Class and social structure within early seventeenth-century Saxon units, including the Mansfeld Regiment, seems to have been different from later armies in several important respects. Although commoners were less well-represented in more honorable or prestigious roles, the army could be a source of social mobility. Some men served in the Saxon army for multiple years, and some families for multiple decades. Soldiers probably picked up military experience through long immersion in the military way of life rather than formal drilling. Within this context, social distance between ranks seems to have been less pronounced in early seventeenth-century armies than in later armies or contemporary civilian life. The close social and physical proximity between officers and men led to fights.

The Mansfeld Regiment’s social organization and material contexts shaped the way it was formed, the path it took from Dresden to Lombardy, and the way it disintegrated. The concepts of the military revolution and the fiscal-military state are still relevant. But developing fiscal-military infrastructure was weak, which laid the groundwork for the Mansfeld Regiment’s loss of funding and failure. In this regiment’s daily operations I did not see the changes in social discipline that were supposedly intertwined with the military revolution. What I have found about the Mansfeld Regiment and the Saxon army may serve as a basis for re-examining some historical assumptions about early seventeenth-century armies. Daily interactions within this pathetic regiment are also an important source for the historical social anthropology of early-modern Europe, shedding light on masculinity, violence, identity formation, and marginalization.

This chapter places the actions of the Mansfeld Regiment within the context of military pay for the Saxon army during the 1620s. Pay for individual infantrymen varied substantially, and this chapter argues that it can be used as a proxy to determine these men’s social status. Mercenary soldiers and female members of the military community could act as subcontractors in their own right, which shaped the way they found sexual partners. Pay in the Saxon army in the 1620s seems high, and was disbursed on time. Although the Saxon army was at paper strength throughout the 1620s, this massive outlay may have been one reason Saxon finances fell apart in the 1640s. Meanwhile, the Mansfeld Regiment was paid far less than the customary rate in the Saxon army, and was swindled by the Governor of Milan.

After a destructive war of nearly three decades (1231–1259), in 1274 the Koryŏ royal family formed a marriage alliance with the imperial Chinggisid throne that lasted a century. At the same time as Koryŏ–Mongol relations influenced Koryŏ’s political, social, cultural, and economic history, Korean personnel also provided agricultural labor and produced essential goods for the Mongols, campaigned in Chinggisid armies, acted as political advisers, offered religious sustenance, served as intimate attendants in the imperial palace, and married into the empire’s elite families, including the ruling Chinggisid line. This chapter comprises three parts: first, a brief political narrative of Koryŏ’s experience of the Mongol empire; second, thematic discussions of the military, personnel, and cultural exchange; and finally, some concluding comments, including the ambiguous legacy of the Mongol period for Korea.

The East India Company’s empire rested on its sepoys – its sprawling army of Indian recruits. The emergence of the sepoy army has usually been understood as a tactical innovation, in which European-style discipline was introduced to an Indian setting. This chapter argues instead that the growth of the sepoy army should be seen as an ideological development. The use of indigenous recruits and other non-Europeans for military labor had a long history across the British Empire as a whole. In much of the empire, including the Company’s earliest trading factories, this practice had been coded as anomalous by colonial elites eager to maintain a monopoly on the prestige of formal military service. Efforts by colonists to preserve that exclusive control made armies and militias across the empire some of the first institutions to be formally segregated along racialized lines. In much of the Atlantic empire, nonwhite military labor was marginalized and rendered invisible. In the Company’s settlements, in contrast, the sepoy became a highly visible symbol of empire – rendered valuable only because of an allegedly transformative system of European command, leadership, and discipline.