Download PDF | (Smithsonian History of Warfare 47) John France - Mercenaries and Paid Men_ The Mercenary Identity in the Middle Ages-Brill Academic Publishers (2008).
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INTRODUCTION
John France Swansea University
Mercenaries have never had a good press. At best they have been largely forgotten. The great war between Greece and the Persian Empire is imprinted in our minds as a struggle of freedom against Asiatic despotism, but it is often forgotten that huge numbers of Greeks fought against Alexander the Great (336-23) as paid men in the ranks of the Persian army. In the twentieth century mercenaries meddling in African wars were regarded with disdain, while even now we look with suspicion upon the private-enterprise soldiers serving the coalition in Iraq. This is all the odder in that they may lay claim to be one of the oldest professions known to mankind. In the second millennium the kings of Assyria and Babylon employed Amorite nomads, while the Pharaohs bought the services of Nubians and Philistines, and all this long before money was invented.
Such dislike and distrust was especially marked in the Middle Ages when the very term mercenarius was for long a term of abuse. In classical Latin the word simply meant a hireling of any sort, but this was given a particular connotation by its use in a famous passage in the Gospel of St John in which Christ contrasts himself, the Good Shepherd with the ‘hireling...whose own the sheep are not’ who flees at the first sign of trouble ‘because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep.” This dislike had very clear consequences. After the conquest of England in 1066, a penance for killing was imposed on the entire Norman army, but it was markedly more severe for those who served Wiliam for pay than for those who were his subjects serving from obligation to their ruler.’
This distinction between duty and the desire for gain may strike us as highly artificial. Virtually all men who fought hoped to gain, and in this case the greater men who were subjects of William stood to gain far more than those who hired themselves for pay. However, this distinction was a very important one in medieval thinking and still forms the basis of modern perceptions of who was a mercenary and who was not.
One aspect of the poor press which mercenaries have received 1s that they are seen as the most brutal and degraded of soldiers. Cruelty, in particular is often seen as their defining characteristic. In 1179 the Third Lateran Council condemned mercenaries and all who employed them, calling even for a crusade against these destroyers of churches who killed the poor and the innocent without any distinction of sex or status.* But this was hardly a special quality of mercenaries. The nobles and knights of medieval Europe tended to justify their privileged position in terms of their sense of social responsibility, and, in particular, the duty to defend the weak and helpless. By the end of the twelfth century, David Crouch (15-32) suggests, this was a central plank of the newly emerging exclusiveness of the aristocrats to whom the knights were being assimilated. But this quality was observed at least as much in the breach as in the performance.
A vital part of medieval warfare was the destruction of the economic capacity of the enemy, and if this involved, as it often did, bullying peasants and much worse, then so be it. Geoffroy de Vigeois, a Limousin abbot who was more familiar than most with the ravages of mercenaries, records that the great noble Aimar, Viscount of Limoges and his friends, massacred 2000 of both sexes in a day in a drive against their enemies towards Brive.° In 1188 William Marshal, the very paradigm of twelfth-century chivalry, advised his king, Henry I of England (1154-89), to deceive the French by pretending to disband his army in order to mount a terrible raid, a chevauchée, into their lands, burning, looting and destroying.® Mercenaries were often the instruments of this kind of violence, but their employers were the nobility who were well aware of their methods.
Similarly, fickleness is often seen as another characteristic of the mercenary soldier. In 1183 Henry the Young King, rebelled against his father, Henry II, and seized the city of Limoges where he found numerous allies amongst the discontented nobility of the Limousin. At the same time he gathered a substantial force of mercenaries, but he was afraid that his father would hire them away from him by paying more. Indeed, Henry II, as John Hosler (33-42) has shown, was a formidable and frequent hirer of mercenaries.’ But switching sides was a commonplace of war and far from limited to paid men. When Philip of France (1180-1223) attacked Normandy in 1204, the infidelity of the local nobility to their ruler, King John (1199-1216), became a major factor in the collapse of the duchy.® By contrast, in 1102 Robert of Belléme’s castle of Bridgnorth surrendered to Henry I (1100-35) at the instance of the local inhabitants, angering the mercenaries in the garrison who felt their reputation had been sullied, compromising their chances of future employment. Henry, impressed by this, permitted them to go freely.?
This may have been an exceptional instance, and Henry I’s generosity was certainly unusual, but in general mercenaries seem to have given good value. King John of England was certainly convinced of their value. He demanded that his bailiffs in Normandy should guard all the booty of his mercenary leader, Lupescar, and later required that the Seneschal of Gascony should assist ‘our beloved and faithful Lupescar’ in all ways.'° Indeed, John’s preference for such men has made a considerable contribution to the bad press mercenaries have received. They were excoriated in Magna Carta as foreigners and the barons demanded that their expulsion from the realm be written into the document as a vital part of their agreement with John.'' The paradox of French-speaking barons who ruled English people condemning other Frenchmen as foreigners is remarkable. It is all the more paradoxical in the case of Robert of Béthune, who John had appointed as Constable of his army, because this man was from a notable Flemish family, and in his own right Lord of Béthune and advocate of St Vaast of Arras.’ However, the memory of the condemnations has stuck in the memory of English-speaking peoples for whom Magna Carta is a sacred text. Kelly Devries (43-60) is surely right to scorn nation as a criterion for identifying mercenaries.
In fact, Magna Carta is only one of the very particular circumstances which have contributed to the poor regard in which medieval mercenaries are held. The condemnation of 1179 seems to be truly remarkable. But in fact it did not merely single them out as perpetrators of horror because their employers, the nobility, were also condemned. Yet the decree of 1179 arose from the fact that Southern France was plagued by a terrible series of wars. The Plantagenet, Henry II, as duke of Aquitaine, had laid claim to the county of Toulouse as early as 1156, but this was rejected by the counts of ‘Toulouse. There followed what has been called “The Forty Years War’, really a series of conflicts, which dragged on until 1196. Inevitably, the kings of France took an interest in this dispute, and usually supported the counts of ‘Toulouse. This conflict, therefore, became enmeshed in the wider Angevin-Capetian rivalry which in the 1180s would severely affect the Berry, where Bourges was an important French royal centre.'? Moreover, the barons of Aquitaine did not enjoy the stern rule of their Angevin masters, and there were eight serious rebellions against Henry II and Richard in the period 1168—-93.'* Furthermore, the kings of Aragon wanted to assert their claim to Provence, the lands east of the Rhéne, and other parts of the south, against the counts of Toulouse. This resulted in a series of wars embroiling Provence, the Auvergne and the Languedoc which smouldered on in parallel with the Angevin-Capetian conflicts, particularly after 1166. It is hardly surprising that the kings of Aragon and the Angevins were commonly allies across this period.’ In fact a huge area of central and Southern France suffered from acute political fragmentation, and the absence of any dominant power created conditions which mercenaries and others could exploit to the full. Rather similar conditions prevailed in late medieval Italy. The collapse of the Empire in the thirteenth century, and the severe problems in such successor-states as Naples, here discussed by Guido Guerri dall’Oro (61-88), created the same kind of political fragmentation which could be exploited by mercenary leaders, foreign in the case of Hawkwood, local in the case of the Da Varano lords of Camerino considered here by John Law (89-104), to their own advantage.'® The notorious ill-fame of such condottiere bands is well-deserved. Leaders like Sir John Hawkwood changed sides at will, blackmailed cities and pillaged the countryside with unprecedented intensity, and all this has been brilliantly exposed by modern writers.'’ It is worth noting, however, that only a minority of such predators were foreign, and that it was the complex and bitter rivalries of small Italian states which provided mercenaries with their opportunities.
In less extreme circumstances, mercenary troops were a normal element in armies across the Middle Ages, hardly exciting comment. The articles in this volume speak clearly for the ubiquity of the mercenary in Europe at this time and for the wide variety of functions which they discharged. Much medieval warfare consisted in the building of fortifications and the conduct of sieges. This is the subject of Nicolas Prouteau’s paper (105-118) which examines the role of mercenaries in the warfare of the Middle East in the age of the crusades. The fact that men worked across the religious divide in such capacities indicates how complex relations were between the crusaders and their Muslim foes. If this is largely unknown territory, it has to be said also that naval warfare in the Middle Ages has not been very fully explored. John Pryor (119-42) has written extensively on this subject and here traces the careers of soldiers of fortune in the naval service of Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily (1265-85).
It is often supposed that mercenaries only became common components in armies from about AD 1000. Richer of Rheims provides an account of the battle of Conquerueil in 992 in which he refers to the Angevin army as consisting of Fulk of Anjou’s vassals and his conducticis.'* This is commonly cited as one of the earliest references to mercenary soldiers in medieval Europe. Richard Abels (143-66) broadly agrees with this time-scale, in that he connects the appearance of mercenaries in the late tenth century, at least in England, with the rise of a money economy which resulted in both the hire of such troops and direct payment being made to those who served out of obligation to a ruler. Bernard Bachrach (167-92), however, contends that in Roman and Merovingian times ‘there were groups of fighting men, perhaps we may call them companies, as well as individual fighting men, who were free to offer their services for hire and who were contracted to perform military duties for various types of remuneration’. Equally, Charles Bowlus (193-206) looks to an earlier date because he characterises the Magyars as mercenaries, who entered the service of various German factions, most notably in 954 when they served the rebels against Otto I, his son Liudolf of Swabia and son-in-law Conrad of Franconia, in the campaign which ultimately led to Otto’s great victory at the Lech 1.959,"
Thus, for the early medieval period this volume presents us with a major problem: when did mercenaries first appear? On closer examination we can see here also the elements of the discussion on mercenary identity, for many soldiers in these early armies were paid. As Abels says, ‘In this paper I will draw a distinction between, on the one hand, mercenaries, that is, soldiers who lacked political or social ties to those who employed them, and, on the other, salaried household men and paid expeditionary soldiers whose duty to serve arose, at least in part, from the demands of lordship.’ ‘This, of course, is the pragmatic definition of a mercenary which is implicit in the medieval distinction, already referred to, between those who fought only or primarily for pay, and those who fought for other reasons.
In this volume it is also explicitly used by Ifor Rowlands (207-230), who distinguishes between those who serve for money and those who have a particular relationship, personal or tenurial, with his commander. This pragmatic view commands widespread acceptance, but the difficulty lies in our sources and their limitations. Were the antrustiones, the armed followers of the great who were so important in Bachrach’s period, mercenaries in this sense, and when, if ever, did a purely cash relationship transform into something else? Were the Magyars mercenaries or allies? It is just this range of problems which Stephen Morillo (243-60) has set out to examine in a wide-ranging article which aims to create a consistent, cross-cultural typology or set of definitions of the varieties of paid and unpaid military service. The basis of the typology is a distribution field with two axes: one running from politically determined terms of service to economically determined ones; the second measuring the degree to which military personnel are embedded in the society they serve. ‘This is one of the few papers here to step outside the purely European sphere, and it provides us with a matrix against which to examine the problem on an international scale, but inevitably we still have to deal with the limitations of our sources.
The problem for the period before c. AD 1000 is scarcity of contemporary comment, and this continues to a degree, but thereafter impenetrability becomes a major element in the discussion. The term mercenarius 1s actually a very rare one in our sources. Geoffroy de Brueil de Vigeois was a monk of St Martial at Limoges who later became abbot of Vigeois (1170-84), to the south-east of Limoges in the modern department of Corréze. He came into close contact with mercenaries and was appalled by the destruction they wrought. But when he uses the blunt term mercenarios it is applied to churchmen corrupted by rich living. Immediately afterwards he lists the soldiers who afflicted the Aquitaine as ‘Primo Basculi, postmodum Teuthonici Flandrenses et, ut rustice loquar, Brabansons, Hannuyers, Asperes, Patler, Navar, Turlau, Vales, Roma, Cotarel, Catalans, Aragones’.*° The decree of Third Lateran of 1179 gives a comparable list ‘Brabantionibus et Aragonensibus, Navaris, Bascols, Coterellis et Triaverdinis’, while another source much interested in the sufferings of the south at this time calls the same people ‘Ruthariorum. Arragonensium, Basculorum, Brabanctonum et aliorum conductictorum’.!
Some of these names are regional designations for the places such soldiers came from, while others are generic terms. Brabancons (men of Brabant) found in all these lists, is much the commonest term used by twelfth-century chroniclers. Aragonensibus, Navaris, Bascolis and Hannuyers are, respectively, those from Aragon, Catalonia, the Basque lands and Hainaut. It is very evident that these are all divided or otherwise troubled lands. There are also, however, places mentioned in these lists which are very uncommon. Turlau could refer to Le Puy-Turlau (Périgord) or Turlau near the town of Curemonte (Corréze) but these seem unlikely, while Vales, Roma are obscure. Asperes poses difficulties. Geoffroy de Vigeois includes them in a list of people from the Netherlands, but goes on to mention Aragonese and others in the same breath. Asperen, in what is now Holland, is a possible place of origin, but so is Vallée d’Aspe (Pyrénées Atlantiques, région du Béarn). Alternatively this may be a generic term derived from the Latin asper, meaning rough (which perhaps could be rendered in English as ‘ruffians’) or an allusion to the aspertolus, a comm. Obvious generic terms are Rutharu, derived from Rupta or Ruta, meaning men of the companies, analogous to routiers, conducticu and coterelles, and all could perhaps be rendered as gangsters or cut-throats in English. Palearu is another generic term connected with paleare meaning a stack of straw, and could be rendered as rough-sleepers. Geoffroy de Vigeois explicitly tells us that he reserves this term for a particular group of men from very diverse origins sent to the Limousin by Philip of France. Triaverdinis, used in the list given by Canon 27, is a very rare word which Ducange thinks may be connected with Tralemello meaning thrice-armoured. All these are clearly pejorative terms, and one wonders why the simple mercenary is avoided. Perhaps Geoffroy de Vigeois provides a clue—that it had ecclesiastical overtones.
But there was certainly another very important reason for avoiding the blunt term mercenary. By the twelfth century it is apparent that most men serving as soldiers were paid. At the very top of society great magnates served kings of their superiors because they had an obligation to do so, arising from personal or tenurial relationships. Their relationship with the commander was essentially political, but lesser men needed funding because military service was costly. Many of these were gentle persons, and they could not be called mercenaries. And there is no shortage of evidence of paid fighting men. Eljas Oksanen (261-74) has studied the treaties between the Count of Flanders and the English kings in the twelfth century. They provide for a pension to the counts in return for an obligation to raise equites for English service on demand. Although we do not know that any of these were ever implemented, Oksanen concludes that the availability of such troops was a useful basis for soldering a political relationship between the two lands. But it is difficult to call the actual soldiers mercenaries.
A cavalryman needs a long training to be useful. Moreover, the daily pay of cavalrymen was substantial, but not so high as to provide easily for the rapid purchase of horse, armour and equipment, so it is a reasonable inference that these mounted soldiers were drawn from knightly families who provided the equipment. The term stipendiari is frequently used in twelfth century documents to describe soldiers in Europe and elsewhere, and it seems to be another euphemism, avoiding the blunter mercenari. In the Latin Kinedom of Jerusalem it is used particularly frequently, and normally it is interpreted as meaning holders of money-fiefs. However, Alan Murray (275-86) suggests that these cash-grants would have been an entirely appropriate way to pay hired men, though he leaves open the question as to whether we should regard them as mercenaries. Similarly, Ifor Rowlands (207-30) has examined the royal records of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and concluded that, at a much humbler level, the paid troops recorded in them and raised from the royal lands were not mercenaries in that their service arose from obligation as well as simple payment. Similarly, the urban militias England and Germany, as David Bachrach shows (231-42), might be paid for their services, but they were not mercenary in any sense. The English served under the direction of the monarchy, while the Germans were entirely the instruments of their cities.
Laura Napran’s paper (287-300) examines the chronicle of Gilbert of Mons, Chancellor of the Count of Hainaut who was very familiar with mercenaries and paid men and regarded the former as necessary to the effective military endeavours of the counts of Hainaut. His chronicle provides evidence of the social standing and costs of mercenaries, while an analysis of vocabulary demonstrates a perceptual difference between professional mercenaries and nobles who received payment as expenses. While the use of paid men was regarded as a sign of power, a ‘paid’ lord was considered by Gilbert to be degraded.” David Crouch (15-32) has reached much the same conclusion by a rather different route. His paper asks what difference was there between Mercadier, Richard’s great mercenary leader, and the young William Marshal and why was William so hostile to his contemporary and fellow-servant of the crown? Both served for money and reward. The answer, Crouch suggests, lies in the fact that at this very time aristocracy was becoming defined and, thereby, exclusive. “The generation of William Marshal was the one in which social class took a step towards becoming self-consciously hierarchical.’ All this tends to reinforce the notion that payment was a sensitive subject in medieval armies and that its form and perhaps, frequency had considerable impact on perceptions of status.
A much larger body of contemporary source material has survived from the later Middle Ages than from the period before. Moreover, the language is much more explicit, and, in the case of royal records, much more informative and detailed. Adrian Bell (301-316) has explored this by taking the muster rolls of two English expeditionary armies to France in 1387 and 1388 and comparing them with other material to reconstruct the careers of men as soldiers and mercenaries fighting in Italy. Including no less than six who served in these campaigns are also found on the strength of the notorious ‘White Company’ in Italy. Bell shows that the ability to fight in the latest style was a profitable commodity, and we know from the example of Hawkwood that there were fortunes to be made in Italy. Spencer Smith (317-30) has reaffirmed this, revealing in his investigation of the archaeology of the manor house of 'Tatsfield, Surrey how well its one time owner, Owain Lawgoch, a mercenary of Welsh princely descent, had done. But fighting in other lands did more than merely profit proficient (and lucky) soldiers. It also spread new fighting techniques and methods. The incessant wars in France spilled over into Spain as both sides sought Hispanic allies. This brought mercenary soldiers into Spanish affairs in large numbers, with the result that, as Carlos Andrés Gonzalez Paz (331-44) remarks, “The fourteenth-century Spanish Civil War cannot be understood without the analysis of the role that the English (and Welsh) or French mercenaries troops played in this armed confrontation. Those mercenary troops, supporting both Pedro I of Castile and his stepbrother Enrique of Trastamara, introduced into the Iberian Peninsula a new way of waging war, which was rather different from the old standards of the chivalry.’
Sven Ekdahl (345-62) has explored another dimension of the mercenary experience in the later Middle Ages, their use by the ‘Teutonic Order during the ‘Great War’ with Poland-Lithuania, 1409-11, whose best known event was the battle of ‘Tannenberg on 15 July 1410. As well as being interesting in itself, a passage in his article throws up the very question—is there a pure mercenary? During the battle of ‘Tannenberg, Luppold von Kockritz, a knight from Meissen, died attempting to kill the Polish king. He was a close friend of the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, Ulrich von Jungingen. In a letter, Luppold recorded that many aristocratic friends would fight the Lithuanians, who were perceived as pagans, on behalf of the Order, but would demand payment in the case of war against the Christian Poles. This raises the issue of identity again, for it suggests that those who fought for money could also be moved by ideological consideration. It is also raised by the two contributions to this volume which reach into what is generally called the early modern period.
Muriosa Prendergast (363-82) discusses the role of Scottish mercenaries in Irish affairs. In a military sense these troops brough a more systematic and effective style of war to Ireland where, hitherto, relative poverty had meant that fighting mainly consisted of raids. At first these mercenaries seem to have been recruited on a limited basis and they became assimilated to Irish political structures. But in the second half of the sixteenth century the supply of Scottish mercenaries became highly political because it gave the opportunity for the Scottish magnates providing them to become powers in their own right in Ireland. Thus the cash nexus with the Irish employers proved less important for these men than the political relationship with their lords. ‘The effect of this demand for mercenary service brought political intervention and new political structures, destabilizing Gaelic Ireland. In the seventeenth century, as Ciaran Og O'Reilly (383-93) shows, Ireland exported mercenaries who served in a vast number of armies in continental Europe. But though we tend to refer to such men, including the famous ‘Wild Geese’, as mercenaries, in reality they would only serve Catholic powers, in whose causes they were prepared, literally, to fight unto death. But is it proper to call somebody who 1s ideologically motivated a mercenary?
The papers in this volume reveal how common mercenaries were in Europe and even elsewhere in the Middle Ages. They also point to their impact on the conduct of war. English-speaking people, in particular, tend to regard foreigner and mercenary as synonymous because of Magna Carta. But this was clearly a nonsense because the conflicts between the kings of England and France had something of the character of a civil war between members of an international French aristocracy. The Hundred Years War is often seen as having promoted a sense of nationality on both sides of the channel, but Jean le Bel was a Hainaulter serving Edward III (1326-77) who saw nothing remarkable in this or in Edward’s claim to rule what we call France. Perhaps more importantly these papers address the question of what kind of people mercenaries were. The veiled language reveals how sensitive the subject of payment for military activity was for a very long time. The key to understanding the mercenary in the period after AD 1000, and perhaps even before, is to grasp how important war was to the European upper class. It was a means of enforcing and extending their power and defending it from their rivals. The moral justification of their economic, social and political dominance was their role as the defenders of church and society. Although aristocrats claimed a monopoly of war, they could not fulfil this function on their own, and they recruited privileged followers, the chevaliers or knights, who were their bully-boys and enforcers. Some of these held land of their patrons, while others were paid men who might aspire to such status. Both groups conceived of themselves as the honourable followers of the great. ‘They lived with them in and around castles, fought with much the same equipment and enjoyed a common lifestyle. There seem always to have been plenty of aspirants to this way of life who could be recruited at need, as the Treaty of Dover and its successor agreements suggest. Thus, when a great man went to war he was supported by his core followers, many of them related, augmented by rather similar people hired for the occasion. But such honourable men could not be called mercenaries. And war on any scale demanded many more troops and of different kinds.
Although the kingdoms of Medieval Europe reserved the right to call all men to arms in times of invasion, arming the general population was not something which the elites encouraged. We do not know precisely how infantry were recruited, but as the money economy of Europe became ever more vigorous, from the end of the tenth century, we hear more and more of paid men, and they represented a major element in almost all armies by the mid-twelfth century. We may wonder that anyone wanted the life of a soldier, but peasants dragged out an existence which was, in the famous phrase, ‘nasty, brutish and short’, and there were always chancers in village communities. It can be no accident that regional designations like ‘Brabanter’ suggest that such people came from troubled frontier areas where disturbance must have increased the numbers of willing recruits. We do not know how ‘regular’ such soldiers were. All armies had short lives, so we can only assume these people went back to their villages and the rustic way of life between campaigns. If anybody was a pure mercenary, serving only for pay and available to anyone with the means, it was these routiers, and this undoubtedly lies behind the disdain in which they were held. But they were not called mercenaries, because that meant ‘hireling’ and would have been a powerful reminder that almost all soldiers, of whatever status, were paid.
Thus, there were very strong social and cultural reasons for a framework of language which hides much reality from us. Roger of Sicily, of the Hauteville family who conquered South Italy in the eleventh century, was happy to tell his family historian to recollect that once he lived as a brigand.* But in the twelfth century the European nobility were rather more fussy, as David Crouch says, about how it presented itself and anxious to stand aloof from others. Hence care was taken to distance the ‘proper soldiers’, the aristocrats and their dependents, from others who fought. Somewhere in that grey and uncertain gap a man became a mercenary, but quite where the change took place is uncertain. In a world where a landed knight might serve both as a vassal and as a paid man, this is hardly surprising. By the later middle ages, however, armies had become much more professional and records are much more plentiful. As a result the mercenary appears as a distinct and identifiable figure. But at this very time other ideological forces appear as motivating forces. John Hawkwood was an entrepreneur of war, but he often represented the interests of the English government in Italy. The indentured soldiers raised by the English captains in the ‘Hundred Years War’ resemble very closely the contracted companies of mercenaries who devastated fourteenth-century Italy, and they often ignored official orders and campaigned for themselves in just the same brutal way. Yet they were different, and ultimately responsive to an ideology of what we call nationalism. And as Europe divided over religion in the sixteenth century Protestantism and Catholicism exercised powerful influences over even the most self-serving of soldiers.
What this conference served to show was the complexity of the military profession in Medieval Europe. The exigencies of a limited agricultural economy prohibited the creation of regular armies. Shortterm armies were made up of many different kinds of people enjoying complicated relationships with their commanders. We may talk of the army of this king or that, but most soldiers probably saw themselves as being the men of a whole host of lesser captains and lords. The greater army was a composite of retinues and hirelings, and though the overall commander’s money held the whole thing together like a cement, it was less a monolith than a network of complicated relationships. In these circumstances we might do well to regard mercenary as a term of art, a paradigm to which some approximated more than others, but which, in itself, had little contemporary reality.
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