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10 Jean Hoeufft, French subsidies, and the Thirty Years’ War Erik Thomson Historians of early modern Europe have emphasized the importance of entrepreneurs and private contractors to governance, ascribing particular importance to the merchants and bankers who lent money to crowns, organized chartered companies, and equipped and provisioned armies, as well as to the officers who recruited, armed, and led military units.1 Although Guy Rowlands has charted some of the operations of international remittance bankers during the reign of Louis the XIV in a recent book, historians have generally neglected the role of bankers and merchants in diplomacy during the Thirty Years’ War.2 Yet bankers and merchants played crucial roles in early modern diplomacy, drawing upon contacts, financial techniques and institutions, and sources of coin and capital to make possible the payment of subsidies and other diplomatic gifts and expenditures that the chapters in this volume suggest were crucial to relations among sovereigns.3 1 David Parrott, The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); The Contractor State and Its Implications, 1659–1815, ed. by Richard Harding and Sergio Solbes Ferri (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2012); and War, Entrepreneurs and the State in Europe and the Mediterranean, 1300–1800, ed. by Jeff Fynn-Paul (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 2 Guy Rowlands, Dangerous and Dishonest Men: The International Bankers of Louis
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