• DOI:10.1017/S0008938900012711
• Corpus ID: 144482963

The Thirty Years' War, the “General Crisis,” and the Origins of a Standing Professional Army in the Habsburg Monarchy

@article{Mears1988TheTY,
  title={The Thirty Years' War, the “General Crisis,” and the Origins of a Standing Professional Army in the Habsburg Monarchy},
  author={John A. Mears},
  journal={Central European History},
  year={1988},
  volume={21},
  pages={122 - 141}
}

• John A. Mears
• Published 1 June 1988
• History
• Central European History

One of the most striking features of seventeenth-century state building was the formation of standing armies. Kings and princes throughout Europe, responding to conditions of almost constant strife, were compelled to transform ineffective feudal levies and unruly bands of mercenaries into regularized bodies of professional troops, making ever larger and more costly military establishments instruments of rational foreign policy rather than the preserves of the old nobility or freebooting condottieri. In building armies of the new type, European monarchs had to surmount determined opposition from two sources: the local representative bodies (estates) which were reluctant to grant rulers the powers of taxation necessary for the maintenance of permanent troops, and the mercenary colonels who were expected to relinquish their rights as independent recruiting masters and subordinate themselves to the state. By the middle decades of the seventeenth century, various territorial sovereigns were successfully mastering this opposition to their political authority and were able to take an essential step in the direction of true standing armies by routinely keeping strong military forces under their command at the conclusion of a campaign, thereby diminishing their reliance on contingents approved by the provincial estates or soldiers hastily raised by private entrepreneurs to meet specific emergencies.