The very epitome of the 16th-century military freebooter and vagabond, the landsknecht was rightly feared wherever he went. Their garish, ripped, and rakishly padded costume, and improbably large weaponry, meant that the landsknechts presented an awe-inspiring sight to friend and foe alike. An unwholesome appetite for plunder and strong drink, and blood-curdling cries of ‘Hut dich Bauer, ich komm’, made them feared by the civilian population in the regions where they campaigned. And indeed they fought in almost every campaign in every region of Europe from 1486 to their decline at the end of the 16th century.
Originally, they had been raised by the Emperor Maximilian, who had no army of his own, as a cheap and efficient way of raising troops by contract with individual mercenary captains. However, having taken up a career of military entrepreneurship, the captains of the landsknecht bands found that the emperor's wages were insufficient and infrequent, and rapidly cast about for the opportunity to serve elsewhere. They were not short of attractive offers, and despite the fact that they were prohibited from fighting against the emperor, many did. The French hired the infamous landsknecht Black Band for service at Pavia in 1525, where it was cut down to a man.
The landsknechts were at times truculent and untrustworthy employees, they were prone to strike for higher pay at the most inopportune moments, and often embarked on escapades of private enterprise like the sack of Rome in 1526. But if well provisioned with gold, food, and drink, they could perform useful service, and in the 1550s a good half of the French infantry was landsknecht in origin. The landsknecht Capt Empser had already shown his loyalty to a foreign flag under Foix at Ravenna in 1512, where he ignored a letter from the emperor recalling him and his company from French service and went to glory and a better life hereafter for his employer.
The captains of the landsknecht bands would recruit in northern Germany and the Low Countries, offering promises of gold and plunder to prospective recruits. Each candidate was expected to provide his own weapons and armour and to prove his fitness by jumping a stand of three pikes or halberds before his name was entered in the roll. The landsknecht companies were mainly pike-armed and supposed to be about 400 strong, including about 100 Doppelsöldener (double pay men) who were daredevils armed with close combat weapons such as 6 foot (1.82 metre) two-handed swords, and who would rush into the attack ahead of the main body in order to break up the enemy formation. Between 25 and 50 of the company would be Schützen armed with crossbow or arquebus who skirmished ahead of the pikes. Between ten and eighteen companies made a regiment, which would combine with three other regiments to form a massive phalanx, fronted by the men with the best armour. There was also a Blutfahnen (Blood flag) of suicide troops that could sally out of the block to take a strong enemy position, or disrupt a particularly stubborn enemy formation.
The landsknechts' deadly enemies were the Swiss, and when German fought Swiss no quarter was given or expected—the ‘Bad war’. Most contemporaries rated the landsknechts as inferior to the Swiss, but considered them the equal of the Spanish foot, and definitely superior to any other infantry in Europe.
— Toby McLeod
