One of these was Caspar von Widmarckter (1566–1621), born in Leipzig to a line of army officers on his father’s side. Unusually for an officer and military entrepreneur, he studied philosophy and law in Paris for six years (1580–1586), passed into the service of a German general in France, fighting for the Huguenots, and in the late 1580s was taken on both as a soldier and diplomat by King Henry IV. Caspar would be greatly engaged in recruiting German mercenaries for the Huguenot cause. Along the way, he was granted French noble status by King Henry and afterward, on embassies, he would be given precious golden chains by King James I of England and King Louis XIII. In July 1597, he was hired by Moritz, the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, again as a diplomat and soldier; and by 1609 he was a leading member of Moritz’s privy council.
Caspar married a young widow in 1598, amassed a large fortune, much of it from the business of war, and had a grand house built in Vacha. By 1614 he wanted to leave the Landgrave’s service and retire, but he was promised promotions and pressed into staying on in his official roles. Three years later, the most remarkable campaign of his life—he kept a record of it—took him and his regiment into France, Savoy, Piedmont, and the vicinity of Milan. In a war between France and Spain, parts of northern Italy became contested ground, and Moritz had sided with the French against the Spanish. Caspar was the sort of man who could stand up to the Landgrave, and there was sometimes tension between them. Combing through his campaign diary, we get the picture of an officer who had no trouble doling out stern punishment, such as by having a would-be mutineer strangled and then shown off to convey a lesson to the other soldiers. Throughout the campaign of 1617, lasting from late March to November, regimental wages came in late, and his troops often went hungry, on at least one occasion seeing no bread at all for three days. Resentment swelled and there were mutinous rumbles. Soldiers fell seriously ill by the hundreds, with the result that during their trek into Italy, Caspar and the regimental commander, C. von Schomberg, were forced to leave behind five hundred sick soldiers. Many or most of these would perish, and some of them were killed by villagers, their supposed caretakers. After the regiment engaged in bloody skirmishes with Spanish troops, the gravely wounded were also abandoned.
It was a hard campaign, and the next year, ailing already, Caspar again sought to retire. But the Landgrave insisted, yet once more, on his continuing service, and had him mustering Hessian troops in 1619 and 1620, which must have helped to bring on a fierce attack of rheumatism. The attack would lead to his death in September 1621. In a time when so many colonels and lieutenant colonels perished in combat, Caspar was fortunate to die in his own bed.
But let’s look next to a major figure, Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar (1604–1639), the youngest of eleven brothers, dukes of Weimar, and the most daring of them. Bred to arms, he soon became an outstanding commander, attracted the loyalty of soldiers, and proved able to raise large levies of armed men. Having no state of his own, he passed easily into the role of military enterpriser, intent on putting his troops—with himself as general—into the wartime service of others. His aims were to multiply his earnings, to raise still larger armies, and to acquire a large principality—that is, his own state.
In late October, 1635, he signed a contract with the king of France, Louis XIII, who had just barged into the Thirty Years War to pursue a policy against the Habsburgs of Austria and Spain. Bernhard “promised to raise an army of at least 6,000 horse and 12,000 German foot” in just under three months, in return for the sum of four million livres per year, to be paid quarterly. He had to field a full array of seasoned officers and produce an artillery train “composed of at least 600 horses.” The money would go to pay for salaries, supplies, horses, and cannon. His foot soldiers had to be armed with “good muskets and bandoliers, or with pikes and corselets,” while the horsemen were to carry two pistols and wear a cuirass. Bernhard was importuned to be as careful with the king’s money as he would be with his own. Since fraud, however, was only too common, because “of the greed of the officers, who try to fill up their companies with passevolants [walk-on impostors], on the day of the muster [or whenever required] … the army is to be formed up in battle order for a new review to be made … [and] a reduction shall be made, in his Majesty’s favour, of 14 livres for every cavalryman who is lacking, and 12 livres for every infantryman.”
Here, then, in the deal cut by king and nobleman, was a classic (early modern) arrangement between a mighty sovereign and a military enterpriser, a bond between power politics and the soldier as entrepreneur. There was also another bond in their tacit understanding that the four million livres (about 1.67 million talers) would be far from sufficient: Bernhard’s troops would also have to live off forced “contributions” from surrounding civilian populations.
In the world of that day, noblemen were meant to live from landed income, office, or soldiering, and to have a head for honor, for “higher” things—not for “trade” and the tang of profit. Yet it was altogether honorable for them to have proprietary rights over a mercenary force, to treat it as a business, and to want to turn a profit. The traditional métier of the medieval noble, that of warrior, had thus passed into early modern Europe in a new form and with enough élan to vindicate all the moneymaking ploys of the nobleman as military entrepreneur.
How much wealth or “social capital” (honor, prestige, or public standing) could be acquired in war may be gleaned from the fact that in northern Italy, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, noble families of ancient lineage strained to have their men taken on as officers in the Spanish army or in the armies of the Venetian Republic. In fact, when a lineage had wealth enough, it might be ready to disburse large sums for companies of mercenaries, if this was the way to obtain an exalted officer’s rank. In France, the social-climbing “robe” nobility (risen through legal study) competed fiercely for the purchase of captaincies and colonelships, hence for the buying up of companies and regiments. And there was bitter complaint about this from the “sword” nobility, who saw themselves, in many cases, priced out of that honorable market.
The greatest banking families—even they—produced men who happily embraced war and arms. Ambrogio Spinola (1569–1630), a Genoese billionaire, was the outstanding example. While serving as commander of the Army of Flanders in the first decades of the seventeenth century, he was also for years a creditor of the Spanish crown for a loan of five million florins, a sum—depending upon the year’s take—in excess of two years of royal income from the wealth of the Indies. But more than the men around Spinola, the Catholic Fuggers of Augsburg, celebrated bankers, were massively intent on gaining glory and money for themselves in war and arms. Three of Hans Jakob Fugger’s sons went into the Army of Flanders as colonels in the second half of the sixteenth century. And during the Thirty Years War, seven Fuggers at least served in the armies of the Empire and of the Duke of Bavaria, where they ranged in rank from captain to field marshal and general. War and arms seduced them not only because of the attendant social capital, but also because they expected the commitment (and their investment of capital) to bring in handsome returns from booty, officers’ pay, and “contributions.”
Educated by Jesuits in the classics, Ott Heinrich Fugger (1592–1644) went on to study at the universities of Ingolstadt, Perugia, and Siena. He began his military career in 1617 as a self-financing colonel in the Spanish army, and by 1618–1619 he and his regiment of three thousand men were seeing action in Lombardy and then Bohemia. Thereafter, Ott would serve in Austria, Hungary, and the Low Countries, and next—for the Catholic League and the Duke of Bavaria—in northern Italy again, Franconia, Swabia, and other places. As military governor of Augsburg in 1635, and then as the city’s commandant from 1636 to 1639, he held two of the most lucrative posts of his career. Meanwhile, as his earnings swelled, he was assembling a rich collection of pictures.
Ott’s biographer, Stephanie Haberer, found that in the course of the 1620s and 1630s, he earned scores of thousands of florins (gulden)
in salaries, “contributions,” and other forms not itemized by his accountant. There were also rich gains from the Imperial confiscation of enemy properties, which were then cheaply bought up by well-placed insiders. In this fashion, Ott got the Hessian lordship of Speckfeld, as well as other lands later on. His earnings enabled him to live in grand palatial circumstances.
All told, then, this entrepreneur cannot be said to have done less well as a soldier than he might have done as a banker. In 1620, the emperor confirmed the Fuggers in their title as counts, and in 1627 Ott was made a Knight of the Golden Fleece by the king of Spain.
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IN ITALY, THE COMPANIES of the leading professional soldiers (condottieri) were among the first of the well-organized mercenary forces. Pulled together and captained by noblemen with distinguished family names, they were hired out by contract to princes and city-states. There was money in such activity, lots of it, and honor too, in spades. And by 1450, Italian warlords were employing more and newer types of gunpowder weapons.
But in the autumn of 1494, when the king of France, Charles VIII, marched some twenty-five thousand men into Italy, the condottieri—war captains from the Orsini, Vitelli, Baglioni, Dal Verme, and other such families—met more than their match in the king’s guns and mercenary troops from Switzerland, Germany, Scotland, and France. From this time on, more than ever, serious war on a larger scale, heralded by the French invasion, would be dominated by hardened professionals: enterprisers who raised armies not only for money, or to acquire noble estates and princely titles, but also with a view to marching them across distant frontiers. They flourished on war. Peacetime garrisons were of no use to them. Without wartime salaries, or booty and so-called “contributions,” the army of an enterpriser fell apart, and he went back home to Scotland, Gascony, Castile, Switzerland, Saxony, Bohemia, the Balkans, or the mountainous parts of Italy.
Europe was seeing dynasties of once stay-at-home noblemen pass into the profession of arms. Between 1500 and about 1680, as a new tax-and-power state came into being, the raising of armies was mainly in the hands of enterprisers. The most successful of these were themselves fighters. They had direct contacts with colonels and captains: men who could draw on their own networks of friends and acquaintances in town and country. And they used those contacts to raise regiments of mercenaries whenever the call came from princes or urban elites. At the peak of the Thirty Years War, at least fifteen hundred such enterprisers were supplying the needs of princes. Among these, for example, were the Scottish nobles Sir Donald MacKay, Colonel Robert Monro, and Alexander Leslie, who led volunteers and pressed men into Sweden’s armies and even into Muscovite Russia.
Some enterprisers were themselves princes, such as the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Christian of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1599–1626), and Charles IV of Lorraine (1604–1674), who could raise armies of up to twenty thousand men, foot and horse, and then negotiate profitable hiring arrangements with a superior power. More remarkably, brilliant generals such as Pappenheim and Wallenstein, turning their armies into private enterprises, were even able to double their numbers while on the march, largely by having their men live off extortion and plunder. Their outstanding reputations—Pappenheim’s on the battlefield—drew men into their ranks. In the late 1630s, the leading Swedish general, Johan Banér, came close to owning his own army of desperados.
At the lower end of the scale, small enterprisers might raise and captain units of anywhere from two hundred to two thousand men. In January 1525, a contract between the Emperor Charles V and Giovanni Maria da Varano, lord of the city of Camerino, called for the Italian to provide Charles with “1500 well-equipped infantry and a smaller cavalry contingent.” In May 1484, another petty warlord from the da Varano family bound himself to serve Venice with a force of twelve hundred cavalry and fifty mounted archers. The contract was for two years and a sum of 50,000 gold ducats. Hired units, however, also came in even smaller numbers. In 1490, in a war between the city of Metz and the Duke of Lorraine (René II), the city brought in twenty-three hundred mercenaries: “‘Burgundians, French, Lombards, Spaniards, Biscayans, Gascons, Hainaulters and Picards, as well as Germans, Sclavonians and Albanians,’ and each ‘nation’ had its own captain.” In other words, this patchwork was the product of ten or twelve enterprising captains, likely subcontractors, under the command of the chief enterpriser, a higher officer.
But there had to be volunteers in enough numbers to satisfy demand, or the ugly art of selective impressment would come into play. With its scale of wars, epidemics, and stunted populations, the seventeenth century posed grave problems for recruiters, and no enterpriser could get around this. One illustrative example tells much of the story.
Early in 1644, Cardinal Mazarin, France’s chief minister, decided to raise troops for the embattled Amalia Elisabeth, the ruler (Landgravine) of Hesse-Cassel, a Protestant ally threatened by Imperial forces. He commissioned the Count of Marsin, a colonel, to raise four thousand mercenaries (half horse and half foot) in the neutral bishopric of Liège and in other parts of the Empire’s Westphalian circle. Marsin’s recruiting captains ran into trouble at once. They found that a Spanish general and a French field marshal were also recruiting in the region. As a result, recruitment bonuses were driven up sharply, bribes were offered to likely enlistees, and Marsin failed to accomplish his mission. The French would have recourse to impressment.
Captains were the key to the business of recruitment. They were meant to look after their men, handle wages, arrange for supplies, and in wartime were apt to dispose of the power of life and death over their charges. Ideally, they captained infantry companies that ranged in size from one hundred up to three hundred men, or cavalry companies of about one hundred horse when at full strength. But as war and disease took their toll, numbers plummeted, and in the seventeenth century, many infantry companies on campaign comprised no more than sixty to eighty men. A lieutenant and an ensign served as aides to the captain, these too usually drawn from the nobility, although commoners also turned up in these grades.
Armies were clusters of regiments, and these were made up of companies. From about the middle of the sixteenth century, infantry regiments were usually under the command of colonels. A regiment might number eight hundred to three thousand men at full strength; but it was in the companies that officers, especially the captains, truly knew their men, thus making them the pivotal recruitment figures in villages and urban neighborhoods. Working with their lieutenants, they conducted the face-to-face dealings and clinched arrangements. But the men who most counted for princes and other big warlords were the regimental commanders, the colonels. These were the enterprisers of substance, the men who often had proprietary rights over a regiment or two, or simply owned them outright.
In the 1590s, ailing financially, the Spanish crown let more and more of its authority slip into the hands of its local elites and captains as it scraped about, desperate for more soldiers. Royal government now saw the passage of “the officer as crown-appointed functionary to the officer as crown-accepted entrepreneur.” In the Netherlands, recruiting was wholly the job of entrepreneurs. There, in changing circumstances, 80 to 90 percent of the Spanish army was composed of mercenaries from Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and the southern Netherlands. Already organized into companies and regiments, they were marched in from abroad by enterprising officers—men moved primarily by the business of profit and loss.
WAGES AND PROFITS
When soldiers were made to go hungry, regulations and promises concerning their expected food rations were turned into a jeering mockery. Everywhere in Europe these called for a daily diet of one and a half to two pounds of bread (or groats for gruel in eastern Europe); from eight ounces to a pound of meat, fish, or possibly cheese; measures of beer or wine; and specific amounts of salt, vinegar, and oil. Government ministers were well aware of what the stomachs of active men required. In Russia and parts of eastern Europe, owing to population scarcities, armies of
ten aimed to carry enough food in their wagon trains to cover basic wartime needs. In the west, instead, in war zones, although efforts were made to carry some food, or even grain and portable ovens for the making of bread, it was frequently taken for granted that soldiers on campaign would be able to pick up food along the way. And wages were supposed to cover the costs of daily food rations, unless the army itself was providing all or part of the food. What really happened?
It is easy to come on itemized facts concerning the wages of soldiers. The German Landsknecht of the sixteenth century received a basic sum of four gulden per month. A frontline Spanish soldier in the 1590s got a wage of forty-five maravedís per day. In 1699, in the Russia of Peter the Great, soldiers were being paid five to eleven roubles per year. Around 1700, a peacetime musketeer in France got five sous per day. And Venice paid foot soldiers about three ducats per month during the sixteenth century, although this sum came to less, because it was paid out in petty cash, not in the valued gold coin, the ducat.
But all these figures ring through to us as meaningless until we put the soldier into the world of his social peers: the landless peasant, the poor artisan, the wage laborer. Now his earnings are converted into a standard of living, and in this light, pairing soldier with lowly civilian, historians have found that the two were in a match in which the civilian was usually better off. Famine could drive peasants and craftsmen into armies, such as in France in 1694 and 1709, or in parts of Germany during the Thirty Years War. In serious scarcity, a good 40 percent of populations were likely to depend on charity or on begging in the streets and village byways. In France, bread claimed one half the budget of the poor. Geoffrey Parker has held that in the Low Countries, possibly “half the income of the average poor family went on bread,” their “staple diet [being] a bowl of salt soup with black rye bread.” All told, indeed, 75 percent of their yearly income was apt to be spent on food. Here at once we begin to pick up a sense of the struggle for survival in the social milieux from which most soldiers came. No wonder then that food was so important for them. There had to be this, at least, or why volunteer for the army?
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