HOW MILITARY justice functioned is central to our understanding of the relationship between civilians and warfare, since – at least in theory – an army's judicial apparatus is not only concerned with prosecutions for violations of military discipline but also with the protection of the civilian population from assaults by soldiers and any infringements of the laws of war. This is particularly true of the period spanning the second half of the seventeenth century until the death of Louis XIV, the ‘roi de guerre’, in 1715, when the nature of warfare in its turn dictated the nature of military–civilian relations. Rather than being directly involved in hostilities such as battles and sieges, civilians in early modern Europe were most frequently affected by war as the result of military logistics, army provisioning and associated consequences such as contributions and billeting. These encounters were particularly detrimental to the civilian population not only because of the financial and material burdens that they imposed, such as the demands for quarters, food and fodder, but also because they often went hand in hand with robbery and plunder or, even worse, personal assault and violence. As a consequence, military discipline and its maintenance were questions of crucial importance to the civilian population.

Whereas the protection of civilians in war had been guaranteed by Christian natural law since the late middle ages, its effectiveness depended on the existence of a working military justice system, which did not emerge until the early modern period. In this context, the ‘long’ seventeenth century – marked by a number of geographically extensive and long-lasting conflicts such as the Thirty Years War, the wars of Louis XIV or the Northern Wars from 1654 onwards – is of special interest for at least two reasons. First, the burden on the civilian population increased significantly as the growth in number and size of armies and tactical units intensified their supply problem, a situation that was only resolved in part during the late eighteenth century. Secondly, a significant increase in the constraints of warfare as well as in the institutions of military justice and police can be observed for nearly all European armies and warring powers from the second half of the Thirty Years War.