Furies (8 page)

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.

* * *

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.

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 often 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?

Along came a rational solution: payment in food, the basic stipend of Sweden's armies in Germany during the Thirty Years War. This policy was frankly laid down by Gustavus Adolphus in 1632. Running short of the needed cash, he saw no better way out of his fix.
But there was also another, if more devious, route. It was described by the Swedish chancellor Axel Oxenstierna in 1633. He estimated that if the army's seventy-eight thousand men were paid on a monthly basis, as was their due, the yearly wage bill would be in the region of 9.8 million Reichstalers. But if he paid them for a mere month, holding on to the rest, and dispensed one pound of bread per day to each soldier, plus occasional small sums of money, he would then be able to keep the yearly bill down to 5.4 million Reichstalers. And this is what he tried to do. Within two years, however, in 1635, though having already confronted a major mutiny, Oxenstierna was again faced with an army in a state of mass mutiny, and he had to rush into negotiations with the officers.

In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the mercenary armies of the Dutch were alleged to be the best paid in Europe. Yet “the pay was half that of a day labourer,” and the Dutch were capable of callously dismissing, without pay, newly recruited mercenary companies on suddenly finding that they no longer needed them, as happened in 1658. The ruling elites of the United (Dutch) Provinces were not in the least generous with their armies; no European state ever was, because paying wartime soldiers was the dearest by far of all government expenses. Hence the Scottish, English, and German mercenaries of the Dutch occasionally bordered on mutiny, their cries a litany against arrears in pay. Still, by managing to pay more regularly than princes, thanks to a booming seventeenth-century economy, the Dutch were nearly always able to attract mercenaries. Even local journeymen, who often lived on the verge of unemployment, despite the boom, might join a home regiment for the simple reason that it “held the prospect of continuous income.” But just as temporary hard times could bring this on, so better times were likely to result in mass desertions. Army life was a choice of last resort.

Military historians point out that when the opportunity arose, soldiers in garrisons were allowed to work at their trades, if they had
one, with an eye to extra earnings. But only peace could impart substance to this rosy view, and even then the working soldier might have to share that extramural income with his commanding officer. War itself—the actual ground and times of warfare—offered few opportunities for workaday labor.