Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria's description of the state of his troops quoted in the title, given to Emperor Ferdinand III in 1637, does not in the slightest match the image of a brutal international band of soldiers willing to do anything, with which Gustav Freytag wanted to shock the educated classes of the 19th century. [1] For obvious reasons contemporary publicists, and soon after, proponents of the "miles perpetuus" were at pains to portray the soldier in the Thirty Years' War exclusively as perpetrators.

For example an anonymous document from the last years before the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War says "Anyone can carry a long spear, a halberd or a battle sword wear armour and ensigns, and go daintily to inspection, or sit on an old horse and show off in nice armour as if he was riding for the young ladies. In a skirmish with the people who are wearing white sashes, everybody should be made to join in and do as their father and their mother did and shall make babies (to put it bluntly), in order to make three out of two. But to make them go to war, besiege, attack and capture cities and forts, that is nothing but vanity. Authorities are much better off taking the riches, the rent and taxes off the land and using scoundrels, vagabonds and riff-raff that have nothing to lose but their lives (as soldiers)." [2]

In an age when exercising with the musket still required 143 different command words [3], the recruitment of professional soldiers was an irrefutable necessity. But at the beginning of the 17th century, even the large European territorial states did not possess more than the rudiments of the required administrative apparatus. Neither was there a regional logistics system capable of supplying larger numbers of troops in thinly populated areas, nor did the respective national rulers have the means and facilities to keep a military force of up to a hundred thousand men continuously armed. An obvious solution, especially for defence of the territory, was to fall back on levied subjects. The corresponding institutions of national defence, also known as "Landrettungswerke", emphasized the militia character of this military model. [4] However as an instrument of national defence the soldiers had neither the training nor the motivation to be deployed against an army of professional soldiers. They were nonetheless used for this purpose, especially in the first half of the Thirty Years' War, which may have been the grounds for the bitter comment made by the unknown mocker quoted above.

Normally the commanders recruited for a campaign and paid off the extraordinary military forces ["extraordinari Kriegsvolck"] after the end of the clashes, from which it got its name. The search for new belligerent employment drove the begging soldiers from country to country in search of a new master. As shown by the extensive demobilization measures after conclusion of the Nuremberg Executionday this principle still applied after the end of the Thirty Years' War. [5] The great war, which gripped Europe for more than a generation, brought constancy of war, but not constancy of warfare. [6] Frequent alternation between recruitment, reformation, reduction and dissolution of regiments was common practice in all European armies during the Thirty Years' War and for decades afterwards. [7] During the course of the war, the military failure of "Ausschüssern", in comparison to professional mercenaries, led to extensive marginalization of militia institutions, although they were not abandoned completely. Especially in the second half of the war, organized peasant resistance against smaller groups of soldiers was often marked by individual military experience in a "Landrettungswerk". [8] (Fig. 1) From time to time, national rulers were tempted to order the deployment of recruited men outside the limits of direct national defence. For example the National Swedish regiments were levied by conscription (utskrivning). [9] For a country with a population of little over a million, obligatory military service during the Thirty Years' War became a demographic catastrophe. [10] The armies of all the warring parties were made up of contingents of varying size of mounted soldiers, foot soldiers and artillerymen. The guild character of the latter survived into the epoch of the Thirty Years' War in the designation "gunsmith". [11] At the beginning of the war, mercenaries on foot formed the bulk of the soldiers, in the tradition of the older national mercenary armies. Only during the war did the foot soldiers with their limited radius of movement fall behind, especially as the soldiers' nutritional base was reduced and it became necessary to travel increasing distances in order to secure daily supplies. The form of warfare also changed accordingly. [12]

The foot soldiers were divided into pikemen and musketeers according to their weaponry. The pikemen's task was to repel cavalry charges using a 15-18 foot (4.50m-5.40m) pike. For protection they wore a breastplate, a gorget, an apron plate and an iron helmet. A rapier served for defence in hand-to-hand combat. The musketeers protected the pike-bearers, but could also flee between the pikemen's spears when their guns became useless in hand-to-hand fighting. [13] In contrast to the pikeman, the musketeer had only a helmet, sometimes even replaced by a leather or felt hat. A sabre completed his equipment. [14] At the start of the war a foot company at full strength had 120 pike-bearers, 20 long-serving halberdiers to guard the flag and 160 musketeers under the command of a captain, a lieutenant as company officer and a standard-bearer as officer's deputy. Three sergeants were responsible for the soldiers' training. A "Capitaine d'armes" took care of maintenance of the weapons. Three corporals and three "Landpassaten" as their deputies, and a lance corporal as standard-bearer deputy were the non-commissioned officers of a company. Finally, nine long-serving lance corporals had the task of helping to maintain the internal cohesion of the unit. [15] 10 companies formed a regiment of 3,000 men. At no point in the war was it possible to reach anything close to the decreed troop strengths. The difference between the theoretical full strength according to regulations and the actually achieved strength was normally up to 30 percent. [16] It was not uncommon for regiments to have just a third of the specified number of men.

During the war some commanders began to enforce the wearing of standard uniforms, to increase the discipline and internal coherence of the units. However supply difficulties, especially in the production of large numbers of uniforms, prevented these plans from proceeding beyond the first tentative steps. Heavy wear and tear on uniforms through the influences of weather forced the soldiers to obtain garments at regular intervals from sutlers at the camp market, from loot, or from the corpses of fallen adversaries. [17] The foot soldiers of all the warring parties normally wore wide trousers and a jacket-like jerkin with wide sleeves. Coats were largely unknown, possession of footwear was often the exception. The general diversity of appearance made additional distinctive features necessary, in order to distinguish friend and foe during battle. Allied troops tried to make themselves recognizable by quickly breaking off green twigs and attaching them to their clothing. During battle, as the mass streamed to and fro in chaos and gunsmoke and dust greatly reduced vision, these signs were not particularly effective. In such situations flags, standards, and battle cries were most likely to give the soldiers a degree of orientation. [18]

The mounted troops in the Thirty Years' War also developed specific differentiation of equipment and deployment, matching their allocated role in battle. Alongside the heavy cavalry, cuirassiers equipped with horse trappings, wheel lock pistols and a broadsword, light units developed, whose members wore a half cuirass, and carried a wheel lock carbine as well as a cavalry sword and wheel lock pistol. These troops were initially referred to as "arquebusiers", after the introduction of the carbine as "carabineers". [19] As extremely mobile mounted infantry, the dragoons attained special importance during the war. They made it possible to carry out surprise attacks, and their supply profited from their greater radius of movement.

Artillery gained in importance during the course of the war. While no important innovations in slow-moving siege artillery occurred during the Thirty Years' War, field artillery made a qualitative leap, especially in the Swedish army. With the use of mobile three and six-pound guns (known as "regimental pieces"), which when deployed ahead of the front could cause the enemy serious losses, artillery lost its previously static function and became a significant factor in the commanders' tactical operational concepts. [20]

Older research had a firm judgement on the origins and motivation of the mercenaries. Evaluation of mostly normative evidence reinforced the view that every soldier in the Thirty Years' War belonged to an international association of work-shy criminal elements. It is no coincidence that the term "Soldateska" [band of soldiers], part of the military administrative vocabulary during the Thirty Years' War, today has an undisputedly pejorative character. In the meantime, however, important corrections have been made to this traditional view.

Various methods were available to recruit soldiers. At first the princely commanders had neither a sufficiently capable administrative apparatus nor the regular income which would have allowed them to conjure up armies of up to 100,000 soldiers out of nothing. For this reason, as in the time of free mercenaries in the 16th century, financially strong or credit-worthy military entrepreneurs were given the job of raising a regiment, or more rarely a whole army, at their own expense. The capital employed not only earned significant interest, but also increased through clever manipulation in various areas of the army supply system, to the loss of the ruler and the disadvantage of the ordinary soldiers. [21] In many cases the significant business risk was compensated by material and political gains. [22] Alongside brilliant major entrepreneurs like Wallenstein, who established a sophisticated system for raising and supplying armies, supported by military sub-contractors, bankers and army suppliers, such war-profiteers in uniform as the Swedish commanders Königsmarck and Wrangel accumulated large fortunes within a few years. [23] Below these top earners were the colonels and regimental commanders, often in a client relationship to their commander-in-chief, raising the regiments for which their superior had received the commission. The colonels in turn made use of personally known officers who, as captains recruited soldiers for their companies. Terms such as regiment owner [Regimentsinhaber] and company boss [Kompaniechef], which survived long after the epoch of the Thirty years' War and of which some are still in use today, make the property relations very clear. [24] The term "company", which had been in use in Italy since the 13th century, probably indicated - initially literally - the feeding community of the soldiers. [25] To this day it forms the organizational framework for the smallest administrative unit of an army. In the existentially uncertain times of the Thirty Years' War the company symbolized the direct living and protective context of the individual soldier. The idea that soldiers often voluntarily changed company, that they had no inner relationship to their unit, fitted so well with the image of the vagabond mercenary that it survived until it was corrected by recent social-historical research. [26] The relatively high personnel losses, whether due to the direct effects of war or to a much greater extent through hunger and epidemics brought in its wake, the regiments dwindled quickly, making merging of units unavoidable. [27] A soldier did not automatically change company, for it had in many respects become a substitute for home. The regiments reflected the structures of local loyalties of the recruiting area in which they were raised. Amongst the troops raised on the territory of the empire only a relatively small percentage (10-20 percent) of the soldiers were from non-German-speaking areas. A certain homogeneity of local loyalties formed an important element of the inner coherence of the units and increased their effectiveness in battle. In this respect the recruitment lists provide very interesting information on the differing intensities of social uprootedness and geographical mobility. [28]

Under the conditions of war, a complicated network of personal relationships, of dependencies and obligations, developed within the companies. The long-serving soldiers, "experienced in battle" or "tried" had an important function. For their comrades they demonstrated the chance of individual survival, and often embodied the social morale of a unit. [29]

But informal hierarchies amongst the men also followed the soldiers' family situation. While most of the newly recruited mercenaries were between 18 and 24 and normally unmarried, the long-serving mercenary was often accompanied by a partner with children. [30] The baggage train which accompanied the armies led contemporaries and later commentators to the assumption that the armies of the Thirty Years' War were unprofessional and their purpose primarily plundering and looting. [31] In "The Art of War on Foot", published in 1615 and repeatedly reprinted during the Thirty Years' War, the influential military writer Johann Jacob von Wallhausen characterized the composition of the armies of the time: "These days if you recruit a regiment of German warriors you have three thousand men, then you will certainly find four thousand whores and boys and the worst riff-raff that cannot stay in one place goes to join the war. And the swearing, womanizing, cursing, fighting, stealing, plundering, destruction of homes and property and other wicked acts carried out by this riff-raff would stop a heathen warrior in his tracks." [32 ](Fig. 2) Here Wallhausen accepts the common prejudice which survived from the 16th century to the end of the old European mercenary armies. On the basis of homelessness and great geographical mobility, military society was classed with the travelling people and goliards, who were seen with mistrust and disapproval by the propertied burghers and the authorities with their interest in social control. [33] This type of judgement, sometimes still found in school books and reference books, overlooks the fact that the regular baggage train in the 17th century armies undertook tasks which were later accomplished by specially created units and institutions. During the Thirty Years' War, the complete supply function for the armies was carried out by the baggage train. At its centre was the "camp", responsible for crucial communication and distribution tasks.

Contemporaries compared the functioning and structure of the armies of the Thirty Years' War with a human body. The commander with his staff was the head, the soldiers the limbs, and the baggage train responsible for feeding and digestive functions. Provision of food for the soldiers was central to the work of looking after the soldiers.

At first the commanders tried to secure the provision of food through payment of money to the troops. [34] But it soon became clear that even a short stay by tens of thousands of troops drove the regional market prices for grain to dizzy heights. In these circumstances, the soldiers found themselves unable to survive using cash. In this situation wild looting often occurred, degenerating into excesses of violence when the population defended itself. (Fig. 3) For this reason, the rulers soon moved to concluding supply contracts with major traders operating nationally. Contracts were awarded on the basis of the lowest offer. The commanding prince normally advanced a third of the calculated sum, another third was due when the supplier had provided the necessary means of transport, and the rest was to be paid directly before delivery started.

But under the conditions of the early 17th century, there was no chance of even rudimentary realization of the corresponding normative rules. Sometimes friction was caused by force majeure which left the suppliers powerless even if they were of good will. Regional crop failures led to price rises which were not covered by the contracted sums. [35] Sea transport over the Baltic held not only the danger of loss of the transport ship, but much more commonly the risk of spoiling of part of the cargo, for example through penetration of water. On land, bread and grain convoys often fell into the hands of the enemy or were looted by marauders and raiding parties.

Attempts by traders to minimize their risk by deliberate manipulation and all types of embezzlement were at least as common as the loss of food. They were often able to count on the assistance of officers and supply commissioners. The soldiers were normally entitled to a daily ration of 730 grams of bread, two thirds of wheat and one third of rye flour. [36] Two days' rations were supposed to be baked in one loaf and distributed. But the men rarely received the amount and quality promised in the regulations. Regional differences in weights and measures often provided sufficient justification for reduction in weight. If this measure was not enough to raise the supplier's profit margin, bread was made with inferior grain like barley, vetch was added, or bran mixed with water, or even bad rations were given out to ensure the expected profit. Officers and commissioners tolerated the goings-on, from which they also took a cut. Some took bribes directly, while others presented provisions lists listing as recipients soldiers who had actually deserted, been captured by the enemy, killed in action or died. It was always the soldiers who suffered. Gnawing hunger, which the soldiers often tried to deaden with alcohol, was not even the biggest problem. Serious cases of diarrhoea occurred repeatedly in the armies of the Thirty Years' War, a result of fraudulent manipulation of the soldiers' food supplies.

While the bread rations were supposed to be delivered directly to the soldiers, meat, beer, wine and cider had to be purchased at the camp market. The Swedish supply ordinance of 1632 provided for a pound of meat and a measure of wine daily for a common soldier [37] Only occasionally did butter, cheese, bacon fat and pulses supplement the common mercenary's menu. In the camp markets, meat, drink and entremets, prepared by specially appointed butchers and served by cooks of dubious competence in cookshops and tents, were often offered at exorbitant prices, which orientated on the substantial demand. (Fig. 4) The sutlers who followed the army with the approval of the commander worked on their own account. They supplied the troops not only with food, but also with all other everyday items. They belonged to the social elite of camp society. Their relative riches and possession of goods which the soldier urgently required but could only purchase at relatively high cost earned the sutlers the envy and resentment of the soldiers. They tried to counteract this through a particularly close relationship to the officers. [38] Butchers and cooks stood with justification under suspicion of illegitimately increasing their profit margins by using poor quality or maggot-contaminated meat and mouldy pulses, and by adulterating beer and wine. They were nonetheless members of the regular baggage train. They were subject to military law and they and their dependants were entitled to the same protection and provisions as the soldiers. If the soldiers were paid late, more the rule than the exception in the armies of the Thirty Years' War, or the army's luck was poor, the sutlers disappeared without a thought for their customers' worries. The soldiers developed an absolutely ambivalent relationship to them. On the one hand they sought to secure preferential treatment through marriage, godparenthood and other personal relationships. On the other, they treated the sutlers, their companions only in good times, with hardly-restrained hatred.

Women played a central role in the camp society of early modern armies. Mostly members of the lower classes, such as maids, wet nurses and cleaners, their previous live in poverty and dependency had become so arduous that the life of a soldier's wife or partner seemed an alternative. They transported on their shoulders all the modest possessions of a soldier's household with many members. They bore children, few of which survived the exertion of the campaigns. [39] The many baggage boys who took care of the horses and watched the cattle herds often came from soldiers' families. The 13 to 15 year old youths were often directly involved in the fighting as drummer boys and horseboys. (Fig. 5)

Women generally provided medical treatment, while surgeons were only available to the officers of a regiment, or often even just to headquarters staff. The army doctors, mostly recruited from the barbers, acted as bone cutters for major surgery. [40]

But it was also women who assisted the soldiers in "looting". Because pay was often not forthcoming, loot was an indispensable factor for the livelihood of soldier families. The soldiers were led to steal principally by the struggle for survival, and less by latent criminal tendencies. Moreover, there was a socially sanctioned view that a prominent position in the army and its administration should be worthwhile for its holder. This attitude produced a looting mentality amongst the leadership of all the armies in the Thirty Years' War, to the detriment of the rulers and the troops. Often the soldiers were really forced to loot. To this extent, it is not surprising that literally everything that was not nailed down was taken by the soldiers. They stole the linen which was laid out to bleach outside the towns, to replace their ragged clothes. They seized food reserves and cattle, loaded up household goods and furniture. Even doors, window frames and rafters were torn out of the peasants' cottages and huts of the settlements, above all as fuel for the soldiers in the cool and damp spring and autumn nights . The arduous life of the women in the baggage train is described vividly in a treatise on warfare written at the time. They made their way loaded with "cloth bags, coats, scarves, pots, kettles, pans, brooms, clothes, big unwieldy bags, hens and dogs etc. And also all kinds of loot, looking not unlike a Spanish mule". [41] It is no wonder that the baggage train could only slowly follow the army. The women and children bore the brunt of the privations, which together with births under unspeakably primitive conditions, caused many to die prematurely of exhaustion. There was hardly a soldier who did not lose his partner during the war. While it was normally no problem for a man to start a new association, for a woman the loss of the protector, whether through death or capture, was an existential threat. If they were already older, had several children to provide for, or were unable to gain materially from the previous relationship (normally only the case for married couples), they were in danger of falling into the socially stigmatized and extremely vulnerable group of unprotected women. Their fate was casual work, begging, or camp prostitution. This opens up another field of the social history of military society in the Thirty Years' War - the irregular baggage train, the lemures of camp society.

The baggage train fulfilled indispensable supply and care functions without which the armies would not have functioned reliably. On the other hand, commanders tried to keep to a minimum the numbers of this cumbersome following, which slowed the movements of the army and placed additional restrictions on its nutritional freedom. But they were unable to prevent undisciplined hangers-on from following in the protection of the camp. Here there were pedlars who sold off unrequired loot, travelling entertainers, players, and all sorts of adventurers, who tried everything to make their profit from the changing fortunes of war, or at least to find a little existential security.

The capital which the mercenaries in the Thirty Years' War contributed to the contract with their recruiters was their health and physical intactness. Both were at great risk in the war. Alongside infectious illnesses, malnutrition, cold and damp were the most common cause of death of soldiers, even more so of their families. During the Thirty Years' War inhabitants of the remotest regions of the continent met in the central European theatre of war, with a geographical mobility as yet unknown in the early modern era. Many of them brought pathogens to the population of the various theatres of war, against which they themselves had become immune through generations of contact. [42] For many soldiers and their dependants there was a long phase of privation between injury or sickness and subsequent death. In the eyes of his superiors, a soldier who had lost his bodily strength was no longer worth his pay. He had become literally "invalidus", worthless. [43] For this reason every wounded or sick soldier first tried to secure medical care from his dependants under the protection of the company. The importance given to the return of recuperated soldiers to the company is demonstrated by the account given by an anonymous soldier in the Thirty Years' War, who repeatedly reported being detailed with other soldiers to guard the sick. [44] Only when the soldier was permanently unable to follow the army, was he handed over to the care of urban hospitals with a small allowance. They, however, rarely had a great interest in the patient's recovery. When the money had been used up the soldier was discharged to an uncertain fate. Provisionally recovered, without ever having fully regained their strength, these former soldiers found themselves robbed of their only relevant capital in military society.

Socially isolated, they sought contact to the army, but without the possibility of reintegration in the social structure of their unit. In this situation the fate of a marauder was marked out for them. Forced to make their own living, these former soldiers became the desperadoes of the war, often still in possession of their weapons. The longer the war went on, the more this burnt-out residue of an increasingly brutalized society, supported by shady characters of all sorts, became a curse on the armies and the population. [45] Jacques Callot's copperplate with the subject "the Tree of the Hanged", created with moralizing intentions, shows these facts quite clearly. (Fig. 6) Where provision of the regular baggage train already posed almost insurmountable problems for the leadership of an army, the irregular baggage train was an additional burden. In a deteriorating supply situation, and against the background of constant conflict with the population, attempts were made to get rid of it. So the marauders were hunted mercilessly by the determined peasants, as well as by the provosts of the armies and their henchmen. Callot depicts this situation very clearly, giving some of the executed wretches artificial limbs, and moreover showing an obvious pile of those miserable aids underneath the gallows. These people were plainly less a danger than a burden to the military leadership.

Whether for reasons of conduct of war or for their supply, the armies of the Thirty Years' War were almost always on the move. Only in the time from mid-November to the end of March were the soldiers at rest in their winter quarters. [46]

The regiments were then replenished by recruitment directly before the start of the summer campaign. This meant that the army was often forced to set out on the summer campaign with freshly recruited soldiers, who had hardly yet been integrated in their companies. This measure caused great losses, especially amongst the recruits.

Because the army was encumbered by its baggage train and as food became scarcer during the Thirty Years' War, the deployment of smaller mobile military units gained greater importance alongside the regular large-scale battles. In the last years of the war it was characterized by capture of fixed points, to guard road routes and river crossings but also as centres from which the surrounding area could be foraged for supplies for the army. [47]

The raiding parties deployed to this end were mobile mounted units. Initially they contributed to reconnaissance of the enemy's strength and position, later also establishing and securing march routes and quarters with favourable supply situations. As the main task of these light troops became tracking down food supplies, seizing enemy convoys and taking magazines, their discipline slackened. And the less mobile the large armies became, the more indispensable were the light troops. Continuous supervision and discipline were made impossible by their deployment far ahead of or to the flank of the army, and anyway this was hardly in the interest of the military leadership. The prospect of looting without punishment led not only scattered troops, but also convicted soldiers and armed desperadoes to make war on their own account as "Freireuter". Contemporaries often associated these feared and dreaded soldiers with the Croat regiments which served the emperor. [48] The name "Crabaten" was associated with all imaginable atrocities, with direct experience, horror stories and irrational fear of strangers forming a potent mixture. The great geographical mobility which developed during the war in the central European theatre also led to similar prejudices against soldiers from other regions of Europe. (Fig. 7) These confronted not only the members of the National Swedish regiments in south and west Germany but also the German regiments of the former army of Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar on its march through the southern Champagne. [49] Apart from the ever more merciless fight for the dwindling means of subsistence, affect reactions governed by mutual fear may have been a cause of the acts of violence which occurred again and again between the population and the soldiers. For the contemporaries whose witness has been preserved for us, it did not matter whether the harm and suffering they complained of were caused by regular soldiers, raiding parties, "Freireutern", marauders, by hangers-on, or by the many bands of criminals who followed the armies. For them the strangers were undifferentiated warriors, at most differentiated broadly between the warring powers. [50]

FOOTNOTES