Months later, after he stabbed his wife twelve times but before the Mansfeld Regiment mutinied and disbanded itself, Theodoro de Camargo told the enigmatic regimental bailiff Mattheus Steiner he had never wanted to go to Lombardy in the first place.

Theodoro de Camargo was a nobleman from Brabant, and the lieutenant colonel of the Mansfeld infantry.Footnote ¹ He had been an officer for a long time. Four years previously at the Battle of Neuhäusel, the Count of Buquoy, commanding the Imperial army, took two lance blows and died in Camargo’s arms.Footnote ² Camargo was with the Spanish at the siege of Breda and after the city fell in summer 1625, the Governor of the Spanish Netherlands entrusted him to take the news to the Emperor.Footnote ³ It was to repeat this success, according to a chronicler in Alessandria, that the Imperialist-Spanish campaign into northern Italy was launched.Footnote ⁴ When Camargo arrived in Vienna, Wolf von Mansfeld was canvassing a regiment for this campaign and wanted him to take command of the foot. Camargo answered that he was already serving Infanta Isabella and could not accept another office, but after Ferdinand II wrote to Brussels the Infanta released him from her service and Ferdinand ordered him to take command of Mansfeld’s infantry. Camargo had no further excuse and joined the regiment in late 1625. His wife, Victoria Guarde, followed: By now, she was openly cuckolding him.Footnote ⁵ He killed her less than six months later.

Officers who served the Spanish Habsburgs commonly moved into the service of the Imperial Habsburgs and vice versa.Footnote ⁶ Theodoro de Camargo was a subject of the King of Spain and Infanta Isabella who went to Lombardy in the King of Spain’s service because the Emperor requested it. His colonel, Wolf von Mansfeld, was the feudal subject of the Elector of Saxony and an Imperial civil servant, and his regiment, raised in Saxony, was going to war for the King of Spain.

For years the Spanish Monarchy and its allies had been fighting France and its allies over northern Italy. The little war that preceded this one had been over control of the Valtelline. This was the shortest and most comfortable route between Tyrol, which belonged to the Archduke of Further Austria, and Milan, second only to Flanders in the system of the Spanish Monarchy in Europe: An exposed synapse between two Habsburg territories north to south. It was an important node on the braid of routes by which Spain sent money, supplies, and troops back and forth between the Netherlands and Milan. East to west the Valtelline was also a trade route between the Kingdom of France and its ally the Republic of Venice, and it abutted land belonging to Venice for thirty miles.Footnote ⁷ The Valtelline had been a focus of French and Spanish foreign policy for decades. For Spain it was the “gate and outer wall of Milan,” the doorway to the Alps, and it was controlled largely by heretics.Footnote ⁸

But not entirely. The Valtelline had been controlled by the Three Leagues or Bünde, three Swiss associations called the League of God’s House, the League of the Ten Jurisdictions, and the Gray League, or Grisons. Spain and France had been cultivating different factions in this federation since the late sixteenth century. Sometimes the pro-Habsburg Catholic faction predominated in local politics, sometimes the anti-Habsburg Calvinist faction. Whoever was on top established rigged courts to punish prominent members of the other side.Footnote ⁹ In 1618, radical young Protestant clerics in the anti-Habsburg faction set up a court in Thusis to purge the region of Habsburg hegemony and Catholics. Some of the Catholic notables in the region, in contact with Milan and Rome, conspired against them and, on the night of July 18, 1620, armed Catholics marched down the valley, killing every Protestant they found. The governor of Milan sent troops to seal off the valley and the killings lasted for fifteen days. Habsburg troops garrisoned the valley, which was lost to the Three Leagues.Footnote ¹⁰

During his lifetime, Henri IV had secured the Valtelline passes for French use; that access cut off, his successor Louis XIII pursued a diplomatic approach at first. In 1621, the French diplomat François de Bassompierre went to Madrid to negotiate, but, although the Spanish government agreed in the ensuing Treaty of Madrid to recognize the sovereignty of the Three Leagues over the Valtelline, it used the treaty’s guarantee of free worship for Catholics as an excuse to keep troops in the area. Louis threatened military intervention in 1622; in response, papal troops were brought in, supposedly to protect the religion of local Catholics, and Spanish troops continued to use the passes with impunity.Footnote ¹¹ On February 7, 1623, France, Venice, and the Duke of Savoy formed an alliance to put the Three Leagues back in control. Richelieu became Louis XIII’s chief minister in April 1624. That summer he began preparations for a military expedition into the region.Footnote ¹²

This expedition, under François-Hannibal d’Estrées, Marquis de Coeuvres, has been overshadowed by the later French incursion under Henri de Rohan in 1635. But these armies were not inconsiderable. De Coeuvres had more than seven regiments under him: One of Three Leaguers recruited secretly in Zürich, two Three Leagues regiments recruited in their own dominions, three Swiss regiments, one French regiment of infantry, and ten companies of French cavalry.Footnote ¹³ Venice sent a battery of guns all the way from the arsenal in Brescia.Footnote ¹⁴ On the Spanish side, Milan was the center of Spanish power in Italy, and the nexus and training ground of Spain’s army in the region. The small Mansfeld Regiment was added to a total military force numbering six or seven tercios, more than 20,000 men.Footnote ¹⁵ This force embarked on October 26. The roads were iced over by November, but this force managed to liberate the Valtelline by mid-December and drive the papal troops out of their fortresses.Footnote ¹⁶

The Duke of Feria, Governor of the Duchy of Milan, said “the water was up to his neck.” He withdrew units from Sardinia and Naples, took out a loan from Genoa, and raised troops with the Emperor’s help. A captain’s patent for this endeavor survives from December 6, 1624.Footnote ¹⁷ One of the Imperial colonels raising and leading troops for the Spanish army was the Count of Pappenheim, looking for an opportunity to take Spanish service.Footnote ¹⁸ He may have already had a reputation in Italy. Peter Hagendorf mentioned him while he was fighting for Venice in 1625: “in the Valtelline, there the King in Spain was our enemy, how now count Pappenheim arrived, he powerfully harried us with fieldpieces and drove us out of the Valtelline from our positions, so we had to give way all the way to Turin …”Footnote ¹⁹

In March 1625, French and Savoyard forces struck Spain’s client state Genoa as part of a coordinated action which was also supposed to include contingents from England and the United Netherlands. In response, Spain brought troops north from Naples and mobilized its allies. Both Parma and Modena sent troops to Lombardy; the ships carrying the Neapolitan reinforcements were Tuscan.Footnote ²⁰ Imperial German reinforcements arrived that summer.

Wolfgang, Count of Mansfeld (1575–1638), was one of the Imperial colonels who raised troops for the defense of Milan.Footnote ²¹ Mansfeld was a member of a large and powerful family with ties to both Electoral Saxony and the Imperial administration. The dynasty hailed from Eisleben, birthplace of Martin Luther – to be precise, the fortress of Mansfeld, perched above the little city Tal Mansfeld, five and a half miles from Eisleben.Footnote ²² Called “one of the most important, if now forgotten, commanders of the middle stage of the war” by Peter Wilson, Mansfeld was an Imperial Privy Councilor and a member of the Imperial Chamber.Footnote ²³ Two of his four brothers were also Imperial officers: His younger brother Bruno von Mansfeld was the Imperial master of the hunt, an influential position in the court of an Emperor who hunted as much as Ferdinand II. Ferdinand died in Bruno’s arms.Footnote ²⁴ Bruno and the rest of Wolf’s brothers converted to Catholicism by the turn of the century. Wolfgang himself was a Catholic sympathizer by the time his regiment went to Italy, and he converted a few years later.

Multiple and possibly conflicting loyalties like these were not unusual for Saxons. Saxony was the most powerful Protestant state in the Empire. It repeatedly acted as a broker in negotiations or attempted negotiations, a center of gravity for smaller moderate Protestant political entities. Elector Johann Georg I’s policies can appear enigmatic or indecisive. Although Wedgwood is broadly sympathetic to him, he did not come off well in nineteenth-century historiography.Footnote ²⁵ But this deeply conservative man pursued a consistent policy from his point of view, attempting to uphold the constitution of the Empire as he saw it. On the other hand, some of his nobles did not agree with his decision to go to war against the rebellious Bohemian Estates, “their dear neighbours, their friends through blood and other ties, and also their co-religionists.”Footnote ²⁶

The Elector of Saxony’s irenic viewpoint explains why early seventeenth-century Electoral policy – and the actions of some Saxons, like Mansfeld and some of his officers – was not only pro-Imperial but also pro-Habsburg and pro-Spain. Saxony had been the birthplace of the Lutheran Reformation and most of the Electors, until Augustus the Strong, were devoutly Lutheran. But to contemporaries, including many Saxons, early seventeenth-century Electoral Saxon policy sometimes ended up looking more “Catholic” than “Protestant” because of its support for both sections of the Habsburg dynasty.Footnote ²⁷ Despite the feelings of some of their nobles, Saxon Electors maintained a good relationship with Spain from 1575. This served the interests of both Saxony and Spain since Spanish foreign policy during the reign of Philip II sought to maintain the balance of power within the Empire. The King of Spain pursued relationships with several important Protestant powers if they were not Calvinist, like Saxony or Brandenburg. Philip II thought Saxony would be able to foster peace within the Empire and hoped that Elector August of Saxony (1526–1586) would influence the Palatinate. August did not support the Dutch against the Monarchy of Spain, even though one of his daughters married William the Silent in 1561. Regular written exchanges between August and Philip II began after April 1576, when Emperor Maximilian II visited Dresden.Footnote ²⁸

Caught between conflicting obligations, Saxony pulled hard for peace at the start of the Thirty Years War but failed; the Electorate entered the war on the Emperor’s side, despite a lack of enthusiasm on the part of his more Bohemian-oriented nobles. During the 1620s the Imperialist coalition including Saxony won a series of victories. Wolf von Mansfeld commanded the Saxon army in successful campaigns in Upper and Lower Lusatia, conquering them from the Bohemian Estates.

The last Saxon troops were demobilized in March 1625 and the Electorate did not raise another army until early 1631, several months before it re-entered the war, this time against the Emperor.Footnote ²⁹ This changing alignment was informed by Johann Georg I’s distrust of both Catholic absolutism and the threat Calvinism posed to the Imperial constitution: Saxony’s 1631–1634 alliance with Sweden was an aberration in an otherwise pro-Imperial foreign policy. In early to mid-1625 Saxony was not at war, and Saxons who were familiar with fighting would have been available for this expedition to Italy. So was Mansfeld himself, the Elector’s former lieutenant general.

According to Wolf von Mansfeld, the Duke of Feria promised him his regiment would only be in Lombardy for a short time. It came in as a reinforcement “to refresh [rafrescar] the others.”Footnote ³⁰ One Italian chronicler believed that, had the Mansfelders not arrived to cover the Spanish retreat, they would not have been able to withdraw from the siege of Verrua without risking the artillery and losing many men.Footnote ³¹

Although they were not yet legally a regiment, since they had not sworn their sacred oaths to their flags, their officers, and the King of Spain, the Mansfelders began to travel in late May 1625.Footnote ³² The infantry looped southwest from Dresden around the mountains separating Bohemia from southern Germany, then south. On June 26, Mansfeld wrote the Bishop of Bamberg from Dresden requesting passage. “About Yr. Gr.’s land, part of my officers of horse as well as of foot must stir themselves to march in it” he said obsequiously,

The Bishop of Bamberg forwarded a copy to the Bishop of Würzburg on July 8 and gave the regiment a pass since Mansfeld was upholding the constitution of the Reich.Footnote ³⁴

By mid-July many Mansfeld infantry were south of Bamberg and Würzburg. Amid local stories like the birth of a large baby the size of a two-month-old child, one Nuremberg chronicle noted that 2,500 infantry and a portion of the cavalry “under the Colonel Count Wolffen von Mansfellt” came through the city in little groups from July 14 to 19, bound for Günzburg, between Augsburg and Ulm. One hundred and fifty horses and 150 foot soldiers came by a day later on July 20, and 300 more horses on the 29th. This chronicler knew this regiment was intended to “form a force of 3,000 on foot, and 1,000 horse, for the Estado de Milan.”Footnote ³⁵ Unlike the bishops of Bamberg and Würzburg, the city of Nuremburg did not want Mansfeld’s “Undisciplinirt[es] Volck” anywhere near them.Footnote ³⁶ They eventually decided to give the cavalry bread and beer, but no money.Footnote ³⁷

On July 19, Leopold, Archduke of Further Austria, reported he had heard from the Mansfeld Regiment’s quartermaster Wolf Winckelmann that 800 men had arrived near Lindau.Footnote ³⁸ By August 1625 both infantry and cavalry were in towns near Ulm.Footnote ³⁹ Late that month, some of the infantry were near Lake Constance: The deserters Phillip Appelt and Jacob Bötger thought they could make it there from the tiny nearby town of Taubenhof.Footnote ⁴⁰

The infantry and cavalry traveled in small groups, and dispersed into small towns by company or smaller units.Footnote ⁴¹ Even the best roads were little more than dirt tracks and would be ruined by a big convoy, nor could the soldiers support themselves off the land in their full numbers.Footnote ⁴² Towns along the way were usually too small to house more than a little contingent of soldiers.Footnote ⁴³ Mansfelders were strung out in dribs and drabs along the roads between southern Germany and northern Italy for months that summer truppenweise, “in troops.” Individuals would have traveled between these little groups constantly: Deserters, whores, children, officers carrying information back and forth, soldiers visiting friends in other companies, running errands for themselves or their superiors. The frequent passage of units like the Mansfelders along the military roads between northern Italy and southern Germany devastated local communities, and country priests moved services from one chapel to another because the transit of soldiers desecrated them.Footnote ⁴⁴

Letters about quartering circulated. Conflicts between mercenaries and non-soldiers sharing a small dwelling against their will were inevitable, but Mansfeld’s soldiers were not given enough money to cover their expenses. They extorted supplies from their hosts.Footnote ⁴⁵ “When I arrived today in this city I understood with the greatest displeasure and perturbation of spirit the coldness with which my cavalry was received in their bands, wanting (after having shared much work, and employed great expense) (done more than obligation carried) to maintain them in the quarters on four batzen a day,” Mansfeld wrote the Duke of Feria on September 17.Footnote ⁴⁶

Research has been done on local support for military transit and quartering in Spanish Lombardy. The egualanza generale, instituted in 1590, guaranteed a system in which Milanese provinces all contributed to the same extent to maintain troops; areas where soldiers were quartered were reimbursed.Footnote ⁴⁷ Confraternities and charitable organizations were founded and provided with tax-exempt capital, which offered liquidity to occupied communities.Footnote ⁴⁸ Villages also formed corporations to provide specialized military housing and equipment like bedding.Footnote ⁴⁹ Although Spanish military officials oversaw and directed this process, these communities managed supplies and lodging themselves.Footnote ⁵⁰

Venetian territories were like Spanish Lombardy in social and institutional structures.Footnote ⁵¹ As in Lombardy, armies in the Terraferma were housed through public–private action, which Giulio Ongaro has analyzed in detail. Under the state’s aegis, communities sold hay to soldiers, or rented housing, bedding, and pallets to them. Military commissions were also important to the local labor market: Locals worked as drivers or gunsmiths, or on military construction projects. Effects were specific. In the small Piedmontese village of Pancalieri, requests from armies had a negative effect on agriculture for personal consumption but incentivized production for the military market.Footnote ⁵² Similarly, quartering in the Veneto resulted in burdens for some and advantages for others, like non-soldiers who were already locally important or members of families that were. Cooperation with military demands kept money within communities in the provinces Ongaro studied, and redistributed assets within those communities, but most of the profit was concentrated in the hands of a few families, who invested what they made.Footnote ⁵³

Military developments in Spanish Lombardy took place within a Eurasia-wide growth, development, and complication of human networks. Administrations knitted themselves together through cooperation with local elites: Similar public–private interaction happened in Spanish Lombardy, Venice, Piedmont, France, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. Traditional means of obtaining military resources remained, but changed; for instance, many contributions changed from in-kind to cash.Footnote ⁵⁴ Government interventions increased. In general, early modern political entities “developed an increasingly greater capability of imposition of burdens and of supervision of the functioning of fiscal and military structures, while the day-to-day practicalities of management remained unseen by the eyes of the state” and handled by private agents.Footnote ⁵⁵

But actions and interactions like the ones that supplied, fed, and housed the Mansfeld Regiment were also regionally specific, even individually specific.Footnote ⁵⁶ Although the documents created by Mansfelders themselves give the impression almost of a regiment in a bubble, Italian sources reveal that Wolf von Mansfeld and his officers were in regular contact not only with the world around them, but with their superiors in Milan and local officials like Camillo Capoletto, paymaster of the office of soldiers’ lodging in Cremona.

The Mansfeld infantry settled in Busto Arsizio, Gallarate, Samarate, and Legnano, just northwest of Milan, surrounded by low mountains, right before the valley opens and sweeps down to that great unlovely city, heaped inside its double walls and smoke over it.Footnote ⁵⁷ Busto Arsizio was a big fortified town, an oppidum in Latin, known for its wire-drawing, and some of its wire was exported as far as the Levant.Footnote ⁵⁸ Gallarate was a market town five miles northwest, a crossroads like Domodossola to the north. Many of its people were artificers, and a market was held every Sunday with commodities from Milan, the provinces of Novara and Vercelli, towns and villages in Lugano, and the Bergamasque.Footnote ⁵⁹

The Mansfeld cavalry was quartered south of Milan, moving among Casale Montferratto, Alessandria, and towns and rural territory near these cities. On November 12, they left for the siege of Verrua to cover the Duke of Feria as he raised an army.Footnote ⁶⁰ After that, three of its companies remained in Pontestura and seven companies took quarters in Cremona.Footnote ⁶¹ Although it is better documented in external German and Italian sources, the cavalry is less well attested in the Mansfeld Regiment’s own sources than the infantry, with one incomplete legal book to the infantry’s two complete ones, perhaps because Mattheus Steiner had traveled with Wolfgang Winckelmann’s infantry company. A Mansfelder cavalry secretary of unknown rank died in a fire in Rammingen on the night of August 10/11, 1625.Footnote ⁶² His death may be another reason for the slim documentation.

Milanese documentation on local housing of soldiers during the period that overlaps with the Mansfeld Regiment’s time in Italy is sparse.Footnote ⁶³ The commune of Busto Arsizio put down a deposit on a property in the Basilica district in 1620 to house soldiers, although the balance was not paid until after the Mansfelders left.Footnote ⁶⁴ Regimental sources mention soldiers quartered in local houses: One official recommended that the Mansfeld cavalry be quartered in “houses of the padroni instead of barracks,” which may have been an attempt to lessen the impact of their presence by splitting them up. “Houses of the padroni” refers to the most substantial and capacious dwellings of landowners, with more amenities. Housing was managed at every step not only by agents of the Spanish governance in Milan but also by important locals who participated in that governance, such as Pietro Paolo Lumello in Pontestura. Billets survive for the housing Lumello provided, scrap-paper tickets inscribed by him and sometimes countersigned by the soldier receiving the billet – like Red Vincent or Bernardo the Cat – in his own hand.Footnote ⁶⁵

On November 2, 1625, after the Mansfeld Regiment’s terrible October, when they had been ambushed and had murdered the residents of two local estates, its infantry assembled on the moor outside Gallarate.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Mansfelders were there to swear their oaths to their Articles of War. Although they had already fought several times that fall, and although the war that brought them to northern Italy was almost over, with this act they formally became a regiment.

The copy of these articles stuck between the first pages of one of the regiment’s legal books is written in Mattheus Steiner’s neat hand; Mansfeld’s signature is at the bottom of the last page above black/red ribbons and his slick red seal. As of November 1, when this document is dated, Mansfeld was still in Italy. He was in front of his infantry on horseback on November 2, his retinue and staff officers, the paymasters, the Marquis de Val de Fuentes, and Steiner at his elbow. He did not stay long. After Wolf von Mansfeld received his people’s oath, after the battles were over, he traveled back north to Leipzig and his estates, leaving his regiment behind.