Soldier trade

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Brunswick troops in British pay in the American War of Independence

The soldier trade was the leasing of military contingents to foreign states.

Procedure

Above all, princes of the former small states of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation operated the soldier trade. Partly to meet alliance obligations, partly to generate income. For this purpose, soldiers were originally recruited, trained and equipped and the military units formed from them were rented out to friendly powers. In the later 18th century conscripts were also used in addition to the recruited soldiers . This method achieved high profits. One of the largest "military entrepreneurs" of this kind was the Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel . Whose relatives the soldier landgrave Ludwig IX. von Hessen-Darmstadt , on the other hand, did not participate in the soldier trade at all.

history

The soldier trade was started by Christoph Bernhard von Galen , Bishop of Münster, in 1665; he was followed by Johann Georg III. von Sachsen , who in 1685 rented 3,000 men to Venice for 120,000 thalers for war in the Greek Peloponnese . Landgrave Karl von Hessen-Kassel followed this example in 1687, who established the tradition of his house for business of this kind.

The largest scale took the soldiers' trade during the Revolutionary War to: about 30,000 were added in Germany (especially from Hesse-Kassel, Nassau , Waldeck , Ansbach - Bayreuth , Braunschweig and Anhalt-Zerbst ) for the UK found that for the prince of this States paid about £ 8 million . A larger contingent of these comes from the soldier trade under Landgrave Friedrich II of Hessen-Kassel . During the War of the Austrian Succession, Landgrave Wilhelm VIII of Hesse hired troops to both England and Emperor Karl VII , i.e. to both opponents of the war. He hired out nearly 17,000 soldiers for £ 1.254 million. The leased soldiers were often deployed in unfamiliar geographical and climatic conditions.

rating

English caricature of a Hessian grenadier

The soldier trade was a generally accepted practice until the 18th century. But then he met with opposition in the Enlightenment ; u. a. Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart addressed it in his magazine Teutsche Chronik (from 1774) and Friedrich Schiller in his drama Kabale und Liebe (1784). The writer Johann Gottfried Seume described his experiences as a victim in the autobiography Mein Leben , published in 1813 . The phenomenon was received in Germany in the 19th century as a failure of the small states and an argument for national unity, for example by Friedrich Kapp , in Great Britain, on the other hand, the uncivilized foreigner, the "foreign" to be rejected, was the focus of discussion.

See also

literature

in alphabetical order by authors / editors

  • Christine Braun: The emergence of the myth of the soldier trade 1776–1813 = sources and research on Hessian history 178. Self-published by the Hessian Historical Commission and the Historical Commission for Hesse , Darmstadt and Marburg 2018. ISBN 978-3-88443-333-1
  • Rainer Christoph Friedrich of Hesse : Hereditary Prince Wilhelm (as Elector Wilhelm I) of Hesse-Kassel (1743–1821) and the soldiers' trade in the county of Hanau . In: Fürstenhof and scholarly republic. Hessian résumés of the 18th century. Hessian State Center for Political Education, Referat VI, Wiesbaden 1997, pp. 42–52 ( Small writings on Hessian regional studies 5, ZDB -ID 2290647-2 ).
  • Max Jähns : Army Constitutions and Lives of Nations. A look around. General publishing house for German literature, Berlin 1885.
  • Philipp Losch: Soldiers trade. With a directory of the Hessen-Kasselian subsidy contracts and a bibliography. Bärenreiter-Verlag, Kassel 1933 (photomechanical reprint. Hamecher, Kassel 1974, ISBN 3-920307-19-4 ).
  • Hans Philippi : The Landgraviate of Hessen-Kassel 1648–1806. H. Philippi on his 80th birthday, Elwert, Marburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-7708-1303-2 ( publications of the Historical Commission for Hesse: Kleine Schriften 46, 8). ISBN 9783770813032
  • JR: About soldiers. Lecture given to the officer corps on March 18, 1881. Mittler, Berlin 1884 ( Militair-Wochenblatt . 8th supplement, ZDB -ID 207819-3 ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wilhelm Oncken : The Age of Frederick the Great - With portraits, illustrations and maps . tape 2 . Baumgärtel , Berlin 1882, OCLC 463170868 , Tenth book of the twilight years of Frederick the Great. The inheritance comparison of 1770. Wilhelmsstein and Pirmasens , p. 708 .
  2. ^ Philippi, p. 21.
  3. ^ Philippi, p. 79.
  4. ↑ Braun, p. 9ff.
  5. ^ Friedrich Kapp: The soldier trade of German princes to America . 1st edition: Berlin 1864 ; 2nd edition 1874.
  6. ↑ Braun, p. 104ff.