FranciaRecensio 2015/4 Frühe Neuzeit – Revolution – Empire (1500–1815) Philippe Rogger, Benjamin Hitz (Hg.), Söldnerlandschaften. Frühneuzeitliche Gewaltmärkte im Vergleich, Berlin (Duncker & Humblot) 2014, 272 S., zahlr. Tab., Abb. (Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung. Beiheft, 49), ISBN 9783428 144204, EUR 39,90 rezensiert von/compte rendu rédigé par David Parrott, Oxford A significant theme in the study of early modern military history over the last decade has been the attention payed to the role of private enterprise, military entrepreneurship and military contracting. Much of this work has been focused on the identities and operations of those in the private sector who recruited, equipped, supplied and operated armies and navies on behalf of state actors. As a result, we know a lot more about the officerproprietors, the merchantconsortia and the financiers who made private military organization viable and attractive to rulers and their administrators. Much less systematically explored however is the »labour force« recruited and deployed in these military operations. The subject received attention in Fritz Redlich’s masterpiece, »The German Military Enterpriser and his Work Force« (Wiesbaden, 1964), but since then there has been little systematic exploration of the practicalities of recruitment and military service: who was recruited; from where; how was military service perceived by local communities and made attractive by military entrepreneurs? The work of Peter Burschel in the 1990’s1 offered an invaluable point d’appui for subsequent research, and contributed a direct challenge to traditional misconceptions about the assumed economic and social marginality of soldiers recruited by enterprisers, and the regional homogeneity of, for example, units of Landsknechte. Recruitment and military employment have thus been in the historical spotlight, and the results can be seen in a number of books recently emerging from collective research projects – for example, the notable volume »Fighting for a Living«, edited by ErikJan Zürcher2., which examines the global characteristics of military employment from the late middle ages to the present. In contrast, the present volume under review by Rogger and Hitz is more confined in both geographical and chronological terms, but its particular focus on what the editors identify as the »spacial turn« in recent historical study addresses some distinctive and wellfocused questions. The essential concern is with the establishment, definition and analysis of Söldnerlandschaften in providing a »market for force« – a recruiting ground (in both spacial and cultural senses) for raising soldiers. The problem of English translation is twofold: avoiding the description of paid soldiers as »mercenaries«, with all the pejorative Peter Burschel, Söldner im Nordwestdeutschland des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. Sozialgeschichtliche Studien, Göttingen 1994. 1 2 ErikJan Zürcher, Fighting for a Living. A Comparative History of Military Labour, 1500–2000, Amsterdam 2014. Lizenzhinweis: Dieser Beitrag unterliegt der CreativeCommonsLizenz NamensnennungKeine kommerzielle NutzungKeine Bearbeitung (CCBYNCND), darf also unter diesen Bedingungen elektronisch benutzt, übermittelt, ausgedruckt und zum Download bereitgestellt werden. Den Text der Lizenz erreichen Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ and particularist baggage carried by that term, and accepting that »landscape« – though having some figurative weight, is less usefully ambivalent than the German Landschaft. This semantic discussion is not, however, simply the preoccupation of an English reviewer, but is central to the theme of the book, and the workshop on this theme held in Berne in 2012 from which the essays emerge. For Landschaft becomes an extraordinarily malleable and useful concept when seeking to explore issues such as geography, ethnicity, militarycultural traditions, or the simple practicalities of recruitment and retention of troops. And it is a tribute to the focus that the editors brought to bear on the discussion that although five of the authors appear in another recent volume of essays edited by Stig Förster, Christian Jansen, Günther Kronenbitter, »Rückkehr der Condottieri? Krieg und Militär zwischen staatlichem Monopol und Privatisierung3, their chapters here are certainly not a repetition of the broader explorations of the workings of military entrepreneurship and privatization offered in »Rückkehr«. The excellent editors’ introduction sets out the terms of the discussion, pointing out that studies of early modern military organization have been dominated by the twin distortions of both national and statist historical traditions, and by the assumption that ethnicity was the defining feature of military recruitment and operational effectiveness. The former misconception has already come under sustained attack through numerous studies focusing on the organizational implications of military enterprise, and of contracting and financing war through international networks. The latter notion of ethnicity as a major driving force in military recruitment is one of the main targets of the essays in this volume. Yet while privatized military recruitment would appear to reflect the existence of substantial international markets for soldiers, the question remains why certain areas – in a literal sense here, Landschaften – were consistently more likely to produce large numbers of recruits, or why these recruits were more highly valued by those assembling military units? As Uwe Tresp explores in his chapter, why did Bohemia have the preeminent reputation as a Söldnerlandschaft in the 15th century, but progressively lose that reputation to other areas in subsequent centuries? In some cases, as Horst Carl demonstrates, it does appear that a distinctive local and »exotic« character provides an ethnic justification for seeking to recruit. He shows this with the Irish (actually Scots) whose recruitment by Gustavus Adolphus in the early 1630’s was heavily publicized, or the Croat light cavalry recruited into the Habsburg armies, while Marian Füssel’s essay takes the discussion of exoticism into the 18th century with the casestudies of Pandours, Cossacks and Sepoys (the last group perhaps fitting somewhat awkwardly into the discussion). Ethnic distinctiveness could encourage unit coherence in the face of a culturally and linguistically unfamiliar external environment: this could bring the considerable advantages of greater loyalty and lower desertion rates, and the ambiguous benefits of greater ferocity and an intimidating reputation in the eyes of civilians and enemy soldiers. Stig Förster, Christian Jansen, Günther Kronenbitter (ed.), Rückkehr der Condottieri? Krieg und Militär zwischen staatlichem Monopol und Privatisierung, Paderborn 2010 (Krieg in der Geschichte, 57). 3 Lizenzhinweis: Dieser Beitrag unterliegt der CreativeCommonsLizenz NamensnennungKeine kommerzielle NutzungKeine Bearbeitung (CCBYNCND), darf also unter diesen Bedingungen elektronisch benutzt, übermittelt, ausgedruckt und zum Download bereitgestellt werden. Den Text der Lizenz erreichen Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Yet as Carl and a number of other contributors point out, the notion that these were homogenous units of troops, motivated by a distinct geographical, linguistic, cultural or confessional identity is pure myth: even when the troops were all recruited from the same region, wastage and replacement rapidly infused everhigher proportions of broadlydefined »professional« soldiers or raw recruits into the units, which became in the broadest sense acculturated. Benjamin Hitz demonstrates in his study of the Canton of Luzern that Swiss regiments contained everincreasing proportions of nonSwiss soldiers, and even amongst the Swiss the other ranks were predominantly drawn from the rural areas, whereas the officers at all levels were more likely to come from a culturally separate urban environment. Stefan Xenakis, in his essay on the Landsknechte of the early 16th century, gets to the heart of this issue by suggesting that »Landsknecht« was in effect a recognized brandname, denoting soldiers whose military skills, group cohesion and selfidentity could recommend itself across the »market for force« of the 16thcentury world. This, as Xenakis demonstrates, could come at a high price in that it was based upon a corporate identity so strong that it could cut right across the military or political interests of the authorities who were hiring the Landsknechte. The weighty and characteristically wideranging essay on recruitment in South Germany by Reinhard Baumann points in similar directions, while emphasizing that the territory as a whole was a Landschaft in another respect: it combined the opportunities for the recruitment of highquality soldiers with the attendant mechanisms to provide for their equipment and supply, and for the financing of the recruitment operation from regional banking houses and other resources. As with the example of the Swiss confederation in the essays by Michael Jucker and Hitz, the appeal of these areas to those carrying out recruitment was also the oversight and support of local and territorial authorities, who were themselves frequently substantial stakeholders in military enterprise and recognized its role in the local economy. The working relationship between the military enterprisers and the authorities was not always easy, as Jean Steinauer demonstrates in looking at the conflicts between leading enterprisers and the citystate authorities in Fribourg, yet disputes were underpinned by the patricians’ realization that the export of soldiers played a vital role in the economy of the state, and the benefits of being seen as an attractive and reliable source of recruits tended to override specific conflicts. These examples, in their different ways, all stress the multivalent character of early modern military landscapes/environments and the various factors which situated them in the market for force. Tresp’s essay attempts explicitly to identify the characteristics of the Söldnerlandschaft in Bohemia under eight categories, but from the condottieri in late fourteenthcentury Italy through to the Hessian mercenaries in the American War of Independence, the volume engagingly explores aspects of this important theme less systematically but with considerable comparative insight. The military landscape of early modern Europe will certainly be the subject of further exploration . Lizenzhinweis: Dieser Beitrag unterliegt der CreativeCommonsLizenz NamensnennungKeine kommerzielle NutzungKeine Bearbeitung (CCBYNCND), darf also unter diesen Bedingungen elektronisch benutzt, übermittelt, ausgedruckt und zum Download bereitgestellt werden. Den Text der Lizenz erreichen Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
© Copyright 2024 ExpyDoc
