From Nubian archers serving Egyptian pharaohs in 2000 BCE to Russian Wagner Group fighters operating across three continents in 2023, hired soldiers have shaped the rise and fall of empires, toppled governments, and changed the course of history. Blood for Gold is a comprehensive global history of mercenary warfare across all eras and all inhabited continents.

Three volumes — Swords of Antiquity, Knights of Fortune, and Corporations of Violence — cover more than 130 distinct mercenary groups, armies, and individuals: the Ten Thousand Greeks who marched 1,600 kilometers through the Persian heartland after their employer died on the battlefield; the Mamluk slave-soldiers who became sultans and ruled Egypt for 267 years; the Catalan Company that saved Byzantium and ended up ruling Athens from the Acropolis; the Irish exiles who fought for the French crown for a century; the Japanese ronin who governed Siam; the African Siddi warriors who built independent principalities on the coast of India; the Baloch warriors from what is now Pakistan who have served the Sultan of Oman continuously for more than 300 years and still make up roughly 40 percent of his armed forces today.

This is not a Eurocentric survey with occasional detours into Asia and Africa. The history of hired warfare is genuinely global, and that is the history this series tells — including dozens of cases that have almost no presence in English-language literature: the Lisowczycy of Poland, the Saika Ikki of Japan, the Black Flag Army of Vietnam, the Jenets of medieval Spain, the San Patricios, the Uskoks, the Qizilbash, and many more.

Volume 1 covers the ancient and medieval world. Volume 2 covers the Renaissance through the age of empires. Volume 3 covers the twentieth century to the present — from the French Foreign Legion and the Congo mercenaries of the 1960s to Executive Outcomes, Blackwater, the Wagner Group, and the emerging world of cyber-mercenaries and autonomous weapons.

What connects all three volumes is a question that every age has asked and none has answered permanently: who controls men with guns?