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Yeah I think medieval caveman is definitely still around.
This pattern of “we thought it was just B.S. / for show / for fashion / due to superstition” but then “we found out some of this is real and works”
Over and over and over again.
That’s really neat. I like that magazine I have a few copies around here. Considered writing for them too. I’ll have to look into buying a copy of that issue it’s a very interesting subject.
He does sound like an interesting person. I think the mid-14th Century was around the time when the vice and the draw plate were being spread around Central Europe by journeymen in the metalworking crafts. The draw plate in particular made life for mail makers much easier. They also started making very fine linked (and sometimes also heat-treated) mail for “civilian” use by courtiers and burghers (particularly in Italy) and these were very expensive – often more expensive than plate harness. So maybe he was able to find some useful profit margin after all.
As for Turcopoles, you have a point there, and in the 15th (but especially 16th) century there was a revival of similar types of light cavalry which lacked a lot of heavy equipment – the so called Uhlans, the original (Hungarian style) Hussars, the Jenetes in Spain and so on. These tended to appear in places with sustained warfare between different types of fighters.
The Spanish also developed light troops like rodeleros and so on.
But even these remained a minority, and an adjunct to the main fighting force, whether you are talking about Turcopoles in the 12th Century or light Hussars (as distinct from the heavier armored Polish type) in the 16th. You didn’t have entire (or majority) armies of light troops routinely winning battles until much later, really 17th Century.
So certainly stressed, certainly under a lot of financial strain, among many other types, but this is still a guy who owns a castle, multiple horses, cannon, firearms, suits of armor, and acres of land, and has many henchmen under his control, as well as looser affiliations with peers and nominal subordinates.
The knight errant was absolutely a real thing, and in the earlier era many of the German knights in particular were actually serfs, but by the 15th century most of those families which were still around acquired wealth.
You are probably right about the dregs of society kind of people who were more or less permanently in the role of professional solider. But the main key thing about the later medieval period that distinguishes it from many others, is that most people did not just do one thing. It was very common for petty nobles, gentry, burghers, peasants and members of other estates to spend a season or two fighting, and then go back to their lives. It was very common for example in some of the more warlike towns for young men of journeymen age to spend a season or two on campaign as mercenaries, in order to raise money to buy their way into master status and full citizenship (including earning enough to afford harness and weapons).
Some of those ended up pulled into a semi-permanent warrior lifestyle but outside of some situations like the 100 Years War in France, or some people associated with the Crusading Orders, I don’t really think that was the norm.
I don’t know if you were following this discussion (I thought maybe you were) but the passage Dan quoted here from the famous Humanist knight Ulrich von Hutten in a letter written in 1518 gives a pretty good insight into the conditions for a median ‘Lehnsmann’ in the increasingly volatile first quarter of the 16th Century.
http://myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=39150&start=20
I quote the letter here for convenience:
“Do you know what sort of place it is to which you ask me to return? Do not make the mistake of equating your own situation with mine. You city people, who lead comfortable, placid easy going lives, seem to think that a man in my position can find peace and quiet in his country retreat. Are you so ignorant of the turmoil and insecurity to which my sort is subject? Do not imagine that your life has anything in common with mine. Even if our estates were large enough to support us and our patrimonies ample, there are many troubles that deprive our minds of peace. Our days are spent in the fields, in the woods and in fortified strongholds. We lease our land to a few starving peasants who barely manage to scratch a living from it. From such paupers we draw our revenues, an income hardly worth the labour spent on it. To increase our revenues would require enormous effort and unremitting diligence.
Most of us are, moreover in a position of dependence on some prince to whom our hope of safety is attached. Left to ourselves we would be at everyone’s mercy, but under princely protection we still live in constant apprehension. Indeed, whenever I leave my tower I face danger. If I fall into the hands of those who are at war with my overlord, they seize me and carry me away. If my luck is bad I lose half my patrimony in ransom… No wonder we must spend large sums on horses and arms and employ retainers at great expense to ourselves. I cannot travel a mile from my home without putting on armour. I dare not even go hunting or fishing except clad in iron. Not a day passes without some dispute or altercation breaking out amongst our retainers. Often it is nothing more than a contention among stewards, but every quarrel must be approached with caution, for if I respond aggressively to a wrong done to one of my men, I may find myself embroiled in war while submission or concessions lay me open to extortion and a thousand new injuries springing from the first. And, remember, these quarrels arise not among foreign rivals but among neighbours, relatives and even brothers.
Such then are our rural delights; such is our leisure and our serene peace. The stone structures in which we live, whether they stand on a hill or in the plain, are built for defence, not comfort. Girded by moats and walls, they are narrow and crowded inside, pigs and cows competing with men for space, dark rooms crammed with guns, pitch, sulphur, and other materials of war. The stench of gun powder hangs in the air mixed with the smell of dogs and excrement and other such pleasant odours. Knights and retainers go to and fro, among them thieves and highway robbers, for our houses are open to all, and how can we tell one armed man from another? There is a constant din of sheep bleating, cows lowing, dogs barking, men working in the fields and the squeaks and creakings of carts and wagons. Wolves can be heard howling in the woods beyond.
Each day is filled with anxiety over what the morrow might bring – worrisome trouble, perhaps, or tempests. We must think about digging and ploughing, pruning the vines, planting trees, irrigating the meadows, sowing, spreading manure, cutting hay, reaping the grain, threshing and picking the grapes. Let the harvest fail, and we suffer terrible privation, with poverty, confusion, sickness, misery all around us. Is it to this life, then, that you are inviting me to return? Shall I leave court for an existence which is anything but the calm have you city people imagine? Do you really think that peace and tranquillity await me in my tower? And if you do not think so, what strange twist of your mind has led you to offer me such advice?”
Yeah but that is camp followers, servants, maybe skirmishers. Not like what comes later where entire armies are made up of the poor.
And of course, armies can go broke in the field, regardless of how they started out.
There is also the Ministerial knight, equivalent (I think) to Sergeants in England, who were armed and equipped by their Lord. But by the 14th Century most of those people had property.
Landsknechts did start out poor, but after being paid a few times and participating in a couple of sackings, most of them did have some possessions and decent kit, like armor, Helmets and their famous katzbalger sidearms – and they were particularly notorious for flaunting their fancy, garish, bright colored clothing. Landsknechts were created in imitation of Swiss Reislauffer, and at least originally were trained by Swiss Reislauffer.
I’m really not sure how pay worked in Spain. Those guys bumming around Hispanola and Cuba around the time of Cortez seemed to be pretty poor, but I gather they weren’t exactly regulars.
France may be kind of a special case because they were infamous for not being able to raise any decent infantry, basically for Socio Economic reasons. Their experiments with the Franc Archers for example didn’t end well when the peasants in question started asserting themselves. That was the issue – well armed people, especially soldiers sometimes made demands. That was one of the things that was gradually worked out, how to control your armies, in the Pike and Shot era, ultimately leading to the Absolute Monarch.
By which time, they had pretty much settled on using the Swiss for infantry IIRC.
Most large western European armies between the 14th and the 17th century contain a big contingent of poor people, because they were easy to recruit (and because if you were a male servant, getting a weapon and calling yourself a soldier was a step up in status). The French told stories about English archers, the English told stories about Scots and Welsh, crusaders told stories about Turkomen. So no special pleading why one example to illustrate a trend does not count! In a forum post I can’t provide a lot of examples with footnotes.
Well, the thing is, the economic side of that always made sense, but the fighting part didn’t add up very well at least not between the High and Late Medieval periods. Most medieval armies weren’t very large. Nor were they made up of cannon fodder. That is a much later invention.
Medieval armies, as a rule, tended to be fairly well kitted out, well trained, and small. And expensive. Those things went together, because experienced, properly equipped warriors didn’t risk their life for cheap. Of course princes were always running out of money and routinely tried to (and sometimes succeeded at) not pay their soldiers & make them fight for nothing. But the Swiss weren’t the only ones who would do an about-face and march home as soon as the boss (or client) missed a payment.
During the middle of the 13 Years War, after brutal sieges, the Bohemian mercenaries working for the Teutonic Order managed to capture 3 Prussian towns. But the Order had run out of money and was unable to pay them for 3 months. So the soldiers promptly turned around and sold them back to the Prussian Confederation for a huge price, and then went home rich men.
Destitute serfs could be used to fight, and were sometimes called up in levies, but they could not win many battles so they were not used much. So this is why expensive mercenaries, militia, or feudal vassals were the typical people doing the fighting. And those were not typically poor people, because in this period in order to fight you needed kit – typically at least some body armor, primary weapons like crosbows, guns, bows, or pikes or polearms, and a sidearm. Or most expensive of all – horses.
Of course there was some place for poor soliders. So every army had their valets and servants. Each lance of four or five riders had one mounted valet. Each handgunner in the Hungarian Black army had a valet too. So serfs could do those kinds of jobs, however traditionally these were not people from poorer estates but rather just younger members of the same estate.
To learn how to ride or to shoot and load a handgun or shoot and span a military grade crossbow effectively took money and leisure time. The economic status of ‘yeomen’ longbow archers is England is pretty well known, let it just be pointed out that crossbowmen in Central Europe were not paid less than English longbowmen. Those guys paid to enter schützenfest and fechtschüler, and spent many hours ‘shooting the popinjay’, hunting, and other forms of target practice. Contrary to what they portrayed so often on the History Channel you couldn’t just hand somebody a military-grade 15th Century crossbow and send them out into the field to fight.
The Landsknechts were the first experiment in raising an army made up primarily from destitute serfs up to the level of professionals. It was a fairly radical experiment, but it worked. The Spanish basically copied the Landsknecht model. This ultimately led to the pike and shot type of warfare, in which troops were far less well trained or equipped, and less effective on a man for man basis than a medieval army, but were so much cheaper the armies could be ten times the size. And as Joseph Stalin said, quantity has a quality all it’s own.
The L/s/d currencies in the Archivo Datini di Prato seem to be worth about 1/10 as much as English money (so an Italian soldo is about an English penny in the late 14th century). IIRC, a florin was about 3 shillings English in the late 14th century, and Datini usually reckoned 23 soldi of Provence or 32 soldi imperiali made a florin. The big thing was that other money was being randomly debased, but gold florins and silver English money more or less kept their value (and if you use one and only one L/s/d system, there is no confusion). But then the Tudors come in, and Cortez and Pizarro, and things become pretty hopeless to track for a couple of hundred years.
L/S/D currencies did fluctuate a great deal due to devaluation. English currency was a bit more stable than Italian currencies because England had those big silver mines in Cornwall, and because England was a fairly large Island Kingdom, so was often under less acute financial crises than individual Italian City States. But England wasn’t the only polity with silver mines, the big mine in Kutna Hora in Bohemia was quite significant and there were others around Central Europe, I think currencies were a bit more stable up there. Anyway, roughly 12 ounces of silver to a mark seems to be at least in the ballpark of reality for most of the 15th Century, though it did fluctuate with the wars, plague and other major events.
Ruth Matilda Anderson, Hispanic Costume, page 65: Before Pavia the imperial commander asked his men to wear shirts over their other clothing for recognition and lend spare shirts to the Germans. Those without a spare shirt would wear sheets and tent awnings (tiendas) or two sheets of paper made into short cloaks or sambenitillos.
I have read stories about soldiers whose clothes are falling apart over and over in western Europe from the 14th century into the 17th century … kings were keener to hire and deploy soldiers than keep them supplied with food and clothing. That is one reason why so many soldiers turned to robbery and extortion, and why the Swiss were so firm that if the money stopped they were walking.
Converting sums into florins or English pounds would make it easier for other English-speakers to understand the sums you are talking about.
Well the thing is, by the time of Pavia, you had Landsknechten who were intentionally recruited from the poorest serfs in Rural Swabia and other poor areas, and the Spanish were copying this method and recruiting from Estremadura etc. also you never know what kind of conditions mercenaries are going to be in after being in the field a few months, and as we know pay was intermittant. But the paucity of fabric seems a little odd given the habit of Landsknechts to wear 4 or 5 different types of fabric on a given limb, then cut it to reveal another two or three types of (often very expensive) underclothing or lining, specifically so as to show off how ‘textile rich’ they were and that they could flaunt sumptuary laws.
Currency is always kind of tough, because the values changed so rapidly and often, and the same names were used for different coins in different times and places.
But it helps to convert it into rough equivalent of silver by weight. Pretty much all countries had a currency roughly similar to an English pound – the French Livre, the German mark, the Italian Lira, the Ukranian Grivna, all roughly correlate to the equivalent value (at least in theory) of 12 ounces of roughly 80% pure silver. As we know the sterling standard is 92.5% but that came a bit later.
That is usually a fiat currency and used as a unit of bookeeping (the word for it usually literally means ‘book’) except in Ukraine or Russia where it literally means a 12 oz silver bar or the equivalent value in furs. Gulden (or Rhenish guilder or Polish złoty) were actual coins typically worth roughly 1.3-1.5 marks or 16-18 ounces (depending on how big or thick the coin and how pure the gold). The word just means ‘golden’ or ‘gold’.
My understanding is that the Florin was a gold coin which was supposed to be worth one pound or lira, i.e. 12 ounces of silver. Of course that depended on many factors.
Everyday currency starts at the equivalent of the English shilling (either 1/20 or 1/40 of a £ / mark / Livre / Lira) and then various coins which are shares of that. The German Kreuzer is usually worth half a shilling, and there are supposed to be 60 Kreuzer to a gulden, or 40 to a mark (or pound or lira or florin etc.) It’s also worth a little ore than 4 pennies.
The groschen (Czech groš) came in different regional variants, but the Prague groschen was worth roughly 3 grams of 93% pure silver, basically depending on how well the big silver mine at Kutna Hora was doing and who had control over it at any given moment (it went through a wild series of boom and bust times as the mine got played out but improvements in technology both for mining and refining metals reopened it again). But probably typically around 3 grams. This is basically a more valuable / better dinari.
Dinari were about half of a groschen, and seemed to be ubiquitous. Roughly 2 grams of silver.
Then you have pfennigs / pennies by the later middle ages, and there were also Heller, usually worth a half pfenning. Anyway a penny is usually somewhere around 1.2 grams of silver, very roughly speaking.
There were of course many other regional currencies. Also these are the base values of each unit type, whereas typical actual coins were often multitudes of the above, so like a 5 Kreuzer coin or a 3 Groschen coin etc.
We are planning to do a currency converter app for this website by the way but I don’t know if we’ll ever get around to it. I have it already on an app I wrote that runs on my desktop, but it’s not written in web compatible software.
When you are talking about larger amounts like monthly pay you can usually convert that to either marks / pounds / livres or to gulden, so that is how you can compare like with like. For smaller denominations it’s harder.
