Men, iron, money, and bread, are the sinew of war; but of these four, the first two are more necessary; for men and iron find money and bread, but bread and money do not find men and iron.1
Niccolò Machiavelli’s famous adage lists men, weapons, money, and food as equally essential components necessary for warfare, but within these four, it assigns priority to the use of men and weapons to acquire money and food. The contributions to this volume, however, firmly invert this causality by claiming for money the role of the main mover of war, reasserting the supremely popular maxim of the early modern age: pecunia (est) nervus belli.2 Money moved men across Europe and beyond, fed them, and fueled the weapon race of the early modern age.
Notwithstanding Machiavelli’s urge to position himself as original thinker – his seemingly timeless didactic principles were outdated when he relied on his experience of the Italian Wars and his interpretation of Roman history for describing how war should be led. In fact, as he was writing, the world around him, and warfare itself was undergoing irreversible changes: In the late 15th century, when Machiavelli’s insights started to take shape, armies were still mainly put together ad hoc, and for a finite period of time. They consisted of varying groups of typically not otherwise associated people, bound by vastly diverse kinds of legal relationship to the lord, which lived off the land and whatever booty they could find as they rode and marched into enemy dominions,
The dominance of the infantry – coveted by Machiavelli who dreamed of a faithful urban infantry militia – eventually proved short-lived. It has also been overstated to a certain extent: It is true that the sheer number of people fighting on foot with a personal weapon by far surpassed all other armed entities for most of the following 400 years. But the main change in warfare came with the introduction of firearms, especially mobile cannons whose efficacy had been shown, for all to see (including Machiavelli) by Charles’ VII of France swift incursion into Italy in 1494–95. The interplay of artillery, infantry, and (to a more or less important extent) cavalry now constituted the core of warfare. Without guns no war, but without money no guns. The master-gunners were in such high demand and so expensive that it was preferable to employ them on a permanent basis. The foot soldiers had to orient their actions in the field towards the presence of cannons (their own and the enemy’s) and had to act in synch with them. The new warfare needed training of vast numbers of people in a short period of time instead of the lifelong education to arms of a small number of men – the ‘flowers of chivalry’ were replaced by anonymous masses that had to be controlled and whose movements had to be coordinated.
The places of war also shifted. In the Middle Ages (notwithstanding military history’s emphasis on ‘great’ battles), short, swift raids and siege warfare had been the dominant expressions of military conflict, reflecting a structure of power that relied on strategically chosen strongholds in lands where confusingly layered and checkered dominions of a multitude of rulers prevailed. After 1500, warfare took place among, within, and crossing over territorially defined boundaries. Finally, the armies themselves turned into vast, moving societies encompassing soldiers and non-combatants, men, women, and children. With them, a huge number of horses had to be fed, outfitted, and administered. Early modern armies were therefore military organizations that entailed an important ‘civil’ element, servicing the diverse needs of all the people involved, yet ultimately aimed at maintaining the army’s belligerent capability.
After a lull around 1500, siege warfare resurged with renewed vigour, but was thereafter directed at fortifications and towns increasingly surrounded
This is not the place to challenge or support master stories, nor the place to discuss egg-and-chicken-problems of army and state. And, of course, precursors to all these developments can be found – on an organizational level with the compagnies d’ordonnance and the mortes-payes designated to guard fortified places created by Charles VII of France in 1445, and other ‘permanent’ elements,4 or the English garrison policy of the 100-years-war,5 and also on a technical level: For a military historian, the rise of the infantry in the late Middle Ages is proven by the decisive victories of infantry troops in Courtrai (1302), Sempach (1386), Agincourt (1415) or Murten (1476). However, in Murten, the foot soldiers of the confederates and their allies were supported by a thousandfold cavalry (in contrast to what had happened a few months earlier at Grandson),6 and Charles the Bold stubbornly refused to believe that his enemies were, in fact, attacking, until it was too late,7 and both factors were
Leaving aside chronological discussion of ‘the military Revolution(s)’, a number of changes after 1500 can be thus highlighted: First, cannons had become decisive ingredients of European warfare, used in tandem with cavalry and infantry;12 Second, small arms became the main weapon of infantry and, with the sabre, the second weapon of the cavalry; Third, firearms proliferation necessitated a major upsurge in the production, trade, distribution, and storage of raw materials and industrially manufactured output (gunpowder; iron, bronze, and other metals; stone, lead, and cast iron for ammunition); Fourth,
1 People
Overall, the contributions to this volume span four centuries, from the 15th to the 19th century. A majority of the chapters, however, emphasize the century and half covering the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), and the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). These conflicts impacted all the major powers in Europe, and left no region unaffected, and at times spread to other continents as well. Abundant business opportunities thus emerged, were seized, and were perpetuated, not least by the men and women profiting from them.
One notable profiteer and active protagonist of the early modern ‘arms race’ was Maximilien Titon (1632–1711), the “merchant of death” described by Guy Rowlands. Titon’s business depended on the plans of the monarch who in turn depended on the services of this powerful man. Uneasy relationships between governments and powerful (and indispensable) brokers of military clout were an unavoidable result of the state’s ‘outsourcing’ of military services: David Parrott investigates steps taken by the French crown to rein in the activities of, and their own dependency on the military entrepreneurs. Government-military business ties also underpinned the activities of men examined and presented by Marian Füssel. These international military capitalists juggled assets between Prussia, Denmark, France, England, Scotland, America, and Canada, profiting from war whenever they could (the German Kriegsgewinnler [war profiteer] conveys the disdain which often met their activities). Others successfully pursued opportunities for personal social
In spite of the risk of sudden ups and downs inherent in war, the sheer duration of wars between the 15th and 19th centuries, combined with the long-lived reign of their most important protagonist, Louis XIV (born in 1638 and king from 1643 to 1715), created relatively solid conditions permitting longer-term business strategies beyond speculation on suddenly arising, short range opportunities.
2 Places
The nerve centers of the bustling business of war were cities, rather than the courts (which were however closely connected to the urban fabric as with Louis
It would be a challenge to find people in, say, 17th-century France that did not make their living, directly or indirectly, through war. The personnel of stables and inns and other providers of amenities catered to the infrastructure of transport and movement of troops, tailors made tents, wainwrights made wheels for wagons and gun carriages, seamstresses sewed uniforms, ropemakers were as indispensable as carpenters, ragmen and -women who collected and sold for recycling cloth, metal, and whatever they could find. This ‘small business of war’ is largely unexplored, but Michael Paul Martoccio deftly puts Genoese bargemen, “moving men around the region”, at the center of an intriguing study showing how the ‘big’ business of war was interlaced with regional specializations profiting from specific political and strategical constellations. That this regional economic focus was transient is inherent to the vagaries of war and its underlying politics.
The small enterprises providing the day-to-day feeding, grooming, and distribution of services within the armies, carried out, to an important degree, by women (and eternalized by Bertolt Brecht in his 1938–39 play Mother Courage and her Children),16 were obviously connected by a myriad of synapses to the big and smaller business of war discussed in this volume. But how these connections worked, and how they can be grasped with adequate historical methods, is another question.
The extensive infrastructure of cities obviously made them crucial to the growing and ever-shifting networks of war related business enterprise. Some
It is the towns that assembled the hustlers and merchants, the opportunists, the bankers and money lenders, the arms producers and the many small businesses who made their living in the context of perennial war, supplying Europe’s belligerent centuries with their products. Here, also, rulers used visible signs to impress upon their subjects and competitors their entitlement as military leaders: They invested their gains not only into large scale fortifications and military buildings that reshaped the towns, but also into monuments and ornaments such as Louis’ XIV monumental rider statue cast by Johann
Discussion of business hubs profits from insights and concepts which comparative urban history has developed on urban networks, the relationship of state and city,22 of the courts and the town, the role of groups as urban ‘stakeholders’, and on the longue durée of change. This close examination of the relationship of town and the military complex from the point of view of urban history has good potential for further study.23 That might also entail considering the transformation of the town and its ‘martial culture’24 since the late middle ages, in a comparative, European perspective: In the late Middle Ages, especially in the Empire, towns’ governments acted as major players as autonomous ‘military entrepreneurs’, providing money, men, and weapons in their own right.25 That is a role that the communal members of the Corpus Helveticum continued into the modern period. However, in the course of their integration into princely territories, towns in most regions of Europe became the providers, rather than the organizers, of military power. It would be
3 Movements
People and places were connected by movements. The contributions to this volume show intrinsically linked movements of people, goods, and money. The logistics and the political agility they needed are explored by Astrid Ackermann who investigates how Bernard of Saxe-Weimar organized the supply of his Armée d’Allemagne during the Thirty Year’s War. Tim Neu follows the money-trail across the Atlantic, where financial instruments and the sheer physical challenges of overseas traffic hampered smooth payments of British troops in North America, and Peter H. Wilson examines military movements as part of labor and migration history. Both add distance (and, albeit implicitly, risk management)28 to the parameters affecting the early modern business of war. Military service can, obviously, be discussed in terms of labor migration.29 This is neither a new perspective nor a new phenomenon; the knights setting out on the first Crusade in 1095 or the Anglo-Saxon warriors who filled the ranks of the Byzantine Varangian Guard after 106630 – to name
4 Military Service as Intergenerational Project
Time and distance are two crucial parameters for understanding the development of the early modern business of war. They underpinned battle strategies and the movements of troops and supplies, but also influenced the development of personal ties and family strategies related to military business. Louis’ XIV 17th century was especially advantageous for such strategies as the relative stability of the long reign of the Sun King facilitated, or even permitted in the first place, intergenerational planning. However, strategies for “staying on top”36 involved more than having enough surviving sons able to follow in their male forebears’ footsteps. David Parrott’s study of military enterprise in France concludes that “the length and scale of war after 1635 ensured that extensive informal networks of personal ties and obligations were forged through warfare and the reciprocal bonds with commanders that this created”. These bonds forged by shared dangers and challenges had a strong emotional glue, but also led to promises and obligations going beyond the individual military comrades. Women played a crucial part in upholding, fastening, and ‘playing’ the networks created by war and the businesses it attracted. The collaboration between the women who stayed in their places of origin and the men who pursued a military career was obviously considered temporary – the wives managed estates and the military business during the absence of the husbands until their eventual return. Male networks were greased by women’s intervention and ‘networking’ by letter and personal intervention, as Jasmina Cornut’s analysis of 18th and 19th century family letter collections shows. While asking their male correspondents for support of sons or nephews, these women regularly invoked professional and emotional ties their male relatives
5 Whose Business is War?
“Il n’y comprenait rien du tout.” Not understanding anything is Fabrice, the hero of Stendahl’s 1839 novel La Chartreuse de Parme. In an iconic scene, Fabrice rides heedlessly and drunk across the battlefield of Waterloo, exhilarated by the deafening roar of the cannons. When a group of officers rushes past him, he does not realize that one of them is the Emperor himself, and that he just witnessed the flight of Napoleon. La Chartreuse de Parme is an ironic, literary take on the changing world of the early 19th century, but might also give historians who are not wont to symbolic narratives, a chance to try looking closer at their own historical perspectives. In particular, the moment the hero witnesses an event that would change the world, but without understanding it, spotlights a classic historian’s dilemma: Writing in hindsight, tasked with bringing order to a confusion of tumultuous events, and finding patterns in the course of history – in short, by ‘making history (work)’ –, historians ‘reduce complexities’. First by deciding whose story they will tell. Is it the story of nameless men, women, and children buffeted by war, struggling to find a living, enjoying the small comfort of the bottle of spirit offered by a kindly sutler? Or the story of the movers and shakers who juggle big money and big losses,
Nonetheless, as the contributions in this volume amply show, it is, in fact, possible to a large extent to jointly incorporate a worm’s eye and a bird’s view, first, by focusing on people who lived of war, and whose actions made war work, and second, by targeting business. Business is a form of mediation. It brings together people of all walks of life. It creates and shapes mechanisms for the exchange of goods, people, and information, and connects them to places. It offers opportunities for many people, even if the chances of succeeding on a grand scale are unevenly distributed: legal obstacles, personal circumstances, acumen – both for business and for networking –, and sheer luck, are as important as geographical and topographical advantages, and the vagaries of climate, weather, and politics. By looking at the human, technical, and financial means that drove war, how they adapted to warfare, and were changed by it, this volume invites opportunities to discuss and rediscover the impetus of historical development itself.38
Niccolò Machiavelli, Art of War, ed. Christopher Lynch (Chicago, 2005), p. 159. Cf. Niccolò Machiaveli, Dell’arte della guerra, ed. Mario Manteilli (Florence, 1971), p. 179: “Gli uomini, il ferro, i danari e il pane sono il nervo della guerra; ma di questi quattro sono più necessarii i primi due, perché gli uomini e il ferro truovano i danari e il pane, ma il pane e i danari non truovano gli uomini e il ferro.”
Michael Stolleis, “Pecunia nervus rerum: Zur Diskussion um Steuerlast und Staatsverschuldung im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Zur Staatsfinanzierung in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Michael Stolleis (Frankfurt a.M., 1983), 63–128. Machiavelli knew the sentence well and contradicted it explicitely: “… non l’oro, come grida la comune opinione essere il nervo della guerra, mai i buoni soldati, perché l’oro non è sufficienti a trovare i buoni soldati, ma i buoni soldati sono bene sufficienti a trovare l’oro” , quoted in Stolleis, “Pecunia”, p. 64.
Patrick Leukel, “all welt wil auf sein wider Burgundi”: Das Reichsheer im Neusser Krieg 1474/75 (Paderborn, 2019), pp. 185–199.
Philippe Contamine, Guerre, état et société à la fin du Moyen Âge: Études sur les armées des rois de France, 1337–1494 (Paris, 1972), pp. 278–301.
See especially the studies of Anne Curry, e.g.: Anne E. Curry, “La Normandie au XVe siècle: l’occupation militaire d’Henri V et le contrôle des garnisons,” in La guerre en Normandie, XIe–XVe siècle, ed. Anne Elizabeth Curry, Véronique Gazeau (Caen, 2018), 179–194.
In fact, Philippe de Commynes explicitely explains the victory of the Swiss by the presence of the cavalry: “Au peu de deffence fust desconfit ledict duc et mys en fuyte : et ne luy print point comme de la bataille precedente [Grandson], ou il n’avoit perdu que sept hommes d’armes (et cela advint pour ce que lesdictz subjectz [i.e. the Swiss] n’avoient point de gens de cheval) ; mais a ceste heure cy dont j’ay parlé, qui fut pres Morat, y avoit de la part desdictes alliances [the Swiss confederates and their allies, and the league of the upper Rhine towns and bishops, plus the dukes of Lorraine and of Habsburg] quatre mil hommes a cheval, bien montéz, qui chasserent tres loing les gens dudict duc de Bourgongne; et si joignirent leur bataille a pied avecques les gens de pied dudict duc, qui en avoit largement …”, see Philippe de Commynes, Mémoires, 1, ed. Joël Blanchard (Geneva, 2007), p. 331.
Johannes Dierauer, Panigarola’s Bericht über die Schlacht bei Murten (Frauenfeld, 1892), pp. 8–10. On this most important description of Charles’ behaviour during the battle of Murten by the permanent envoy of Galeazzo Maria Sforza to the duke of Burgundy, see the introduction by Dierauer, and on Giovan Pietro Panigarola, see Gigliola Soldi-Rondinini, “Giovan Pietro Panigarola e il ‘reportage’ moderno,” Freiburger Geschichtsblätter 60 (1976), 135–154.
I follow here: Laurent Vissière, “Les Français face aux Suisses: une guerre incertaine (1512–1515),” in Marignano 1515: La svolta, ed. Marino Viganò (Milan, 2015), 33–73.
Olivier Bangerter, Novare (1513): Dernière victoire des fantassins suisses (Paris, 2012).
Rainer Zenke, Mark Häberlein, “Waffen,” 2019, in Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit Online. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2352-0248_edn_COM_376114. Accessed 30 April 2023.
Catherine Fletcher, “Venice, Brescia and Gardone Val Trompia: Martial culture in a subject city and its hinterland,” in Urban Martial Culture in Europe (1350–1650), Proceedings of the Conference Bern, November 12, 2021, eds. Regula Schmid, Daniel Jaquet (forthcoming).
Vissière, “Français”, p. 66: “Les succès des Français en Italie ne proviennent pas de leur fureur, ni d’ailleurs de l’emploi privilégié d’une arme – la chevalerie ou l’artillerie – sur les autres, mais de la combinaison extrêmement réfléchie de trois armes la cavalerie lourde, l’infanterie suisse et l’artillerie de campagne.”
La cour et la ville dans l’Europe du Moyen Age et des Temps Modernes, eds. Léonard Courbon, Denis Menjot (Turnhout, 2015); Ein zweigeteilter Ort? Hof und Stadt in der frühen Neuzeit, eds. Susanne C. Pils, Jean P. Niederkorn (Innsbruck, 2005); John P. Spielman, City and the Crown: Vienna and the Imperial Court, 1600–1740 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1993).
David Bitterling, L’invention du pré carré: Construction de l’espace français sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris, 2009).
Jean Meyer, “States, Roads, War, and the Organization of Space,” in War and Competition between States, ed. Philippe Contamine (Oxford, 2001), 99–128.
Markus Meumann, “Tross,” 2019, in Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit Online. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2352-0248_edn_SIM_367809. Accessed 1 May 2023.
Peter H. Wilson, Marianne Klerk, “The Business of War Untangled: Cities as Fiscal-Military Hubs in Europe (1530s–1860s),” War in History 29:1 (2022), 80–103.
Jean François Bergier, Les foires de Genève et l’économie internationale de la Renaissance (Paris, 1963).
See also Philippe Rogger, “Erlach, Hans Ludwig von,” 2015, in Lexikon der Heerführer und hohen Offiziere des Dreissigjährigen Krieges, ed. Markus Meumann. Available at https://thirty-years-war-online.net/prosopographie/heerfuehrer-und-offiziere/erlach-hans-ludwig-von/. Accessed 15 May 2023.
See the introduction in this volume. On the ‘renaissance’ of the rider statue in early modern Europe, see Volker Hunecke, “Fürstliche Reiterstandbilder in Europa (16.-19. Jh.),” in Die Inszenierung der heroischen Monarchie, ed. Martin Wrede (Historische Zeitschrift Beiheft, n.s., 62) (Munich, 2014), 236–265.
Daniel Jaquet, “Les fontaines à statue,” 2022, in Martial Culture in Medieval Town. Available at https://martcult.hypotheses.org/2407.
For an overview on (German) research, see Heinz Schilling, Stefan Ehrenpreis, Die Stadt in der Frühen Neuzeit, 3rd ed. (Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte, 24) (Berlin/Boston, 2015), pp. 35–48, 69–75.
Holger T. Gräf, “Militarisierung der Stadt oder Urbanisierung des Militärs? Ein Beitrag zur Militärgeschichte der frühen Neuzeit aus stadtgeschichtlicher Perspektive,” in Klio in Uniform? Probleme und Perspektiven einer modernen Militärgeschichte der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Ralf Pröve (Köln, 1997), 89–108.
Martial Culture in Medieval Towns: An Anthology, eds. Daniel Jaquet, Regula Schmid, and Iason Eleftherios-Tzouriadis (Basel, 2023); Regula Schmid, Daniel Jaquet, Elena Magli, and Mathijs Roelofsen, “Martial Culture in Medieval Towns: Forschungsbericht,” Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 80:2 (2021), 348–355; Ann B. Tlusty, The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany: Civic Duty and the Right to Arms (Basingstoke, 2011).
Stefanie Rüther, “Reichsstädte als Kriegsunternehmer? Ratsherren, Bürger und Büchsenmeister als Profiteure der Süddeutschen Städtekriege (1376–1390),” in Die Kapitalisierung des Krieges. Kriegsunternehmer im Spätmittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit, eds. Matthias Meinhardt, Markus Meumann (Berlin, 2021), 47–59.
An attempt to grasp the longue durée of European (and transcontinental) developments up Bonaparte’s reconceptualization of the military urban landscape is the article Regula Schmid, “The Military City,” in the forthcoming Cambridge Urban History of Europe vol. 2, eds. Maarten Prak, Patrick Lantschner.
War and Competition between States, ed. Philippe Contamine (Oxford, 2001).
Explicitely addressed in: Hanna Sonkajärvi, “Moblity between Risk and Opportunity: The Military Profession in the Eighteenth Century,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome 123:1 (2011), 49–56.
Krieg, Militär und Migration in der Frühen Neuzeit, eds. Matthias Asche, Michael Herrmann, Ulrike Ludwig, and Anton Schindling (Berlin, 2008).
Nicholas C.J. Pappas, “English Refugees in the Byzantine Armed Forces: The Varangian Guard and Anglo-Saxon Ethnic Consciousness,” 2014. Available at https://deremilitari.org/2014/06/english-refugees-in-the-byzantine-armed-forces-the-varangian-guard-and-anglo-saxon-ethnic-consciousness/. Accessed 15 May 2023. For the Middle Ages in general, see Philippe Contamine, “Le problème des migrations des gens de guerre en Occident durant les derniers siècles du Moyen Age,” in Le migrazioni in Europa secc. XIII–XVIII , ed. Simonetta Cavaciocchi (Florence, 1994), 459–476.
André Holenstein, “Wenig Krieg, schwache Herrschaft und begrenzte Ressourcen: Wirkungszusammenhänge im Militärwesen der Republik Bern in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Schwerter, Säbel, Seitenwehren: Bernische Griffwaffen 1500–1850, eds. Jürg A. Meier, Marc Höchner (Bern, 2021), 15–32, pp. 23–24, 26–28; Philippe Rogger, “Söldneroffiziere als gefragte Militärexperten: Zum Transfer militärischer Kultur in die frühneuzeitliche Eidgenossenschaft,” in Miliz oder Söldner? Wehrpflicht und Solddienst in Stadt, Republik und Fürstenstaat, 13 – 18. Jahrhundert, eds. Philippe Rogger, Regula Schmid (Paderborn, 2019), 141–172; André Holenstein, “Militärunternehmer, gelehrte Geistliche und Fürstendiener: Karrieremigranten als Akteure der Aussenbeziehungen im Corpus Helveticum der frühen Neuzeit,” in Beobachten, Vernetzen, Verhandeln: Diplomatische Akteure und politische Kulturen in der frühneuzeitlichen Eidgenossenschaft, eds. Philippe Rogger, Nadir Weber (Basel, 2018), 154–165. Telling biographies from a different cultural context are in Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, Intellectuals, eds. Michal Biran, Jonathan Brack, and Francesca Fiaschetti (Oakland, 2020).
Sonkajärvi, “Mobility”.
Guy P. Marchal, “Die ‘Alten Eidgenossen’ im Wandel der Zeiten: Das Bild der frühen Eidgenossen im Traditionsbewusstsein und in der Identitätsvorstellung der Schweizer vom 15. bis ins 20. Jahrhundert,” in Innerschweiz und frühe Eidgenossenschaft, 2, ed. Historischer Verein der Fünf Orte (Olten, 1990), 309–406; Katharina Simon-Muscheid, “‘Schweizergelb’ und ‘Judasfarbe’,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 22 (1995), 317–344.
Holenstein, “Militärunternehmer”; André Holenstein, “Die militärische Arbeitsmigration ab dem 15. Jahrhundert,” in André Holenstein, Patrick Kury, and Kristina Schulz, Schweizer Migrationsgeschichte: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Baden, 2018), pp. 47–49; Philippe Rogger, Geld, Krieg und Macht: Pensionsherren, Söldner und eidgenössische Politik in den Mailänderkriegen 1494–1516 (Baden, 2015).
Mary E. Alies, Military Migration and State Formation: The British Military Community in Seventeenth-Century Sweden (Lincoln, Nebraska, 2002).
Rudolf Braun, “Staying on Top: Socio-Cultural Reproduction of European Power Elites,” in Power Elites and State-Building, ed. Wolfgang Reinhard (Oxford, 1996), 235–260.
Nathalie Büsser, “Die ‘Frau Hauptmannin’ als Schaltstelle für Rekrutenwerbungen, Geldtransfer und Informationsaustausch: Geschäftliche Tätigkeiten von weiblichen Angehörigen der Zuger Zurlauben im familieneigenen Solddienstunternehmen um 1700,” in Dienstleistungen, Expansion und Transformation des ‘dritten Sektors’ (15.–20. Jahrhundert), eds. Hans-Jörg Gilomen, Margrit Müller, and Laurent Tissot (Zurich, 2007), 143–153; Jasmina Cornut, Femmes d’officiers militaires en Suisse romande: Implications, enjeux et stratégies de l’absence, XVIIe–XIXe siècles (unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of Lausanne, 2023).
I am grateful to Drew Keeling for commenting on the draft of this paper and adding his considerable linguistic support, and to Philippe Rogger and André Holenstein for many most instructive and fascinating discussions.