Daniel Jaquet, Iason-Eleftherios Tzouriadis, Regula Schmid (Hg.): Martial Culture in Medieval Towns

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MARTIAL CULTURE IN MEDIEVAL TOWNS

AN
ANTHOLOGY
Daniel Jaquet | Iason-Eleftherios Tzouriadis | Regula Schmid (eds.)

Daniel Jaquet, Iason-Eleftherios Tzouriadis, Regula

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MartialCulturein MedievalTowns An Anthology

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Contents Daniel Jaquet, Regula Schmid, Iason-Eleftherios Tzouriadis: Foreword – Martial Culture in Medieval Towns ... .... .... ... .... 9 Daniel Jaquet, Regula Schmid, Iason-Eleftherios Tzouriadis: I. Cities as Incubators of War and Civic Defence ... .... .... ... .... 11 Paolo De Montis: Assault on the Church:The Bellicosity of the Brescian Valleys’ Inhabitants .. .. .... .... ... .... .... ... .... 13 Markus Jansen: ARhineland Army:Compositionand Regional Distribution of Cologne’sContingent to the Imperial Army of 1532 19 Andreas Moitzi: AHistory of Motivation:VienneseBurghers in Action – or rather Inaction ... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... 24 Noah Smith: ACase of Individual Taste?The Arms and Armours of the Guilds in the Leugemeete Chapel .. .... ... .... .... ... .... 31 Daniel Jaquet, Regula Schmid, Iason-Eleftherios Tzouriadis: II. Martial Games:Fencing, Throwing Stones and Ice-Skating Jousting Bouts .. .... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... 39 Samuel Bradley: A “festa diabolica” for Saint John: The Saint’sDay Tournament in Florence, 1513 ... .... .... ... .... 42 Iain MacInnes: War and Medieval Scotland’sUrban Communities: The Case of Berwick-upon-Tweed .. .. .. .... ... .... .... ... .... 46 Maciej Talaga: “As Turf is Thrown,a Remarkable Battle Begins” : AMartial Game in the Late Medieval Town of Hirschberg, Silesia .. 50
Sara Offenberg: Sword and Buckler in Hebrew Letters: Traces of Early Illuminated German Fight Books in Jewish Manuscripts .. ... ... .. .. ... .. .. .. .. ... .. ... ... ... .58 Jean Henri Chandler: Martial Sports in the Travels of Leo of Rozmital ... ... .... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... 63 Olivier Dupuis and François Siedel: “Timeo clipeos et plagas ferentes”,orthe Accidental Death of aFencing Master in 1331 .... 68 Daniel Jaquet: Dancing on the Rope, Swallowing Knives, Juggling with Daggers:Sword Players in the 15th Century .. ... ... .. .. ... . 75 Daniel Jaquet: Fencing with the Blessing of the Authorities: Patent for aFencing Master in Neuchâtel, 1546 ... ... .. .. .. .. ... . 80 Iason-Eleftherios Tzouriadis: ATrue Son of Mars:Ascanio della Corgna’sUrban Duels .. ... ... .. .. ... .. ... ... ... .. ... .. .. ... 86 Daniel Jaquet: “Une piteuse bataille”:A Trial by Combat between Commoners in Valenciennes, 1455 .. .. .. .... ... .... .... ... .... 93 Daniel Jaquet, Regula Schmid, Iason-Eleftherios Tzouriadis: III. Weapons in the City:Guns, Cannons and Pointy Things .. ... . 99 Ralph Moffat: Crying Over Spilt Castlemilk:The Tale of Sir William and the Silver Sallet ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... 102 Chassica Kirchhoff: Silver-Pommelled Swords and Old Italian Cannonballs .. .... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... 125 Kirsty Haslam: Mastering both Artillery and Festivities? Burgh Appointments in Aberdeen in 1523 .... ... .... .... ... .... 133 Daniel Jaquet: Holy Gunpowderä Purchased from the Pope for the Solothurner Master Gunner in 1444 .. ... .... .... ... .... 136 Mathijs Roelofsen: An Iron Hand for aMaster Gunner Injured in the Burgundian Wars .. ... .... ... .... .... ... .... ... .. .. ... . 143 6 Contents
IV. Archive Anecdotes:Women, Villains, Battle Monks, and Dog Poo .. .. .... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... 147 Elena Magli: Lyriman and Grymmenstein: One Man and his Accomplice are Going to War .. ... ... .. .. ... . 150 Regula Schmid: AThief’sTale ... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... 154 Daniel Jaquet: AMonk Hired for his Magical and Martial Skills .... 158 Isabelle Schuerch: Dog Poo, Horse Traps and Cat Guerilla: An Animate History of Medieval Warfare .... ... .... .... ... .... 161 Selected Bibliography ... .... ... .. .. ... .. .. .. .. ... .. ... .. .. ... 167 Image credits .. .. .... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... 177 Index ... .... ... .... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... 181 Contributors .. .. .... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... .... ... .... 185 Contents 7
Daniel Jaquet, Regula Schmid, Iason-Eleftherios Tzouriadis:

Foreword – Martial Culture in Medieval Towns

Today, the use of institutionalised violence is the territory of professionals like police officers or soldiers. Unsanctioned interpersonal violence is punishable by law. Therefore, the possession, education and training in the use of arms by private individuals or groups is considered, with few exceptions, as aberrant or even bad. In Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, however, things were different. This book presents stories defining the boundaries of what we can identify as ‘martial culture’.The notion of martial culture encompasses all activities pertaining to the use of weapons, even in times of peace, and not always in order to inflict injuries to others.

The possessionand use of weapons were not restricted to noblemen and knights, but were accessible to all social strata, to men, women, children and, depending on the region, to members of religious orders, and to Christians, Jews and Muslims alike. In western Europe, however, Christian, adult, ablebodied men were the main participantsinmartial culture and the main producers of this culture. For example, craftsmen within city walls were not, in principle, meant to take up arms and fight in wars. However, they knew how to wield asword and how to use acrossbow. They had to be ready to defend the walls if the circumstances called for it. They acquired the necessary expertise during regular practice with their comrades in the shooting guilds and had the opportunity to show their fellow citizens their martial skills during public competitions. They played physical games during festivities and taught their children how to wrestle. They inherited old armour pieces from their ancestors and had to acquire anew helmet and ahalberd, which they then had to present during reviews held by the city. This practice demonstrated martial continuity as well as the conduct, maintenanceand importance of martial matters under the auspices of public authorities.

These craftsmen were not warriors in the modern sense of the word but lived in aworld where martial activities were common. To acquire their right of citizenship and practise their craft as members of aguild, they had to pos-

sess armour and show their martial skills, even if they rarely used them against others and only when their lives and the lives of others were in danger. They also contributed to the display and celebration of the town’ smartial culture in stone. This occurred when guilds paid for the sculpted banner bearers embellishing the fountains in their town’sstreets or when their taxes were used to finance the construction and maintenanceofthe walls, gates and towers protecting the town.

This anthologyassembles selected reworked contributions from established and younger scholars, as well as from independent researchers – often practitionersofEuropean martial arts – to the research blog “Martial Culture in Medieval Towns” ,a publication of the Swiss National Science Foundation project of the same name, hosted by the University of Bern, Switzerland. This blog brings together specialists from all over Europe and beyond. English, the academic lingua franca, was therefore used for both the blog and this publication. The contributions emphasise the urban contexts where European martial culture developed. Towns regulated and organised martial activities and played acentral role in local and superregional conflicts, serving as hubs of war-related services, informationand manpower. They appear as places for experimentation, construction and the developmentofmartial culture. Each section is introduced by ashort abstract of the subject matter delineating the common framework of the essays and contextualising the themes discussed.

I. Cities as Incubators of War and Civic Defence

The town lies within and around its defences.Walls, towers, doors and bridges are the bones of aliving organism, filled with inhabitants and travellers going in and out. The town’ssafeguards are its physical,natural or constructed,defences and the people manning them. Towns had to constantly adapt their defences to the evolution of warfare and especially to siege technology. Furthermore, they had to provide areservoir of able warriors to take part in local, regional or even international conflicts. Alarge amount of their wealth was therefore dedicated to martial endeavours in (re)building defences, acquiring weapons and training citizens.

External dangers were aconstant reality. Gates had to be closed and guarded, and the walls had to be defended in order to protect the inhabitants of the town. Citizens organised the guarding duties on the level of guilds, neighbourhoods or quarters. Some dangers could also be internal, in the form of fire, or any disturbance of the peace. Policing against the latter, guarding and firefighting were among the duties of the people manning the defences. The town’scitizen-soldiers had to be equipped, trained and managed.

Towns could also be called to arms by their allies and had to provide troops for common expeditions or for securing the safety of events such as shooting competitions, tournaments, princely entries or large markets. The authorities had to check regularly if their men were armed and trained for these tasks. Citizens were obligated to show up with their own armour and weapons during reviews. In many cases, all households had to own armour which would be put into service in case of an imminent threat.

The mechanisms that ensured that atown was defended and able to provide fighting men were similar, but specific at the same time. In the next pages, several examples taken from arange of different towns in western Europe will show how these processes unfolded.

Fig. 1. With cannons and asuperior fighting force, confederate troops force the abandonment of atown. Diebold Schilling, Amtliche Berner Chronik,1478–83 (Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Mss.h.h.I.3, vol. 3, p. 150).
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Daniel Jaquet,Regula Schmid, Iason-Eleftherios Tzouriadis

Assault on the Church: The Bellicosity of the Brescian Valleys’ Inhabitants

The passage commented on in this essay is taken from achronicle written in the last years of the 15th century by the notary Iacopo Melga from Brescia. It demonstrates the bellicosity of the inhabitants of Brescia’svalleys, in particular the Valdel Garza and the ValTrompia.Inthe 12th century, the hermit Costanzo founded achurch and amonastery on the mountain Conche that separates these two valleys. After his death around 1151, Costanzawas canonised.1 In 1443, following the transfer of the religious complex to the nuns of Santa Caterina in Brescia, the Dominican fathers set out in search of the remains of the holy founder, hidden inside the church. The remains were found only in 1481 and then brought to Brescia in the same year. This transfer was at risk of degeneratinginto aproper carnage, as Iacopo Melga reports:

[

…]Men from neighbouring villages were involved in the transfer of the saint’ s body from the church of Conche. The inhabitants of the villages of Nave, Caino, Lumezzane and certain other villages had heard of the discovery, and many went to Conche, armed with partesane (partizans), giaverine,and even sticks. They had the support of some citizens of Brescia, such as the late Count Luigi Avogadro and others who had an interest in those lands. Their intention was to force the local friars to give up the relics. One of them, the Venetian Tommaso Donato – prior priest of the convent of San Domenico, atalented theologian, good preacher and currently patriarch of Venice – decided to hide the body inside the church tower, to ensure that

1 San Costanzo was born in the second half of the 12th century, perhaps in Niardo in ValCamonica. He was from anoble family and served in the comune of Brescia as an official and general, until he decided to walk away from his wealth and become ahermit. He retired and went to live in Conche, alocality between the villages of Nave (Val del Garza)and Lumezzane (Valtrompia). There, he devoted himself to the study of the sacred scriptures. Carlo Doneda, Notizie di San Costanzo Eremita bresciano eMemorie istoriche del monastero di S. Caterina di Brescia (Brescia:Giammaria Rizzardi, 1755).

the villagers would not find it. It was auseless attempt because the villagers – furious

climbed the bell tower, damaged it and took the body from the friars by force. They carried it, kept inside achest, down the mountain into the land of Nave. Some of these villagers animatedly discussed friar Tommaso inside the church, and also tried to kill him with the ronche (bills), but he managed to escape. The villagers acted like this out of devotion to the saint:they said that few would know him as long as his body remained in Conche. Some of them were imprisoned, but they came out of prison cursing the saint and swearing they never knew him.2

On the one hand, the passage quoted above shows all the bellicosityofthe inhabitantsofthe valleys, driven into homicidal fury for several reasons. In addition, we should consider, at least in part, the religious devotion towards the saint and the willingness – reported also by the notary – to give his remains amore prestigious resting place. On the other hand, some noblemen supported the expedition. The counts of Avogadro,mentioned in the chroni-

2 Cronaca del notaio Iacopo Melga, Le cronache inedite bresciane,vol. I, ed. by Paolo Guerrini (Brescia:Moretto, 1922), pp. 35–36. The remains of San Costanzo were brought to the church of Santa Caterina di Brescia, apart from the bones of one of his arms, and afterwards were split between the church of San Domenico and the Duomo. The relics are currently kept inside the parish church of Nave. The saint is the patron of Nave and Niardo, and he is celebrated on 12 February.

14 Paolo De Montis
Fig. 2. The complex of the Santuario di Conche.

cle, had kept Lumezzane as afiefdom since 1427 and had every interest in the glorification of asaint who had worked in the vicinity of their territories. The expedition was not that of afeudal army;these noblemen probably manipulated the commonersand created akind of popular militia. The local rulers exploited the ferocity of the inhabitants of the two valleys on more than one occasion. In 1512, the people of Nave, under the leadership of the condottiero Valerio Paitone, heroically resisted the French assaults, at least until the sacking of their town on 26 July.3 The Venetians integrated the inhabitants of the valleys into the cernide,the military corps recruited in the mainland of the Serenissima 4 The militiamen of the valleys were harquebusiers, unlike those of the Brescia plain, who formed regiments of pikemen.5 In their reports to the Consiglio dei X,the governors of Brescia repeatedly celebrated the value of these highlanders and their attachment to Venetian rule.6

3 Carlo Pasero, Francia, Spagna, Impero aBrescia (1509–1516) (Brescia:Tipo-Lito Fratelli Geroldi, 1957). Sanuto claims that on 25 April 1512: “[…]the French had gone to loot the valley of Nave:they returned to Brescia wounded and humiliated, and many of them had died. San Marco wanted to show him that he was the defender and the protector of the Venetians” Idiari di Sanuto,vol. XIV (Venice:F.Visentini, 1886), p. 293.

4 Carlo Pasero, “Aspetti dell’ordinamento militare del territorio bresciano durante il dominio Veneto” , Commentari dell’Ateneo di Brescia,1937, pp. 9–39;Francesco Rossi, “Le armature da munizione el’organizzazione delle cernide nel bresciano” , Archivio Storico Lombardo,1971, pp. 169–186;John Halle, “Brescia and the Venetian Military System in the Cinquecento”,in Armi eCultura nel Bresciano 1420–1870 (Brescia:Tipo-Lito Fratelli Geroldi, 1981), pp. 97–119 (Italian translation:pp. 121–139).

5 An interesting document found in Nave’sarchive reports about amilitary drill which took place in the village on 24 October 1563. Captain Hieronimo Negro arrived that day in the village, along with his faithful sergeant Tamburino, to conduct the drill of the territorial ordinance. We know that the men who participated in the drill were harquebusiers from aspecific reference in the document: “[…]so(the captain)distributed or had distributed to those equally powder for the harquebuses” (Nave Archive, Sezione Antico Regime [1509–post 1785], busta 1, fasc. 4, n. 65).

6 Report by the Captain of Brescia Marino Cavalli, 1554: “This second valley is the ValTrompia, crossed by the Mella. It has many good lands and about 18,000 souls, and they are men who are estimated to be more ferocious and more belligerent than all the others […]They are very loyal to the Serenissima”.Report by the Captain of Brescia

Antonio Lando, 1611: “Ihave visited the three valleys – Valcamonica, ValTrompia and ValSabbia:they are worthy of all esteem. In these valleys there are 900 service soldiers,

I. Cities as Incubators of Warand Civic Defence 15

The reference to the arms used by the inhabitants is also quite interesting. Partizans, chiaverine,bills and even sticks are mentioned in the passage cited above.7 Except for the bills, we do not know and cannot exactly establish the type of the first two arms described. There is no exact correspondence between the current terms and those used at the time in the territories of Bres-

good and very well disciplined by Captain Giacomo Negroboni […]” . Relazioni dei rettori veneti in terraferma,vol. XI: Podestaria ecapitanato di Brescia,ed. by Amelio Tagliaferri (Varese:Dott. A. Giuffrè for the Istituto di Storia Economica, 1978), pp. 49, 211.

7 According to current terminology:The Chiaverina is atype of spear with awide blade and two wings on the haft. The partizan is a Dagona-shaped blade with two wings at the bottom. It derived from the spiedo alla bolognese towards the end of the 15th century or in the first decades of the following century. It remained in use as arepresentative arm for most of the 18th century. Carlo De Vita, Armi Bianche dal Medioevo all’Età Moderna (Firenze:Centro Di, 1983), p. 30.

Fig. 3. San Costanzo and Beato Innocenzo, Church of San Maurizio, Niardo (Val Camonica).
16 Paolo De Montis

cia. They were certainly hafted arms, hardly distinguishable from improvised agricultural tools – especially in the case of bills.8

Curiously, the three villages mentioned in the testimony,Nave, Caino and Lumezzane, were all known for arms manufacturing. In 1609–1610, swordpommelswereproduced in Lumezzane andatthe beginningofthe 19th century flintlockmechanisms and bayonets.9 Swords were produced in

8 Mario Troso, Le armi in asta delle fanterie europee dal 1000 al 1500 (Novara:Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 1988), pp. 137–253.

9 Il Catastico Bresciano di Giovanni de Lezze (1609–1610),vol. I, ed. by Carlo Pasero (Brescia:F.Apollonio, 1969), p. 190;Giovanni Battista Brocchi, Trattato mineralogico e chimico sulle miniere di ferro del dipartimento del Mella con l’esposizione della costituzione fisica delle montagne metallifere della ValTrompia,vol. I(Brescia:Nicolò Bettoni, 1808),

Fig. 4. Italianbill, c. 1500 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 14.25.159). I. Cities as Incubators of Warand Civic Defence
17

Caino fromthe end of thesixteenth to the end of the17th century.10 In Nave,the same production hasbeen recorded starting from the fourth decade of the 16th century. Twoactive forges are already attested at the end of the 15th century.11 It is not known whatexactly wasproduced in those forges in thoseearlier years, but we canspeculate thatitwas either arms or agricultural tools.

In conclusion, the passage reported covers two important aspects of Brescian history relevant to modern research on martial culture:first, the (successful)attempt by Brescia noblemen to create aparamilitary force, exploiting the bellicosity of the valleys’ inhabitants;second, the mention of the arms used by the villagers. It is indeed apeculiar fact, although not directly connected with the story, that the origins of the armed men could be traced to three cities known for their arms production. Nonetheless,asthe Brescian illuminist Carlo Maggi wrote in 1781, the manufactureand use of arms were closely linked in the Brescia territories and this industrial production might indeed have contributed to making their inhabitants particularly predisposed to warfare.12

p. 95. Lumezzane is also home to the Erede Gnutti company, famous throughout the world for the quality of its fencing foils.

10 Sandro Rossetti, Le fucine della Valle del Garza (Brescia:Grafo, 1996), pp. 52–59; Caino,ed. by Roberto Gotti (Brescia:Punto Marte, 2011).

11 Rossetti, Le fucine della Valle de Garza,pp. 39–47.

12 Carlo Maggi, Del genio armigero del popolo bresciano. Saggio politico (Brescia: Daniel Berlendis, 1781), pp. 23–24.

18 Paolo De Montis

ARhineland Army:Composition and Regional Distribution of Cologne’sContingent to

the Imperial Army of 1532

In 1532, the Holy Roman Empire was on the march. Three years after the long, bloody and ultimately successful defence of Vienna in 1529 another large Ottoman army was on its way, led by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and trying to finish the tasks left undone.1 To meet this threat, the Imperial Diet in Regensburg called for troops from the Imperial Estates, aso-called ‘eilende Türkenhilfe’ (emergency relief force to help against the Turks). The Imperial Army, which had not always proven to be afast or efficient force, raised about 6,000 horsemen and 30,000 foot-soldiers.2 However, the fortunes of war prevented abig battle, as the Ottoman army was halted at the Hungarian fortress of Kőszeg (then known by its German name Güns). Most of the Ottoman host retreated south, but smaller contingents remained and raided the surrounding countryside. Such agroup of roughly 8,000 men was defeated at Leobersdorf (intoday’sLower Austria)byImperial troops. This remained their only major battle and, with the threat gone, the Imperial army dissolved in October 1532.

One of these contingents sent to the Imperial Army was from Cologne. The Imperial City of Cologne, located on the left bank of the river Rhine in modern Northern Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, was one of the biggest cities north of the Alps. After the formal recognition of its status as an Imperial Estate in 1475, its military and financial resources were frequently used by

1 Abrief contextualisation of this campaign can be found in:Alfred Kohler, Das Reich im Kampf um die Hegemonie in Europa 1521–1648 (Munich:Oldenbourg, 1990), pp. 13–14.

2 The best in-depth study of an Imperial Army to date has been written by Patrick Leukel, “all welt wil auf sein wider Burgundi”:Das Reichsheer im Neusser Krieg 1474/75 (Paderborn:Schöningh, 2019), who outlines the problems involved in raising an Empirewide army.

the Habsburg Emperors for their numerous wars.3 Troops from Cologne served for the Empire in Maximilian’ swars in Flanders in 1477, in the war against the Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus in 1482, in another campaign in Flanders against Bruges to liberate the imprisoned Maximilian in 1488, in the siege of Arnhem in 1505 and in the campaign against the outlawed knight Franz von Sickingen in 1517. Therefore, the army raised to defend the Empire in 1532 belongs in the contextofthis tradition.

One may wonder why this campaign deserves acloser analysis, as the contribution of Cologne to the outcome of the war was minimal,ifnot insignificant. For that very reason, the focus lies not on the activities of the city’ s men in Austria, but on the composition of this army as such. The archives of Cologne keep alittle booklet entitled Monster zedell (inspection paper)that

3 Brigitte Maria Wübbeke, “Die Stadt Köln und der Neusser Krieg 1474/75” , Geschichte in Köln,24(1988), pp. 35–64.
20 Markus Jansen
Fig. 5. Troops from Cologne guarding an execution in 1587. Detail from Franz Hogenberg, Execution of Hieronymus Michiels in Cologne,1587 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-POB-78.785–230).

lists all 500 men who took part in the campaign.4 In the document, they are called landtzknecht though we might not necessarily suspect them to be professional or battle-worn soldiers. Their leaders are Andreas von Esslingen, most likely asouth German mercenary, and Johann vom Hirtz, amember of awell-established family of the city’selite. In fact, all the listed men were paid for their service. The employment of paid men to guard the city’swalls and to fight the city’sconflicts is apractice that, in the case of Cologne, goes back to the late 13th century. Yet this does not imply in any way that the city relied on ‘foreign’ troops to keep it safe, but often employed its own citizens as mercenaries. Thus, paid men cannot easily be equated with foreigners, as traditional military history has abundantly done.5

The analysis of the Cologne army of 1532 allows us to highlight this statement, supplemented by the question of which areas did the mercenaries come from. To answer both, an assumption must be made – one that is important to the argument but cannot be ultimately proven. The great majority of the men whose names appear in the Monster zedell are named after places, i. e. they bear so-called toponymical surnames.Examples are Daim van Guylich (ofJülich), Hans van Covelens (ofKoblenz)orHans Arndtz van Norenberch(of Nuremberg). Such names usually imply an origin from a certain city or region, but do not always prove where the person was born. This can be demonstrated by taking aquick look at the elite of Cologne in the examined period, where families such as the von Siegen, von Heimbach or von Stralen can be found. They might have migrated from the places their toponymical surnames refer to and were named after them when arriving in Cologne, but these surnames were passed on to their families. Therefore, in 1532 for example, Arnold von Siegen, several times mayor of Cologne, was native citizen of this city and not of Siegen.

This information is important to the following analysis. However, while not every man with atoponymical surname might originate from the very

4 Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln, Best. 50 (Köln und das Reich (K+R), A30.

5 The distinguished military historian Charles Oman, to give one of many possible examples, called the mercenary “astranger to all the nobler incentives to valor, an enemy to his God and his neighbor, the most deservedly hated man in Europe”.Charles W. Oman, The Art of War in the Middle Ages,ed. and rev. by John H. Beeler (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1953), pp. 65–66.

I.
of
Civic
21
Cities as Incubators
Warand
Defence

town in question, there is astrong indication that this still holds true for most of the mercenaries. If we consider the thirty-five men called “from Düren” or the thirty-eight men called “from Cologne” it becomes obvious that we are not dealing with huge families collectively enlistingbut with a group of men from the same place.

Out of the total of 500 men, 288 could be assigned to 106 (identifiable) places. Their average distance from Cologne is about 90 km, but many of them were located in the Rhineland region close to the city. The majority of places (69 in total)are just mentioned once, twelve are mentioned twice and nine of them three times. This geographical distribution becomes more precise if we extract the seventeen places mentioned the most. Remarkably,all these places are located on the left bank of the river Rhine (see Fig. 6).Together they provided 168 landsknechts, thus only 16 %ofthe places provided 58.33 %ofthe 288 men that could be assigned.Leading amongst them is Cologne itself with thirty-eight men, followed by Düren (42 km from Cologne)with thirty-five men. Next are Linnich (53 km)with fourteen, Jülich (46 km)with thirteen and Nijmegen (135 km)with eight men. Seven mercenaries came from Aachen (71 km)and Euskirchen (35 km), six from Geldern (85 km)and Kempen (66 km), five from Herzogenrath (68 km)and Neuss (37 km), four from Bergheim (25 km), Bonn (28 km), Kerpen (23 km), Sittard (83 km), Wijk bij Duurstede (179 km)and Zons (24 km). Thus, most men came from an average distance of just 58.82 km. More than every tenth originated from Cologne itself. One might argue that all those men without toponymical surnames might also be inhabitants of Cologne and thus there was no need to note their place of origin. Yet this is ahypothesis that can only be proven by an in-depth prosopographic analysis. Besides this strong regional aspect, there is aminority which came from rather distant places such as Trier (155 km), Frankfurt (173 km), Osnabrück (188 km), Delft (243 km), Bruges (288 km)orNuremberg (382 km), but all these cities are mentioned only once.

In conclusion, it appears that the army of 500 Landsknechte the city of Cologne fielded in 1532 was, in large parts, drawn together from the city itself and the surrounding Rhineland with aclear emphasis on the left bank of the river. In this region, the city could rely on its longstanding network spanning the lands between the Rhine and the North Sea. At the same time, even in the age of mercenary,anarmy raised based on paid service could still

22 Markus Jansen

3) Linnich;4)Jülich;5) Nijmegen;6)Aachen;7)Euskirchen;8)Geldern;9)Kempen;10) Herzogenrath;11) Neuss;12) Bergheim;13) Bonn;14) Kerpen;15) Sittard; 16)Wijk bij Duurstede;17) Zons.

have strong local ties. To construct aclear opposition between the local militiaman and the foreign mercenary, as Niccolò Machiavelli so famously did in his Il Principe (Cap. XII)isanunsuitable simplification which modern scholarship should avoid.

Fig. 6. Map showing places to which the toponymical surnames of the Landsknechte refer. The outline shows modern-day North Rhine-Westphalia. The towns are:1)Cologne;2)Düren, I. Cities as Incubators of Warand Civic Defence 23

AHistory

of Motivation: Viennese Burghers in Action – or rather Inaction

The bombing of the city of Vienna and the storming of its suburbs in May 1485 by Matthias Corvinus led to the final decision of the Viennese citizens to hand over their city to the Hungarian King. In letters to princes and cities of the Empire, the city council claimed that they were forced to surrender because of the famine, the lack of support from the emperor and the treachery of Bohemian mercenaries. The prestigious city of Vienna was thus in the hands of the Hungarian king. However, the so-called Hungarian War was by no means over. After the capture of Vienna, Matthias Corvinus went as far as the imperial residence Wiener Neustadt and took it under his control. On the way there the troops, among them Vienneseservants, passed through several villages and landmarks, including the castle of Merkenstein.1 The city council’saccounts book of 1486 lists the damagesthat mercenaries and servants had suffered and were paid for by the city. One entry stands out in particular:

For Hans Gsmachl, who lost his hand cannon at Merkenstein. For along time, he was not to be compensated for his loss due to his indolence, but the mayor has now bought him an overcoat in order to incite his willingness to stay in the field with the others.2

1 Peter Csendes, “Geschichte Wiens im Mittelalter”,in Wien. Geschichte einer Stadt. Band 1: Vonden Anfängen bis zur Ersten Wiener Türkenbelagerung (1529),ed. by Peter Csendes and Ferdinand Opll (Vienna:Böhlau, 2001), pp. 172–174.

2 Hannsenn Gsmachl fur sein hanndtpuxn die er vor Merknstain verlornn hat, Darumb man im Lanng nichts hat gebn wellnn seins vnfleiss halbnn vnd doch yetz durch den Burgermaister das er im ain peltzl kauf vnnd im velde nebenn anndernn beleibn mug Zugebnn bevolhnn hat, 20 t. Vienna, Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Oberkammeramt, B1/1. Reihe, vol. 47, 1486, 20r

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