The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany: Civic Duty and the Right of Arms by B. Ann Tlusty (review)

Citizenship in an urban community was based on paying taxes and serving on guard duty, which required every citizen to maintain weapons. But after guard duty, Ann Tlusty demonstrates in her monograph, burghers did not just store their weapons away until the next watch. The demands of citizenship extended beyond just keeping the peace, she argues, and consequently fostered a martial culture central to both social and gender identity. Tlusty spends very little time examining or defining the term citizenship. She mentions it at the beginning of the study, but for the rest of the book, the term refers to Christian males who belonged to the community. There is also some intended ambiguity in her notion of an armed citizenry, since widows who headed households also had duties as citizens. But like clerics, Jews and poor householders were not normally called on to participate in defense. The true focus of her work is not citizenship, then, but rather how being armed augmented and defined the concept of male identity for urban dwellers.

She begins by discussing guard duty: who had the right to bear arms, who was required to do so, who was forbidden or discouraged from using weapons—all of which determined maleness. Tlusty includes a lengthy section that vividly depicts what citizens actually did when on duty. Besides being alert to attack, citizens had police functions and the task of fighting fires. At public celebrations, the militia was present to demonstrate the power of the community. She also describes the experiences of the night watches patrolling the streets: "The night watch, then, could be marked by tension, excitement, bitter cold, or, undoubtedly, occasional boredom. But it always involved social contact with other men, whether friendly or antagonistic" (40).

Tlusty never discusses the militia actually defending the city against attack or being mobilized for war. She illustrates how a citizen accustomed to carrying weapons used them in defense of honor, person, or property. City government wanted to limit armed disputes, but its efforts enjoyed limited success because the freedom and responsibility to bear arms implied the right to use them in self-defense, including in matters of honor. In the sixteenth century, it was still fashionable for burghers to carry swords and fight duels. And as long as the fight was fair, the winner of a duel would not be punished—even if he killed his opponent.

Delving further into the culture of bearing arms, Tlusty argues convincingly that in the early modern Empire, the use of the sword was not limited to nobles until the end of the seventeenth century. One might expect martial culture to have changed when firearms became more prevalent, but in the city, she shows, males overwhelmingly continued to use swords. Tlusty also investigates whether women got into fights, which they occasionally did. She also deals with inhabitants of the urban community who were not citizens: Jews, peasants, students, and Catholic clergy. Tlusty concludes her study with the controversy surrounding the introduction of the new Gregorian calendar, which created tensions in Augsburg from 1583-84. With the armed male populace socialized to respond to threats of violence, such fears could have dangerous consequences when tensions were high. As a result, the conflict led the city council to strip citizens of a part of their masculinity by bringing in hired swords to protect the city, thus contributing to the transformation of the urban citizen to civilian.

Tlusty does not address issues of civic duty and urban military power. Her reason for not doing so—which is based on a notion of the linear progress of the sovereign state—is not convincing. Free imperial cities could take advantage of new military technologies and mercenaries just as German territorial states could. Furthermore, they did not have the luxury of not thinking about their defense. Free imperial cities needed to be...