5 - Foreign Mercenaries in the Service of the King of France

Summary

The need for foreign troops

When Coligny drew up his infantry regulations in 1550, he prescribed severe punishment for a quarreller in the ranks who ‘gave the cry of a nation.’ The French army of the 16th century was obviously a multi-ethnic one. Why? As we have seen, Christine de Pisan recommended that, if the French King lacked men, he should recruit ‘foreign soldiers.’ On the other side, we can recall the observations of Machiavelli, Seyssel and Suriano. Thomas More saw France as overrun by mercenaries, even in peacetime, because of the decision to have an army of veterans, though he thought native French levies a match for them if properly trained. Du Bellay observed, on Bicocca, that the Swiss had to be appeased and that ‘you can thus see the problem of having the bulk of an army made up of foreigners.’ Soldiers were thought to exemplify national characteristics. For du Bellay, ‘the Spaniard fears death more than any other nation’ because he goes to war for gain and if he sees no gain he will not risk his life. The French were furious in attack but easily bored by long campaigns and wearied by long sieges. It was customary to echo Livy's formula that the Gauls were more than men at the start of battle and less than women at the end. On the other hand, du Bellay thought French infantry had more stamina for marching than the Germans – ‘better legs than the lansquenets’.

It has been argued that French troops gradually came to outnumber foreigners in the armies of Francis I and Henri II whereas the latter had predominated in the Italian wars. This stretches the case. The figures for the army commanded by Montmorency in Piedmont in 1537 show that the infantry were mainly Germans, three groups of whom amounted to 14,500 men in November. Added to them were 6597 Italians and 9263 French and Gascons.10 Besides the poor conventional reputation of some French troops and the need for battle-hardened professionals, one problem may have been mobility. French infantry companies normally did not move far from their home base. For flexibility the crown relied, down to the 1550s, on foreign troops. When the French commander in Piedmont was faced by a serious imperial counter-attack in 1537, it was natural to call on a strong force of Swiss or German infantry to remain ‘master of the country.’