Furies (7 page)

Recruitment officers also worked with gangs of thuggish “enrollers” (
racoleurs
), who plied their trade in Paris, Lyon, and other cities. Having caught their prey, they would lock them up and sell them, as new enlistees, to officers eager for men. The king's recruitment money thus passed through different hands.

THE THIRTY YEARS WAR AFFLICTED Germany with such storms of carnage that after it ended in 1648, regional elites began to give way, by the approval of tax hikes, to the pressure of princes, who were now determined to have permanent armies. These would serve—so ran the argument—to guarantee security. But problems of recruitment quickly surfaced. As the German economy picked up after the war, and men were able to make a living from daily work in town and country, territorial princes found that they could not afford the sums required to attract the needed numbers of men into their budding armies. Taxes would not allow it, and there were seldom enough volunteers. In the crunch, one partial solution was—as in France, England, and Spain—to let men out of prison to be pressed directly into armies. In the duchy of Wolfenbüttel, even before the 1630s, serious criminals were regularly “condemned to war,” or were often freed from prison to serve in the front lines. Their destinations might be the Netherlands or the Hungarian-Turkish borderlands. Later, it became common for Germany's princely governments to offer army service as a substitute for prison and even, occasionally, for the penalty of death.

Generally speaking, however, snooping recruiters, such as for Brandenburg and Saxony, more often resorted to cunning and to brutal grab-and-lock-up tactics. Having concealed his helpers, a recruiter would turn up in “dives” or “low-life” inns and taverns, where the case of a man whisked away would raise no great hue and cry. Wine or brandy often worked when the sign-up money was not enticing
enough. “Malice and beatings also helped.” And so it happened that in East Frisia, as poor Hilke Wessels complained in 1665, if her vanished husband had not been brutally assaulted, “he would never have dreamed of becoming a soldier!” In Prussia, right up to the 1730s, the army recruiter was “the most feared individual in the land.” To escape what they saw as a life of abuse, young peasants maimed themselves or fled from home. Indeed, now and then entire villages fled, so that in the face of resistance to recruitment, “the killing of [Prussian] subjects … was not rare.”

Recruiters sometimes had secret agreements with local tavern or innkeepers. But they could get their signals crossed, and fights occasionally broke out between preying parties of recruiters, with each claiming the same man. Recruiting was a business, and there was keen rivalry here and there among the predators. Agents for recruiting officers haggled over their prey. They spoke of “delivering,” “owing,” “lending,” and “borrowing” men, such as when they “sold” new recruits to captains or colonels. Yet for all their cheating and lurking in the shadows near the scenes of their thuggery, army officers importuned their governments to take stern action against runaway men. They insisted on their rights over deserters, and in dogged pursuit of them might break into houses in the middle of the night to pull their victims out into the streets and drag them away.

In the sixteenth century, Germany's Landsknechts, professional pikemen, had a notorious reputation. With their gaudy dress and codpieces, they were seen as troublemakers, devils, gluttons, and braggarts who hated the routines of ordinary life. But the dominant adjectives for them did not necessarily turn them into “lower-class scum.” Later, in the turmoil of the Thirty Years War, some contemporaries, looking back, would even regard them as patriots. After 1650, however, Germans began to see soldiers in a different light, owing to the recruitment of criminals and to the organized pressing of men from the unsavory reaches of society: vagrants, beggars, misfits, and the unwanted poor. No hardworking peasant or craftsman wanted a place in the ranks alongside such men, unless he was
fleeing intolerable strains at home, or foolishly imagining a life of adventure and easy-come loot.

Yet impressment parties also got their hands on men of a more solid type, with the result that German armies, like the armies of Louis XIV, came to be plagued by the scurvy of desertion. Men had deserted massively in the moil and toil of the Thirty Years War—out of fear, hunger, lack of pay, and even religious conviction. But desertion after 1650, which went on in a rising tide through much of the eighteenth century, was the natural consequence of impressment and biased, selective conscription. To cut off escape routes for aspiring deserters, army officers in Prussia even sought to avoid nighttime marches and camping in the vicinity of forests, or marching through them, unless they were flanked by Hussars—cavalry. Now, however, in that climate of repression, civilians were more willing to help runaway soldiers—despite the risk of dire penalties, the alarms raised against desertion in Sunday sermons, and the publication of long lists of deserters in the newspapers.

The conscripted permanent army had arrived, and recruitment was moving in a new direction, now chiefly by enforced enlistment under the rule of the state. It was the route most prominently taken by Sweden after 1620, in the reign of Gustavus Adolphus.

Jan Werth (1591–1652), one of the leading generals of the Thirty Years War, was born a peasant near Cologne. He joined the Spanish army in about 1610, turned into a fearless horseman, and became—riding over every social obstacle—the top general of cavalry in the Bavarian and Imperial armies. The convulsions of the Thirty Years War fostered the rise from “nothing” of several other generals, including Johann von Aldringen (1588–1634), Peter Melander (1589–1648), and Guillaume Gil de Haas (1597–1657). Aldringen was the
son of a town clerk from Luxembourg. Melander, born into a Calvinist peasant family in the Low Countries, managed to get a university education before becoming one of the Empire's most important generals. And Gil de Haas, a stonemason from Ypres, ended his life, like Aldringen, as a Bavarian general.

But these men were wonders. With a few exceptions in Italy, including prominent
condottieri
, such as the humbly born Niccolò Piccinino and Gattamelata (Erasmo da Narni), the like had almost never been seen before, and would not be seen again until the end of the eighteenth century. Officers came overwhelmingly from the nobility, above all in the upper grades of command. Yet enormous disparities cut through Europe's noble ranks, with great lords at one extreme, possessing vast tracts of land, towns, and rights over people, while at the other were Prussian junkers with a little house on a tiny farm, or Spanish
hidalgos
who might have trouble finding the money for a decent pair of shoes. Still, all claimed (or aspired to have) a family coat of arms and clung to privileges that set them apart from the multitudes of commoners, especially with regard to taxation and army service. Taxes were customarily weighted in their favor, or, in many parts of Europe, they paid none at all, apart from indirect sales taxes.

It did not follow that poor noblemen, if so minded, were alone in turning to look to the profession of arms for income. Younger sons of the well-off nobility also directed their ambitions that way.

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.”