Mercenaries and Paid Men: The Mercenary Identity in the Middle Ages (review)

John France introduces and presents twenty-three conference papers that reveal the identity of medieval mercenaries. Typologies, taxonomies, and case studies are put forth to guide future scholarship on medieval warfare. Mercenaries, stereotypically, are "paid" and "foreign", but as Kelly DeVries notes, these dual characteristics are flawed by anachronistic preconceptions and the modern constructs of contemporary language. The soldier's stipendiary relationship with those commanding him was more complex than the naked cash nexus of modern capitalist relations. Dynastic ambitions, patronage networks, and prestige interwove themselves in the condotte negotiated by the celebrated mercenaries of the Italian Renaissance, as John Law's study proves.

How does one distinguish stipendiaries, whose motivation for fighting derived from their socio-economic obligations, from troops who pursued soldiering as an occupation? DeVries suggests that for contemporaries this might have been a pedantic distinction (p. 55). On the other hand, David Crouch argues that in the later medieval period "social class took a step towards becoming self-consciously hierarchical" (p. 30). Combatants, especially commanders, serving out of obligation and honor (even if receiving monetary compensation) considered themselves a cut above soldiers whose only palpable connection with the army was money. The transitional economies of the Middle Ages and Renaissance exhibited the characteristics of a budding market society, but still the modern paid army remained far away in the future. As France puts it, "The exigencies of a limited agricultural economy prohibited the creation of regular armies" (p. 12). In the absence of the modern nation-state, the terms of service weren't binary.

Another anachronism, "nation", obscures medieval mercenaries. Mercenaries, by definition, were "foreign" as well as paid. Although certain "national" groups became identified with specific weapons, and mercenary companies might bear association with a given region or "nationality", complex dynastic alliances and medieval diplomatic arrangements render the use of the term "foreign" to define mercenaries highly problematic (p. 46). Stephen Morillo discards "foreign" and constructs a distribution field with one polarity charting the degree to which soldiers were "embedded" within the society that was fielding them. The other axis attempts to fix the degree to which the soldiers' terms of service were essentially economic or political. The quadrants (social armies, political armies, stipendiaries, and mercenaries) contain a broad spectrum of warriors classified by military service type.

While this book succeeds in creating working definitions of mercenaries and paid men, no concluding chapter discloses what transpired at the conference and if the distinguished scholars assembled reached any consensus. David Bachrach and Kelly DeVries crafted powerfully convincing essays but their conclusions regarding militias appear diametrically opposed. Were the typologies and taxonomies proposed ever adapted and/or adopted? One might have commissioned contributors to recast their essays in light of the conference discussion and published those revised papers. Phrases suggest that the essays were sent off to press almost verbatim from their reading (pp. 5, 32, 106, 152). The editor does, however, proffer a well-reasoned paragraph that concludes that the conference illustrated "the complexity of the military profession in Medieval Europe" (p. 12). Although the editor's summaries of the contributions are lucid and his contextualization of the papers accurate, the raw materials should have been fashioned into more of a finished product. For example, if one wishes to compare the contributors' various views on militias, the index is of little use as it contains proper names only. Topics and issues are not included. Minor but also revealing is the list of contributors, which lacks uniformity in the entries and exhibits inconsistencies in format and capitalization. In sum, the book was pushed too fast to press.

The Swansea conference attracted a stellar group of historians (including John Hosler, Guido Guerri dall'Oro, Nicolaus Proteau, John Pryor, Richard Abels, Bernard Bachrach, Charles Bowlus, I. W. Rowlands, Eljas Oksanen, Alan Murray, Laura Napran, Adrian Bell, Spencer Smith, C. A. G. Paz, Sven Ekdahl...