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Chapter 1
Mercenaries Medieval to Modern
The End of the Middle Ages
It is not easy to mark the moment that the Middle Ages became the Modern World, because that moment did not occur everywhere at the same time. It is like trying to identify when an individual becomes mature – for some people it is at an early age, for others it is ‘any day now’. The Russians are widely considered the last major European power to enter the modern age, the Italians the first.
Today we call this new world the Renaissance, but that term would have meant nothing to the humanists and artists we think of as typifying the era. What educated men and women understood was that the world they knew was changing, and that nothing demonstrated the changes more than developments in the military arts. The traditional city-state or small kingdom could not afford to equip and maintain large armies, rebuild ageing castles, or to ask vassals and militias to travel far from home. Only the richest kings could stay in the competition for greatness, and even then only by hiring professionals.
That, perhaps, is the moment when we know the Middle Ages have passed – the moment when professionals take over everywhere – in art, music, education, architecture, medicine, commerce ... and war. We call many military professionals of this era mercenaries. They will be the heart and soul of the first royal armies, the armies that crush the small states in Renaissance Italy, the armies that hold together and protect the new national state.*
But that is to hurry the story. It took 300 years for the concept of nationhood to mature. Until then loyalty to a lord, not a nation, remained the dominant ethos. As Jacques Barzun noted in From Dawn to Decadence, 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, common men were ‘subjects’, not ‘citizens’, and with provinces being passed around according to the whims of war, marriage and inheritance, there was no reason for any ambitious and capable man to limit his employment to the ruler of the land of his birth.
Nowhere was this clearer than in Germany.
Germany in the Reformation Era
Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) repeatedly criticised princes for making wars and civilians for approving them; soldiers, he said, joined armies to take booty (going away like Mercury, coming home like Vulcan – that is, flying off in search of profit, limping back). In his essay Dulce Bellum Inexpertis, written in 1515, he criticised Vegetius’ then popular military manual De Re Militari. He once commented that milites ad odorem pacis peiora moliuntur quam in bello* (soldiers get up to worse things at the smell of peace than they do in war), meaning that mercenaries always preferred war to unemployment. This certainly applied to the class of free knights in the Holy Roman Empire, many of whom served in mercenary armies.
These knights were mostly descendants of that class of German warrior-administrators called Ministeriales. Originally, many were called serf-knights because their lords had selected outstanding commoners to perform military service. This emphasis on ability rather than birth is a major distinction between German knights and their neighbours on all sides. But how many were originally peasants? Many must have been free farmers; some were burghers, young men accustomed to bearing arms while transporting goods from one city to another.
In the course of time these knights came to think of themselves as noble, and they were extremely sensitive to any implication that they were not. As a result, when the massive political, economic and social changes of the early sixteenth century began to bear down on them, they hired themselves out as mercenaries in order to afford the expenses associated with their claims to be free, independent and noble knights.
This claim was supported by those few of their members who had been educated in classical studies – that is, younger sons who had been sent to a university to prepare for a clerical career but did not feel the calling as much as their parents wished. Ulrich von Hutten, the most famous of these humanist scholars, delved back into Tacitus to show that all Germans had once been free warriors, men and women who refused to bow to Roman servitude.* Their descendants were unwilling to give up their rights and properties to the Holy Roman Emperor. This meant that this class of knights was likely to find the Protestant Reformation more agreeable than bending to the demands of a Roman Catholic Church that tended to support imperial rights.
Germany was fragmented into a small number of duchies (the most important ruled by the electors who served as imperial councillors and who voted in imperial elections), counties (whose noble rulers had the right to attend the sessions of the German equivalent of parliament, the Reichstag) and free cities (which sent representatives to the Reichstag); there were also archbishops (three of whom were electors), bishops and abbots (also represented in the Reichstag; many were called prince-bishops because of their secular life styles) and the free knights. All of these states were independent. Most were hereditary, except the cities and ecclesiastical states, which in practice tended to be dominated by the same families generation after generation.
There was much less peace and order than everyone desired, but there was even more fear of anyone who acquired enough power to enforce the rulings of the Reichstag and the imperial council.
If this was a problem for maintaining order at home, it was even worse for efforts to develop a coherent foreign policy.
German Knights
Ulrich von Hutten’s famous letter to Pirckheimer in the autumn of 1518 is often quoted to illustrate the declining status of the free knights in Germany. He depicted harried men trying to protect their forest-bound estates from attack, unable to raise more revenues from their poverty-stricken and ignorant peasants, and seeking a protective association with some powerful lord who would not simply dispossess them at the first opportunity.
Life was squalid in the lofty but crowded fortifications atop isolated hills; visits from bandits and robbers outnumbered those from merchants and churchmen. There was fear of a peasant uprising, as did soon occur, and appeals to chivalry brought more wry smiles than sympathetic nods. German society was in desperate need of reform, but the knights’ influence was reduced to two areas – their role as administrators of church property and their willingness to serve as officers of mercenary units.*
The Habsburg emperor Charles V came to power in Germany from 1519 until 1556. He would become wealthy thanks to the silver mines in his American possessions. However, faced by hostile powers – the Ottoman Turks, France and then German Protestants – he would be unable to bring his forces to bear on more than one crisis at a time, thus allowing earlier opponents time to recover from their defeats.†
In addition, Charles’s Spanish subjects insisted on his seeing to their interests, too, which meant defending their commercial interests in the Low Countries (the Netherlands and Belgium). The famous ‘Spanish Road’ across the Holy Roman Empire was created by using silver from the Americas to hire mercenaries in Italy and Switzerland, then marching them through Germany to the Low Countries.
Austria, Spain and the Low Countries
Charles V’s grandfather Maximilian I (1493–1519) had been a cautious ruler who followed his own father’s example of doing little, but doing it very well. His leadership in rallying resistance to French encroachment on German frontiers made him popular, but he talked more than he acted. When Germans in distant Livonia appealed to him for help against the grand duke of Moscow, he sent sweet words of encouragement, but no money or troops.
His Austrian and Czech lands made a compact, if landlocked, economic unit, and merchants there were in easy contact with their counterparts in wealthy Italian and German cities. But the economic heart of the Holy Roman Empire was in the Low Countries. That trade with England and Scotland, Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic, Spain, Portugal and the Mediterranean caused treasure to flow into the Habsburg coffers long before it was supplemented by the rich stream of gold and silver from the New World.
The New World was one of the attractions for a marriage between Maximilian’s son, Philip the Handsome, and Juana (Joanna), the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. But there was more than a combination of looks and money – instead of fighting over the Low Countries and Italy, they joined forces. Their two sons, Charles and Ferdinand, would successively become Holy Roman emperors, each founding a Habsburg dynasty, the former in Spain, the latter in Austria.
The other attraction was to form a united front in Italy to defend their possessions from the French; they succeeded, temporarily, only to find their allies then wished them to leave as well.
To make matters worse, the Ottoman conquest of most of Hungary and the Protestant Reformation in Germany distracted Charles V from his efforts to deal with the French.† By the time religious peace was reached, temporarily, at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 – allowing each prince to determine his subjects’ religion – the old problems had been supplanted by new ones. The new Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand (1556–64) essentially stood on the defensive on every front. Doing little once again seemed the safest policy.
Italy
The Italian peninsula was politically divided even before the French invasion of 1494. After that date it was a battlefield, with French and Spanish armies unsetting the balance of power that had long kept the level of violence at an acceptable level.
Machiavelli, the author from this era most widely read today, tried to make sense of this new situation. Spanish armies, led first by Ferdinand of Aragon (1479–1516) and Maximilian of Austria, then by their grandson, Charles, fought French armies led by Louis XII (1498–1515) and Francis I (1515–47). The popes and other minor rulers tried to maintain a balance of power by siding with whomever was the weaker at any given point in time, but it was a game that they inevitably lost.
The story of these wars, told in Medieval Mercenaries: the business of war, is complex, somewhat interesting, and inconsequential. Italy was so rich, Italians were so creative, the pope so central to religious life, that no great power could afford to withdraw from the contest. But none was sufficiently powerful to prevail. Italy became the black hole of the pre-Copernican European political universe, sucking into it everyone who approached.
Just off-stage lurked the Ottoman Turks, a menacing presence perhaps familiar to those who remember Shakespeare’s and Verdi’s versions of Otello. To us it may seem strange that a black man commanded the Venetian fleet, but to Shakespeare’s contemporaries it was no surprise – mercenaries came in every guise and colour. Most Turkish slaves were white – especially the skilled warriors of the Janissary Corps, selected as children from the sultan’s Christian subjects – but the Ottoman territories stretched across northern Africa, with trade connections across the Sahara and down the East African coast; moreover, Turkish slavery was not an immutable condition, and more than a few slaves rose to high positions in the Ottoman civilian and military ranks. For a black mercenary to offer his services to the greatest maritime power of the era was entirely plausible.
As for the tragedy, Shakespeare’s audience might believe that Iago was a reference to Santiago, the patron saint of Spain; and Spain was England’s greatest enemy.
France
The kingdom of Francis I was more or less surrounded by Habsburg lands. The goal of Francis, of his successors, and of countless talented royal advisors, was to break that iron ring. This meant first opposing the Habsburgs in Italy, then encroaching on the frontiers of the Low Countries and Germany.
Although many historians suggest that the horseman had been partially supplanted by mercenary infantry, it might be more accurate to say that he had been supplemented; certainly, proud French knights were reluctant to abandon their high social status – for good reasons they were envied by nobles throughout Europe – and fighting on foot was a step too far in that direction. Cavalry remained important for the royal invasions of Italy. A king could not command effectively except from horseback; and he needed cavalry for scouting, sudden attacks and pursuit. Daring horsemen remained indispensable.
France had no overseas possessions yet, so no need for a large navy. When Louis XII invaded Italy in 1499, it was simply a matter of controlling the Alpine passes – hence the emphasis on acquiring Savoy. He seemed to have good chances for success in both Lombardy and Naples, but he fled the peninsula in 1513, defeated in every way. Francis I attempted to retake Milan, only to be defeated by Charles V and captured. He eventually gave in to the unique Habsburg method of torture – the emperor encouraged all the ladies of the court to flirt with him, but warned them that dire consequences would follow if any dared to give him sexual satisfaction.
Francis was a true Renaissance prince, with fine tastes in art and architecture, also in women and wine. He spent money freely, squandering the reserves left by his father, dispersing his assets and increasing taxes. He left his nation bankrupt.
In addition, by the mid-century there was a growing Protestant community in France, the Huguenots, who – like many Protestants in northern Europe – tended to have commercia...
