It would be wrong to categorize all paid troops as mercenaries in the medieval period. Pay was widely used, and many who served under some form of obligation were paid to fight. There were also true mercenaries, professional soldiers, who were prepared to serve under any master. Their reliability was sometimes suspect but their skill was rarely in doubt. They were the product of periods of endemic warfare.
In the 11th and 12th centuries the Low Countries were a prime recruiting ground for mercenary troops, or routiers. William ‘the Conqueror’ hired large numbers when invasion was threatened from Scandinavia in 1085. Robert de Bellême used mercenaries when he rebelled at the start of Henry I's reign. The civil war in Stephen's reign in England provided employment for many such men, ‘utterly steeped in craft and treachery’, who used castles as bases from which to terrorize the countryside. William of Ypres, illegitimate son of the Count of Flanders, brought many with him when he fought for Stephen. Many of the evils of the Anarchy were blamed on the activities of mercenaries. Their expulsion from England was an important element in the restoration of order under Henry II. ‘They seemed to disappear in a moment, like phantoms.’
Mercenaries from the Low Countries found employment easy to obtain in the second half of the 12th century. The German Emperor Frederick ‘Barbarossa’ hired many in 1166 for his invasion of Italy. Flemings and Brabançons were employed by Henry II of England during the rebellion of 1172-3, and were hired again by Barbarossa in 1176. Southern France and Spain were also significant recruiting grounds. Richard ‘the Lionheart’, John of England, and Philip II of France all took on mercenaries, under such leaders as the Provençals Mercadier and Lupescar. King John in particular relied extensively on mercenary troops. In 1210 he had at least 65 knights from the Low Countries with him on his Irish campaign, while a muster list from 1215 names 375 foreign knights in the king's service. John had substantial financial resources and was prepared to offer significant rewards. The Spaniard Martin Algais, for example, prospered from service in John's cause. His booty was protected, his merchants excused payment of customs, and he became seneschal of Gascony and Périgord.
Mercenary troops depended on their reputation as well as their skill for their livelihood. At Robert de Bellême's castle at Bridgnorth in 1102, his mercenaries objected strongly to a capitulation accepted by the local men; rather than punish them for their refusal to make terms, Henry I acknowledged that they had acted properly and allowed them to depart with their horses and arms. If they were not paid, however, mercenaries could prove disobliging, as the future Henry II discovered on his first expedition to England in 1147, when the troops he took with him failed him and fled.
The mercenaries comprised soldiers of very different types. Some were knights, but the majority were foot soldiers. The weapon that made them especially feared was the crossbow. The routiers were hated not simply because of their skill in war, but also for their cruelty and lack of respect for many of the conventions of a Christian society. They were ‘shamelessly guilty of murder and pillage and various abominations’. Many of them were younger sons, some illegitimate, impoverished figures on the fringes of society. They were condemned in the Third Lateran Council of 1179, but did not in the end pose the threat to the fabric of society that many considered them to be. Nevertheless, in 1215 Magna Carta demanded the expulsion of the mercenaries from England, and after the end of the civil war in 1217 few remained in the land.
Mercenaries continued to find employment in the 13th century, but not on the scale of the previous century. In Italy the wealthier cities began to stiffen their militia forces with hired professional soldiers. In 1277 Florence was even employing a hundred English troops. German mercenaries were brought south through the presence of the German Hohenstaufen dynasty in southern Italy and Sicily. It was not until the 14th century that the great mercenary companies emerged, dominating warfare above all in Italy and the Levant.
The first, and in some ways the most remarkable, of these companies was the Catalan Grand Company, formed by veterans of the wars of the Sicilian vespers, and led by Roger of Flor. It was hired by the Byzantine Emperor Andronicus II in 1302, and operated in Greece where it achieved major successes. The Company remained together after Roger's murder in 1305. It had formal statutes, and possessed its own seal. Its success was assured after it defeated the Duke of Athens at the battle of Kephissos in 1311, and the Catalans remained dominant in Greece until the 1380s. In Italy in 1339 the Company of St George, formed of Swiss, Germans, and Italians, came close to defeating Milan. The Great Company, founded in 1349 by Werner of Urslingen, had a continued existence under several leaders until 1363. Large profits were made from booty and ransom, and by exacting protection money from the cities. Even defeat at the hands of Florence did not destroy a formidable force. The Anglo-French conflict of the Hundred Years War, which opened in 1337, offered some good opportunities for mercenaries further north. The Hainaulter Walter Mauny did well serving Edward III, as did others from the Low Countries such as Eustace d'Aubrichecourt. The peace between England and France made at Brétigny in 1360 released many experienced soldiers onto the mercenary market. D'Aubrichecourt chose to enter the service of the king of Navarre, and continued to fight in France. He was accused by his former master Edward III of ‘seizing, robbing and ransoming the people, burning and destroying buildings, violating and ravishing widows, virgins and other women’.
Italy, not France, was the prime haunt of those who sold their military services in the 14th century. The celebrated White Company, largely formed of veterans of Anglo-French warfare, began its operations in Italy in 1361, and defeated the Great Company two years later. The company took its name from the ‘white’, or polished metal, armour its members wore, and its striking successes were in part due to use of the tactics developed by the English in France under Edward III. Dismounted men-at-arms fought with archers equipped with longbows in support. The first leader of the White Company was a German, Albert Sterz, but its most notable commander was the English knight, Sir John Hawkwood, one of the most notable of the foreign mercenaries operating in Italy. A highly professional and formidable soldier, he built up a great reputation, largely in Florentine service. The companies were international in composition, but by the late 14th century Italians were increasingly coming to the fore.
Alberigo de Barbiano who established a new Company of St George in the late 1370s is often taken as the first of the Italian condottieri. This term derived from the contracts, or condotte, which the companies made with the Italian cities. These set out the number of troops to be provided for a given period, and the payment due. Increasingly, the individual condottiere came to dominate Italian warfare, rather than the corporate great companies. Some were great men. Bartolomeo Colleoni, who commanded the Venetian armies from 1455 to 1475, was not only a formidable soldier, but also a man of culture, an important patron of art and sculpture. There was an obvious relationship between the employment of mercenaries and the power of states to raise money. It was in cash that mercenaries wished to be paid, and it was no coincidence that new forms of taxation were introduced in England in the late 12th and early 13th centuries at a time when mercenaries were extensively used. The widespread use of mercenaries in later medieval Italy was made possible by the commercial wealth of the cities.
Mercenaries thrived in periods of endemic warfare and in regions where political authority was relatively dispersed. They played a very significant role in medieval warfare. The employment of such men, tough and reliable (as long as they were paid), usually conferred a distinct advantage in war on a ruler or a city, which outweighed the unpopularity that resulted from the way in which they might disregard some of the conventions of war. They were international, and helped to spread advances and changes in military technique from region to region, most notably by introducing the methods used by the English in the Hundred Years War into Italy. Above all, the medieval mercenaries made war a profession.
Bibliography
- Contamine, P., War in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1984).
- Mallett, M., Mercenaries and their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (London, 1974).
- Prestwich, M. C., Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages: The English Experience (London, 1996)
— Michael Prestwich
