Introduction

Summary

The concepts of the fiscal-military state, the military revolution, and increasing control over the ordinary soldier have been intertwined in European historiography. But the assumption that the growth and development of military finance was accompanied by increasing discipline within military units has not yet been seriously tested for the early seventeenth century. The War People is a historical social anthropology of ordinary central European soldiers during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) which interrogates this assumption. It focuses on the understudied political entity of Electoral Saxony, once the most important Protestant German state and a rich source of unpublished archival records, including the legal books of a single regiment. These rich archival sources are the basis not only for statistical inquiry but for a deep microhistorical study of ordinary soldiers as human beings.