, 46, 71, 72, 76, proveedor general de víveres (supply
79, 82, 198 contractor), 221, 226
Philip III, king of Spain, 96, 198 Proviantmeister (contractor), 226
Philip IV, king of Spain, 220, 251 Public–private partnerships, 20, 77, 102,
Picardy, 185 116, 150, 264, 291, 323, 326
Piccinino, Niccolò, 27 changing character of, 194
Piccolomini, Ottavio, 122, 175, 189, Colbert’s navy, 278–9, 305
253, 255 continuous warfare reshapes, 79–80
Pilgrim, Arndt, 214 growing criticism of, 324–6
Pilsen, 121 post-1650, 260, 277–8, 295, 304–5, 317
Plymouth (dockyard), 293, 302 Spanish model, 135
Polcevera, valley of, 203 Puységur, Jacques de Chastenet de, 222
Pomerania, 120, 130, 175, 250, 281 Pyrenees, Peace of (1659), 270
Portsmouth (dockyard), 293, 302
Portugal, 85, 86, 321 Qing dynasty (China)
Prague, 115, 122, 130, 183 armies of, 304
Prague, Peace of (1635), 116, 216, 233,
240, 258 Ragusa (Dubrovnik), 84
Gualdo Priorato, Count Galeazzo, 261 Raleigh, Walter, 36
prisoners of war, 159, 249, 262 Ramsay, James, 248
private banks, 239 Raspenau, 234
private security companies, 4 Ré, Isle de, 149
privateering, 33, 82, 229, 244, 247, 291 Redlich, Fritz, 14, 22, 171, 249, 296, 304,
critique of, 150, 306 305
Dutch, 111 Regensburg, 188, 191
French, 36, 305–6 Rehlinger, Marx Conrad, 176, 231, 251
profitability of, 35, 88, 245–6 Rehlinger, Mathäus, 251
Spanish, 36 Reichenberg, 234
Spanish Flanders, 37, 140–3, 309 Reichskreise, 55, 115, 118, 176
Index 427
Reislaufen, 52, 57 Schwendendörfer, Johann, 216

Reiter, 54, 58–9 Schwendi, Lazarus von, 55
religious identity, 60, 113, 167 Scotland
Requesens, Don Luis de, 89 mercenaries from, 18, 30, 133
Resteau, Daniel, 232 corporate identity, 164, 167
revolutions in military affairs, 76, 153 hired by Denmark, 110
Rheinfelden, battle of (1638), 151 hired by France, 273
Rhine, river, 176, 190 hired by Sweden, 126, 146
Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis, traditional contracts, 247–8
cardinal de, 10, 86, 122, 179, 193, shipbuilders, 223
267, 271, 275 Scott, Hamish, 326
Rigsrad (Denmark), 110, 111, 223 Seignelay, Jean-Baptiste Antoine Colbert,
Riva, George de, 53 marquis de, 279
rivers, logistical role, 176–7, 235 Sempach, battle of (1386), 46
Roberts, Michael, 1, 14, 16–17, 100, Senj, Uzkok city of, 32
145, 149 Serra (Genoese bankers), 213
Rocroi, battle of (1643), 153, Seven Years War
179, 181 casualties in, 318, 319
Roman Republican armies, 15, 17 and contractors, 300, 302, 325
Römermonate, 55 Sforza
Rotte, 62, 167, 287 Ludovico, duke of Milan, 53
Rottmeister, 63, 64, 164, 287 Massimiliano, duke of Milan, 27, 51
Rovere, Francesco Maria della, duke of Musio Attendolo, 44
Urbino, 44 shangyun (transport by merchants), 304
Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, 93 Sickingen, Franz von, 57
siege warfare, 16, 77, 148, 179, 225
Sabathier, François, 227 central role in warfare, 148–9, 193, 318
Sachsen-Lauenberg, Franz Albrecht von, and disease, 172
163, 165, 169, 208, 210, 243, 254 and military manuals, 263
St John, Order of, 37 reluctance to engage in, 174, 187–8
St Quentin, battle of (1557), 71, 79 Silesia, 118, 176, 229
saltpetre, 198, 212, 214, 221, 237 Skokloster, castle of, 243, 258
Salvius, Johan Adler, 232, 240 Snayers, Pieter, 255
San Sebastián, 37 Soldateska, 161
Sandline, 4 solliciteurs-militair, 112
Santander, 223, 251 Soubise, Benjamin de Rohan, duc de, 39
Santiago, Order of, 251 Southern Netherlands
Santo Stefano, Order of, 38 arms production in, 212
Savelli, Frederico, 191 sovereignty, rulers’ perception of, 264–5,
Saxe, Maurice de, 318 285, 309
Saxe-Weimar, Bernhard von, 107–9, 130, Spain, 106, 198, 315
176, 189, 249, 281 Spanish Armada (1588), 84
army of, 108–9, 170, 229 Spanish army, 16, 135, 152, 164, 313. See
fortune of, 232 also Flanders, Army of
in French service, 267, 270 and Lombard nobility, 250, 297
as general contractor, 23, 102 military quality of, 160
and Rehlinger, 231 Spanish Council of State, 207
Saxony, 13, 176, 182, 227, 280 and military contracting, 96, 199, 220,
army of, 123, 131, 146 263, 265, 268, 305
Schaffhausen, 176, 231 Spanish navy
Schiller, Friedrich, 145 Genoese galleys, 82, 207
Schindling, Anton, 60 and Order of St John, 37
Schleswig, duchy of, 181 Ragusan ships, 84
Schmalkaldic War (1546–7), 57 shipbuilding, 198, 222
Schwarz, Martin, 57 supply contracts for, 221
428 Index
Spanish Succession, War of (1702–13), 22, Sweden

306 Dutch economic involvement, 126, 201,
Spaur, Abbess Katharina von, 120 237
Sperreuth, Claus Dietrich von, 130 Swedish army, 146, 191, 268, 280
Speyer Reichsabschied (1570), 94 evolution from later 1630s, 131–4
Spinola family, 38, 207 financing of, 127–9, 313
Spinola, Ambrogio, 93, 225, 246, 249 indebtedness of colonels, 129, 245
squerarioli (shipbuilders), 200 and mercenaries, 18, 109, 126, 127
state-formation profits of commanders, 242
and ‘absolutism’, 310, 313 size of, 115, 126, 127, 180
and citizen armies, 320 Swedish navy, 86, 126, 291
compromise with elites, 294, 312 shipbuilding, 197, 237
and control of militias, 99 Swedish–Danish War (1643–44), 86, 111
decentralized authority, 11, 310, 315 Swedish-Polish War (1655–60), 280
limitations on state power, 310–12, 316 Swiss, 27–8, 46–54, 168
monopoly of violence, 3, 4, 8, 21, 30, 261, in French service, 30, 51–2, 168, 206, 273
279, 310, 324 in Habsburg service, 51, 52
and navies, 126 in Milanese service, 27
privatization of office, 226 military qualities of, 79, 158
and revenues, 71–2, 73, 224, 227–8, privileged status of, 273
283–4, 326 soldiers’ justice, 63, 165
and warfare, 8–14, 96, 150, 194, 279,
286, 306, 313 tercios (Spanish infantry formation), 22, 47,
Stockalper, Peter von, 49 55, 60, 89, 135, 164, 297
Stoke, battle of (1487), 57 camaradas, 63, 165
Stradling, Robert, 245 Theatrum Europaeum, 253
Stralsund, 235 Thionville, 153
strategy, 16, 76, 145, 177–80 Thirty Years War, 38, 279, 297
attritional, 179–80, 181 and historians, 9, 16, 21, 139, 144–5, 174,
and ‘decisive’ battles, 144, 182 181, 286, 309
determined by rulers, 194, 267, 285, 306 impact on military enterprise, 101–4, 260,
logistical constraints on, 225 285, 304
and military inflation, 195 and military change, 87, 115, 124, 173,
positional warfare, 179, 194, 318 180
subsidies, 94, 121, 229, 232 strategy in, 151–2, 191
Suhl, 212, 233 Thompson, I. A. A., 220, 224
Sully, Maximilien de Béthune, duc de, 88 Tilly, Charles, 310
supplying war. See also logistics; arms and Tilly, Jean T’Serclaes de, 113, 118, 174,
munitions 179, 182, 241, 248
centralized contracting, 207, 224–5, 278, Torstensson, Lennart, 131, 151, 153, 181,
300–1, 324 184, 232, 239, 264
conflicts of interest, 226–7, 301, 323, 324 and Danish campaign (1643–44), 86,
contracts negotiated by commanders, 134, 175
229–32 military autonomy of, 192
corruption and wastage, 302, 304 strategy of, 133, 186, 188
hostility to contractors, 302, 325 trace italienne, 75, 290
international networks, 232, 233, 300, Trip, Elias, 237
303, 304 cast-iron cannon, 201, 202, 213
profit and loss on contracts, 222–3, 302, hires ships to European powers, 85–6
303 and international arms trade,
and state administration, 197–9, 220, 213, 216
226, 320 saltpetre monopoly, 213–14
sutlers, 69, 167, 203–6 Trip, Hendrik, 239, 259
Swabia, 181, 191 Tromp, Maarten, 145, 149
Swabian War (1499), 51 Troß, 67–9, 167, 184, 203, 204
Index 429
Turenne, Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, Wallenstein, Albrecht von, duke of

vicomte de, 109, 184, 187, 189–91, Friedland, 93, 107, 117, 171, 211,
269 251, 253
avoids sieges, 193 and arms manufacturing, 199, 201
and historians, 145 assassination, 122, 130, 251
Tuscany, Grand Duchy of, 82 autonomy of, 125
Tuttlingen, battle of (1643), 155, 188 dismissal (1630), 120, 231
early career, 105, 116–17
Ulm, truce of (1647), 171, 191 and historians, 18, 101, 261–2
United Provinces. See Dutch Republic military priorities, 176, 196
Urslingen, Werner von, 40 military system of, 104, 117–22, 176, 178,
Uskoks, 32–5, 116, 229 179–80, 181, 182, 209, 264
Utrecht, Peace of (1713), 306 not general contractor, 23, 102
social ambitions, 249–50, 258
Valli, Giovanni de (Venice), 216 and supply contracts, 229
Valmy, battle of (1792), 320 and ‘treason’, 121–2, 308
Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre, maréchal de, Wallhausen, Jacobi von, 97
148, 195, 278 war taxes. See contributions
on privateering, 306 Weber, Max, 10, 271
Vaucelles, truce of (1556), 71, 76 Werth, Jan de, 171, 180, 210, 249
Vegetius Renatus, Flavius, 15, 98 1636 campaign, 179, 180, 185
venality of administrative office, 226, 311, as multiple proprietor, 114
314–15 social ambition, 250, 258
venality of military office, 275–6, 296–7, 309 West India Company (Dutch), 111, 143,
Venice, Republic of, 28, 33, 85, 116, 216 169
mercenaries, 45, 78, 281, 283 and military priorities, 321–3
navy, 80, 85 shipbuilding, 323
Verdugo, Francesco, 92–3 Westphalia, peace negotiations (1643–48),
Verpoorten-Ruland-Groenedael, 213, 216 245, 282
veteran troops, 42, 89, 126, 139, 158, 172, White Company, 41
269 White Mountain, battle of (1620), 106, 116
market in, 159–60, 281 Wider, Antoine, 53
proportion in armies, 160, 173 Williams, Sir Roger, 158, 160
Vienna, 118, 153, 216, 301 winter quarters, 114, 118, 121, 188, 189, 211
vieux régiments (French army), 164 Witte, Arnold de, 216
Vigo, 37 Witte, Hans de, 119, 213, 232, 251
Vittorio Amedeo II, duke of Savoy- mercantile and financial network,
Piedmont, 286 216–19, 231
vivandiers. See sutlers and money fairs, 240
Vogelsberger, Sebastian, 57 relationship with Wallenstein, 230–1
Wrangel, Karl Gustav, count, 131, 134, 176,
Waldburg, Truchseß von, 57 189–91, 244
Waldeck, Johann, Graf zu, 280 self-fashioning, 243, 258
Walle, Adrien van der, 246
Walle, Jacques van der, 246, 259 Xenophon, 3, 328
Wallenstein
army of Ysselstein, Maximilian d’, count of Buren, 59
campaign of 1628, 181
colonels’ pay, 118 Zoller, Gutmann, 53
logistical support, 176–7, 180, 204, Zollikofer, Hans Ludwig, 252
210, 229, 234 Zug, canton, 28, 60
recruitment, 159, 160 Zunckel, Julia, 214, 215
troop numbers, 115, 117, 180 Zusmarschausen, battle of (1648), 186

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The Business of War

david parrott is a fellow and lecturer at New College, University of

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press,

© David Parrott 2012

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2012

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

ISBN 978-0-521-51483-5 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

List of ﬁgures page viii

Part I Foundations and expansion 25

Part II Operations and structures 137

1.1 A pirate sloop operating in coastal waters. ‘Brigantin

2.2 Merchant ship from Furtenbach – Dutch merchant/

V, Franckfurt au Main, 1643–1738 [fol. Delta 330–350,

Courtesy of Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van

This book originates from an invitation by the Master and Fellows of

errors of substance and style from the manuscript, and to my editor,

DBB Documenta Bohemica Bellum Tricennale

mercenaries, military enterprise and private contracting are mentioned in

non-European) military organizations have been built on, or were at least

genuine discussion about the merits and demerits of relying on private

prescience of the Great Elector; Louis XIV’s disposition towards ‘abso-

those engaged in war impose a remorseless, upward pressure on the

military force, especially if the most likely response were to be a typical

The problem with the reformed Dutch army, as many contemporaries

dimension of strategic thinking. Moreover the risk of such crushing defeats

studied, was a force at least 50 per cent composed of hired foreign

of a wide variety of different systems of what could broadly be termed

mercenary captain or colonel, the ‘military enterpriser’ provided the

Foundations and expansion

On 31 August 1515 the recently crowned king of France, François I, at the

dependent on pikes, blood and guts, being irrationally deployed in a battle

German lands and of Reichsitalien, never hired a mercenary during his

The practice of contracting-out was equally typical when much larger

Irregulars and privateers

contracted German soldiers. Both the Germans and the majority of

Hiring private naval forces

numerous ways, especially when dealing with third-party seafaring

of Spanish naval campaigns against Ottoman forces, and to act more

San Sebastián La Rochelle Venice

Map 1.1 Major privateering bases in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

military operation other than straightforward attacks on enemy merchant

Deﬁning a contract: the Italian condottieri

Despite a burgeoning humanist rhetoric of civic obligation and all the

disobedience, insufﬁcient strength, or simply a rapid resolution to the

that a princely condottiere, or one with substantial landholdings, was more

and Guastalla cadet branches of the Gonzaga of Mantua made hugely

The Swiss infantry

Between Sempach and the spectacular victories of 1476–7 at Grandson,

the propensity of agriculturally poor, mountainous regions in Europe to

develop military experience, while it also provided the opportunity not

normal cantonal recruitment system, but a natural pool of recruits for

substantial reduction in rights of French supervision over the recruitment

system administered via cantonal authorities was in areas of ﬁnancial

of a small farmer and schoolmaster in the Rheinpfalz; he had none of the

no sense of unit identity or cohesion.134 Hiring German units of Reiter

purchased equipment of pike and half-armour, and especially if drawn