Rider boy

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Rider boys , even Ross Jacks or Rider boys were child soldiers that the mercenary armies , mainly in the 17th century Thirty Years' War , belonged. They were the - better than the mercenaries riders as - provided Albatross boys assigned.

The war-related consequences of poverty and lack of prospects, the annihilation of the family or entire village communities during the Thirty Years' War and the war situation into which they were already born, prompted boys to take refuge in the supposed protection of the mercenaries. Their rider, to whom they were personally assigned, provided food and a certain amount of security, on the other hand they had to accompany him on the campaigns and provide for them "around the clock".

Horsemen were of essential importance for the function of the mercenary armies of the 17th century. The boys cleaned the weapons, tended the horses, and tended the cuirass . In addition, they rode the reserve horse and made various kinds of handouts for the supply and preparation of food and accommodation. One of the main tasks was searching the battlefields for valuables, looting, and plummeting corpses for their master after the fight.

In the novels Der Abentheuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen and Die Ahnen (Volume 5: Die Geschwister ) by Gustav Freytag , the life of the rider boys of the Thirty Years' War is vividly depicted.

The number of child soldiers in the mercenaries of the Thirty Years' War can hardly be quantified, but it is likely to have been considerable. Each mounted mercenary usually had one or more boys as assistants. In individual cases, figures have been handed down that make it possible to estimate the proportion approximately. In December 1630, the city of Langenau hosted a mercenary army with 368 riders, including 307 rider boys.

Normally - and if he survived - the status of the rider boy passed seamlessly into that of the mercenary at around the age of 16.

In public the rider boys were perceived as accomplices of the murdering and plundering mercenaries, as marauders and as rascals . After the Peace of Westphalia it was problematic to integrate orphaned children, accustomed to the unrestrained mercenary life, into the village and urban communities. Many are likely to have committed crimes and ended up on the gallows , others probably found a task in the Turkish wars that followed.

In addition to the rider boys, there were other child soldiers, for example the drummer boys, who marched into the mercenary heap and beat the signal drum, the cabin boys on the warships of the 17th and 18th centuries and the so-called "powder monkeys" , who carried the powder bags to the ship's guns.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Daniel Putzger: Children as Actors in Armed Conflicts , GRIN-Verlag Norderstedt 2005, ISBN 978-3640293117 , pp. 37-39
  2. Gerd Zillhardt: The Thirty Years War in a contemporary representation , Kohlhammer Stuttgart 1975, p. 201
  3. Friedrich Fiederlein: child soldiers in Africa. In: Schule & Mission, Heft 1, 2003, p. 10 ( PDF  ( page no longer available , search in web archivesInfo: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. )@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.sternsinger.org