This week we’re going to take a look at mercenaries in the ancient Mediterranean world! This was one of the runners-up in the latest ACOUP Senate poll, coming out of quite a few requests to discuss how mercenaries functioned in antiquity. In order to keep the scope here manageable and within my expertise, I am going to confine myself to mercenaries in the Classical (480-323) and Hellenistic (323-31) Mediterranean, but we’ll have more than enough to talk about within that framework.
Mercenary soldiers make frequent appearances in our sources for these periods and as a result also are often prominent in modern representations of warfare in the ancient Mediterranean, showing up, for instance, as a standard feature of strategy games (Rome: Total War; Imperator, etc.) set in the period. That said, while our sources often note the presence of mercenaries, the actual mechanics – who serves, how are they recruited, how are they paid and so on – are often more obscure (though not entirely so!). So that is what we are going to focus on here, not an exhaustive list of every known mercenary outfit in antiquity (you can consult the short bibliography below for that) but rather an outline of the subject with a focus on mechanics.
I do want to note there are two things I couldn’t fit in here. The first was a complete discussion of the Carthaginian army and the different soldiers who served in it. We’re going to do that, but not here and not right away (this year, though, I think). The second is that I do not really get into here how specific mercenary troops fought – Tarantine cavalry tactics, Cretan archery, thureophoroi and so on. We’ve discussed some of that, actually, in our treatment of Hellenistic armies, but the rest of it will have to wait for another day. In my defense, this post is already 7,600 words long.
But first, as always, if you like what you are reading here, please share it; if you really like it, you can support me on Patreon; members at the Patres et Matres Conscripti level get to vote on the topics for post-series like this one! If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
(Further Reading Note: For a very long time, the standard references on this topic were H.W. Parke, Greek Mercenary Soldiers from the Earliest Times to the Battle of Ipsus (1933) and G.T. Griffith, The Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World (1935). These days, Parke has largely been replaced as a reference by M. Trundle, Greek Mercenaries: from the late archaic period to Alexander (2004), while Griffith remains the standard reference for mercenary service in the Hellenistic period. For a somewhat broader but still Mediterranean focus, S. Yalichev, Mercenaries of the Ancient World (1997) offers a lot of coverage. Note also S. English, Mercenaries in the Classical World to the Death of Alexander (2012), which is one of those examples of a quite solid book languishing as a Pen & Sword title; I’d say Trundle is to be preferred to English, but the latter is by no means bad – I detected no great or terrible errors in it and it may be easier to get a hold of.)
Defining Mercenaries
However before we can even dive into outlining mercenary service in antiquity, we need to clarify exactly who we mean when we discuss mercenaries. One of the challenges in discussing mercenaries is that some of our sources – most notably Polybius – are deliberately slippery with their use of terms. As a result, it is often very easy to end up in a situation where a translation (faithfully translated!) describes a given set of soldiers as ‘mercenaries’ who are not, by modern definitions, mercenaries at all! Indeed, much of the notion of ‘mercenary armies’ evaporates when we actually investigate the conditions under which many of these so-called ‘mercenaries’ were recruited.
The primarily culprit here is a Greek word, μισθοφόρος (misthophoros), which is often translated as ‘mercenary’ and indeed had that meaning in antiquity, but our sources – again, particularly Polybius – play fast and loose with the broad meaning of the term and the narrow meaning. The narrow meaning of misthophoros is that of a mercenary soldier – a soldier serving purely for pay with no real attachment to the state they fight for – but the broad meaning is its literal one: ‘wage-bearing’ (a μισθός being a wage, distinct from σίτος or σιτώνιον, both literally “bread [money/supply]” and thus ‘basic maintenance’ – μισθός is pay in excess of basic maintenance).1 So while a misthophoros could be a foreign mercenary serving for pay – that misthos – they could equally be a domestic soldier who, for whatever reason, was paid a wage.
When we think of mercenaries, we generally think of foreign soldiers fighting for a country for the sake of money, rather than any commitment to the cause. Greek authors can easily make this clear by describing soldiers as ξενικός, (xenikos, ‘foreign’), but they often don’t or blur these categories. The issue is that, of course many soldiers who are not mercenaries might still be paid a wage in excess of basic maintenance.
And that brings us to Polybius, the worst offender in the ‘fudging the definition of mercenaries’ category. Polybius is famously the source for the claim that Carthage’s armies were both “foreign” (xenikos) and “mercenary” (misthophoros).2 Generations of readers and scholars have carelessly accepted that description but it is fundamentally a deception. This isn’t the place to fully describe the Carthaginian military system (I discuss this more in my book project!) but the backbone of Carthaginian armies were infantry drawn from Carthage’s North African territories. Polybius is happy to describe these fellows as misthophoroi and let his readership follow his lead into assuming the narrow (‘mercenary’) definition, which is wrong, rather than the broad definition (‘wage-bearing’) where he is accurate.
Polybius rarely lies to your face, but he absolutely bends words and facts to make his arguments seem more plausible. In particular, Polybius is looking to set up a contrast between what he views as the inferiority of Carthage’s ‘mercenary’ armies as compared to the martial excellence and moral purity of Rome’s armies of citizen soldiers. So he wants to emphasize the mercenary nature of Carthage’s armies and minimize the same about Rome.
But here’s how those North African troops were organized. Carthage had expanded its control over many communities in North Africa and evidently alongside the taxes they had to pay to Carthage, part of subordination was that they were liable for conscription. When Carthaginian generals raised armies, after enrolling any Carthaginian citizen volunteers, they would head out into Carthage’s African subject communities and conscript troops (ἐπιλέγειν, ‘to pick out’) from these communities.3 These conscripts were then evidently paid a wage for their service and seem to have functioned something like semi-professional forces, often serving on quite long campaigns. These are not mercenaries by our definition! They are not foreign, but rather subject communities being conscripted from within the territory that Carthage controlled – not very different from how Rome raised the forces of the socii (the main difference being Rome made the socii communities pay their soldiers; Carthage taxes its subjects and then pays the soldiers out of those taxes).
Likewise, we know that early on in Carthaginian history, the Carthaginians recruited Iberian soldiers – men from the Mediterranean coast of Spain – as mercenaries for their armies.4 Fair enough. But by the Second Punic War (218-201), Carthage – or more correctly the Barcids – control the Iberian homelands in Spain. The Barcids – Hamilcar, his son-in-law Hasdrubal the Fair and biological son Hannibal – have moved in with an army, defeated the locals and set themselves up essentially as ‘warlords of warlords’ in a non-state military hierarchy. So when Hannibal and his brother Hasdrubal (different Hasdrubal) raise absolutely massive numbers of Iberians to fight for them, these aren’t mercenaries either, but the native military forces of what are essentially Hannibal’s vassal warlords (what the Romans term reguli, ‘petty kings’). At this point, these Iberians are forces again internal to Carthage’s empire.
Meanwhile Hannibal’s Gauls are also mostly not mercenaries but rather they understand their polities to be allies of Carthage in a joint war against Rome which Hannibal is leading, something made clear in the treaty Carthage makes with Philip V of Macedon, which specifies these allied forces.5 Under that framework relatively few of Carthage’s soldiers in the Second Punic War are actually mercenaries! Instead, Carthage’s army is a patchwork of subject-community conscripts, local allies, vassal levies and troops raised by individual generals through personal relationships – a system that is more akin to the Roman army than any other force in the Mediterranean.
But saying that does nothing for Polybius’ arguments either about Roman martial virtue or his glorification of the Roman citizen-soldier ideal (which one rather gets the impression he thinks the Greeks back home ought to adopt), so he – without ever quite lying – lets the reader believe Carthage’s armies are mostly mercenaries and this is why they are less effective in the field (Polyb. 6.52). It’s a definitional fudge to heighten the contrast.
It isn’t even the only time Polybius plays this trick! In his description of the Ptolemaic army at the Battle of Raphia, Polybius (5.65.6) groups together the cavalry ‘from Greece’ (actual mercenaries from Greece hired by the Ptolemies) with the ‘mercenary [misthophoroi] cavalry’ in a single unit, making it sound like this is a single unit of mercenary cavalry from Greece and elsewhere. But in fact the misthophoroi hippeis, ‘wage-bearing cavalry’ are a well-attested unit of Greek-speaking military settlers in Egypt serving as cavalry.6 Polybius’ narrative is one in which the moribund Ptolemaic army is whipped into shape but a set of mercenary Greek commanders (Polyb. 5.63.8-14), a fresh infusion of Greek martial spirit into the army and this fudge lets him make it seem that while the ‘native’ (Macedonian) Ptolemaic cavalry on the left was wholly defeated it, the battle was won by the – he will let the reader understand incorrectly, mostly mercenary – cavalry on the right, when in fact much of the cavalry on the right is also ‘native’ Greek-speaking cavalry from Egypt.
In practice, Ptolemaic victory at Raphia seems to depend a lot more on the fact that, having at last incorporated native Egyptians into the phalanx, the Ptolemies arrive on the field with almost twice as many heavy infantry phalangites as the Seleucids, forcing Antiochus III to try to oppose the Egyptian phalanx with much lighter forces, to his misfortune.
The result of all of this is we need to be quite careful about how we define ‘mercenaries’ in ancient armies, since our sources are very slippery with their terms, sometimes willing to term any soldiers paid a wage beyond basic maintenance – even if native to the state they fight for – mercenaries. In particular, when we say mercenaries, we mean soldiers recruited from outside a given state, serving for pay. That is to say, these are not domestically recruited professional soldiers (like the legions in the Roman imperial period) or domestically recruited non-citizen auxiliaries (like the imperial Roman auxilia or Egyptians in the Ptolemaic army) or allied forces fighting in an army because their own state is a party to the conflict (like Hannibal’s Gauls or Eumenes II’s Pergamon troops at Magnesia) or vassal levies present because their own polity is subordinated to the main party in the war (like the Roman socii or Hannibal’s Iberians). All of those soldiers are notionally fighting for the state to which they belong. We want soldiers fighting purely for money, for a state to which they do not belong.
That said, there were absolutely mercenaries by this definition in service in the ancient Mediterranean, so lets talk about them!
Early Mercenaries
Our evidence for mercenaries in broader ancient Mediterranean world prior to the Classical period is quite thin, but certainly suggests – as we’d expect – that the profession is an old one, perhaps as old as the state itself. We have evidence, for instance, of foreigners on the standing royal guard of Sargon of Akkad (r. 2334-2279), including a unit of Amorites (a foreign people), which would seem to suggest the hiring of mercenaries even at this early point.7 We can’t be certain why Sargon resorted to foreign soldiers, but it may well have been the same reason that many kings through history maintained foreign, mercenary bodguards: a guard of foreign mercenaries would lack any political connections, making them notionally entirely reliant on the king for their status and thus more loyal. Likewise we have some evidence from the Old Kingdom onward of Nubians in Egyptian military service who were probably mercenaries and even a tomb inscription commemorating an Egyptian Harkhuf who brought back – among other goods – mercenaries for the Egyptian King Merenre Nemtyemsaf I (r. c. 2300) from his trade expeditions into Nubia, an early mercenary-recruiter.8
Greeks seem to have served as mercenaries across the Eastern Mediterranean from an early point as well – we have evidence for Ionian Greeks, seemingly on mercenary service, in Babylon and for Greeks in Egyptian mercenary service by the seventh century.9 We often cannot see these early mercenaries very well – their terms of service, methods of recruitment and so on are obscured to us by the limited evidence – but they serve as a useful reminder that mercenary service was not invented in the Classical period (480-323) when it becomes increasingly visible to us.
That said, I want to focus on how ancient mercenaries might function in the Classical (480-323) and Hellenistic (323-31) periods because this is where my expertise is best.
Recruiting Mercenaries
The first thing that is worth stressing here is that we shouldn’t think of the ancient Mediterranean world in either the Classical or Hellenistic periods as having something like a single linked ‘mercenary market’ that all states had access to. Instead, mercenary recruitment was generally highly localized, with each state having access to different regional ‘pools’ of manpower they could hire. This limitation is somewhat obscured by the tendency both in our sources and in modern scholarship to focus on Greek mercenaries, which can be somewhat deceptive simply because the Aegean ‘mercenary market’ was the one that almost every central or eastern Mediterranean state had some access to. But this is just a complicated way of saying that the states which had contact with Greece (and thus are of concern to our Greek sources) had contact with Greece (and were thus able to contract mercenaries there).
There is a tendency in the popular imagination to image mercenaries functioning as an entirely separate ‘pool’ of manpower from ‘regular armies.’ That is how they function in most strategy games, for instance. But in practice, of course, the supply of men in any of these societies able to equip themselves to fight – something that demanded either a degree of wealth or social standing – was always limited. A ruler recruiting mercenaries was thus reaching into the ‘manpower pool’ of other polities, sometimes in similar ways to how those polities would themselves have recruited their residents. So the question here is essentially how does a leader gain access to the military manpower supply of a foreign polity?
In practice there were two main methods. The first and easiest was through diplomacy: a ruler might, because they already had an existing diplomatic relationship with another power, be able to negotiate access to the military population (however composed socially and economically) that their friendly neighbor controlled. For most of the Classical period in particular, friendship with Sparta acted as the key that unlocked access to Greek mercenaries from the Peloponnese – with various Mediterranean powers being relatively eager to hire Greek mercenaries presumably because the Greek style of heavy infantry combat had proved quite effective during the Greco-Persian Wars (492-478).
Thus for instance in 380, when both Egypt (under the Pharoah Hakor (r. 392-379)) – having revolted from Persian control in 404 – and the Persians were seeking Greek mercenaries, they both courted Athens for access to them: the Egyptians reached out to the Athenian general Chabrias to command a force for them and the Persians responded by sending envoys encouraging the Athenians to recall Chabrias and instead send the general Iphicrates to put together a force for them (Diod. Sic. 15.29.1-4). Likewise, when the Egyptian king – Egypt having revolted from Persian control in 404 – Nectanebo I (r. 379-360) wanted to raise a force of Greek mercenaries in c. 361 he did so directly through one of the Spartan kings, Agesilaus II (Xen. Ages. 2.28-31). This was hardly only a game for non-Greeks: Dionysius I, Tyrant of Syracuse (r. 406-367) used his friendly relationship with Sparta to enlist substantial numbers of mercenaries from the Greek mainland to supplement his Sicilian-Greek army (Diod. Sic. 14.44.2).
The above, of course, is hardly an exhaustive list. That said, as you might imagine, it is often really tricky to separate this kind of mercenary recruitment – where the mercenaries are sometimes coming under the leadership of a ‘mercenary captain’ who is also a political leader in another state – from allied or vassal forces. I keep saying we need to discuss the Carthaginian army another time (we will, I promise), but Carthage recruits this way all the time, with Carthaginian generals maintaining friendly relationships with Numidian princes or Iberian warlords who they can then call upon for soldiers – the line between a mercenary force, an allied force or a vassal force gets extraordinarily blurry in these sort of situations. You have some clear examples of mercenaries drawn up this way – the 4,000 Celtiberians raised by Hasdrubal Gisco, for instance are clearly external mercenaries (Polyb. 1.67.7), the Celtiberian Meseta being outside of Carthage’s political control – but other examples, like the 2,000 Numidians Hamilcar Barca gets in exchange for a pledge to marry his daughter to the Numidian prince Naravas seem to be more allies-and-vassals than mercenaries (Polyb. 1.78.1-9).
Those lines can even blur over time: early on Carthage is sending ambassadors to Spain to negotiate for mercenaries using trade goods (Diod. Sic. 13.44.6, 13.80.2) in what is clearly the sort of mercenaries-recruited-through-diplomacy relationship, which appears to be how Carthage recruits Iberians at least through 241 (Polyb. 1.66-7). But then of course the Barcids go and conquer the place and so post-237 the Iberians we see in Carthage’s army – probably the largest single manpower source in the Second Punic War (218-201) – are not external mercenaries but rather internal vassal levies, raised by local warlords who have been subjugated by the Barcids.
Again, I promise we’ll talk about Carthage’s military machine in detail. Later.
For leaders who could not take the expedient of recruiting mercenaries directly through the state apparatus like this, the alternate method was to recruit mercenaries through the dispatch of a ‘mercenary captain,’ though I should be clear that ‘mercenary captain’ was not generally a specialized career – these tended to be exactly the same sort of men who might hold high office (like that of general) in a Greek polis or be major elites with retinues in a non-state polity. Often these particular men might be politically on the outs, in exile, or in similar conditions – which would put them in the court of a foreign leader who might trust them and want the use of their talents – but of course they retained the kind of experience, influence and connections to put out the call for fighting men in a given region or within a given polity.
The classic example of this sort of recruitment, rendered unusually visible to us by Xenophon’s report of it, was the recruitment of the 10,000 by Cyrus the Younger for his attempt on the throne of Persia in 401. Cyrus recruited his mercenary force in a number of separate detachments to conceal his preparations for civil war. His own territory – he was satrap in Asia Minor – included the poleis of Ionia, where he recruited domestically (Xen. Anab. 1.1.6), but to supplement this Cyrus used his connections to employ a number of prominent Greeks as mercenary recruiters and captains. He sends Clearchus, a Spartan exile into Greece with a large sum of money to recruit troops (feigning that they were for a war in Thrace, Xen. Anab. 1.1.9) in the Chersonese (but probably drawing primarily Peloponnesians). To Thessaly, he sent Aristippus, a Thessalian in political difficulties to recruit there (Xen. Anab. 1.1.10); to Boeotia a Boeotian named Proxenus and in Achaea two Achaeans named Symphalian and Socrates (Xen. Anab. 1.1.11). Again, what we’re told about these fellows implies they were all men of local political significance, who had become friends (read: political allies) of Cyrus and so by giving them access to his money Cyrus could use them to access the manpower pool of Greece.
The system of recruitment doesn’t really change all that much for mercenary recruitment outside of Greece or later in the Hellenistic period.10 As Griffith notes, for the major Hellenistic powers, access to Greek manpower was an important strategic consideration and so the relations of these Macedonian dynasts with friendly Greek cities often included promises to allow free transit for mercenary recruiters (ξενόλογοι) in their territory and to bar the same from the king’s enemies. Equally, we regularly see the appearance of men who – although we do not get the detail Xenophon gives us for the early leaders of the 10,000 – appear to be the same sort of mercenary recruiters discussed above. Thus for instance we get the roster of mercenary captains involved in preparing the Ptolemaic army for Raphia: Echecrates from Thessaly, Phoxidas of Melita, Eurylochus the Magnesian, Socrates the Boeotian and Cnopias of Allaria (Polyb. 5.63.11-12). In 203, Ptolemy V’s court dispatches an Aetolian mercenary captain, Scopas, to his native country in an effort to recruit more Greeks (Polyb. 15.25.16).
Sources of Mercenaries
Given those two primary means of getting access to sources of men willing to fight for pay – either using diplomatic channels to gain access or employing a local notable who already has access – it is now not hard to see why each state or leader is going to have access to different ‘pools’ of mercenaries, based on who is in their court available and sufficiently trustworthy to be tasked to do mercenary recruiting or on what diplomatic arrangements they have. On the latter point, while in some cases these diplomatic arrangements are essentially between states and basically treaty arrangements, you will note above in many cases they are fundamentally personal in nature: not just ‘is your state friendly with Sparta’ but ‘do you, personally, have a relationship with, or a way to contact a key leader like Agesilaus II personally to have him broker the arrangement.
That said in the Hellenistic Mediterranean there are so very ‘standard’ sources of mercenaries we see show up frequently in a lot of armies. The most obvious and persistent one is Greeks, particularly Greeks from the Aegean – that is, mainland Greece, the Aegean Islands and Ionia. Alexander the Great’s conquests and the states that his empire fragmented into meant that effectively every major Eastern Mediterranean power was Greek-speaking with substantial cultural and personal ties in Greece. Because these kingdoms relied substantially on a ruling class made up to at least some degree (primarily made up in the case of the two largest, Ptolemic Egypt and the Seleucid Kingdom) by Greek military settlers meant that they had a rapacious demand for these fellows. But at the same time, for states whose capitals (Alexandria, Seleucia-on-the-Tigris and the Syrian tetrapolis (which included Seleucia Pieria and Antioch)) were new, large Greek-speaking urban foundations with a river of royal money flowing through them, it meant that any Hellenistic ruler had an ample supply of the sort of fellows who could be sent with a bunch of cash (or promises of cash) to Greece to put out the call to enlist men.
Indeed, if you were such a fellow from Greece – a politically important exile or an experienced military commander on the outs – the obvious place to go was one of the Hellenistic capitals, whose kings could pay you lavishly for your abilities and connections.
The odd result of this persistent demand for Greek mercenaries was the very brief emergence of a fixed ‘clearing house’ of sorts for Greek mercenaries in the fourth century: Taenarum (modern Cape Matapan, on the very southern tip of the Peloponnese). I find that interested students of antiquity often assume, encountering Taenarum in this function, that it must have been one of many such ‘mercenary marketplaces’ but in fact it really does seem to be the only spot quite like it. It was hardly the only place to recruit mercenaries, but it is the only place where it seems like large numbers of prospective mercenaries simply hung out, waiting to be recruited. It seems to have filled this role from at least the 320s onward (see Diod. Sic. 17.108.7, 17.111.1). That said, Taenarum itself seems to have faded in importance and we get no references to it continuing as a mercenary rallying point in the third century, nor does any other place take up its role. Instead, the recruitment of Greeks largely continues along the lines above: through diplomacy or recruiting captains.
A notable sub-component of Greek mercenaries were units of ‘Cretan’ or ‘Neo-Cretan’ troops. These seem invariably to be archer mercenaries, although it is not always clear if ‘Creten’ here signifies them being from Crete or trained to fight in the Cretan manner. Nevertheless such soldiers show up with regularity in the armies of Alexander, the Antigonids, the Ptolmies, the Seleucids and the states of Greece proper, inter alia. This is one thing that is tricky in assessing mercenary units: they’re almost always described with an ethnic marker, but it is sometimes unclear if this indicates where the men are from, or how they fight or both.
The nature of polis armies clearly has something to do with why the Greek world seems to produce mercenaries, perhaps rather more than we might expect. These states, after all, maintain citizen militia forces with both heavy infantry hoplites (much in demand) and lighter infantry troops (peltasts in the Classical period, thureophoroi in the Hellenistic). Since these fellows all self-equip, that means in peacetime there is no shortage of men with the necessary equipment and experience to fill these battlefield roles who might – either out of a desire for adventure or the need for the money – be tempted into mercenary service. The turmoil of polis politics must also have often thrown off these men when they found themselves on the wrong side of a political restructuring in their community – and of course it will also have produced no shortage of exiled or politically unpopular generals and captains to organize them.
We shouldn’t overstate their numbers: Greece was not awash with tens of thousands of mercenaries. It is striking that when Cyrus the Younger essentially attempts to recruit everyone he can in 401, he ends up with 10,000 of them. For the Battle of Raphia (217), when Antiochus III, the Seleucid King, and Ptolemy IV (of Egypt) essentially both try to recruit everyone they can get their hands on, the Seleucids have 5,000 Greek mercenaries and another 1,000 Cretans and the Ptolemies have around 8,000 Greek mercenaries and another 1,000-3,000 Cretans and Neo-Cretans (some number of whom may be settlers) for a total of something like maybe 3,000 or so Cretans and 13,000 Greek mercenaries available. So we might say something to the effect that after 40411 or so, there were around 10,000 to 15,000 or so mercenaries available to be had in the Greek world. Obviously not a small number, but also not a number so large that one could predicate an entire major army on them (but plenty for a small polis to figure they could get away with a mostly mercenary army and spare the rich citizens the annoyance of hoplite service, as some seem to have done).
Another key source of mercenaries were non-state or early/weak-state peoples caught in the orbit of these large kingdoms. We’ve talked about how ‘tribal’ polities – which sometimes consolidated into weak kingdoms (e.g. Odrysian Thrace) – recruit internally through the networks of individual powerful aristocrats (with their retinues). That volatile mixture means these societies have a bunch of local notables who could potentially raise a significant amount of military force for a private agenda, whose power and influence is in part based on their ability to demonstrate martial valor. At the same time, those men also have sons, the ‘youths’ in our sources who also have a social need to demonstrate military virtue and who might get more than a bit ‘antsy’ if there is no conflict at present in which to do so.
Meanwhile neighboring states have access to cash (that is, actual coined money) and prestige goods that these non-state/weak-state societies – with less economic specialization – often do not produce. Those prestige goods are quite valuable for aristocrats (and their sons) in the non-state societies because they can use them to demonstrate their own wealth and connections or as valuable gifts to retainers. The potential for a state to leverage that to recruit these aristocrats – with their retinues – as mercenaries are fairly obvious and through this interaction mercenaries from these societies become a standard feature of Mediterranean armies in the Hellenistic period.
Carthage, of course, has the most notable reputation for this kind of recruitment, recruiting substantial numbers of Iberians and Gauls this way, before Barcid expansion in Spain and Hannibal’s invasion of Italy fundamentally change those relationships into a non-mercenary character (Diod. Sic. 13.44, 13.80; Polyb. 1.17.4, 1.67.7). As an aside because this fits nowhere else, Carthage also seems to have been able to access at least some sources of Greek mercenaries, but one gets the sense these were never a major part of their manpower pool.
The three major Hellenistic powers utilized these sources as well, with the most consistent non-state/weak-state mercenary draws being Gauls and Thracians. The Seleucids also regularly employed Gallic mercenaries, but whereas Carthage’s Gauls were drawn from what today would by southern France and northern Italy, the Seleucid supply came from the Galatians, a Gallic people who had migrated from the lower Danube through Greece (quite violently) before settling in central Anatolia; some 3,000 infantry and 2,500 cavalry of this sort are part of the Seleucid array at Magnesia. The Ptolemies, able in the third century to project substantial naval power of the Eastern Mediterranean, also employed smaller numbers of Gallic and Thracian mercenaries, which show up at the only Ptolemaic order of battle we have, the one for Raphia. The Antigonids, controlling the Macedonian heartland – which is next to Thrace and Gallic peoples in the Danube River Basin – also employed substantial numbers of these as mercenaries. Perseus (r. 179-168) when he brought his whole army together for review, had 2,000 Gauls and 3,000 ‘free’ Thracians (along with 2,000 allied Thracians from the Odrysian Kingdom) in his army, alongside 3,000 Cretan mercenaries and around 1,000 Greeks from various places.12
You can see the Galatian infantry on either side of the phalanx and the Galatian cavalry on the left.
Other sources of mercenaries appear only briefly in our sources rather than showing up consistently. The Seleucid King Demetrios I recruited Jewish mercenaries (I. Macc. 10.36). The Seleucids also employed a substantial number of troops from areas around the edges of their empire – Dahae, Thallians, Carians, Cilicians – who might be mercenaries but in many cases might equally by subjects or vassals (Livy 37.40). The Mamertines, who will end up starting the First Punic War were a body of Campanian mercenaries who were hired by Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse (r. 317 – 289) and afterwords set themselves up as the rulers of Messina in Sicily.
That said, Italy is notable by how it doesn’t throw off large numbers of mercenaries (neither does Carthaginian North Africa, once we cut through Polybius’ fudging). The Carthaginians employ some mercenaries (but again, fewer than generally supposed), but they do not seem to allow anyone else to really hire from their own recruiting pools, while the Romans largely do not employ any meaningful number of mercenaries and also appear to keep their military resources locked up. The fact that the Roman Republic is essentially a non-actor in the mercenary market – neither a supplier nor a consumer – is remarkably striking, though it makes a degree of sense when you remember that the Roman military-economic machine generated soldiers in tremendous quantity (with their equipment) but relatively little hard cash. Why pay for the one thing you have in abundance? The more curious question is why no one else tries (or succeeds?) to hire Romans. In any case, Rome and Carthage both seem notably not to generate the sort of ‘floating supply’ of mercenary military men that Greece does.
Terms of Service
We can conclude very briefly with a sense of how mercenaries might serve and be paid.
For the most part, when we hear about mercenaries, they are being raised for specific campaigns, but every so often we get hints of standing bodies of mercenary troops as well. I’ve already mentioned mercenary royal guards, but we also see mercenaries serving as effectively garrison forces for states they did not want to keep their citizen-militia or military-settler population (raised for major campaigns) ‘in rotation’ in peacetime. The Ptolemies seem to have maintained substantial garrisons this way – we’re told in preparation for the Battle of Raphia that the advisors of Ptolemy IV put together a force of some eight thousand mercenaries which seem to mostly have been drawn from garrison duty, particularly in Ptolemaic overseas holdings (Polyb. 5.65.4). Interestingly, we also see the Greek poleis, still fighting their smaller wars in the shadows of Hellenistic giants, sometimes raising small standing units of paid citizen soldiers and they sometimes employed mercenaries (Athens quite frequently), but the impression, sometimes given in the older scholarship that the Hellenistic period was an age of Greek warfare-by-condottieri is overblown: citizen soldiers remained the mainstay of polis forces.13
Mercenaries seem generally to have served in defined units under the captains who recruited them. In our sources, these units generally show up with ethnic signifiers, which often indicate both where mercenaries were from and also how they fought. Mercenaries were expected to provide their own equipment for a specific style of fighting, which naturally restricted who could be a mercenary. If you wanted to be a hoplite mercenary, you needed to have hoplite equipment! However this meant mercenary forces could be a way for a state to ‘buy’ a kind of warfare it could not produce effectively itself, with the most obvious example – but hardly the only one- being the Persian appetite for Greek heavy infantry.
The precise terms of payment varied and were often negotiated and sometimes renegotiated as campaigns wore on. Unfortunately, we cannot see the payment terms of basically any non-Greek mercenaries clearly, so we’re largely in the dark about how Iberian, Thracian, Gallic, etc. mercenaries were paid. Diodorus’ indication that Carthaginian mercenary recruiters went to Spain μετὰ πολλῶν χρημάτων, “with lots of stuff” is frustrating in its vagueness, since χρήματα could equally be trade goods or actual coined money (Diod. Sic. 13.44.6). What is, I think, fairly clear is that Carthage is not – pace Hoyos – paying their mercenaries nearly as much or in the same way as the Hellenistic states of the East, if for no other reason than their budget probably could not support it.14
By contrast, we can see the arrangements for the pay of Greek mercenaries fairly well. Compensation, while subject to negotiation generally came in two components: what we might term ‘maintenance’ (σίτος, ‘bread [money]’ in the Classical period, σιτώνιον or σιταρχία sometimes in Hellenistic sources, with the same meaning), essentially an allowance for the soldier to survive, and the actual wages for labor (μισθός, ‘wages’ or ὀψώνιον, ”relish [money] ‘salary,’ literally ‘relish money,’ from ὄψον, ‘relish, delicacies, sauces’ – anything used to go with bread to make a tasty meal – making ὀψώνιον wonderfully evocative phrase, essentially ‘pay for the nicer things in life’).
Naturally, the maintenance pay had to be handled at least a little bit in advance and had to be doled out to any kind of soldier in installments as their service progressed. Any kind of wage payment in our sources is almost always expressed as a daily sum, but mercenaries probably did not receive their σιτώνιον on a daily basis but probably in larger pay periods. These expenses could, of course, be handled in two ways: mercenaries might receive an allowance with which to buy rations from local markets (in cash this is the narrow meaning of σιτώνιον) or, of course, they might be issued rations and other basic supplies, which goes by the term σιτομετρία (literally ‘measured bread’ but really ‘rations’).
By contrast Greek and Macedonian soldiers expected wages – the μισθός – to be paid in cash, specifically in silver.15 Whereas maintenance pay came in advance (albeit sometimes in installments), μισθός came at the end – either of a pay-period or a campaign. The ideal way to handle wage expenses was to keep them ‘on the books:’ soldiers were issued their maintenance pay at regular intervals but merely had their actual wages credited to their account – the idea being that soldiers would then be ‘cashed out’ at the end of the campaign. That freed the army (and the soldiers) from the requirements to carry huge amounts of minted silver coinage with them wherever they went…but of course also gave the employer all sorts of cheeky opportunities to withhold or delay payment. Generals might often promise to find the money for wages from the loot and spoils of a successful campaign (e.g. the Spartan Teleutias, Xen. Hell. 5.1.14-18); this worked fantastically well if you fought for Alexander the Great and perhaps less so if you fought for basically anyone else.
We can see the obvious catch that system creates in the start of Carthage’s Mercenary War (241-237; Polyb. 1.66-72). Under the terms of the peace at the end of the First Punic War (264-241), Carthage had withdrawn its army from Sicily and brought it back to North Africa, but Carthage was financially exhausted by the war and caught in a bind: the campaign being over, it now had to settle the arrears of the men’s pay. Those arrears were considerable – this had been a really long war – and Carthage simply didn’t have the money. The Carthaginians initially are able to kick the can down the road by scraping together money for the maintenance pay – they can scrape together the σιτώνιον – but absent the ability to pay the arrears of μισθός, the army – both mercenaries and also regular North African soldiers (who made up the bulk of the force, but were paid a wage as well) – mutinied and then backed a revolt of Carthage’s subject communities in North Africa, which was eventually put down by Hamilcar Barca.16
For a mercenary employer who found himself unable to pay out the silver demanded by his mercenaries, the normal result was either mutiny or the mercenary unit melting away. However for larger states, there was an alternative to pay in something other than silver the soldiers would accept and here the obvious candidate was land. This certainly seems to be a significant part of what is happening with Hellenistic military settlements: Greek and Macedonian soldiers, serving in East (where Macedonian dynasts have land and peasants in abundance) are being paid at the end of their service in part by lavish plots of land (often large enough to live as rentier elites, rather than as farmers!) presumably in lieu of hard cash the king might not be prepared to spend. And as an added bonus the land both sustains the former-mercenary-now-settler’s household in perpetuity and at the same time renders him (and his descendants) liable for future military service. That said, such settlements could run into problems: recall that many of Alexander the Great’s less-than-fully-willing military settlers revolted when he died, seeking to just go home (Diod. Sic. 18.7.1).
We have a few examples of attested pay rates, invariably for Greek or Macedonian soldiers. While maintenance was often handled in kind, the standard rate of μισθός for military service is almost invariably a drachma (=six obols) a day, which as we’ve noted before was a good wage – a bit above typical – for a day’s work. The evidence for maintenance pay as a money-amount is exceedingly tricky (epigraphic and papyrus evidence that often comes with interpretive problems) but 2-3 obols per day seems to be the ‘cash value’ of a mercenary’s maintenance, making a Greek or Macedonian mercenary’s ‘gross pay’ around 8 or 9 obols per day. That was also, coincidentally, seems to be about what the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms – competing for the scarce supply of ethnically Greek and Macedonian manpower – seem to have paid their domestic Greek and Macedonian (but not native) soldiers (once you adjust for the lighter Ptolemaic currency standard). By contrast, the Antigonids and Romans, conscripting their own peasants, seem to have paid them 4 and 2 obols (=3 Roman asses) per day, respectively.
If you are wondering why the Seleucids and Ptolemies are ‘overpaying’ so badly for their military manpower…questions answered in my book project! Which I promise will, at some point, actually come out! Doubtless it will arrive at roughly the same time your mercenary pay arrears are cashed out.
No one is getting rich on a drachma a day (plus maintenance), but on the flipside a mercenary serving on a campaign or garrison deployment already had their expenses covered and might get to the end with some loot and – once they were ‘cashed out’ – a chunky pile of very spendable silver. For substantially unmonetized17 non-state peoples, this might be one of the few ways to get a chunk of cash, which in turn could be a significant status marker and provide economic and social opportunities otherwise unavailable at home. Assuming your employer actually paid your wages, this was not a bad economic bargain.
The rise of Rome brought a slow but steady end to this system, because the Romans largely didn’t use it and in any case steadily extinguished all of the other states that did. While it is common to see the armies of the Late Roman Republic or early Imperial period also termed ‘mercenary armies,’ that is really a misnomer. The armies of the Late Roman Republic were still mostly citizen-soldier armies, while the army Augustus and Tiberius created was a long-service professional standing army recruited from citizens and subjects of Rome, not a mercenary force. It is striking that the braggart mercenary soldier – a staple stock character of Hellenistic comedy – appears in Roman comedy in Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus (set in Ephesus in the Greek world), written in the late third century BC as the Romans are beginning to expand beyond Italy in a two-century run of conquest that will render the braggart mercenary himself a thing of the past.
- There’s a further distinction that σίτος (again, ‘bread money’) had to be paid in advance or continually, whereas μισθός might be withheld until the completion of a campaign, see Griffith, op. cit., 264-273.
- Polyb. 6.52.4.
- E.g. Diod. Sic. 13.44.6; 13.80.1-4.
- Diod. Sic. 13.44.6 again.
- Polyb. 7.9.4-6
- See Johstono, The Army of Ptolemaic Egypt (2020), 15-7 on this.
- Yalichev, op. cit., 13-16
- Yalichev, op. cit., 31-3.
- Yalichev, op. cit., 19-20, 56-60.
- Griffith, op. cit., as always, presents an effectively exhaustive list of all of the examples.
- It has been supposed by scholars that the end of the Peloponnesian War substantially raised the number of men who might do mercenary work in the Greek world; that argument has been disputed and honestly I do not have a position on it, but I’ll play it safe with my date here.
- Breakdowns on these armies via Taylor, Soldiers and Silver (2020).
- On polis warfare in this period, note especially J. Ma, “Fighting Poleis of the Hellenistic Age” War and Violence in Ancient Greece, ed. H. van Wees (2000).
- A point made by Taylor, op. cit., 143. Cf. Hoyos, Truceless War (2007), 27-9.
- It is actually a meaningful problem for the Ptolemies that the cultural expectation is payment in silver coins. Egypt does not have much silver. It has copper and gold! But not silver – and so acquiring silver was a major Ptolemaic strategic objective at basically all times because their soldiers expected payment in silver coinage.
- This is, as an aside, exactly how early modern European professional regiments worked, which could create a nasty bind for states that found themselves ironically without the money to discharge their soldiers because to do so, they’d have to settle arrears in pay, just like the Carthaginians here. In a lot of cases, regiments were just kept setting around under these conditions (the arrears growing the whole time). On this in early modern armies, see G. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567-1659: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries’ Wars (1972, 2nd ed. 2004) and you can actually get walked through this happening to a specific regiment in our recent recommendation, Lucian Staiano-Daniels The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War (2024)
- That means no coinage, not that they have no concept of monetary value.
Well, I’d been begging for this for years, and it did not disappoint. Thank you for writing this, and to the other senators for voting for it. I’ll just add in one other note, what actually sparked my curiosity in the question. There are several mentions in the Tanach for the use of mercenaries, although it’s never at any more detail than like for example 2 Samuel 10:6, where a particular group hires some mercenaries (in this case, an implausible number of Arameans), with no details of how it’s done or what the terms were or who these people were before someone came over to pay them to fight. This was very illuminating at least in the general case.
On the topic waiting a long time: I know! This topic has been in every single Senate poll since the first one in 2021 and it’s never last – there’s always interest – but it never cracked the top three until this year so I figured the heck, I’ll do the top three instead of the top two so I can finally do the topic.
Ancient Polytheism and the State is the other topic that kept getting stuck in the middle, but it was finally the 2nd place finish in the last Senate poll, so I’ll be doing that one this year too.
If you’re looking at the Book of Samuel, David himself probably fits the best example of mercenary recruitment and dovetails nearly with this article’s description of a mercenary captain: As a general on the outs with his king, he managed to recruit others on the outs in his own society and took up with the Philistine leaders, at least until they went to war with Saul and the other commanders started to wonder if David would be loyal in such a fight.
That is a case that feels less like David hiring mercenaries and more like him winning the Philistine leaders with promises so he could have enough men to defeat Saul.
He’s not hiring mercenaries, he’s getting hired. What he’s getting hired as is somewhat blurry since he’s on quite good terms with local rulers.
David wasn’t trying to defeat Saul and I’m surprised you even got the idea considering how Kings 1 (a.k.a. Samuel 1) is hammering it home over and over – he was mindbogglingly loyal to the guy that tried to kill him several times. He had Saul at his mercy about 2x. He didn’t incite more war against Saul, it’s just a natural way of life that someone goes to war with someone else eventually.
Interesting; so there weren’t standing mercenary companies like we tend to imagine? They were assembled for individual wars?
Correct! And interesting – standing mercenary companies were a think in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, but we have no evidence for them in antiquity.
Fascinating!
I personally associate standing mercenary companies with sometimes fighting for their own country, which you were very strict to not allow in your definition of mercenary.
Perhaps in the modern day we might call those standing companies as PMCs. I was wondering why you weren’t allowing for the possibility in your definition of mercenary. With this added point you answered it to my satisfaction.
I tend to agree that my mental model of “mercenary” includes companies that fight for their own countries and that things like Wagner and Blackwater are modern examples. That gets pretty muddy in the middle ages too, though, doesn’t it? Is a company comprised of a bunch of people from various parts of England fighting for one Earl against another Earl “foreign”?
I would argue that Wagner is historically and contemporaneously an anomaly residing in faults in the Russian state and military apparatus occupied by oligarchs, and Blackwater is basically a glorified security company that exists within the niche of “the US took on the task of extended occupation of a high insurgency region” that created a market for its brand of security.
Otherwise, I think mercenary companies operating as a paid service to leadership of their resident sovereign states is something with little to no historical example.
People in different time periods have had ideas of regional identity that would not necessarily be familiar to us living in modern nation states, but I find it unlikely that different residents of the kingdom of England would regard one another as foreign (setting aside the whole thing of “different earls waging private war on one another using their retinues” is almost unheard of in that country).
It’s hard to really define this idea in a coherent way before you have a consistent national army they can exist separately from.
Well accounts of the white company and so forth imply they would only work with nobles already friendly with the english crown.
@Isator Levi what about the Landsknecht?
The landsknecht get slotted right under “the structural, administrative, and military history of the Holy Roman Empire and what constituted state boundaries within it is very complicated”.
I’m curious as to any major ways this differed in the medieval period, with the lower state capacity of many states, alongside the fact that less areas in Europe were stateless, seems like it would have created a lot more demand for mercenaries, but also changed the nature of how some of those mercenaries were found.
A lot of this translates reasonably directly, in particular the idea of mercenaries as a way to reach into the recruiting pool of another polity. Many of the most famous medieval mercenary examples (the Swiss, Genoese crossbows, etc) are straightforwardly exactly this.
Two specific points probably worth mentioning:
1. Long service mercenary companies – we see a trend towards groups that maintain a continuous corporate identity over an extended period, like Hawkwood’s White Company. These are hired as a group by various powers over time, and there doesn’t seem to have been much like this in the ancient world.
2. Scutage and soldiering. This is less a “mercenary” thing in the way Bret is defining the terms in his post, but overlaps a lot with the discussion of Carthage in particular. We tend to think about “knightly” or “feudal” armed forces as being a matter of receiving land and owing service, which was true in theory but could be undesirable for both parties for various practical reasons. As a result, the concept of scutage was developed, by which someone owing service could instead pay a cash fee. This was first an option used by the vassal to get out of service, but it increasingly became a tax imposed by the lord or king to raise cash with which they could hire soldiers, whose service was not bound by the same limits as feudal service and so could be more effectively used on longer campaigns. Note that “soldier” as a term for an armed man comes directly from the concept of serving for payment, as opposed to those who are serving as a condition of citizenship or vassalage or the like. My impression is this trend gets going in England earlier and more strongly than on the continent, both due to a more centralised administration and the practical constraints of trying to campaign overseas, but it becomes a thing everywhere over time.
It starts in England first because William I inherits the quite heavily centralized Anglo-Saxon (the term is imprecise, but it will have to do) administration. Reaching back as far as we can see clearly, England seems to have been much more centralized than its continental counterparts – hence why private wars between English vassals don’t really happen, but they’re common in France.
It takes the French Crown until the 13th century to rein in their vassals sufficiently (notably, this involves kicking out the better-organized English) to be able to do this sort of thing. Even then, the French nobility will continue to be a thorn in the monarchy’s side right up to 1789.
In England by contrast, we get the emergence of Parliament, which of course requires a unified state apparatus complex enough to require legislating for and far-reaching enough that nobles need to be consulted before they’ll pay taxes. Conversely, the continental solution was to issue an edict about taxes and see it ignored.
This means that feudalism in the pure sense declines really quite quickly in England with the rise of scutage &c – such that by 1252, the English central government is issuing orders for mass military training (Assize of Arms). The key advantage of this is that you don’t have a loose agglomeration of retinues each with nobles who might not be fond of you, but you can reach down to the peasants directly and put them under officers appointed centrally, which dovetails and reinforces the more centralized government structure by giving the monarchy access to manpower suo jure, but also depriving the nobility of the same
Leaving aside the question of to what extent “feudalism in the pure sense” was ever really a thing _anywhere_, it definitely is true that England centralises a lot earlier and more strongly than France.
However, I’m not sure that’s an adequate sole explanation for scutage taking off there first. The other factor which obviously plays a big part is that the main campaigns of the English crown are primarily overseas on the continent. If you try to raise your troops under a ‘feudal’ model, the traditional 40 days of service will barely suffice to assemble your army and get them on boats. When trying to campaign overseas, you need to be assembling forces for several months minimum, and hiring them for cash is an easy way to achieve that.
Similarly, the English nobility do very much maintain retinues and independent military capabilities – that becomes extremely obvious in the Wars of the Roses, but you can see it throughout the Hundred Years War as well. In many cases, what we see are the same nobles and troops who could have been called up under a ‘feudal’ model, but instead are being paid as soldiers with the revenues brought in from scutage.
I think the major difference is in the lack of armed autonomous communities at large that can yield up such mercenaries, compared to the material conditions of networks of retinues bound by relationships of vassalage. I would note that when armed autonomous communities do start becoming more prominent in the likes of the Swiss cantons, sovereigns actually do become interested in taking advantage of the resource they afford.
I do note that we seem to see people (both nearer “germanic” and scandinavian) people serving in the roman armies in the later empire.
I think that is addressed in the article’s topic on how those people were residing within the Roman state at that time, and their leaders had generally become citizens.
>The more curious question is why no one else tries (or succeeds?) to hire Romans.
I’ve been given to understand that Roman mercenaries were present in Ptolemaic Egypt, albeit they were supposedly mercenaries in a very French/British adventurer in India or Africa way, with little in the way of loyalty to their employer and always with an eye towards the homeland and an opportunity to sell their employer out to the same.
If I absolutely had to guess, and I am working off of virtually zero knowledge here, my gut impression would be an extension of what our good host wrote. Mercenaries have to be raised, often on a campaign by campaign basis. And they compete with the same pool of militarily available manpower in whatever region it was.
Rome drew on its available manpower pretty damn hard to produce all those monstrously huge armies running around the ancient Mediterranean. Even if you had money and the right contacts to go hiring people, I imagine you would be facing a lot of competition with the Dilectus and probably not have too much available at any given time.
I’m wondering if it’s not just the matter of the Dilectus drawing upon them and demanding that men under arms be available, but that the Consul having military authority by definition (compared to the more ad hoc Greek strategos) means that there’s always somebody with command to direct available military resources that doesn’t really leave them available to be recruited elsewhere.
I think this is also an interaction between the way mercenary captains have to recruit prospective soldiers and the political aspect of the Roman War Machine.
On the soldiers’ side, the pedites have been given a political voice in Rome thanks to the assemblies and thus have a stake in fighting as part of the roman state; on the captain’s side, the notables who could act as captains have their careers tied to the Cursus Honorum and the Senate of Rome, so like the pedites, the nobiles do not have an incentive to fight outside the roman state, if anything, the weight of Mos Maiorum would have forbidden them from trying.
I think this might be it – from the post, a common way of hiring mercenaries is that you find a local notable and say “here’s ten grand, can you raise 1000 pikemen and bring them here on this date to fight for me?”
And I have a feeling that Roman equestrians raising their own private armies to fight for pay for foreigners might be seen as un-Roman and potentially dangerous to the Republic. In a feudal society, of course the nobles could levy their own armies, that what nobles were for.
Hm, I don’t think that’s a sufficient explanation. The Dilectus draws a large army, but except during real crises it’s not even a majority of the men liable for service, and the equipment isn’t state-issued so many of the men not conscripted will have their own gear. The Roman peak mobilization during the Punic Wars gives us a lower limit on the number of men that can be fielded simultaneously, and the Dilectus is usually smaller.
Could another factor be that Rome was never at peace? A Roman young man never has to worry about there not being some war where he can prove himself and earn plunder; he doesn’t need to go abroad to fight in a war because there is always some Roman war he can fight in.
Imperial britian was in a similar situation, but it often leased out its officers to friendly powers.
“Imperial britian was in a similar situation, but it often leased out its officers to friendly powers.”
I don’t think it was, actually – or at least not all the time. One of the main drivers behind early polar exploration was that Britain had a lot of underemployed military and naval officers who needed some way to distinguish themselves and earn promotion in the absence of a convenient war. “Points in favour of going. It will help me professionally as in the army if they want a man to wash labels off bottles they would sooner employ a man who has been to the North Pole [sic] than one who has only got as far as the Mile End Road” wrote Captain Oates – and he had had a distinguished military career by this point (MiD, recommended for VC).
Even the lower size of armies when the Punic wars weren’t going on is still a lot of people, much more then Greek city states were doing and possibly more then Gallic/Iberian/etc. areas might have been fielding at points. Greece had a lot more then soldiers who could fight then mercenaries who were hired from the region, so it would make sense that only certain kinds of people were interesting in going somewhere else and fighting for money. Even Rome’s smaller deployments could plausibly have taken up all these sorts of people as volunteers, arguably these are the kinds of personalities that would have joined as long service soldiers as those became more widely used.
My suspicion is that what the Dilectus did was lower the immediate cost of asking the Senate to send a legion to help you out low enough that it made more sense to just do that instead of messing around with trying to find some Roman notable willing to do some adventuring.
Are you thinking of the Gabinian Legions?
It’s unclear if those were regular legions that had “gone native” after a decade in Alexandria, or if they were always Roman soldiers that had been hired off as a royal bodyguard, or something else. Goldsworthy talks about them at length in a recent video (on Caesar in Alexandria), but the source material is so thin here conclusions are hard. No other example of something similar springs to mind.
I think so, yeah.
Hm. The going native part is admittedly an interesting (perhaps debatable?) parallel to Sertorius.
Sertorius is a bit different, he “went native” because he ended up on the losing side of a Roman civil war and had to fight to not to get killed for it. The Gabinians seem to be more-or-less forgotten by the Romans until Pompey and then Caesar try to call them back up, by which times they had likely settled down, started families in Alexandria, and had no interest in following distant Rome’s orders.
I’m admittedly deeply concerned that the way I remembered the Roman soldiers in Egypt is the exact opposite of what was actually happening.
I’ll have to track down where I got this idea from, unless it all just happened in my head, anyway.
I recently read a book called “The Land Trap” by Mike Bird, which is essentially an economic history of modern land ownership: the economic inequalities and instabilities it creates, the complex politics that arise around it, and how those outcomes vary with different ownership models. Bird mostly focuses on the period since 1800, but it would be interesting to see a similar analysis of land ownership in the ancient world — how did practices like Hellenistic land grants to Greek soldiers, or Rome’s tendency to promote smallholding by its citizens, change the economic center of gravity of those societies &, by extension, their politics? It sounds like Bret’s long-awaited book will address this to some degree; in the meantime, does anyone have other book/article/podcast recommendations?
I have been thinking about buying that book: Should I?
Yes, it’s excellent! I read it back-to-back with Adam Tooze’s “Crashed,” and both books are richer for being read in tandem with the other (yes, this does mean you also have to buy Crashed)
Having read The Wages of Destruction some years ago, I feel there are worse fates than having to read Tooze.
“alongside 3,000 Cretan mercenaries and around 1,000 Greeces from various places.”
Greeks.
RE: why no one seems to have hired Romans, as someone else pointed out they did seem to go to war a lot, thereby meaning that the “potential mercenary” manpower pool was already taken, but I also wonder if the socioeconomic incentives were a little different for them as well.
For example, would it have been considered shameful to serve in an army under a non-Roman commander? Did the stability of the early-to-mid Republic mean that there were fewer political losers who needed to get out of town or lose their heads? Was it easier to get land in Italy than in Greece?
Also, there’s the early Roman legion formation to consider. I could be stereotyping, but it seems to me that if you were recruiting Roman mercenaries you’d mostly end up pulling men who would be velites or hastati rather than the principes or triarii, and I can imagine that might make a mercenary Roman legion less effective than a “normal” one.
The strict term limits of the cursus honorum did seem to have served as an effective release valve for ambition, so that until pretty late there would be few exiled “losers” of the political game available to recruit. And I think you’re also right that when the own state is already pretty committed to a land redistribution program to support its soldiers, as the Romans were, it makes less sense to go overseas to get land there – and even the alternative payment of a pot of silver would be worth less because it’d be hard to buy land with it when it’s already been parcelled off that finely.
Although I think it’s not right to look at socio-political factors of Rome to make the decision, because after all we don’t see any other of the Italian communities serving as mercenaries, either.
For me I’d put a lot of influence on their absence from the mercenary market to sheer geography: Many mercenaries are recruited from neighbours of large and flush with cash states, which did not exist Italy. And reaching across the sea to get mercenaries from other communities seems to have been done mostly for fighting styles that the rulers already knew and valued and somehow believed could not be done by equipping the locals – but that was again not the case for Italy. If Pyrrhus had been successful in creating a united Magna Graecia and from that become a major player in the Hellenic world, maybe there would have been demand for Samnite-like mercenaries to use as connecting tissue for a sarissa phalanx (they certainly work better than elephants).
I’d also argue geographic constraints on the mercenary provider also play an important role. Crete is the prime example here, as an island state. It clearly needs to have an army, including a pool of veterans, to ensure the survival of its state. But on the other hand, it’s an island, so there’s no village feuds across the border that could escalate, no boundary markers that could be argued over, no river water that might get diverted by somebody upstream. And naked aggressive land-grabs are expensive if your imperial holdings are now on a different island and it takes a few days by ship to get there. For the poleis of mainland Greece, the situation was not as dire, but as Sellasia had shown, the Macedonians to the north would not just block expansion in that direction, they would also heavily come down on any rising contenders trying to unite the heartland – so the release valve of getting people to fight overseas was useful. For Rome, that was not the case, they had hinterlands full enough of Samnites, Umbrians, Etruscans and Gauls to beat up.
> Crete is the prime example here, as an island state. It clearly needs to have an army, including a pool of veterans, to ensure the survival of its state. But on the other hand, it’s an island, so there’s no village feuds across the border that could escalate, no boundary markers that could be argued over, no river water that might get diverted by somebody upstream.
I’m afraid that this is almost entirely wrong. Create wasn’t “a” state. It was a patchwork of lots and lots of tiny states, most barely large and organised enough to be poleis. If anything it’s because of how fractured and plagued by constant warfare it was that it was such a large recruitment pool of mercenaries: lots of men experienced in violence, at any moment a decent chunk of which would be doing badly and keen to redeem their situation through other means.
Interesting. I stand corrected, then.
You may be thinking of the Minoan culture in Bronze Age, which had Crete unified under Knossos for some centuries.
Italian mercenaries did exist and might have been common. Mamertines were Italian as I understand it, and Soldiers and Silver talks about Hannibal fighting over “traditional mercenary recruitment grounds”.
And the Tarantines were also famous as mercenaries, no?
Rome *specifically* does not seem to produce many mercenaries, but Italy seems to do.
(incidentally I know there’s an argument that the gallic army that crushes the romans at Allia and allegedly sacks the city were actually mercenaries hired by the syracusean ruler at the time who decided to do a bit of pillaging on the way down…)
I guess my argument does not stand up to peer review then. I’ll have to ask Bret to put a large “Redacted” on the top of my post.
The hastati were pretty much just medium infantry of the thureophoroi variety, or in other words akin to the most common Hellenistic mercenaries
“The worker must have bread, but she must have relish too.”
– Ancient Greek socialist-feminist slogan
“The ketchup of sin is death”
— Romans 6:23
Tomatoes are a Colombian Exchange crop.
The side dish of sin is death.
Ketchup predates the eating of tomatoes in Anglo countries by a century or so. Originally it’s made from mushrooms or walnuts, or was a fish reduction not wholly unlike _garum_.
Having eaten pickled walnuts, I can say that I really can see how them mushed up would make a fairly solid alternative to tomato ketchup. Not identical of course, but fitting into the same culinary slot.
I am slightly miffed that we missed out on a home-grown fish sauce option. Luckily enough the thai version is fairly common in supermarkets now.
[replying here because it’s too deep to reply to Ynneadwraith]
The home-grown fish sauce alternative is Worcestershire sauce, for better or worse. (I do use it in some recipes, but it seems like it would be extremely weird on its own as a condiment, because it has such a strong flavor that a teaspoon can be enough for a meal for two.)
I do like Worcester Sauce (especially with cheese on toast, or with baked beans), though it was only invented in 1835 after someone commissioned a replica of a sauce they’d encountered in India. I was more wondering what this older tradition of fish sauce might be like.
On a broader note, I would be interested to know if the tradition that broad us garum ended up dying out completely, or whether it survived anywhere around the world to return to us.
That kind of etymology really does help get into the mindset of people for whom rare luxuries or the mark of uncommon wealth are nice seasonings. It speaks to something that many of us can take for granted, but would probably be kind of miserable without. Also helps reinforce the experienced significance in a world where this is the option to buy compared to things like sophisticated and highly functional manufactured items.
@IsatorLevi,
Fun fact, when my mom was growing up in South India in the 1960s, *ketchup* was considered a high class luxury (and the carefully prepared, homemade, complex condiments based on pickled vegetables or cilantro or coconut were all considered boring and ordinary). Not because ketchup is or was particularly tasty, but because it was imported and (relatively) expensive and associated with American glitz and glamor, I guess. Just goes to show how much of taste and preference is really based on status, signalling and scarcity, I guess.
After the invention of non-exploding ketchup, it became one of the safest (and most consistent) condiment options worldwide. Nowadays you might pay big bucks for a fresh sauce that tastes slightly unique every time you have it, but back when inconsistency was a normal expectation it was food that was exactly the same every time that was a novelty. Cultural colonialism was doubtless also a factor though, I agree.
Yes. Came across this in Bangladesh. Excellent local coffee, but the prestige drink was Nescafe.
The thing that does this for me is the fact that ‘vanilla’ has gone from ‘exceptionally rare spice grown only in Mexico and nowhere else that was the preserve of literal royalty and the stupendously wealthy’ to the default word for ‘kinda plain and uninteresting’.
We live in a weird relationship with exotic spices.
McDonald’s in Eastern Europe (just after the gradual opening of the market) is another similar example, for a brief while it was the “thing” in spite of local fast food being present (and arguably better tasting).
I suppose, when it comes to food (and luxury goods in general), it’s a pretty general rule that scarcity plays a major role in what makes them valuable, not just the taste.
@Ynneadwraith,
Vanilla is actually still a very high-value and expensive spice, from the farmer’s point of view, apparently one of the world’s most expensive per gram. It’s only grown in a few places (primarily Madagascar and Indonesia), and is very labor intensive to produce (apparently it has to be pollinated by hand) as well as finicky about environmental conditions and hard to get to set seed. It’s valuable enough, in Madagascar, that there are armed criminal gangs (which is rare, in a country without many weapons floating around) that get involved in the trade.
It’s considered cheap and “basic” for consumers in America and presumably in England because we only need a tiny amount of the spice to get the flavor (and also because I guess over 90% of “vanilla” we use is artificial flavoring, not derived from the actual plant).
It is always such a delight to learn that castoreum is one of the substitute vanilla flavorings. Thankfully it’s a perfectly natural product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castoreum
Yeah I think that reinforces the point. Not only was vanilla historically an exceptionally expensive luxury good…producing it today is still exceptionally expensive.
We just live so detached from the means of its production that the word has come to mean ‘a bit plain/kinda boring’.
I doubt it has the same connotations in Madagascar.
@Ynneadwraith,
No, the connotations in Madagascar are definitely different!
When I lived there I didn’t live anywhere near the vanilla-growing region, or know anyone who grew vanilla, so my knowledge of the industry is pretty hazy, largely based on what I heard from other Peace Corps workers who were based in that area. But, this article matches up with what I do know, and adds some more detail:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/madagascar-vanilla
The connotations of “vanilla” there are….complex. It’s an industry where if you’re lucky you can get *very* rich (by the standards of a poor country in greater Africa, at any rate). The vanilla growing region, I’ve been told (never been there) had the nicest infrastructure and highest average standard of living in the country, outside of the capital city. On the other hand, as the linked article suggests, you are also at extreme risk of 1) having a crop failure due to poor weather that year, 2) having your crop end up almost valueless due to fluctuations in the global vanilla price, or 3) having it stolen by armed gangs.
On the flip side, there were commodities produced in Madagascar that were quite cheap and available locally, but get very expensive by the time they reach American markets. Crabs and octopus for example were local staples, at least where I was, and then in other parts of the country lychee fruits in season were extremely cheap, while in the US supermarket a couple blocks from my house they’re about $10-$15 a pound or more.
@Ynneadwraith,
One other interesting note about the vanilla: apparently the hand pollination process, that’s used today, was discovered by a slave on a Reunion plantation, owned by a French guy with an interest in botany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmond_Albius
Something similar is true of pecans, I believe, the grafting process was discovered by a slave. (Pecans were one of the most recent crops domesticated, in the mid 19th c.).
Ok but that’s not a great example, if actual vanilla beans are involved it is at least somewhat prized (an actual vanilla milkshake is 8$+tip at the hip coffee shop around the corner, a milkshake using the ersatz is 3$ no tip expected at Cookout and maybe twice the size). “Vanilla” became synonymous with plain because the ersatz version is particularly bad, and few people actually bother to use actual vanilla.
A better example is how a carefree, even decadent wardrobe from the 50s would have “a pair of shoes for each day of the week”. I think *I* have 7 pairs of shoes and I really don’t like shopping or dressing up.
[Mercenaries in the Classical World to the Death of Alexander]
I checked and this is available on Hoopla, so if your local public library system participates in Hoopla you ought to be able to check it out for free. (The other recommended books are not on there as far as I can tell.)
I’m always mildly surprised when monarchs from larger states *didn’t* have a foreign mercenary bodyguard given that it seems to work rather well in insulating your bodyguard from political games. And with a nice outfit (hello Papal Guard!) they are a good status symbol as well
You need a source of competent mercenaries you can be reasonably sure you won’t be outbid for, and doing it sends the message you don’t trust your own army. If you can be reasonably certain of the ideological loyalty of a section of your own army, you’re better off with them. Foreign bodyguards mostly strike me as a sign of deep domestic dysfunction, hence their prominent association with the Byzantines. Swiss Guard are something of an exception, because a) they’re drawn from what was at the initial time considered to be the best soldiers in Europe, and b) the Vatican doesn’t have a deep native recruiting pool but has a disproportionate amount of money.
The Pope’s guards are members of the church he runs. He’s also technically the monarch of a fifth of a square mile, but that’s far less important than his religious role.
I would observe that at the time the Swiss Guard became enshrined under the command of the Pope, the Vatican ruled over the entire central region of Italy.
Not to be too negative about the Vatican, but they are a notoriously dysfunctional state that has lost virtually all of it’s territory since the founding of the Swiss Guard and would not exist at all without outside events weakening Italy and then making them a useful Cold War proxy.
Also you *must* keep paying them, on time. If you have cash flow difficulties this may not work out well.
In Greek thought, having a mercenary bodyguard was the mark of a tyrant who didn’t trust his own citizens. So if you wanted ot look like a proper king, or like a successful politician, you would stick with a ‘national’ bodyguard (as Macedonian kings did, for example, and as Sicilian tyrants didn’t.
True, but in retrospect a reliable guard of Scythians or some other colourful, quite faraway tribe, might have spared the Macedonian royal a few really disruptive murders.
While I agree politically insulating your bodyguard as a ruler is a good idea, I would posit that both “hiring foreign mercenaries” is not the only way to do it, and that also depending on the mercenary market and the ruler’s source of legitimacy, it might not actually be feasible. And of course the foreign mercenaries are also human, and thus while their status might insulate them from some political corruptive temptations, their status also opens them up to other forms of corruption. I don’t have data in front of me, but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t at least one example in history of the foreign bodyguards just being bribed to look the other way while some monarch-stabbing is going on.
In a different tack, your comment made me think of the Medjay of Ancient Egypt, who were such a politically isolated bodyguard institution. While they started out being Nubian mercenaries, apparently over time their members were recruited from within Egypt, even though they kept their distinct status. It’s suspected that these might be ethnically Nubian military settlers, but it might really just be an institution that got its legitimacy from its declaration of being outsiders.
The Mamluks are an example of a foreign separated class of royal guards ending up as a significant political player, and eventually the heads of state for places like Egypt.
Not quite mercenaries as a quirk of their recruitment, but certainly mercenary-adjacent, and recruited for the same purpose of providing a politically isolated bodyguard.
They may well be an outlier. I don’t know enough to say either way. But it does show that the risk very much exists.
“whipped into shape but a set of mercenary Greek commanders” pretty sure this part is supposed to say “by a set of”
Chalk me up as another one interested to hear about this model of mercenary recruitment distinct from late Medieval/early modern free companies. It’s another facet of the fascinating degree to which pre-modern armies are drawn out of the distinctions of local cultural and material conditions.
For the kind of person that looks at this sort of thing for inspiration in the likes of roleplaying games, I think there’s particular potential in the image of the roaming mercenary captain recruiter.
On the subject of why no one (successfully?) attempted to hire Roman mercenaries, I’m reminded of the adage that “once you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane” – Roman politicians seem to have been energetic at injecting themselves into local squabbles that could be escalated into a “peacekeeping” mission and, oh look, now you’re a Roman vassal state. Was this a generally observed Roman tendency that meant that people were reluctant to ask them for help? Or was everyone at it and we just hear about the Romans doing it because a lot of people ended up as oops-all-vassals?
Unless my Greek completely deserts me isn’t χρημάτων one of those lovely autoantonyms and means not only “means to satisfy needs” but also “needs” themselves? Is it possible that Diodorus is sneering at the Carthaginian recruiters having to go cap in hand?
I get frustrated by the image of mercenaries in pop-culture. This was a useful corrective! Particularly the stress on how mercenaries were integrated into the political scene both domestically and internationally, rather than somehow standing outside it offering their services to the highest bidder
The difficulty in pinning down who is and is not a mercenary reminds me very strongly of the work of Prof Stephen Morillo. He essentially uses the same two criteria of 1) is paid and 2) is foreign, but elaborates both of these into continuous axis. The former becomes “How much is pay a motivator for signing up?” with on one extreme being “fully” and the other “not at all” (in which case political factors dominate). The other axis is “How socially imbedded are the soldiers?” with foreigners being the least and full citizens the most. The more a soldier is motivated by pay and the less socially imbedded they are, the more a mercenary they are; but all it remains a fuzzy category.
The same thoughts clearly map very well onto the context covered by this blog. A full Punic citizen fighting for Carthage is clearly completely socially imbedded. A Libyan in a subjugated city state slightly less so. An Hispanic tribesman fighting for their chief who is fighting for a bigger chief who is fighting for a Barcid general that impressed them even less so. A tribesman who volunteers to fight for a young aristocrat for silver in a foreign war waged by said aristocrat’s connection is barely socially imbedded at all. Similarly, mercenaries recruited via elite diplomacy (one of the two pathways mentioned in this blog) seem a little less mercurial that those recruited by a recruiter carrying a big bag of silver (the other pathway).
When a category is as hard to define as “mercenary”, it’s normally a sign to embrace the fuzziness and use sliding scales rather than try to enforce a strict dichotomy.
I prefer the concept of this as a continuum as well.
“When a category is as hard to define as “mercenary”, it’s normally a sign to embrace the fuzziness and use sliding scales rather than try to enforce a strict dichotomy.”
Now this I like as well. Shall have to remember that for future use.
These are also perfectly possible to have these two things coexist: You might be considered a friend *because* you show up now and then with bags of silver, because isnt’ that what friends do, help each other out? Etc.
“In my defense, this post is already 7,600 words long.”
Excuses, excuses!
Rookie numbers!
Oh wait. You’re doing this weekly? Do you even sleep? 😀
Bret in 2024 did a rough run-through of the manpower components of the Carthaginian Empire. Worth checking out if you missed it: https://acoup.blog/2024/07/19/collections-teaching-paradox-imperator-part-i-divisa-in-partes-tres/. Thought I would do similar for Great Northern War Sweden.
The Swedish Empire had a peacetime strength of about 60,000, rapidly increased to close to 100,000 by 1701, then then further increased to about 115,000 by 1708 before crashing. The Swedish Empire had a population of about 2.5 million. In proportional terms, similar to Prussia during the 7 Years War, but far more resilient to losses.
Enlisted/Regulars (mostly Germans):
Strength: 25,000-30,000 (pretty steady)
Sweden had 22,000 regulars serving as garrisons at the start of the war, who stayed there until their garrisons fell post-Poltava. Royal guard numbered 2-3,000. Saxon POWs, a few German regiments, and some German militias also cycled through. Perhaps 50,000 foreigners died in Swedish service.
Finns:
Strength: 20,000 in 1701, 25,000 in 1708. Lost 1714.
Finland was part of the contractual regiment system. This infrastructure was used to then generate additional forces, the manning regiments. Most Finnish forces served in Finland itself or the Baltic Provinces. Finnish manpower toward the end seems to have been brittle, fielded strength collapsed in the 1710-14 period. Perhaps 40-50,000 Finns died in Swedish service.
Baltic Militia: 10,000 in 1701
Numbers gradually declined, capitulation of Estonia and Livonia in 1710.
Swedes: About 40,000 in 1701, 65,000 in 1708.
Most of Sweden was also in the regiment and manning system. But Scania had its conscripts feed into other regiments until the late war and some areas served the navy. Most forces involved (and lost) in the Swedish invasion of Russia were actual Swedes. That may have briefly left less than 30,000 Swedes under arms. However more men were rapidly raised. But one army was captured in 1713 at Tonning and another at Stralsund in 1715. Despite these disasters, the Swedish army was 40,000 strong in 1715, expanded to 60,000 for Karl XII’s invasion of Norway in 1718, then dropped back down to 45,000. This was simultaneously the largest, most resilient, and most flexibly deployable source of Carolean manpower. Perhaps 120,000 to 150,000 Swedes died in service.
Some interesting things can be seen. The horrendous losses of the Russia Invasion were actually replaceable given a few years, except the temporary drop in strength resulted in more enemies joining and the permanent loss of manpower recruitment regions. The falls in 1710-15 of Riga, Tonning, Finland, and Stralsund combined saw as many losses as the invasion of Russia.
It is almost impossible to overstate how nuts the manpower generation capability of the Swedish Empire was. Finland suffered proportionate to its population nearly as many military dead each year as World War I France, except for 14 years instead of 4. Sweden did a bit better, it was only comparable to the North during the American Civil War, except for 21 years instead of 4.
They put it into perspective, in the 1621-1721 century roughly a third of all adult swedish men died in the military.
About the qualifications for “mercenaries”…
I see two different passages of Bret here:
“There is a tendency in the popular imagination to image mercenaries functioning as an entirely separate ‘pool’ of manpower from ‘regular armies.’ That is how they function in most strategy games, for instance. But in practice, of course, the supply of men in any of these societies able to equip themselves to fight – something that demanded either a degree of wealth or social standing – was always limited.”
“Mercenaries were expected to provide their own equipment for a specific style of fighting, which naturally restricted who could be a mercenary. If you wanted to be a hoplite mercenary, you needed to have hoplite equipment!”
But this plays about the options that a state wanting more soldiers wanted.
So a state had mobilized their own men who were obliged to equip themselves and serve in return for their citizenship or landholding and wanted more men – and had silver coin left over, to try and leverage into more men?
One option would have been to recruit men from others states who owned their equipment. And motivate them with the money.
But the other option might have been to buy equipment and recruit men who could not afford to buy their own.
When governments took the second option, to recruit poor free men and issue them arms, what terms do Greek and Roman writers use about that?
My impression is this option was much less common.
Moving someone from the “poor and unarmed” legal class to the “moderately wealthy and serving with arms” legal class is quite a substantial change in a lot of these societies, and doing that en-masse could potentially be seriously politically disruptive. Additionally, the practical structures for a society to buy and issue equipment on this scale may well simply not have existed in a lot of these situations.
The Romans of course do get onto this sort of line with later forms of the legion, and it does indeed correlate to a lot of major political disruption…
IIRC, the Romans freed and equipped 2 legions worth of slaves during the 2nd Punic war. No great big social or political disruption flowed from that. If anything the following century was the most stable in the republic’s history!
This is true, but the Romans seems to be weird when it comes to their class dynamics in relation to pretty much everyone else.
I think the more you study any specific nation / country / polity, the more it appears weird. Averages, norms, and trends exist, but everything is an outlier in its own way. Like that story about a ergonomically-mean jet fighter seat that suited nobody.
AIUI the Athenians also recruited and freed slaves to help man their fleet on at least one occasion. More recently, the Christian commander at Lepanto offered a guarantee to free any Christian slave in the fleet who fought “bravely”, and I gather an number of European tropical colonies did something similar. Not to mention the West India regiments, and the black loyalists of the American War of Independence.
So it can be an acceptable thing. A lot of societies see loyalty as something to be rewarded, after all.
@ad9 fleets are a very different thing, since they required huge manpower to row. For a typical Athenian trireme, you’re looking at ~170 rowers to ~20 crew to ~20 marines.
“Not to mention the West India regiments, and the black loyalists of the American War of Independence.”
And indeed the Colonial Marines, recruited in the 1812 War from escaped slaves, who fulfilled the dream of every freed slave by burning the Big House to ruins in 1814.
@holdthebreach Possibly, though there are degrees of weirdness. Very, *very* few polities globally managed to escape the mess of interstate anarchy and create a ‘Pax Romana’ or equivalent over an appreciable proportion of the planet’s surface (or however you want to quantify the extensiveness of a polity).
Each of them is likely to have been doing something that was quite a bit weirder than what everyone else around them had been doing.
If we take our host’s interpretation of the matter, then that something that the Romans were doing had something to do with creating what looks to be the most inclusive model of citizenship the Med had seen up until that point (and then leveraging that into applying mass quantities of heavy infantry to murder their opposition, just on the off chance you thought the point I was making was too ‘woke’).
The Romans were doing something deeply weird with their class dynamics. Even compared to the individual weirdness of other polities at the time.
Do we know what happened to these legions?
If half of the freedmen died, and the other half got a nice piece of land on the other side of the sea, I would expect no great social upheaval
I can imagine “relish money” living on linguistically. Calling a bonus “guac money” or something of the like
There was a time in my life where I called bonuses “beer money”. Same energy, I think.
And if the state collects a debt you owe to someone, they can garnish the relish.
The Russian word for “tips” literally means “tea money”, not exactly the same but close enough. Funnily, if you read older books, apparently it used to be “money for vodka”, but changed to the more health-conscious version at some point.
Thanks for the posts. This enlightened me a lot but I do have a question regarding the “mercenary captain” method and how do states/communities who are the source of mercenaries respond to it. The diplomat approach obviously means the local authority accepts other powers drop in and recruit some of their people for a war, but how about the mercenary captain approach? Presumablly a pool of armed military aged men would be very valuable for a community, and whatever local authority that exist might have issue with the mercenary captain, former local notable and current exile, suddenly comes back with a huge bag of money to hire people left and right.
For example if I am a local major notable on a Greek city state’s boule, would I/should I be concerned if some big shot come back from abroad with a huge bag of money and try to recruit citizens while there might be local rivals communities ready to pounce? Same questions can be applied to whatever Gaulish major landowners and their client network.
For organized states, would there be laws restricting citizens from becoming mercenary abroad, or is this not really a thing?
“and whatever local authority that exist might have issue with the mercenary captain, former local notable and current exile, suddenly comes back with a huge bag of money to hire people left and right.
For example if I am a local major notable on a Greek city state’s boule, would I/should I be concerned if some big shot come back from abroad with a huge bag of money and try to recruit citizens while there might be local rivals communities ready to pounce? Same questions can be applied to whatever Gaulish major landowners and their client network.”
Agreed. I also see major problems with opposition politicians recruiting armies with foreign money.
It is one thing if it is a foreign diplomat, with no local friends and enemies, who comes to ask the state as a whole to join as an ally, with the foreign ally paying the costs and the state getting to appoint the commanders of their allied contingent – commanders who are in favour with the government that sends them.
It is quite another thing to have an opposition politician to show up with a large sum of money and recruit malcontents. Because the outcomes might be:
1) The opposition politician simply uses the malcontents equipped with foreign money to pull off a coup at home
2) The opposition politician does lead the malcontents abroad without molesting the government at home, and they get killed in the foreign war and never return
3) The opposition politician and the malcontents win their foreign war – and get peacetime employment in the winner´s standing army, or land to settle down on, and never return
4) The malcontents win and get paid off with a lot of money – and come home and use the wealth to pull off a coup.
Now 2) and 3) get rid of the opposition. But the problem is cases 1) and 4).
If the opposition politician was “exiled” to begin with, how can the government trust him not to try 1) or 4)?
Could it be a safer approach to try and capture/kill the opposition politician for returning from exile, and try to confiscate his foreign money?
Well, the answer is that sometimes they *did* prevent people from going.
But the reasons they might *not* is… Well, that guy wtih the money is coming from someone with a lot of moeny to spend and that person might be worth having as a friend… or at least not as an enemy.
It might also give all those armed young men something to do rather than get into fights or getting dangerous ideas.
You might also quite simple be getting a commission in some fashion.
Sometimes the “mercenaries” are also the *losers* of a political or military struggle, and haivng them march off to the toher end of the world and die of some horrible disease is a more palatale way of getting them out of the way than executing them. (which might just leave their relatives a lot angrier) basically a form of exile.
I also think that what Bret points out is that the distinction is a floaty one: A diplomat is bringing gifts, a mercenary captain also serves as an emmissary etc. They’re *ideal types’ in but in practice most mercenary recruiters are probably doing a bit of both.
Keep in mind that the mercenary class is also the political class. So any leader who wants to prevent their community from joining up is asking their votes/clients to go against their own personal interests. Maybe you’ll be able to convinced them to make that sacrifice for the greater good, but you better have a good argument (and bribes of your own probably wont go awry).
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Greek city-states that produced so many mercenaries also tended to take a robust view of the rights and freedoms of the Hoplite class. And it’s not much of a stretch to suggest that the Gaullish (or Iberian) warrior-nobility was similarly touchy about its prerogatives.
“how does a leader gain access to the military manpower supply of a foreign polity?”
Now isn’t this a mechanic I’d love to see in a Total War game (or any other strategy game TBH). The ability to destabilise the military recruitment pool of other polities by recruiting them as your mercenaries (or to have the same thing happen to you).
Most of the time, having a war happen on your doorstep in these sorts of games is mostly an opportunity for you to mop up whoever comes off worse. Doing this would add a reasonable amount of jeopardy to this happening as both sides might hoover up your military recruitment pool, leaving you vulnerable.
This would pair well with a mechanic that actually attempted to model the seasonal nature of recruitment for warfare. Say something that means you can recruit and maintain professional year-round soldiers but that this is very expensive, so for most polities at most times it’s necessary to temporarily raise other troops for short time periods at a much cheaper rate (to simulate levy forces that disband for the harvest).
That would also provide quite a neat little balancing mechanic between leveraging a larger army for campaigning in the ‘proper’ season, but leaving yourself vulnerable to attack by smaller professionalised forces in the ‘off season’. Plus increasing the risk of having those levy forces hoovered up by neighbouring conflicts.
On the upper end, Paradox games have some similar features. In EU, you can send a spy to greatly boost the chances of a [Your] Nationalist rebellion in a province that is capable of generating such. They are technically allied with you, and thus will e.g. join your sieges (and on the other hand can be siege leaders) in addition to making a mess for the enemy to fight. (Alas, provinces they have taken aren’t wired into to the peace negotiation.)
In CK, the levies have a ticker where if you keep them raised beyond the usual period of service, their notional owners will become increasingly unhappy with you. CK also has a fixed-ish pool of standing mercenary companies and religious orders, who you can recruit if you have a good enough relationship with them and nobody else has taken them first.
On the lower end, RTSes can levy workers for base defence. (Human worker: militia transformation, orc peón: throw javelins from burrow, elf wisp: sacrificial AoE dispel&disband.)
Trust Paradox to have already tried to operationalise it!
Though the thing that really piqued my interest was the idea that a rival polity with more money could sweep the feet out from under your own military forces by swooping in and recruiting them as mercenaries.
Or, say, a neighbouring war that’s nothing to do with you could hoover up half of your potential armed forces for a year, leaving you with a much reduced army to fend off the people you’re at war with.
Of course, maybe a Total War game is less of the right audience for that sort of mechanic. There’s a bunch of players who tend to vocally whinge when a mechanic doesn’t seem ‘fair’, rather than taking enjoyment in the sense of jeopardy. Meanwhile I get the impression that Paradox players practically live for the masochism.
I think that the Roman socii network institutionalized the same networks that Greek cities and Hellenistic kings used to recruit individual batches of troops for one-off campaigns. Instead of calling on your guest-friend to send you a captain and 200 soldiers, the SPQR calls on its established relationship with the people of Minimum and Minimum sends them 200 soldiers just like it sent last year. One of the big points of recent research like Matthew Trundle’s or Jeff Rop’s is that recruiting soldiers was a political act, if you wanted meaningful numbers of troops the local polis or federation or tyrant had to approve of your recruiting.
Don’t forget that Aulus Gabinius’ men in Egypt seem to have ‘gone native’ in the corruption of Late Ptolemaic Egypt and lived like any other soldiers in Ptolemaic service.
I notice that after your classic reminder about your Patreon, of which a usual part is that you do not pledge to buy a hoplite equipment (or whatever the post is about), here you certainly did not pledge to not use the money to hire mercenaries of your own.
Should we worry ?
He’s planning on taking over a history department via coup, using hired adjuncts as his troops.
Which is why the name of the blog is “a coup“.
I did note when reading this that it felt a lot like Polybius is applying mercenary as an adjective rather than as a noun – the brave Roman boys were, of course, motivated by love of Rome and pay and loot are incidental, while the perfidious Carthaginians are in it for greed.
Yes, “mercenary” is a moralistic term. Even a King of Sparta fighting for the King of Egypt or an Athenian commanding a fleet for the King of Kings is often a way to help the Spartiates or Athenians back home, so you can’t simply say “a mercenary is paid to fight for foreigners.” Greek and Roman elites had hangups about being paid cash which Mesopotamian and Persian elites did not (from the Archaic onwards, Greeks often call their foreign soldiers epikouroi “helpers” or xenoi “foreigners” and other people’s misthophoroi “wage-earners”).
Even today, someone who takes a leave of absence from a NATO military to fight in Ukraine might be more ‘idealistic’ than someone who joins their own army for free education.
Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries, by AE Housman:
These, in the days when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.
Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and the earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.
The mercenaries in question were the long-service professional soldiers of the BEF in 1914.
Even today, someone who takes a leave of absence from a NATO military to fight in Ukraine might be more ‘idealistic’ than someone who joins their own army for free education.
Most (possibly all?) NATO militaries would not permit a serving soldier to take a leave of absence, especially not to join another nation’s military.
Captain Brittney Shki-Giizis, Canadian Armed Forces, made it happen and has been featured on the CBC and in Kyiv Independent (no links to avoid triggering spam detectors). She seems like a very determined woman.
I had not heard of her before. Good for her! I am still quite surprised that the CAF allowed her to do it.
That celebrated exchange between General Westmoreland and Milton Freedman:-
Westmoreland:
“I do not want to command an army of mercenaries.”
Friedman:
“General, would you rather command an army of slaves?”
Followed by:
Westmoreland:
“I don’t like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves.”
Friedman:
“I don’t like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries.
If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher.”
Since you mention Gauls both in modern France/Northern Italy and on the Danube and in Antolia, this gets me wondering: to what extent would Galatians have recognized, says, Arverni as part of a same cultural community?
Obviously Vercingetorix was able to draw on different polities when fighting Rome so I assume there were some amount of cultural ties among Gauls in present day France, even if modern representation probably exagerates this. But would they have spoken a mutually intelligible language with Galatians? Would a Galatian from the other side of Europe have seem less foreign to them than a Celtiberian or Roman from just over the mountains?
A 4th century bishop from northern Gaul found the Galatians speaking a similar language as the peasants from his own region. So recognisably close to Gallic. What that says about ties or contact I don’t know.
When you don’t have an “official” language, you likely get more used to dealing with lots of different accents. Maybe the Roman patricians all speak alike, but most of the other people end up listening and talking to lots of people who “talk funny”. Mutual intelligibility is a spectrum and depends on how patient you are with decoding things.
GB Shaw was possibly exaggerating, but Professor Higgins being able to determine what street in London someone was born did not trigger an audience’s disbelief in his play Pygmalion. And that was a lot later, with many more people in London.
I’ll focus on language here as that’s a bit easier to find comparisons with, rather than the much broader ‘shared culture’.
There’s an interesting video between Simon Roper and Dr Jackson Crawford where they both speak to each other in Old English/Old Norse attempting to recreate a conversation between two people in the Danelaw. It’s just a bit of fun really, but they were able to understand each other. There is evidence of translators between Old Norse speakers and Old English speakers in the Danelaw, but they don’t seem to be ubiquitous or widespread. This sort of paints the picture of two languages that are approaching the point of no longer being mutually intelligible, but aren’t quite there yet. It seems like the two languages had developed isolated from each other for about 500 years at that point.
I’ve read elsewhere that Spanish and Portuguese are about at the limits of mutual intelligibility. Spanish and Portuguese began diverging between the 9th and 13thC, so that’s roughly 800-1200 years.
Though note that there’s a difficulty here because we’re not necessarily comparing the same thing. The point a language is estimated to have started diverging and the point at which a language is isolated from each other. This complicates the picture somewhat, but we can try to clarify things a little to get apples to apples. Old Norse and Old English are believed to have been diverging for around 1100 years at the point of the Danelaw and been isolated for 500. Spanish and Portuguese have been diverging for around 800-1200 years, but I’m not sure if you could ever say that they have been truly isolated from one another.
Now, the Galatians are thought to have migrated to Anatolia around 277BC. The Arverni under Vercingetorix fought the Romans from 58-50BC so we can take that as our benchmark for ‘isolation’ (around 220ish years, so much shorter than our previous two examples). The Galatians are believed to be an offshoot of the Volcae, who were found in at least reasonable proximity to the Arverni, and are both believed to have spoken ‘Gaulish’ (whatever that means…we’ll get to that in a moment).
However, all of this is complicated on a number of fronts.
1. The Arverni are thought to have established themselves in Gaul much earlier than the Volcae (900BC vs around 300BC, noting that the Volcae used to live around the Danube area, and it was from there that the split with the Galatians occurred).
2. We do not understand how much connection there was between the peoples-that-became-Arverni and the peoples-that-became-Galatians before all of this migration occurred.
3. We do not really understand the linguistic diversity of ‘celtic’ peoples particularly well*. Our sources are sparse because they were largely illiterate, and much of what we understand comes from toponyms and names which are difficult materials to be working with.
4. Languages diverge at different rates depending on the external and internal influences acting upon them.
5. We should not fall into the trap of assuming that ‘shared language = a perception of shared culture’ (noting that you didn’t actually suggest that, and you did mention culture, but we put that out of scope because that would be a research thesis in itself).
Unfortunately, this puts us right in the sort of grey-area window of ‘maybe the Arverni and Galatians could understand each other, maybe they couldn’t’. On the face of it, they’d only been absolutely isolated from one another for around 220 years. However, they could potentially have been isolated from one another for 600 years (if they became ‘isolated’ when the Arverni migrated) or for even longer if the Celtic tribes from ‘east of the Rhine’ (the Arverni) were not particularly well connected to the Celtic tribes from ‘around the Danube’ (the Volcae). If forced to put a wager on it, I’d say ‘yes they could probably just about understand each other’, based on the understanding that ‘east of the Rhine’ and ‘the celtic bit around the Danube’ aren’t all that distant from one another, meaning it’s likely that the upper end of isolation is the 600 year estimate.
What that says about the perceptions of shared cultural connectivity between the Arverni and the Galatians in the absence of modern theories of linguistics-based nationalism I have no idea. But it’s an interesting thought experiment!
*I put the ‘celtic’ in quotes because people often like to view ‘celts’ in a sort of ‘proto-nationalist’ way with it being one expansive ‘volk’ when what actually comes through to us in the evidence is quite considerable regional diversity within a sort of ‘celtic cultural complex’. Personally, I like to view ‘celtic cultures’ as the same type of category as ‘romance cultures’. Yes there’s the implication of shared cultural heritage. No it does not mean that they viewed themselves, or were viewed by others, as ‘the same people’ or even necessarily all that closely connected.
The Celtiberians are another kettle of fish that I probably don’t know enough about to comment on properly (I’m still waiting for the Oxford Handbook of the European Iron Age to come out in softback).
However, there’s some things that we might be able to look at.
1. The also migrated into Iberia around 300BC, about the same time as the Galatians.
2. There was likely multiple waves of celtic migration into Iberia, with some occurring much earlier (around the same time as the Arverni, circa 900BC).
3. They migrated through lands that were broadly ‘celtic’ speaking (including past the lands that the Arverni lived in), whereas my understanding is that the Galatians migrated through areas that were less celtic speaking. We don’t really know how long either of them stayed in these areas.
4. As far as I’m aware, we don’t know where either of these pre-Celtiberian folks came from geographically (I may well be wrong about this).
5. The Celtiberians displayed a wide range of different degrees of local assimilation, so some Celtiberian tribes may appear as ‘more foreign’ than others. I don’t know enough about the Galatians to know if this is the same, but it’s probably reasonable to assume they did.
6. The Iberian peninsula seemed to be a bit of a refuge for pre-Indo-European languages (though not necessarily the bit the Celtiberians settled in), and aspects of pre-Indo-European culture. Whether the Arverni would have found this more or less foreign than the Phrygian culture that the Galatians superseded (which was at least Indo-European, though had likely been diverging for a long time) I have no idea.
7. We do at least have quite a bit of written Celtiberian, but regrettably I don’t know enough about this to know how much it differs from other celtic languages (other than that it tends to be grouped as a different category by us, whatever that’s worth).
“the moribund Ptolemaic army is whipped into shape but a set of mercenary Greek commanders”
-> by a set
“in the Hellenistic Mediterranean there are so very ‘standard’ sources of mercenaries”
-> some very ‘standard’ (I think)
“regiments were just kept setting around under these conditions”
-> sitting around
We can’t be certain why Sargon resorted to foreign soldiers, but it may well have been the same reason that many kings through history maintained foreign, mercenary bodguards: a guard of foreign mercenaries would lack any political connections, making them notionally entirely reliant on the king for their status and thus more loyal.
Is this also related to why some of the medieval Islamic states liked to buy foreign slaves for use as soldiers? Like in Egypt, South Asia etc.?
A good piece but a couple of observations. I think you miss out another method of recruitment, which was individuals travelling overseas under their own steam (or sails) and getting recruited in the recruiter’s territory. This was certianly a thing in the early Hellenistic, perhaps less so as time went on. Also while a lot of people did provide their own equipment (especially if it was ehtnically/culturally-specific), there are also cases of employers arming (or at least upgrading the arms of) their mercenaries. Whether this extended to taking peasants and equipping them as hoplites is debatable (after all, you have to know how to use the gear), but it could certainly mean eg taking poor, unarmoured hoplites and giving them armour.
Also the standing army, specifically garrison, nature of Hellenistic mercs is higly important. Most ‘citizens’/’settlers’ would only serve on occasion, whereas garrisons would be needed all the time.
Do we have any info on how many individuals were recruited this way as opposed to the more formal methods? I would imagine that signing up a chieftain who brings a warband of forty is much more efficient in time than individually recruiting forty warriors, and at the level of say Xenonphon’s Ten Thousand the vast majority must have been already members of a mercenary organisation of some kind.
I think the organisation they were members of might have been “these poleis already have an institution for their military age man to gather in assembly, hear out appeals as a group, and make decisions collectively, because that’s what a polis is”.
“Also while a lot of people did provide their own equipment (especially if it was ehtnically/culturally-specific), there are also cases of employers arming (or at least upgrading the arms of) their mercenaries. Whether this extended to taking peasants and equipping them as hoplites is debatable (after all, you have to know how to use the gear), but it could certainly mean eg taking poor, unarmoured hoplites and giving them armour.”
One piece of equipment I see as problematic to provide is horses.
While heavy metal armour might have cost comparable to the cost of a light horse, the armour weighed much less when packed up aboard ship and did not need to be fed and kept comfortable.
At Raphia, Ptolemies deployed 2000 horse “from Greece”.
How did the 2000 horse get to Egypt across the wide Mediterranean sea? Did individual mercenaries have to make their own shipping arrangements? The “easy” way of crossing just the Turkish Straits and then riding through Asia was in Seleucid hands.
Were the mercenary employers actually ready to accept trained but dismounted horsemen, and issue them horses, like horses raised in Egypt, or imported in peacetime when it was easier to do so, and kept in Egypt?
More accurate idiomatic translation of “relish money” might be “gravy.” Heard it used in informal discussion of business plans often enough, for revenue / profit beyond recouping costs and covering other essentials: “After that, it’s all gravy.”
I’m curious if there was a stigma against people who went and fought for a foreign state (even if that state was notionally friendly to one’s own)? The way Polybius talks about them suggests to me there was, but the fact that there usually seem to be mercenaries available suggests that a decent number of people weren’t deterred by any potential social consequences.
Sorry, this was supposed to be a standalone comment.
I think Polybius is talking up Roman virtue and doing down all foreigners. The Carthaginians happen to be a convenient placeholder for “not Roman”.
It doesn’t sound like Romans fighting for foreigners is a thing, but if they were then I could imagine Polybius either being horrified that they would lend Roman virtue to mere foreigners (it might give them ideas!), or else praising said Romans for bringing the light of Rome and showing them how to *really* fight.
I think when one considers what is stigmatised in these societies, it should be considered against the priorities of the sources and the kind of social stratification they had. Some of our major sources on Athenian democracy come from Athenian aristocrats who stigmatise that, and yet it might be apparent that the majority had a more favourable view of the system.
“The more curious question is why no one else tries (or succeeds?) to hire Romans.”
My first thought was that the Romans, at least in the early days, likely sopped up all the ones who were willing/able to go, into their armies. They were fighting pretty much every year weren’t they? And the limit on where they fought seems to be the number of people they trusted with an army, rather than hard limits on soldiers.
So if you’re Roman you’re too young to go, you’re already in a legion, or you’re too old to go. Or you’re needed to farm and can’t go.
The Romans were unusually good at raising multiple armies at once to campaign on several fronts, but the only times they maxed out their actual capacity were during major existential crises to the Republic. The multiple fronts should be seen in terms of “the fact that they have such a large reserve after raising an army is why they can raise another one ad hoc” and not “they have no reserves”.
It would be my understanding that this is part of how the military obligations of patronage work. If your patron is called to service and you are not, you’re still required to voluntarily join up with him to fulfil your duty as client. If you were going to be assigned to a legion anyway, which may differ from your patron’s, that obligation wouldn’t really mean anything.
“If your patron is called to service and you are not, you’re still required to voluntarily join up with him to fulfil your duty as client.”
Having just been re-reading the ‘How to Raise a Tribal Army in Pre-Roman Europe’ series, it’s interesting how this parallels the approach with which the various Celtic polities were able to mobilise truly astonishing proportions of their fighting population (effectively through aristocratic patronage arrangements): https://acoup.blog/2024/06/21/collections-how-to-raise-a-tribal-army-in-pre-roman-europe-part-iii-going-to-war-with-the-army-you-have/
If I remember correctly, this institution of patronage is one of the distinguishing factors between Roman society and, say, the Greeks. It’s sort of doing both things at once: utilising deep interpersonal ties of fealty to reach deeply into manpower sources…but also having the state apparatus required to equip large proportions as heavy infantrymen and raise multiple armies at once without risking a coup.
But they didn’t use their state apparatus to equip soldiers.
I think it’s reasonable to read that in terms of resources available to the state as a result of characteristics of the territory that the state governs, even if the state itself is not directly organizing or assigning them.
I think I’ve worded that in a shorthand way that’s confusing.
The Roman state did not directly arm its citizens (certainly not in the republican phase we’re talking about).
The Roman state created the conditions to allow large proportions of the Roman population to arm themselves:
1. Comparatively broad and effective political enfranchisement of the primary military demographic which led to an improvement in their prosperity compared to elites and thus their ability to afford equipment.
2. The provision of state-funded stipend for military duty from land taxes redistributing wealth from the ‘big men’ to the primary military demographic, improving their ability to afford equipment.
3. Systematic redistribution of war booty between regular soldiers, elites and the state ensuring the enrichment of the primary military demographic, thus improving their ability to afford equipment*.
4. The complexity and stability afforded by the operation of the state allowing for a more robust economy, meaning pretty much every Roman was richer than their comparison in a Gallic polity, thus improving their ability to afford equipment.
*I don’t think we know what the process was for redistributing war spoils among Gallic societies, if there even was a uniform approach. However, what we don’t see is things like the Gauls stomping a Roman army flat (as they did a number of times) and then the Romans having an issue with an army of super-Gauls all dressed up in the chainmail they’d stolen. This suggests that the processes of redistribution within Gallic societies were not necessarily that effective at redistributing war booty to maximise military equipment availability. The one time we do see this is with the members of Hannibal’s army ‘re-arming themselves in the Roman fashion’. So it was possible…they just didn’t seem to do it effectively most of the time.
I don’t think this is true at all. When I think of mercenaries, I think of organizations like Blackwater (USA) or the Wagner Group (Russia), who provide military force to their own government in exchange for money, but who are not part of those governments’ armed forces.
I think it’s reasonable for somebody running a blog on the subject of history to assume that the readers have perspectives on subject matter that goes back earlier than about fifty years. Private military contractors are recent historical outliers to the norm of what mercenaries have generally been and been understood as.
While I’d include Blackwater in my definition of mercenaries, they certainly aren’t the norm. I’m not sure I’d count Wagnet fighting for Russia as mercenaries; my impression is that they’re de facto part of the state apparatus and Russia picks their overseas clients.
Agreed. I’d see the Wagner Group more as a branch of the Russian military that’s separated enough from the rest of state apparatus to be able to maintain plausible deniability about their actions. I suppose this is sort of ‘mercenary adjacent’.
I don’t know enough about Blackwater to comment.
> “absent the ability to pay the arrears of μισθός, the army – both mercenaries and also regular North African soldiers (who made up the bulk of the force, but were paid a wage as well) – mutinied and then backed a revolt of Carthage’s subject communities in North Africa, which was eventually put down by Hamilcar Barca.”
I’m really curious then, how did Hamilcar put down the revolt? What army did Hamilcar use to fight the rebels, given that Carthage could not afford to pay for an army?
Apparently a combination of Carthaginian citizens, other North African conscripts that were not motivated to revolt, and deserters from the rebels.
What are you thoughts on Roman mercenaries like Publius Sittius and Lucius Septimus?