Maestre de campo

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Maestre de campo , also maese de campo , maesse de campo or maestro de campo (German: field master ), was a military rank among the foot troops of the Spanish army , which was given by King Charles I in 1536 along with the introduction of the tercio as the basic tactical Organizational and combat unit of the infantry was created.

He is the commander of a Tercios , a field army of approx. 3000 men and divided into eight to twelve companies , which in the beginning could be used as an independent army. The field master, who is often compared to a field captain or colonel , must be viewed as the rank of general in today's terms ; He was directly subordinate to the captain general ( capitán general ), that was usually the king himself or his chief military officer, and stood above the sergeant-major ( sargento mayor ), who acted as his deputy and command officer and with whom he jointly led the association.

Field masters were appointed directly by the monarch in the Spanish Privy Council ( Consejo de Estado ). They were entitled to a bodyguard made up of eight German halberd-bearers , paid by the king , who accompanied them every step of the way. Their powers and powers, which also included the exercise of military and civil jurisdiction , the requisitioning of supplies and billeting of troops and the founding of cities in the name of the king, corresponded roughly to those of the late medieval marshal ( mariscal ) in the Kingdom of Castile . In the overseas colonies , the governors or viceroys who carried the rank of captain general in military terms each appointed their own maese de campo .

Under the authority of a maestre de campo several Tercios , he was already called maestre de campo general ("general field master ") in the 16th century , from which the name general arose. Juan de Herrera , the tutor to Prince Don Carlos , was the first to mention this distinction and got to know it in Flanders as early as the 1550s . In any case, in this second, superordinate function, he practically equates the authority of the maestre de campo with that of a capitán general . John Stevens († 1726) compares the simple maestre de campo of his time with an English colonel (head of the regiment ); the maestre de campo general , who according to his Herrera-based view corresponded to the original maestre de campo , with a lieutenant general or major general .

The commanding officer and assistant to the general field master was the general field sergeant ( sargento general ); in addition, at the turn of the 17th century, staff officers ( oficiales mayores ) were more and more released from their duties as troop commanders and appointed deputies ("lieutenants") of the general field master ( teniente de maestre de campo general ), since the duties of the military leader were carried out by one person could not be mastered alone. These officers formed a general staff that advised and supported the commanding general, so that the war council of higher troop officers that had been customary up to that time became less important for the leadership of the army. In this way the gap widened between the new officer class of the "generals" including their lieutenants general on the one hand and the ordinary troop commanders who, as maestre de campo de tercio, together with the sargento mayor , commanded a Tercio field heap.

With the colonel or coronel ( colonel ) of the infantry regiments , which were often deployed in the European theaters of war in parallel with the Tercio , or with his deputy, the "lieutenant colonel" or teniente coronel ( lieutenant colonel ), the tasks of the simple maestre were de campo and his sargento mayor ( major ) towards the end of the 17th century are in principle easily comparable. In terms of social prestige and the position of the maestre de campo in the military hierarchy, there was a clear gap between them and the colonels of the infantry regiments towards the end of the Eighty Years' War and in the following decades.

literature

  • Fernando González de León: The road to Rocroi: class, culture and command in the Spanish Army of Flanders, 1567-1659. Brill, Leiden 2009, ISBN 9-0041-7082-0 , pp. 17-23 in the Google book search.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Miguel Martínez: Front Lines. Soldiers' Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2016, ISBN 978-0812248425 , p. 45.
  2. ^ Miguel Martínez: Front Lines. Soldiers' Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World. Philadelphia 2016, p. 85.
  3. ^ John Stevens : A New Dictionary Spanish and English and English and Spanish. London 1726, Sp. MAG .
  4. ↑ Bernd Warlich: Piccolomini, Silvio, Count d'Aragona. In: The Thirty Years' War in personal testimonies, chronicles and reports. Online publication October 16, 2015, accessed June 11, 2017.
  5. ↑ Fernando González de León: The road to Rocroi: class, culture and command in the Spanish Army of Flanders, 1567-1659. Brill, Leiden 2009, p. 22.