In the early seventeenth century, the Iberian peninsula must have been crisscrossed daily by thousands of deserters on the run: dodging, begging, hiding, trying to get back home or somewhere else. Others sought to return to their commanding officers or sat in jails, awaiting trial. Some towns simply rebelled against forced recruitment, such as coastal Murcia, with people ready to kill royal recruiters. In Alburquerque, in August 1641, two hundred armed men freed a group of recruits, removed their handcuffs, and told them to flee, while at the same time threatening to kill their military escorts. In September, just inside Portugal, another group of handcuffed and chained recruits was freed by an armed band.
But Castilian resistance to forced soldiering paled by comparison to that in Catalonia, a province of the old kingdom of Aragon. Here, in 1636, as the historian Luis Corteguera has pointed out, royal agents were able to recruit only “criminals whose death sentences were commuted for military service.” In June of the same year in Barcelona, when six reapers were tricked into enlisting and detained by force in the recruiter’s house, a group of their fellow workers turned up to protest, only to be greeted by armed men who were there on orders from the regional governor. Soon five hundred reapers came back. They stormed and sacked the house.
Only the threat of war with France could rally the people of Catalonia to the defense of the larger realm, if with little enthusiasm. In August 1639, aiming to halt the advance of a French army in the province of Rosselló, the northeastern province of Spain, officials had managed to raise a force of ten thousand men. Almost immediately, however, two thousand defected, and by November more than nine thousand “Catalan soldiers were missing” from the Rosselló campaign, although many of the losses were the result of disease and casualties. Early in January 1640, when the French finally surrendered the fortress of Salses, the price was found to have been the death of “4,000 to 10,000 Catalans,” including “a quarter of the nobility,” victims all of “disease and wounds.” A great and unprecedented Catalan revolt broke out before the end of the year, when it was discovered that the royal government proposed to keep and billet troops in Rosselló, in preparation for a springtime campaign against France. Repudiating their allegiance to the king of Spain in January 1641, the angry Catalans “elected France’s Louis XIII as their new king.” And therein, for a time, lay a different history, well told in J. H. Elliott’s The Revolt of the Catalans.
In eastern Europe, starting at the Elbe River, where serfdom saw a resurgence and had deeper roots, hauling men away was also a labor of brutality. Tsarist Russia brought in a compulsory draft in the 1630s, taking one peasant from every ten or twenty households, including even boys of fourteen and fifteen. Noblemen, poor ones in particular, were also subject to enlistment, and they nearly always opted for the cavalry units. Under Peter I, around 1700, the men borne away numbered from one in fifty to one in 150 households, depending upon need.
Conditions in the Russian army were the very ones we have come to expect. Soldiers often went cold and hungry, and they were seldom if ever paid on time or in full. Aside from the fact that half of their pay was routinely deducted for clothing, they were sometimes also paid in kind. Captains beat their men, in a replay of lord beating serf. Desertion was rife, and in the early eighteenth century gangs of disciplined deserters occasionally terrorized rural communities. Peter I had recruits put in irons, in the clasp of which they might be marched hundreds of miles to their destination. Punishment for deserters was inevitably harsh, ranging from hanging and flogging to sentences of hard labor for life. “On the march back from Pruth in 1711,” Hughes tells us, “gallows were erected in camp each night to remind deserters of the fate that awaited them.” But the hunt for runaway men could also lead to stiff reprisals against their communities or families, with the former compelled to provide substitutes or guarantees, and family members “seized as hostages until they [the deserters] gave themselves up.” John Keep observes that recruitment in Russia generated furious debate, “for everyone knew that … a recruit was unlikely ever to see his family again.”
THE REASONS FOR THE PASSIONATE resistance to being pressed into a soldier’s life were not hard to fathom. In Spain, as in England, it was clear that forced recruitment was crudely one-sided, or given to every degree of string-pulling and favoritism. Where choosing the needed men was the job of the local lord or community, as in Sweden, Brandenburg, and Russia, parochial interests, and local likes or dislikes, came quickly into play. In the world of early modern Europe, with its “natural” hierarchies of privilege, this had to be tolerated. Such was life. What was not life in the rebellious popular imagination was the life of the common soldier. Whether by lottery, selective conscription, or kidnapping, impressment was often seen as a kind of sentence of death. Men knew—the knowledge circulated—that armies were unhappy hosts to disease, hunger, and other forms of wretchedness, such as the effects of freezing cold and dogs’ abuse from officers. What lesson was to be drawn from this? That it was better to die at home, in one’s own squalid poverty, than to die even more wretchedly in a foreign land. The devil you knew was better than the one you didn’t know.
In Sweden, a needy nobility and the overriding ambitions of the Vasa kings carried that agrarian country into a close series of wars in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The call for fighting men, hence for peasants, became acute during the Thirty Years War; and at one point the ordinary peasantry had to offer up one son from every eight households. Replacement pressures became pitiless. Between 1626 and 1630, the Swedes and Finns (then under Swedish rule) supplied Gustavus Adolphus with 51,367 conscripts, of whom 35,000 to 40,000 had perished by 1630, mainly from disease. Too dispersed to resist, peasant communities appear to have cooperated with this cull, thereby keeping control over the question of the men who would be picked for war in distant fields. Well-off farmers took little poor boys into their houses, fed and clothed them, drew on their labor, and then, when the summons came, turned them over to the army as substitutes for their own sons. Now neither the farmers nor their offspring would be drawn for the carnage in Germany.
Reflecting on the foregoing practice, the historian Robert I. Frost has concluded that in view of “a growing landless proletariat” in Sweden and Finland, from which “the military state drew its cannon fodder,” the designated system of culling “was beneficial for all: the government got its soldier, the farmer did not have to go to war, and children from poor households received a more comfortable upbringing.” Indeed, he opines, the poor families also “benefitted: they did not have to feed an extra mouth.” Never mind that the chosen young man now went off to die of disease, starvation, or wounds.
THE EUROPEAN POPULATION EXPANDED in the sixteenth century, passing from nearly 62 million souls in 1500 to about 78 million by 1600. But by the 1590s the rate of growth began to slow down, stunted by plague epidemics, ruinous weather, and harvest failures. Spain, Germany, and Italy saw declines in their populations. War, too, impeded growth by spreading disease and wrecking the productive cycles of rural life. With their demand for longer-serving or bigger armies, princely states scooped down more deeply into the pools of men fit to brandish pikes and guns. By the early 1630s, at the peak of the all-European Thirty Years War, field commanders had seen such a dramatic wastage of soldiers that it became impossible to find the needed volunteers—or even to find enough men to press quietly into the ranks of mercenaries. The result was that battles usually ended with the impressment of large numbers of the captured enemy soldiers, who now passed to the winning side. In the wake of their shattering victory at Breitenfeld (1631), Gustavus Adolphus’s Protestant army took in the Italian regiments of the defeated Imperialist commander, Tilly. But happily enough for them, “they all deserted the next year, as soon as they came in sight of the Alps.”
Although triggered by religious conflict, the Thirty Years War turned into an outright bloody contest for territory and loot, while always being passed off as a conflict over dynastic, religious,
or security claims. Hence pressing the captured enemy into the ranks of the victorious did not always make for strange bedfellows.
Under the guidance of Cardinal Richelieu, France entered the Thirty Years War in 1635, in pursuit of a policy aimed at stopping the supposed expansionist march of the Spanish and German dynastic houses. From this point on, in their clamor for soldiers, the French began to turn to the practice of forcible recruitment. Thanks to the sway of aristocratic authority in the local communities, many officers (noblemen born) were able to drum up companies of volunteers: tenants and servants of theirs, as well as retainers and others. But these numbers no longer sufficed for the ambitious needs of the crown.
In the 1640s and 1650s, French recruiting parties used alcohol and trickery to catch their men. They would get them drunk, or have them enticed by prostitutes, or slip coins into their pockets and then swear that their victims had accepted the binding enlistment money. But quotas were more often reached by means of violence. Recruiters would seize travelers, grab men off the streets, break into houses, or even lay hands on their prey in church. Force was more easily used in the country than in towns, and peasants were likely to flee or hide when hearing about the approach of recruiters. In the 1670s, officials “reported that, owing to the threat of forced enrolments, markets were deserted and peasants feared leaving their homes.” During the Nine Years War (1688–1697), writing from Orléans, an officer of the crown claimed that “the markets are full of people who carry men off by force.” The War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1714) set off another flurry of impressments. Now and then, bands of peasants responded by assaulting recruiters and releasing the kidnapped men. In the 1690s, a leading minister frankly admitted “that enrolments are still almost all fraudulent,” and he repeated this claim in 1706.
The activity of press-gangs was an embarrassment for the government, and edicts were issued against the practice. But the demands of war, widened by Louis XIV’s aggressive foreign policy, imposed connivance on his ministers. And army officers, more than conniving, were the linchpin of the system. They “themselves forcibly enrolled and kidnapped men and even boys, including monks, notaries, geriatrics, and shopkeepers whose relative prosperity would have given them little incentive to take the king’s silver.” In one case, Paris’s top policeman had to force a cavalry captain to abandon his possessive claim on a boot maker. The claim was based on a signature fraudulently obtained, and the captain had threatened to kill the cobbler if he refused to join his regiment.
Recruitment officers also worked with gangs of thuggish “enrollers” (racoleurs), who plied their trade in Paris, Lyon, and other cities. Having caught their prey, they would lock them up and sell them, as new enlistees, to officers eager for men. The king’s recruitment money thus passed through different hands.
THE THIRTY YEARS WAR AFFLICTED Germany with such storms of carnage that after it ended in 1648, regional elites began to give way, by the approval of tax hikes, to the pressure of princes, who were now determined to have permanent armies. These would serve—so ran the argument—to guarantee security. But problems of recruitment quickly surfaced. As the German economy picked up after the war, and men were able to make a living from daily work in town and country, territorial princes found that they could not afford the sums required to attract the needed numbers of men into their budding armies. Taxes would not allow it, and there were seldom enough volunteers. In the crunch, one partial solution was—as in France, England, and Spain—to let men out of prison to be pressed directly into armies. In the duchy of Wolfenbüttel, even before the 1630s, serious criminals were regularly “condemned to war,” or were often freed from prison to serve in the front lines. Their destinations might be the Netherlands or the Hungarian-Turkish borderlands. Later, it became common for Germany’s princely governments to offer army service as a substitute for prison and even, occasionally, for the penalty of death.
Generally speaking, however, snooping recruiters, such as for Brandenburg and Saxony, more often resorted to cunning and to brutal grab-and-lock-up tactics. Having concealed his helpers, a recruiter would turn up in “dives” or “low-life” inns and taverns, where the case of a man whisked away would raise no great hue and cry. Wine or brandy often worked when the sign-up money was not enticing enough. “Malice and beatings also helped.” And so it happened that in East Frisia, as poor Hilke Wessels complained in 1665, if her vanished husband had not been brutally assaulted, “he would never have dreamed of becoming a soldier!” In Prussia, right up to the 1730s, the army recruiter was “the most feared individual in the land.” To escape what they saw as a life of abuse, young peasants maimed themselves or fled from home. Indeed, now and then entire villages fled, so that in the face of resistance to recruitment, “the killing of [Prussian] subjects … was not rare.”
Recruiters sometimes had secret agreements with local tavern or innkeepers. But they could get their signals crossed, and fights occasionally broke out between preying parties of recruiters, with each claiming the same man. Recruiting was a business, and there was keen rivalry here and there among the predators. Agents for recruiting officers haggled over their prey. They spoke of “delivering,” “owing,” “lending,” and “borrowing” men, such as when they “sold” new recruits to captains or colonels. Yet for all their cheating and lurking in the shadows near the scenes of their thuggery, army officers importuned their governments to take stern action against runaway men. They insisted on their rights over deserters, and in dogged pursuit of them might break into houses in the middle of the night to pull their victims out into the streets and drag them away.
In the sixteenth century, Germany’s Landsknechts, professional pikemen, had a notorious reputation. With their gaudy dress and codpieces, they were seen as troublemakers, devils, gluttons, and braggarts who hated the routines of ordinary life. But the dominant adjectives for them did not necessarily turn them into “lower-class scum.” Later, in the turmoil of the Thirty Years War, some contemporaries, looking back, would even regard them as patriots. After 1650, however, Germans began to see soldiers in a different light, owing to the recruitment of criminals and to the organized pressing of men from the unsavory reaches of society: vagrants, beggars, misfits, and the unwanted poor. No hardworking peasant or craftsman wanted a place in the ranks alongside such men, unless he was fleeing intolerable strains at home, or foolishly imagining a life of adventure and easy-come loot.
Yet impressment parties also got their hands on men of a more solid type, with the result that German armies, like the armies of Louis XIV, came to be plagued by the scurvy of desertion. Men had deserted massively in the moil and toil of the Thirty Years War—out of fear, hunger, lack of pay, and even religious conviction. But desertion after 1650, which went on in a rising tide through much of the eighteenth century, was the natural consequence of impressment and biased, selective conscription. To cut off escape routes for aspiring deserters, army officers in Prussia even sought to avoid nighttime marches and camping in the vicinity of forests, or marching through them, unless they were flanked by Hussars—cavalry. Now, however, in that climate of repression, civilians were more willing to help runaway soldiers—despite the risk of dire penalties, the alarms raised against desertion in Sunday sermons, and the publication of long lists of deserters in the newspapers.
The conscripted permanent army had arrived, and recruitment was moving in a new direction, now chiefly by enforced enlistment under the rule of the state. It was the route most prominently taken by Sweden after 1620, in the reign of Gustavus Adolphus.
OFFICERS AND ENTERPRISERS
Jan Werth (1591–1652), one of the leading generals of the Thirty Years War, was born a peasant near Cologne. He joined the Spanish army in about 1610, turned into a fearless horseman, and became—riding over every social obstacle—the top general of cavalry in the Bavarian and Imperial armies. The convulsions of the Thirty Years War fostered the rise from “nothing” of several other generals, including Johann von Ald
ringen (1588–1634), Peter Melander (1589–1648), and Guillaume Gil de Haas (1597–1657). Aldringen was the son of a town clerk from Luxembourg. Melander, born into a Calvinist peasant family in the Low Countries, managed to get a university education before becoming one of the Empire’s most important generals. And Gil de Haas, a stonemason from Ypres, ended his life, like Aldringen, as a Bavarian general.
But these men were wonders. With a few exceptions in Italy, including prominent condottieri, such as the humbly born Niccolò Piccinino and Gattamelata (Erasmo da Narni), the like had almost never been seen before, and would not be seen again until the end of the eighteenth century. Officers came overwhelmingly from the nobility, above all in the upper grades of command. Yet enormous disparities cut through Europe’s noble ranks, with great lords at one extreme, possessing vast tracts of land, towns, and rights over people, while at the other were Prussian junkers with a little house on a tiny farm, or Spanish hidalgos who might have trouble finding the money for a decent pair of shoes. Still, all claimed (or aspired to have) a family coat of arms and clung to privileges that set them apart from the multitudes of commoners, especially with regard to taxation and army service. Taxes were customarily weighted in their favor, or, in many parts of Europe, they paid none at all, apart from indirect sales taxes.
It did not follow that poor noblemen, if so minded, were alone in turning to look to the profession of arms for income. Younger sons of the well-off nobility also directed their ambitions that way.
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