Well don't I feel stupid. I always thought they had knights in the medieval era and they had feudalism. That is, you were either "born into" fighting, or you weren't.
"Feudalism" is a fairly bad word these days. It's not really a thing.
Anyway, mercenaries were reasonably common during the Middle Ages in Western Europe. Usually, you'd hire them on a seasonal basis, because to hell with paying men during the wintertime when they weren't even fighting. They had a bad reputation among people who have romantic notions about war back then, as mercenaries do in the modern era, and were frequently slaughtered upon surrender because they were supposedly not subject to the laws of war.
The Catalans provided the most famous groups of mercenaries - units of them served on multiple sides in the Occitan wars of the early thirteenth century, and the Catalan Company of Roger de Flor's adventures around the Aegean in the fourteenth century have passed into near-legend among people like gangleri. Richard I of England was notorious for employing mercenaries, which he could do on an unrivaled scale because the state of English taxation and resource mobilization was so good. And so on, and so forth.
Pay was not always in the form of cash, because most countries - let alone kings - weren't exactly flush. Furthermore, mercenaries were not the only kind of people who fought for cash; some states, such as the Byzantine Empire, employed paid regular troops (the
tagmata for the Byzantines) recruited largely from their own population. (Of course, the definition of what was and was not a mercenary is fairly fraught in historical terms, not just modern ones.)
the armies weren't exactly mercenary, but they did have to provide their own armor, weapons and supplies, and their pay was basically what they could grab when they conquered a town or village. One of the reasons the 30 years war was so devastating.
This is not actually true. Pay structures were supposed to be very regularized. Men don't fight simply in order to score some take, especially since the 'take' is usually awful. This was even more true after the Middle Ages, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when mercenary use was even more widespread. Hence the creation of the "Dutch month" and the "Roman month".
It is true that, during the course of a given war, most states ended up lacking the ability to pay their troops on time, or even at all. The Habsburg Spanish monarchy went into bankruptcy multiple times during the course of its sixteenth century wars, not least due to the demands on pay of the Army of Flanders that fought in the Eighty Years War. At the end of the Thirty Years' War, a massive international effort had to be made to 'satisfy' the troops of the various belligerent powers, almost all of which were owed considerable pay arrears and who would not demobilize until they were paid. But this was not converted into giving the troops carte blanche to pillage and destroy if they were not paid properly.
What did happen was the increasingly organized levying of "contributions" on local territories in order to quarter, feed, and clothe one's armies. This was not pillage - at least, not usually, especially if you had disciplined troops - but it did represent an undue burden on the people of a given locality. Contributions were imposed on friendly territory, enemy territory, and neutral territory, but usually on the latter two, because they could also serve as a political goad (e.g. "stop fighting or we'll keep making exactions from your populace"). They were necessary elements of the machinery needed to run a large army at that point, because the means to feed an army independent of the territory in which it bivouacked did not exist, most states lacked the textile industry to properly clothe all of their troops, and quarters had to be found
somewhere.
Most instances of pillage and atrocity during the period were from sieges - troops tended to view the populace of a city that resisted a siege as fair game - and/or done by direct order of their commanders. Of the former, the most horrifying example is the 1631 siege of Magdeburg by the forces of the Catholic
Liga, an atrocity that got significantly worse due to an accidental fire. Of the latter, the 1688 devastation of the Rhineland by the French armies of Louis XIV was the most disgusting example. Neither of these things had much to do with troops being mercenary. Militia types were just as willing to behave awfully if they ever succeeded in a siege (and sometimes they did), while the armies of Louis XIV are not usually described as mercenary at all, being, supposedly, one of the first professional armies raised by the state from the state's citizens.
History Buff said:
Not just that, I think it's also important (though Dachs may swoop in and correct me) that the people paying these mercenaries (and also supplying manpower) were all outside the area of conflict, which was quite unusual for the time I think.
No side (except for Denmark perhaps) could possibly have afforded to keep the war going as long as they did had the warfare been happening on their own territory.
While it was more difficult for the rulers of the Imperial states to keep their armies in the field when their territories were under attack or contribution, they did usually manage to do so, even if they were forced to ask for subsidies from their allies to do it. The Habsburg monarchy of the east faced invasion multiple times during the war and still managed to pay its troops, albeit not regularly (nobody could do that, though, except for the Dutch, and then only sometimes). Bavaria was even worse off most of the time, and managed to keep a
Liga army alive largely off its own resources for a very long time. Elisabeth Amalie of Hessen-Kassel kept her own army alive during the Hessian sub-conflict for several years, despite the parlous state of her own territory. Even France faced invasion in the late 1630s and successfully continued to enlarge its army.
No country would deliberately seek a war on its own territory, but only very poor countries like Denmark and Sweden would be forced to let such a situation dictate their foreign policy.
ParkCungHee said:
Outside of a specific context, "Mercenaries" is one of those terms that kind of falls apart when you try applying it to different time periods and settings, so saying something like "during the medieval era (and) thirty years war, most of the fighting was done by mercenaries" isn't really a meaningful idea.
I've never been satisfied with the definition of mercenaries, either, but operating on the generally understood definition of same is reasonable in the context of this thread. Nobody's said anything about gallowglasses yet, for instance, although I think the
tagmata kind of break the mercenary paradigm as well.