16th Century ‘Landsknechts’

When it comes to historical accuracy, Hollywood is a mixed bag. If Hollywood is to be believed, medieval warfare lasted from 300 to 1700 AD and mostly took place in foggy forests and swamps. Men in dirty armour and woollen chainmail fought one-on-one, having forgotten to put on their helmets or their tabards. They hacked each other to death with swords, axes, maybe crossbows, and it never occurred to them that maybe they could use some gunpowder, or that a formation of some kind would protect them. No doubt they left their brains at home, next to the helmet and the tabard.

This is a shame, as the world of the landsknecht was as colourful as it was dangerous, and a good formation is very satisfying to watch. What would a movie about Roman legionaries be, without the classic tortoise formation?

The word landsknecht (‘servant of the land’) first appears in 1486. Maximilian I had realised that his armies’ organisation and tactics were ineffective, so he cribbed from the Swiss. He recruited pikemen from his territories in South Germany and gave them new training under a Swiss captain. The result was two new regiments, totalling six to eight thousand men.

Unfortunately for Maxmilian and his successors, the landsknechts took something else from the Swiss: the right to choose their own employer, and the right to recruit others to serve that employer. They based this right on ancient customs.

Unlike France and England, Italy and Germany were far from centralised. Italy was a mixture of duchies, republics and principalities. Germany’s political map – a complex mosaic that is almost tiring to look at – makes Italy’s look stable and straightforward in comparison. National identities are fluid, tenuous things, and in the modern day we take it for granted that a nation is represented on a map by a state. Germany and Italy were ideas, names given to regions. We think of Erasmus as Dutch, but at the time he was called ‘the German Socrates’.

Each tiny piece of that German mosaic represents a different prince with his own ambitions, ideas, and beliefs. The more princes there are, the harder it becomes to enforce religious unity. When threatened, religious dissidents can simply hop the border and enter the jurisdiction of a different duke. Alone, a duke might have difficulty defying the emperor, but the German states knew there was strength in numbers, forming alliances like the Schmalkaldic League.

The prince-employer bought his landsknechts in units called standards (or ensigns). He would then choose a colonel from among the landsknechts and give him letters patent – orders to recruit a fixed number of troops. The colonel needed permission from local magnates to recruit in their territory – but in a region as divided as Germany, that was not hard to obtain.

Each company had a captain, so the captains roamed the area, equipped with fifes, drums, and commission papers. If a willing recruit looked suitable, his details were written down on the muster roll: name, age, birthplace, and primary weapon. The recruit would be given the location of the company’s place of assembly and told when he needed to be there to muster.

The captain would choose an open space as the place of assembly. Then he would stick two halberds upright in the ground and lay a pike across them, making a rectangular doorway. When the recruits arrived, they would form ranks behind this rectangle. One by one, they would step through the doorway, a bit like going through the metal detector at the airport. The men and their weapons would be examined, to see if both were in good working order. From this process we get the phrase ‘to pass muster’. Once the muster was complete, everyone formed a circle around the colonel and he read aloud a letter of articles: the terms and conditions.

Captains could be confident they would find enough willing recruits. The sixteenth century was a time of economic hardship. Depopulation caused by the Black Death had improved the bargaining power of labourers in the later medieval period. By the sixteenth century the population was back up, and so now labour was plentiful instead of scarce. That meant high unemployment and a fall in living standards, because those with work saw their stagnant income eroded by inflation.

A pikeman could expect around 3 ducats a month, but skilled warriors could bargain for more. Fighting on the front line came with the highest risk and the highest reward: the men in the front lines were doppelsoldner, or double-pay-men. If your name was entered on the muster roll, you got conduct money to cover the cost of travelling to the place of assembly. Captains could also earn a little extra by cheating: they were paid for each name, so some of the men on the muster rolls didn’t exist. Having a muster at a place of assembly helped to counteract this: if men didn’t turn up, they would have to be struck off the roll.
The structure of Italian society made long-term recruitment of troops more difficult than in other countries. They tended to employ mercenaries instead of being them. Famously, Machiavelli loathed mercenaries. He had learned the hard way that mercenaries can desert at a critical moment. He argued that a prince could still use mercenaries effectively, but only to invade another prince’s territory – never to defend his own. A prince should put his territory’s defence in the hands of his citizens. They could be relied upon when the battle got desperate – because they would be fighting for the security of their homes, their families, their churches, their crops.

But mercenaries still demanded discipline and internal order in their companies. After the colonel had read the letter of articles, landsknechts sealed their service with oaths. Standard-bearers had an additional oath to defend the company’s standards at all costs.
There was a hierarchy within an army of landsknechts. At the top was the colonel, answering to the prince-employer. Answering to the colonel was the lieutenant-colonel, and the captains answered to the lieutenant-colonel. Each company had a quartermaster called a harbinger and a surgeon. Surgeons were highly skilled at operating – they could amputate a leg in under a minute – but infection was a major killer. The provost oversaw discipline, and he brought troublemakers before the Justizamptmann – the bailiff. (Also known as a Schultheiss.) The bailiff enforced martial law. He selected the jury and the court martial officers. If the jury found the accused guilty, the bailiff sentenced him.
Landsknechts were not exempt from the rules of war. Priests, women, and churches must be spared – and if you were inside a church, you were forbidden from selling alcohol when the priest was holding a service. Gambling and drunkenness were also forbidden, to prevent fights from breaking out among the ranks. Landsknechts were not permitted to continue feuds in the name of their personal honour.

Under the stress of supply problems, order crumbled. It was not easy to keep landsknechts well fed and well-paid. Mills were a vital piece of infrastructure, the places where grain could be turned into flour, but rampaging armies targeted them in order to starve the enemy. In 1527, unpaid mercenaries mutinied and sacked Rome – shaming their employer, Emperor Charles V. To add insult to injury, the landsknechts scrawled LUTHER on the frescoes of the papal palace.

Despite their reputation for unreliability, cowardice and desertion carried the death penalty. Of course, in the heat of battle, there was no time for a court martial, so panicking deserters were killed by their fellow soldiers. Before battle, some landsknechts had a ritual to purify themselves: they threw mud over their shoulder, rather like the superstition of throwing salt over the shoulder today.

Each landsknecht had to own his own weapons: no sharing, no borrowing. Armour and weapons could be decorated with religious symbols or erotic imagery. Weapons made beautiful gifts: Erasmus was a total civilian, but he owned a long dagger called a baselard, the scabbard decorated with a design by Holbein.

Each landsknecht had a sword for his secondary weapon. For his primary weapon, he would have a pike, a zweihander, a halberd, or an arquebus. Most landsknechts were pikemen. The pike was eighteen feet of ash tipped with a steel spearhead, so it allowed the pikeman to hold off his enemy at some distance. Pikemen were effective against infantry and essential for breaking cavalry charges. Welsh pikemen helped put Henry VII on the throne in 1485.

Landsknechts used a square formation called gevierte Ordnung (fourth order). A formation could include up to ten thousand men. Usually, landsknechts drew up in three squares, called igels – igel means hedgehog. Each of the four sides of the square had three outward-facing rows of pikemen.

If pikes weren’t enough to hold back the enemy cavalry, halberdiers with their billhooks could come to the aid of the pikemen. A halberd is a three-in-one spear, axe and billhook, usually around eight feet long. If the horse reached within eighteen feet- past the pike points- the billhook could be used to unseat the rider. Landsknechts with zweihanders could also protect pikemen: the weight and length of zweihanders meant they could be swung around to knock aside the weapons of the enemy. According to the Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet, it was a halberd that killed Richard III. Given the versatile nature of the weapon, the different wounds on Richard’s skull could have been made by halberds.
Arquebuses (also known as hackbuts) could cut down cavalry with their fire, but loading and firing an arquebus is a slow and fiddly business demanding both hands. An arquebusier preparing his weapon for the next shot is vulnerable. So, pikemen and arquebusiers worked well together. The arquebusier takes down the horse before he can reach the pikeman, and the pikeman guards the arquebusier from attack.

Landsknechts didn’t have formal uniforms, but their colourful clothes are distinctive. The troops of Giovanni de Medici wore mourning sashes permanently after his death, and the colour contrast would have been striking. Landsknechts could go up to a month without changing these clothes, as there wasn’t much by way of laundry facilities for an army on the move. This isn’t quite as awful as it sounds: early modern clothes were made from linen and wool and were far more breathable than modern synthetic fabrics. Over the top, thick leather coats could protect the landsknecht from cuts and slashes.

And perhaps, those huge feathers in his hat brought him a little cheer as he rode off to war.

Further reading:
The King’s Painter: The Life and Times of Hans Holbein by Franny Moyle
The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance by Catherine Fletcher
“The Landsknecht: His Recruitment and Organization, With Some Reference to the Reign of Henry VIII.” Military Affairs, vol. 35, no. 3 (1971) pp. 95–99, by John Gilbert Miller.

CF Kirkham-Sandy is the author of the Tudor novel Shackled to a Ghost, now available on Amazon US, Amazon UK and Kindle Unlimited (search on Amazon using code B0DV5F6585).

CF Kirkham-Sandy grew up in Devon and has a BA and an MA in History from the universities of York and Bristol. CF lives and works in Herefordshire, and moonlights as a history tutor for students of all ages. CF is currently writing another novel and can be found on Threads @kirkhamsandycf and Twitter @Catofthepigeons.