Mercenaries in history

Favourites? Good stories?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palman
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costas_Georgiou
gutenberg.org/files/1170/1170-h/1170-h.htm
youtube.com/watch?v=c85eQrEvFCY&t=
warisboring.com/45650-2/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Faulques
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

He fought enough different people that they made a play about his life.

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Sir Arnaud de Cervole (the Archpriest) (c.1320-66)
Arnaud de Cervole was of a minor noble family on the Gascon march. He entered the Church and became the archpriest of Velines in the diocese of Perigueux (hence his nickname). Deprived of his benefice by the archbishop of Bordeux he embraced a military career.

The capture of King John II of France at Poitiers and the negotiations between the English and French brought a halt to military actions and to pay and plunder for the Free Companies in John’s employ. In 1357 Arnaud was elected commander of the "Great Company", a loose collection of companies of freebooters of various nationalities. While most ordinary companies numbered no more than a few hundred men, the great company at its height made up an army of about 2700 men. Arnaud took his newly formed Great Company into wealthy and hitherto untouched Provence in the realm of Jeanne d'Anjou, queen of Naples. There they took castles and towns by assault and plundered land as far as Avignon, terrorizing Pope Innocent VI and his cardinals, who opened negotiations with him. According to Froissart: "He entered Avignon with most of his followers by friendly agreement, and was received with as much respect as if he had been the king of France's son, and dined several times with the Pope and the cardinals. All his sins were remitted him and when he left he was given forty thousand crowns [20,000 gold florins] to distribute among his companions.

John Hawkwood

The son of a tanner, Hawkwood chose a soldier’s career, serving in the French wars of Edward III, who probably bestowed a knighthood on him. After the Treaty of Brétigny temporarily ended Anglo-French hostilities (1360), Hawkwood became the leader of a free company, going to Italy three years later to join the English band known as the White Company in the service of Pisa. He was elected captain general in January 1364. Using the English longbow and tactics developed by the English in France, he became famous for the rapidity of his movements, made possible by lighter armour and equipment, for his handling of infantry, and for the discipline of his troops.

Between 1372 and 1378 he alternately served the pope and the duke of Milan, whose illegitimate daughter he married in 1377. The following year he became captain general of Florence, fighting for other clients when his services were not needed by the Florentine republic.

Roger Faulques was interesting just because of how many conflicts he took place in.

what was the most powerful mercenary group? Was it Executive Outcomes?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palman

You already know who it is

Compagnia Bianca del Falco - the infamous White Company of the XIVth century. Was for a time led by the equally infamous Giovanni Acuto (John Hawkwood)

Baba Novac, mercenary in the service of Michael the Brave , sworn enemy to the hungarians and ottomans. The most based non romanian character in romanian history.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costas_Georgiou

Died fighting against communism.

The whole Hungarian Black Army

Simo Hayha

Honestly, the Anabasis is the greatest thing ever.
gutenberg.org/files/1170/1170-h/1170-h.htm

>A bunch of Greek mercenaries, about 10,000 of them, are hired to take a part in a civil war in the later Achmaenid empire.
>There's this big battle in what's now Iraq.
>Cyrus the Younger, the mercenaries patron, wins the battle, holds the field, in large part owing to the extreme toughness of these Greek mercenaries.
>However, Cyrus himself dies in the battle, and his enemy, Artaxerxes, wins the war by default, even though his own troops are mostly scattered and/or dead
>He's obviously not going to pay the mercenaries that worked for the other side
>But he doesn't have the force to actually get rid of them.
>Meanwhile, these mercenaries are trying to figure out how to get paid, and more importantly, how to get home, since they're now stranded with little in the way of provisions in the middle of fucking Iraq.
>Essentially be a pseudo-nation on the march, trying to get to a place where they can hire or build ships to get home, trading, fighting, and negotiating their way through the myriad subject kingdoms of the Persian Empire.

I've always thought it would make a good miniseries, but alas, it's never been done.

Almogavars, they served to the byzantine emperor and basically rekted the turks everywhere, but seeing that the emperor killed the leader of the company and then they revolted and devastated everything they went through until arriving to Greece, where they conquered the duchy of Athens for the king of Aragon.

I like xenophon

Reporting in

Make it a thing. It sounds really interesting.

theses.gla.ac.uk/941/1/1973fallonphd.pdf

Above link is a thesis on Scottish mercenaries in 17th century Europe - spoiler; there were loads of them, and they liked to rape.
That feel when you will never bumble through Central Europe dirling wangers until you get lynched by a gang of butthurt Alpine slopeheads.

Xenophon is the man

What do you mean, the arduous journey of the ten thousand is a thing

The Catalan Company may have been the first true mercenary company in Western Europe.

Michael VIII Palaiologos restored greek rule to the remaints of Byzantium in 1261,but with the loss of Anatolia to the turks ment a smaller population base to draw upon, hiring mercenaries became the only answer.

The Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos hired the 6,500 strong "Catalan Company" of Almogavars

The Almogavars - Their name is the corruption into Catalan of an Arab word, al-mogauar, which means “one who devastates”.

The Catalan Company was raised in 1281 to fight as mercenaries in the War of the Sicilian Vespers, where the Angevin and Aragonese dynasties fought over the Kingdom of Sicily. When the war ended 20 years later its commander was Rutger von Blum, better known as Roger de Flor.

De Flor was originally a Templar sergeant. At the fall of Acre in 1291 he became rich using one of the Templar galleys to shuttle fugitives from Acre to Cyprus for enormous fees; later he was a pirate before he joined the Catalan Company and worked his way up to command it.

The Company arrived at Constantinople in September 1303 and were truly welcome by the Greeks. They had no sooner arrived in Constantinople than they got involved in a bloody melee in the street with the local Genoese community.

Soon afterwards Andronikos asked the Catalans to go to Anatolia to reinforce Philadelphia, a Byzantine city entirely surrounded by the Turks for some years. In less than 8 days, Roger de Flor and his army destroyed the Turkish and left nobody alive. In the next 3 years the Catalans cleared Greece of Turkish presence

Pretty sure in context he meant "Make a miniseries out of it".

Another perspective in the battle of Counaxa is that the Ten Thousand got played by the Persians. The Greek mercenaries play no decisive role since they were too busy chasing after their fleeing enemies with all their might. Instead the decisive action between Cyrus the Younger and Artaxerxes is the decisive factor in which Cyrus and his close circle are killed and his army flees. The Persians sack the Greek's camp and Artaxerxes, rather than waste men in fighting the politically irrelevant Greeks, leaves them out to starve out in the night.

It might explain why the Persian infantry, including the feared Egyptian pike levy, fleed instead of facing the Greeks. By playing on the Greeks aggressiveness they managed to lure them away from the battle and away from the decisive moment.

Okay, I may be stupid for asking, but how did these companies get contacted in the past? Like how do rulers first, learn of all these mercenary bands, and how did they contact them? Most of these mercenaries go to other countries for work, so how do you recruit them? How long would it take?

>no mention of the mad bloodhound
Come on sons, he tried to get a whole country

True mercenary company in what way?
There were plenty of mercenaries in the West before 1261.
But yeh the Catalan company was pretty rad

+1, the army that managed to occupy Vienna

do people that joined some war for fun because they had nothing better to do while being regular soldiers of some other state count as mercenaries?

>Mao Zedong said that a million pinpricks can kill even an elephant. I took that to heart, and spent my whole life picking the Soviet elephant with my little pin. That elephant died. Stench of his corpse rises over many European countries. People, be cautious of his cadaverous poison.

Name me one (1) more based mercenary than Rafal Ganowicz.

The kind that chooses sides according to his beliefs and won against Che Guevara and other villains.

that nigger fought on the side of Soviet-backed rebels in Congo

Against them. He was one of the biggest commie haters I know. The group he was with for example celebrated the death of Dag Hammarskjöld which was when UN supported the pro-Soviet side of the Kongo war. It was the UN that changed its side later on.

...

He fought against commie revolutionaries that wanted to kill all whites, and were recieving heavy weaponry from commie ruskies, czechs and chinese.

Mad Mike Hoare was also there but he wasn't as photogenic. He's turning 99 next week.

>Dag Hammarskjöld which was when UN supported the pro-Soviet side of the Kongo war
Is supporting Pol Pot being pro-Vietnamese now?

>that wanted to kill all whites
wew lad, its not like 99% of white colonists opposed Belgium and some even joined the rebels

Waiting for someone to call him a Soviet supporter too.

reminder that Ganowicz was a Wahhabi muslim tatar

You know who he was which is rare but at the same time you decided to lie about who he was. Twice. Hmmm.

Being a Tatar and fighting for Zionist Saudi sultan against Baathist freedom fighters sounds quite like being a Wahhabi muslim

Ganowicz recalled how revolutionaries comitted a literal genocide on white population of Brazzaville though

youtube.com/watch?v=c85eQrEvFCY&t=

Vasili Blokhin was a good christian boy who dindu nuffin

So you're claiming he was a muslim too? Or what you're saying is the similarity here?

I suppose that's possible, but I think that's unlikely owing to the later inability of Artaxerxes's government to adequately deal with their post battle rampage to get home. Nobody likes having an unfriendly army camped within spitting distance of their heartlands, and the lack of a later organized Persian response to the mercenaries strongly implies that they didn't think they could deal with the problem.

you are showing me a tomb of someone with cross on it and you try to claim it means he was a christian

His one desire in life was to fight against the Reds or to be more specific against the Soviets and Soviet-supported sides. And he was one of those mercs who actually killed Soviet "military advisors" (as he said he kept firing at them) It was a personal thing for him.

Because he was. Like many Polish noble families of Tatar origins.

that makes him a nigger, also his claim is the only source for supposed MIG shot down

This.
Hawkwood was self-made and one of the greatest knights in history, up there with the black prince and william marshal

Welcome to the world of mercenary literature where you only have a handful of sources to work with because only a few people are willing to talk openly about their past. Many former mercenaries "disappeared" in the following decades but everybody is welcome to do some investigation and factcheck the things they wrote. Soviet planes were really flying (and falling) over Yemen.

warisboring.com/45650-2/

and those people that are willing to talk create memestories in order to romantize their massacres of civilians

It's not impossible to verify their claims. I don't know about any of those old timey mercs being exposed. They were a part of a bigger picture of the Cold War. Fight in those third world wild countries was rough but necessary.

Bob Denard, corsair de la republique
want a coup in your petit country mon ami?

Was a hired gun in South America before unifying Italy

King Arthur

>Baba Novac
In Serbia we have great epic poems about him. Wonder if that's the case in Romania...

I've read a Finnish comic of Anabasis that used this interpretation. Cyrus gets rekt while the Greeks chase the bait.

Fuck. The guy is almost 100

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Faulques