Description
This book uses the transnational story of a single regiment to examine how ordinary soldiers, military women, and officers negotiated their lives within the chaos and uncertainty of the seventeenth century. Raised in Saxony by Wolf von Mansfeld in spring 1625 in the service of the King of Spain, the Mansfeld Regiment fought for one and a half years in northern Italy before collapsing, leaving behind a trail of dead civilians, murder, internal lawsuits…and copious amounts of paperwork. Their story reveals the intricate social world of seventeenth-century mercenaries and how this influenced how they lived and fought. Through this rich microhistorical case study, Lucian Staiano-Daniels sheds new light on key seventeenth-century developments like the military revolution and the fiscal-military state, which is supported by statistical analysis drawn from hundreds of records from the Thirty Years War. This pathbreaking book unifies the study of war and conflict with social history.
Table of Contents
List of figures; List of tables; Preface: money, dates, ranks, and measurements; Preface: the people; Acknowledgments; Introduction: the war people; 1. Display all good will and keep moving: the Mansfeld regiment and the 1625–1627 campaign Hieronymus Sebastian Schutze and Hans Devil; 2. The Italian dance: early modern Military finance and the Mansfeld regiment; 3. Righteous guys: military society; 4. The spinner-Lords of Saint Gallen: small group Cohesion and Military social networks as seen through a theft of fabric; 5. The kind of people I know you will like: social structure in the Saxon Army and the Mansfeld regiment; 6. Elizabeth Sanner and the dead men: Mansfeld interactions with their surroundings; 7. To be happy doing what you want: the death of Victoria Guarde and the life of Theodoro de Camargo Hieronymus Sebastian Schutze, Felix Steter and Wolfgang Winckelmann; 8. Making it in this thing: money and payment within Saxon regiments in the 1620s; 9. And to my son the breaking wheel: the Mansfeld regiment falls apart; Conclusion: a beautiful regiment; Bibliography; Index.
