The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order Read Online Free PDF Page B

called
condottieri
—literally, “contractors”—who agreed to perform security services described in written contracts, or
condotte
. Both modern and medieval contractors were organized as legal corporations, selling their services to the highest or most powerful bidder for profit. Both filled their ranks with professional men of arms drawn from different countries and loyal primarily to the paycheck. Both have functioned as private armies, usually offering land-based combat skills rather than naval (or aerial) capabilities and deploying force in a military manner rather than as law enforcement or police.
    Both historical and contemporary PMCs have been international in composition. Although the mercenary companies in the high Middle Ages fought mostly in northern Italy, their ranks swelled with men from every corner of Europe and even Muslim Saracens from the Levant. Private armies today also gravitate to where the fighting is, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, yet they employ personnel and subcontractors from all over the world. Differences also exist, as ancient firms were private armies akin to Executive Outcomes rather than today’s weaker PMCs, but suffice it to say that today’s firms share DNA with their ancestors.
Private Military History
    Mercenaries fight primarily for profit rather than politics, and the job is as old as war itself, often referred to as the second-oldest profession. The word
mercenary
comes from the Latin
merces
(“wages” or “pay”); today it connotes vileness, treachery, and murder. But it was not always so. Being a mercenary was once considered an honest albeit bloody trade, and employing mercenaries to fight wars was routine throughout most of military history: King Shulgi of Ur’s army (2094–2047 BC); Xenophon’s army of Greek mercenaries known as the Ten Thousand (401–399 BC); and Carthage’s mercenary armies in the Punic Warsagainst Rome (264–146 BC), including Hannibal’s sixty-thousand-strong army, which marched elephants over the Alps to attack Rome from the north. When Alexander invaded Asia in 334 BC, his army included five thousand foreign mercenaries, and the Persian army that faced him contained ten thousand Greeks. In fact, Greek mercenaries were core to his military campaign, on all sides of the conflict.
    Rome relied on mercenaries throughout its thousand-year reign, and Julius Caesar was repeatedly saved, even at Alesia, by mounted German mercenaries in his war against Vercingetorix in Gaul. Nearly half of William the Conqueror’s army in the eleventh century were mercenaries, as he could not afford a large standing army, and there were not enough nobles and knights to accomplish the Norman conquest of England. In Egypt and Syria, the Mamluk sultanate (1250–1517) was a regime of mercenary slaves who had been converted to Islam. From the late tenth to the early fifteenth centuries, Byzantine emperors surrounded themselves with Norse mercenaries, the Varangian Guard, who were known for their fierce loyalty, prowess with the battle ax, and ability to swill copious amounts of alcohol. In Europe, the
condottieri
, Swiss companies,
landsknechts
, Bretons, Gascons, Picards, and other mercenaries dominated warfare from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The list is long. For at least three thousand years, private military force has been a feature—often the major feature—of warfare.
    Independent mercenaries foster a different kind of armed conflict: contract warfare. Contract warfare is literally a free market for force, where private armies and clients seek each other out, negotiate prices, and wage wars for personal gain. There were problems with this way of war, especially in the European Middle Ages, when bands of brigands sold their services to the highest bidder during wartime and became marauders in times of peace, raiding and ravaging the countryside. In extreme cases, such as medieval Italy, this attracted more fortune-seeking mercenaries,