Between 1500 and 1900, hired warfare transformed from the informal arrangements of the medieval period into something resembling a professional industry. Volume 2 of Blood for Gold traces that transformation across four centuries and every inhabited continent.
In Europe: the Condottieri of Renaissance Italy, who ran military operations with the logic of business contracts and produced both famous victories and the dynasty that ruled Milan; the Swiss pike squares that every major European power spent fortunes trying to hire or imitate — and the myth of Swiss loyalty, which their actual history does not support; the Landsknechts, who dressed in deliberately outrageous costumes, developed their own laws and culture, and played a central role in the Sack of Rome in 1527; the Polish Lisowczycy, who received no regular pay at all, funded themselves entirely through plunder, and covered 150 kilometers per day — a speed that made them effectively untouchable and put their name into German folklore as a symbol of terror for generations; and Wallenstein, who understood that the Thirty Years’ War was primarily a financial operation and built private armies for the Holy Roman Emperor while becoming one of the wealthiest men on the continent.
Beyond Europe: Japanese ronin selling their skills across Asia after Sekigahara left 100,000 samurai without masters; Buddhist warrior-monks who mastered the arquebus and held entire Japanese provinces against samurai armies; the Black Flag Army in Vietnam, which began as Taiping rebels, became mercenaries, and ended as national heroes in both Vietnam and China; and the African warriors who arrived in India over a thousand years ago and built principalities that survived every change of dynasty.
Two chapters cover what may be the most distinctive mercenary traditions in the series: the Irish Wild Geese — the 14,000 soldiers who left Ireland after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691 and whose descendants died in French service across the following century — and the Baloch warriors from what is now Pakistan who have served the Sultan of Oman continuously since the eighteenth century and still constitute roughly 40 percent of his armed forces today. The longest unbroken mercenary tradition in recorded history.
Also included: the Hessian soldiers sold by their princes to fight in America; the San Patricios who deserted the U.S. Army to fight for Catholic Mexico and ended up as national heroes on two continents; and the armies of the East India companies, which conquered entire subcontingents with corporate efficiency and no formal declaration of war.
