Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France

8. A Great Multitude of Soldiers: Personal Armies

A s political contention and confessional hostility mounted in Guyenne late in the summer of 1613, one of the prominent nobles of Périgord reportedly worked “to raise a great multitude of soldiers,” assembling his own field army of 2,000–3,000 infantry before “leading them to besiege a town in peacetime.”1 While this account expresses shocked indignation at this sudden mobilization, the military elites of Guyenne and Languedoc often managed to assemble impressive personal military forces during early seventeenthcentury civil conflicts. Some provincial warrior nobles were even able to field armies capable of conducting independent campaigns and siege operations. This chapter considers how warrior nobles fielded and funded personal military forces, assembled around military commanders through complex processes of accretion that drew in various armed components. Once organized, such an army had to be supplied and sustained through improvised measures. Early seventeenth-century observers of civil warfare often described field armies as organisms that fed continually on blood. Contemporaries discussed the difficulties of satisfying armies’ appetites, and the cardinal de Richelieu offered a “remedy ” for the subsistence of armies.2 Early seventeenth-century military thinkers and reformers were deeply concerned with using military drill to establish discipline and, ideally, to form military units into articulated single bodies whose each and every movement was orchestrated by their commanders.3 Corporeal metaphors referred not only to the state as a body politic, but also to a field army as a corpulent giant, resembling François Rabelais’s Gargantua.4 Provincial warrior A Great Multitude of Soldiers Personal Armies c h a p t e r e i g h t 224 t h e c u l t u r e o f r e v o l t nobles played central roles in organizing civil warfare by constructing, maintaining , and financing their personal armies. constructing armies In the early seventeenth-century, French field armies were formed in ways which were quite distinct from the contemporary Spanish or Swedish armies that are more frequently studied. Charles Tilly calls the predominant system of warmaking during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries “brokerage,” a system based on “mercenary forces recruited by contractors,” and state reliance on “independent capitalists” for loans, enterprise, and taxation.5 Applying John A. Lynn’s suggestive model of army style, one could characterize the French field armies of the early seventeenth-century civil wars as “aggregate-contract” armies that already incorporated some elements of the “state-commission” army style. This seems to support his theory, since he posits the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as the point of transition from the aggregate-contract to state-commission army style.6 The French king and his nobles constructed field armies using techniques similar to those used by other contemporary states, but adapted to French society and to the circumstances of religious and civil warfare. Nucleus of an Army Early modern French field armies normally formed around a nucleus, or core, of military units. Scholars have frequently pointed to a small standing army as a nucleus for royal armies, and contemporaries certainly contemplated this idea. Richelieu recommended in 1627 that the king must always have a corps of 10,000 infantry and 1,500 cavalry [ready] to go at a moment’s notice, with His Majesty at their head. The corps must be kept in a place where the king sees it frequently so as to keep it whole, otherwise the dispersed troops will always be in the pay of their leaders and the king poorly served. Only a few troops are needed in Poitou, the Cévennes, and Languedoc, with men who would be notified of the routes by which they are to march and who would furnish them with food, hay, and oats at a certain price, with most of the costs to be settled in council and paid by the king, for which a specific levy would be made afterwards in the places where the troops had passed.7 But Richelieu’s recommendations were an impractical fantasy in the circumstances that prevailed. Such a force would have been ill suited both for internal p e r s o n a l a r m i e s 225 civil conflicts in southern France and for external threats from Spain or Savoy. The French monarch did maintain a few units on a permanent basis in the early seventeenth century, but...