MERCENARIES and PAID MEN. the MERCENARY IDENTITY in the MIDDLE AGES1 INTRODUCTION John France Swansea University Mercenaries

MERCENARIES AND PAID MEN. THE MERCENARY IDENTITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES1 INTRODUCTION John France Swansea University Mercenaries have never had a good press. At best they have been largely forgotten. The great war between Greece and the Persian Empire is imprinted in our minds as a struggle of freedom against Asiatic des- potism, but it is often forgotten that huge numbers of Greeks fought against Alexander the Great (336–23) as paid men in the ranks of the Persian army. In the twentieth century mercenaries meddling in African wars were regarded with disdain, while even now we look with suspi- cion upon the private-enterprise soldiers serving the coalition in Iraq. This is all the odder in that they may lay claim to be one of the oldest professions known to mankind. In the second millennium the kings of Assyria and Babylon employed Amorite nomads, while the Pharaohs bought the services of Nubians and Philistines, and all this long before money was invented. Such dislike and distrust was especially marked in the Middle Ages when the very term mercenarius was for long a term of abuse. In classical Latin the word simply meant a hireling of any sort, but this was given a particular connotation by its use in a famous passage in the Gospel of St John in which Christ contrasts himself, the Good Shepherd with the ‘hireling . whose own the sheep are not’ who fl ees at the fi rst sign of trouble ‘because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep.’2 This dislike had very clear consequences. After the conquest of England in 1066, a penance for killing was imposed on the entire Norman army, but it was markedly more severe for those who served William for pay than for those who were his subjects serving from obligation to their ruler.3 This distinction between duty and the desire for gain may strike us as highly artifi cial. Virtually all men who fought hoped to gain, and in this case the greater men who were subjects of William stood to gain far more than those who hired themselves for pay. However, this distinction was a very important one in medieval 2 john france thinking and still forms the basis of modern perceptions of who was a mercenary and who was not. One aspect of the poor press which mercenaries have received is that they are seen as the most brutal and degraded of soldiers. Cruelty, in particular is often seen as their defi ning characteristic. In 1179 the Third Lateran Council condemned mercenaries and all who employed them, calling even for a crusade against these destroyers of churches who killed the poor and the innocent without any distinction of sex or status.4 But this was hardly a special quality of mercenaries. The nobles and knights of medieval Europe tended to justify their privileged posi- tion in terms of their sense of social responsibility, and, in particular, the duty to defend the weak and helpless. By the end of the twelfth century, David Crouch (15–32) suggests, this was a central plank of the newly emerging exclusiveness of the aristocrats to whom the knights were being assimilated. But this quality was observed at least as much in the breach as in the performance. A vital part of medieval warfare was the destruction of the economic capacity of the enemy, and if this involved, as it often did, bullying peasants and much worse, then so be it. Geoffroy de Vigeois, a Limousin abbot who was more familiar than most with the ravages of mercenaries, records that the great noble Aimar, Viscount of Limoges and his friends, massacred 2000 of both sexes in a day in a drive against their enemies towards Brive.5 In 1188 William Marshal, the very paradigm of twelfth-century chivalry, advised his king, Henry II of England (1154–89), to deceive the French by pretending to disband his army in order to mount a terrible raid, a chevauchée, into their lands, burning, looting and destroying.6 Mercenaries were often the instruments of this kind of violence, but their employers were the nobility who were well aware of their methods. Similarly, fi ckleness is often seen as another characteristic of the mercenary soldier. In 1183 Henry the Young King, rebelled against his father, Henry II, and seized the city of Limoges where he found numerous allies amongst the discontented nobility of the Limousin. At the same time he gathered a substantial force of mercenaries, but he was afraid that his father would hire them away from him by pay- ing more. Indeed, Henry II, as John Hosler (33–42) has shown, was a formidable and frequent hirer of mercenaries.7 But switching sides was a commonplace of war and far from limited to paid men. When Philip of France (1180–1223) attacked Normandy in 1204, the infi delity of the local nobility to their ruler, King John (1199–1216), became a major factor in the collapse of the duchy.8 By contrast, in 1102 Robert .

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