The Mansfeld Regiment’s social organization and material contexts shaped the way it was formed, the path it took from Dresden to Lombardy, and the way it disintegrated. The concepts of the military revolution and the fiscal-military state are still relevant. But developing fiscal-military infrastructure was weak, which laid the groundwork for the Mansfeld Regiment’s loss of funding and failure. In this regiment’s daily operations I did not see the changes in social discipline that were supposedly intertwined with the military revolution. What I have found about the Mansfeld Regiment and the Saxon army may serve as a basis for re-examining some historical assumptions about early seventeenth-century armies. Daily interactions within this pathetic regiment are also an important source for the historical social anthropology of early-modern Europe, shedding light on masculinity, violence, identity formation, and marginalization.

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understudied political entity of Electoral Saxony, once the most important Protestant German state and a rich source of unpublished archival records, including the legal books of a single regiment.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.