But who were these soldiers and how they recruited? Apart from the Swedish and Finnish soldiers of Gustavus Adolphus’s army in the Thirty Years War who were mainly recruited through a form of conscription, most of the men at war in our period were volunteers, raised internally by government-appointed captains, or recruited externally by military entrepreneurs. The latter was by far the most popular option because most governments in this period did not possess a sufficient bureaucracy or adequate finances to be able to raise an army on their own. Armies raised this way became quasi-private institutions which often depended on a far greater extent on the contractor who raised and paid them, than the prince they fought for. This system reached it apogee during the Thirty Years War and undoubtedly found its most prominent exponent in the bohemian nobleman and Imperial commander, Albrecht von Wallenstein, who twice raised and financed armes for Emperor Ferdinand II, in 1625-30 and again in 1632-4, until finally murdered by his distrustful employer. Vast amounts of venture capital were deployed by networks of financiers, often through a complex web of subcontracting, in order to raise and equip such large forces.. . . Page 102
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Dinesh said: