Cover photo: Swiss and Landsknecht soldiers engage in the exceptionally-fierce hand to hand combat known as “bad war.” The long spear shafts are their pikes, which became awkward to handle if the push of pike became too disorganized. In that case, halberds and swords became the deadliest weapons. Engraving by the German-Swiss painter and printmaker Hans Holbein the Younger, a significant contributor to the history of book design. Albertina, Vienna.

Text by Manolis Chatzimanolis

In 1477, the well-equipped army of the Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, consisting of longbowmen, gendarmes, and firearms, was crushed at Nancy by a force of Swiss pikemen, with the duke himself falling slain from numerous halberd blows. The catastrophic defeat of what was considered to be the strongest army in Western Europe at the time by a force of mountainous rural men deeply impressed the European aristocracy, especially Prince Maximilian, the successor to the German Emperor Frederick III (1452-1493).

Deeply influenced by the victories of the Swiss during the Burgundian Wars (1476-1477) and having inherited territories in Flanders, Luxembourg, and Burgundy as the son-in-law of the deceased duke, Maximilian soon found himself in need of defending his new possessions against the French King Louis XI (1461-1483). Indeed, in the Battle of Guinegate on August 7, 1479, Maximilian’s Flemish pikemen defeated the French, convincing the future German Emperor that the dominance of heavily armored knights on the battlefield had now been succeeded by the supremacy of pike and disciplined, stubborn infantrymen who wielded them.

With the aim of creating a permanent professional army that would fight according to the standards of the Swiss pikemen, Maximilian proceeded with extensive recruitment of men from the Rhineland, Alsace, Upper Germany, Switzerland, and the Low Countries, and hired Swiss veterans to train them. By 1486, the year of his election as King of Germany, he already had at his disposal two formations of 3-4,000 men each (gevierthaufen = square masses), which were trained in Bruges, while by 1488 a third one was formed in Friesland, which was named the “Black Guard” and soon gained the status of an elite unit, serving for 12 years in the Low Countries, on the border with Denmark, and on the shores of the North Sea. In 1490, another army was formed in the East to fight in Bohemia and Hungary against the Ottomans.

In order to instill a sense of unity among the men and the aristocrats, who were primarily their officers, Maximilian encouraged his officers to advance and fight on foot among their soldiers, while to instill the new martial ethos in his knights, he introduced infantry combat competitions in the tournaments held. Indeed, he himself often fought in the ranks of his pikemen, triumphantly entering the city of Ghent at the head of his formation on July 7, 1485. Having thus acquired a strong unit spirit, akin to that of the Swiss “Reislaufer,” the German Landsknechts (Landsknechte = servants of the country) had just been born.

Maintaining a permanent army in the 15th century, of course, was neither an easy nor a cheap matter. As the newly elected German king, Maximilian I (1486-1519) urgently needed new revenues, and these presupposed reforms to strengthen central royal authority against the semi-autonomous local duchies that constituted the German Empire. In the Imperial Diet of Worms in 1495, and in order to find funding for the Italian campaign that the new ruler was preparing, the German electors approved a new, “imperial” tax.

Always suspicious of imperial authority, the Swiss, who had already concluded a defensive alliance with the Duchy of Bavaria in 1491, reacted by including King Charles VIII of France in this treaty in 1495. With Maximilian, on the other hand, being equally determined to impose imperial reform on the Swiss, war broke out between the Empire and the Swiss Confederation in 1499. This conflict, known as the Swabian War (January-September 1499), ended in a proud victory for the Swiss and marked the beginning of an unrelenting enmity between the humiliated Landsknechts and the despised “chueschweizer” (loosely translated as “cowhides from Schwyz”, one of the original cantons of the Confederation from which the whole country eventually took its international name, Switzerland), which would last throughout the 16th century.

The reorganization of the Imperial troops would henceforth be undertaken by Field Marshal Georg von Frundsberg, also known as the “Father” of the Landsknechte (Vater der Landsknechte). Under his leadership, the German halberdiers acquired a new, strictly organized hierarchy, while systems of recruitment, administrative care, and their legal code, the so-called “Articles of War,” were institutionalized, to which all Landsknechte were subject from the moment of their recruitment. Additionally, at the dawn of the new century, portable firearms were introduced into their ranks, which began to gain increasing importance on the battlefield.

With the German Empire at that time essentially being nothing more than a confederation of duchies and city-states without a centrally organized conscription system, the recruitment of Landsknechte was undertaken by trusted recruiters/commanders (obrists) upon Commission (Bestallungbrief). After the terms of recruitment, soldiers’ salaries, the size of the regiment, and the duration of military service (usually 3 to 6 months) were determined with the characteristic German methodicalness, the commander and his staff (usually up to 22 officers) undertook the recruitment of men to staff their regiment (gevierthauf).

The process, over time, took on an almost ceremonial character: after the captains of the forming regiment gathered veterans and recruits from various “gathering places” throughout the territory (usually a city or village with which they had personal connections), ceremonially striking drums to announce their arrival and reading aloud the Commission, they would then give instructions for assembly and inspection at a predetermined time and place (usually within a month). When the day of enlistment arrived, the recruits gathered at the agreed-upon location and, after inspection and assessment (each recruit was required to bring his own arms and be relatively fit to endure the hardships of a campaign), were integrated into their chosen companies. Subsequently, after the commander read them the Articles of War (a set of military rules which soldiers were obliged to follow faithfully, and violators were punished with penalties ranging from beatings to death depending on the severity of the offense), the recruits swore “to serve the Emperor well and to obey their superiors without objection and delay” and received their first pay (sold).

Each regiment (gevierthauf) was a deep square formation composed of approximately 10 companies (“fahnlein” = lit. “banners” of 300-500 men). Each company consisted of halberdiers and alebardiers. Selected doppelsoldner, armored veterans equipped with halberds or flamberges, were positioned in the front ranks of battle (rottmeister) and received double the pay of a common soldier. At the head of the company was a captain, appointed by the commander, who was accompanied by a lieutenant and the standard-bearer of the company. Each company also had a chief sergeant (feldweibel), selected by the commander from among the men of the company for his experience, reliability, and bravery, to maintain battle order. Subordinates to the chief sergeant were usually two lieutenants (gemeinweibel) armed with alebardes, who were positioned at the two ends of the front rank.

In a typical company of 400 men, with a width of 20 rows (rotten) and a depth of 20 ranks (glieder), each of the 20 doppelsoldner rottmeisters led 20 men, while the ranks of the subaltern officers were supplemented by the sergeants, the fuhrer (a kind of attorney who defended the men of the company in the regiment’s court-martial), and the fourier who represented the interests of the company to the camp commander. All subordinate officers from the rank of lieutenant down were elected by the soldiers with a vote for a term of one month.

As conflicts between opposing units of halberdiers were extremely deadly, some regiments included a “lost troop” (“verlorene haufen“), typically manned by convicts or prisoners. These men, usually equipped with heavy armor and two-handed swords (Zweihänder or Doppelhänder), undertook the difficult task of breaching the enemy’s pike square wall. Organic units of crossbowmen had the missions of harassing the enemy with arrows and providing cover for the regiment’s movement or advance through difficult terrain. With the incorporation of portable firearms into European armies, crossbows were massively replaced by arquebuses from 1522 onwards, and later by muskets.

At the higher echelons, the colonel (obrist) was surrounded by a plethora of officers, with the most important being the camp marshal (quartiermeister), the head of provisions (proviantmeister), the military judge (schultheiss), the provost (provost), the watch commander (watchmeister, responsible for the camp’s security and supply), the chief campaign doctor (feldarzt), and the treasurer (pfennigmeister). As organized logistics in the modern sense did not exist, each regiment was followed by a conglomerate of artisans, merchants, and camp women who, for a fee, satisfied every need of the soldiers.

In the case of large campaigns where many regiments were gathered, the army was led by a general (feldobrist) or even a field marshal (generalfeldobrist). Having proven their worth in battles during the Italian Wars, on the Eastern front against the Ottomans (First Siege of Vienna in the fall of 1529, battles in Hungary), and in North Africa (Siege of Tunis in 1535), the social status of the Landsknechte rose sharply. At the height of their power, a simple soldier received a wage of four guilders, twice the amount received by a laborer. Illustrative of their elevated position on the social scale of the time were their flamboyant outfits.

In a period where the common people were constrained by social conventions and poverty to an extremely conservative dress code, the German halberdiers, following the trend first introduced by their rebellious Swiss counterparts, were true fashion icons of their time: they wore colorful garments, extravagant hats adorned with ostrich feathers, leggings with exaggeratedly puffed calves, while meticulously maintaining long mustaches and beards. In response to a complaint made to the esteemed Emperor Maximilian (crowned in 1508) by one of his nobles about the “indecent” way his men dressed, he famously replied: “Leave them be. With the miserable and wretched life they lead, let us not deprive them of a little entertainment.”

Although Maximilian’s initial intention was to transform the Landsknechte into a permanent army of his empire, neither he nor his successors had sufficient funds for this purpose. Thus, the Landsknechte gradually began to turn to other employers, offering their services to powerful warlords of their time or even to forces hostile to the empire, such as the Italian duchies or the Kingdom of France. A unit of German mercenaries with the macabre name “Black Band” served for ten years under the French King Francis I (1515-1547), fighting fiercely until the bitter end in the Battle of Pavia (1525), while others found themselves in Spain fighting against the Muslims of Valencia (1526).

This successful mercenary career intensified the existing animosity with the Swiss. In September 1515, Landsknechte in the service of Francis I of France (1515-1547) fought relentlessly for two days(!) against a Swiss army at Marignano, with neither side taking prisoners. The ferocity of the clash between the two most powerful mercenary infantry forces of the 16th century served as inspiration for the artists of the time, while those accustomed to a different code of moral ethics referred to such deadly clashes with disgust as “Bad War”.

As previously mentioned, the delay in mercenaries’ wages could lead to dangerous situations. In 1490, unpaid Landsknechte of Maximilian I refused to continue their march towards Budapest against the Ottomans and returned home “loaded with loot”, while unpaid Lutheran mercenaries of Charles V (1519-1556) under the command of Charles de Bourbon looted Rome fiercely in 1527, annihilating the Pope’s Swiss Guard.

The evolution of warfare inevitably influenced the historical trajectory of the Landsknechte. The increasing introduction of firearms, already from the time of the Italian Wars, forced German mercenaries to adapt accordingly, increasing the proportion of arquebusiers (and later musketeers) compared to halberdiers in their ranks. The Italian Wars also marked the last major conflict where such a large number of mercenaries were used, as European monarchs’ main concern thereafter would be the establishment of permanent “national” armies.

Indeed, permanently organized and almost exclusively Spanish “tercio” units overshadowed the unstable and untrustworthy Germans who, from the mid-16th century, began to rapidly lose prestige. A characteristic of this reality is that the salary (sold) of an average soldier remained stable, despite inflation, at 4 guilders for almost a hundred years. Nevertheless, German mercenary regiments would continue to serve the empire until the devastating Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), as thousands of descendants of the Landsknechte, bearing the less pompous name “soldaten” by then, would be enlisted in the mercenary armies of Emperor Ferdinand II (1619-1637) under the command of Albrecht von Wallenstein and the Catholic League under Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly.

This conflict was also the last for the German mercenaries. The devastation caused by the uncontrollable mercenary troops during this conflict, as well as the organizational and administrative reforms introduced by pioneers such as the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus (1611-1632) and the Dutch governor Maurice of Nassau (1618-1625), convinced the Habsburgs that the once feared Landsknechte were nothing but a relic of the past. Henceforth, professional, organized units of musketeers, “national” infantry regiments, would take the lead.

Notes:

1. The designation “Swiss” or “Schweizer” is anachronistic, as the entirety of the cantons and cities constituting the Swiss Confederation was then called Eidgenossenschaft or simply Confederation, and the Swiss mercenaries were called Eidgenossen (Confederates) or Reisläufer.

Sources:

1. J.Richards, «Landsknecht Soldier 1486-1560», publ. Bloomsbury Publishing, imprint Osprey Publishing, 2002.
2. Landsknechts – The Most Sought After Mercenaries in Europe | Late Medieval & Early Modern Warfare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gUOSVm2b9E
3. C. Shaw, M. Mallett, «The Italian Wars 1494-1559: War, State and Society in Early Modern Europe», publ. Routledge, 2018.