The early seventeenth century was a period of economic crisis throughout Eurasia. Finance was developed enough for heads of state to raise and equip massive armies, but not developed enough to pay these armies regularly. Within the context of the Mansfeld Regiment’s financial problems, this chapter describes mutiny, desertion, female labor, and the challenges of finding small change during a financial crisis. The Mansfeld Regiment’s operations depended on a network of military finance in central Europe and northern Italy which was broadly ramifying but imperfect and disorganized. The loan that was supposed to support this regiment was delayed; by the time the money arrived, the regiment’s superiors may simply have forgotten about them. The Mansfeld Regiment collapsed two years later.

Class and social structure within early seventeenth-century Saxon units, including the Mansfeld Regiment, seems to have been different from later armies in several important respects. Although commoners were less well-represented in more honorable or prestigious roles, the army could be a source of social mobility. Some men served in the Saxon army for multiple years, and some families for multiple decades. Soldiers probably picked up military experience through long immersion in the military way of life rather than formal drilling. Within this context, social distance between ranks seems to have been less pronounced in early seventeenth-century armies than in later armies or contemporary civilian life. The close social and physical proximity between officers and men led to fights.

The Mansfeld Regiment’s social organization and material contexts shaped the way it was formed, the path it took from Dresden to Lombardy, and the way it disintegrated. The concepts of the military revolution and the fiscal-military state are still relevant. But developing fiscal-military infrastructure was weak, which laid the groundwork for the Mansfeld Regiment’s loss of funding and failure. In this regiment’s daily operations I did not see the changes in social discipline that were supposedly intertwined with the military revolution. What I have found about the Mansfeld Regiment and the Saxon army may serve as a basis for re-examining some historical assumptions about early seventeenth-century armies. Daily interactions within this pathetic regiment are also an important source for the historical social anthropology of early-modern Europe, shedding light on masculinity, violence, identity formation, and marginalization.

While the Mansfeld Regiment traveled through southern Germany in August 1625, flag-bearer Hieronymus Sebastian Schutze accidentally shot and killed his friend Hans Heinrich Tauerling during a drinking bout. Two days later, one of the regiment’s cavalry companies started a fire in the small town of Remmingen near Ulm. Thick descriptions of these events reveal daily life in the Mansfeld Regiment, as well as attitudes toward masculinity, murder, guilt, drunkenness, and violent death.

On November 30, 1625, a substantial quantity of fabric from a shipment intended for the Mansfeld Regiment’s third-most-honorable company went missing. The regimental legal establishment investigated the theft but covered up one key detail, revealed at the end of this chapter. This incident sheds light on the way this company interacted with a cloth trade that spanned Europe, in addition to the criminal activities of its captain/owner, regimental quartermaster Wolfgang Winckelmann. The investigation revealed that Winckelmann’s flag-bearer Hieronymus Sebastian Schutze also stole some fabric and distributed it to some men in this company. These men can be traced using social network analysis. This chapter argues that the concept of small group cohesion should be supplemented with the broader concept of military social networks.

This chapter examines every muster roll from the Thirty Years War in the Saxon State Archives in Dresden to determine the demographics of the entire Saxon army during the entire war. In contrast to enduring stereotypes of early seventeenth-century soldiers as rootless social outcasts, these soldiers were recruited and often served near their homes. Both infantry and cavalry were far more urban than the average central European population. Soldiers called themselves righteous guys and lived within a dense thicket of social networks that included friendship, similar religion, and place of origin.

This chapter analyzes interactions between the Mansfeld Regiment and its surroundings, including confessional conflict, fights, burials, and the regiment’s effect on local demographics. The Mansfelders were both Protestant and Catholic, but the regiment was quartered in a Catholic land. Its members fought with or plundered locals. However, its effects on baptism, marriage, and death rates in most of the areas I analyzed were ambiguous. The exception is tiny Pontestura: Not only was the effect of numerous armies magnified in such a small town, but wrongdoings there were less likely to come to the attention of the authorities. I also locate a woman who may have been the wife of the enigmatic regimental secretary Mattheus Steiner in local baptismal records, exemplifying that interactions between Mansfelders and locals were not solely hostile. This chapter examines military death rates, which were awful even outside of combat, and may find evidence of the great Italian plague of 1629–1631 in the deaths of soldiers and other marginal men.

This chapter places the actions of the Mansfeld Regiment within the context of military pay for the Saxon army during the 1620s. Pay for individual infantrymen varied substantially, and this chapter argues that it can be used as a proxy to determine these men’s social status. Mercenary soldiers and female members of the military community could act as subcontractors in their own right, which shaped the way they found sexual partners. Pay in the Saxon army in the 1620s seems high, and was disbursed on time. Although the Saxon army was at paper strength throughout the 1620s, this massive outlay may have been one reason Saxon finances fell apart in the 1640s. Meanwhile, the Mansfeld Regiment was paid far less than the customary rate in the Saxon army, and was swindled by the Governor of Milan.

For several crucial months after the war that brought the Mansfeld Regiment to Milan ended, its superiors forgot it existed and failed to secure funding for it. In summer 1627, the regiment disintegrated. Although Wolf von Mansfeld wanted the regiment to travel north from Milan to liaise with the forces of Albrecht von Wallenstein, it mutinied on the way through Switzerland and only 600 starving men reached Frankfurt am Main. Because these soldiers proceeded to mistreat civilians in the region, this chapter also analyzes atrocities in a flash-back to October 1625. During that horrific month, the Mansfeld Regiment suffered numerous attacks including an incident in which twenty soldiers were killed and their bodies were never found. They retaliated by sacking two small settlements near Alessandria. This chapter also situates the Mansfeld Regiment within events after it fell apart: The eventual Franco-Spanish War of 1635–1659.

Three thick descriptions offer detailed accounts of the ongoing squabbles among the Mansfeld Regiment’s third-in-command/regimental quartermaster Wolfgang Winckelman and two officers in his company: flag-bearer Hieronymus Sebastian Schutze and lieutenant Felix Steter. These men’s actions demonstrate the importance of individual agency in addition to structural accounts of history, as well as the history of alcohol and drunkenness, dueling, and masculinity.