Were there some professional troops in middle ages...

>Middle Ages
>about 1000 years over vast land masses
Stupid question.
Different places had different systems.
For example the English law making it illegal not to practice long bow on sundays. Or in the feudal English era where lords owned land from kings grant with requirements of military service. One lord might owe 50 trained men, another 10. This worked with various degrees of failure depending on the era. In late feudal (really the same time it was ending). some grants got down to things like 'x amount of men for 16 weeks a year', with lots of exceptions and liberties. you can wonder how well that worked out during war times.
'Freeman' English in certain eras were supposed to have different levels of personal gear at all times, the higher your status, the more expensive armor and weapons you were supposed to own and maintain. Kings would complain when armies were called at thier poor state of training. Also hire Welsh professionals or lowland troops with debt money. Also this

> in middle ages
When and where in the middle ages?
I swear this is like the equivalent of Veeky Forums's "depends on the setting"

a lot of the weapons in the middle ages actually came from tools the peasants used on the land on a day to day basis.

so they were not totally untrained.
they were fucking fit actually.

From the high middle ages onwards the vast majority of the men on the battlefields were professional mercenaries.

The main issue with professional troops is their cost.
Firs of all, by "middle ages", I will simplify everything by restraining myself from talking about the XVth century ; By now, many countries tried to build standing armies, like France with the organization of "bands" that were the antiquity of regimental organization.

Contrarly to what you see on Warhammer Total War, peasants did not fight. In fact, the whole feudal system existed only so the laborers didn't have to go to war. Knights were the professionnal soldiers of the time, and they were omnipresent in the social system for a long time, from the Xth to XIIIth Century ; Afterwards, it gets a little complicated, because the small nobility slowly died out, but managed to survive by acting as dependent soldiers of the king thanks to a "fief-rente", basically a wage for their military service.

However, you're probably talking about the meat, about the majority of the forces that you see in big battles, the infantrymen.
Basically, in feudal France (Which was probably the same in all of Europe), three territorial organization acted as recruiters for the military : The lords in their castles, the bishops in their parish, and the mayors in their cities. All of them had negociated a service of "ost" with the french King, and as such, were meant to provide a certain number of trained troops to go to war. Most of them were a poor choice of military, being mostly a raised militia of local thugs and 'gang' enforcers, but they were still numerous, well-armed, and as such, could fight a bloody battle while the knights were jousting on the sides of the conflict in search for capture and ransom.

As for day-to-day military enforcement, like patrolling roads, or doing the lord's bidding, all of them were maintaining a small cadre of commoners, that were called "sergeants". These men were armed and trained depending of the possibility of their local warlord.

However, if the militias were of questionnable quality and discipline, the princes of Europe quickly turned to using mercenaries as the mainstay of their infantry.
The mercenaries varied in organization, culture, and discipline. In England, the mercenary system was very well-rounded, by using a local population of trained longbowmen that were held under a contract, the "endenture". The continentals, however, mostly paid independent companies to fight for a time, then discarded them.
The mercenary companies were generally well equipped, well trained, and good tacticians ; But they demanded high wages, and kept looting everything on sight to fulfill their lust for gold. When the war ended, they could plague the countryside, living in the country as they wished, and generally this only ended by paying them a ransom, sending them to fight elsewhere, or purging them by rallying knights.

Some companies managed to build their own principalties. Other depended of a government, like the Genoese crossbowmen, or the swiss pikemen.

Early middle age states could barely feed themselves. They didn't have the capacity to overproduce and produce a larger population. In times of war, they'd use up their extra food stored for war purposes pretty quickly if they eat normally. So they ration it out.

Later middle ages could support larger armies and have better agriculture techniques. Thus able to provide their recruits with better food.

>The main issue with professional troops is their cost.
Well, that and the political ramifications of keeping them around. Professional armies had a distressing tendency to overthrow their rulers or demand ever increasing privileges; backed with the threat of smashing up shit if their demands weren't met. The Ottoman and Roman Empires both had colossal problems with their professional troop corps essentially turning significant parts of their empires into self-serving protection rackets.

Indeed.
In fact, many of the first experiences of a permanent army in western europe were simply an uniformization of the military elite of the time ; As such, the "compagnies d'ordonnances" of Burgundy and France were simply meant to organize the vast rabble of mercenaries and paid noblemen into a some-what disciplined standing force. It was born out of a reality, and not out of a real desire to build a professionnal military.

France, was the biggest employer of Swiss mercenaries.

Burgundy and its modern army was soundly defeated, by militia troops from Flanders and Switzerland.

Yes ; The Duke of Burgundy had a great, modern army, equipped with the greatest artillery of Europe at the time. And he lost. In fact, the battles of Morat and Nancy are the proof that sometimes, battles and their random nature are indeed decisives.

>Europe is kinda big

topkek

Now imagine if Texas was actually populated with whites.

So Texas is 10% of the size of Europe, not sure what this was supposed to prove

They're more proof that people need to stop thinking "professional" is synonymous with trained, and "amateur" means untrained/unprepared.