[Basic] Realistic Low Tech Challengers

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

A mercenary is a soldier who serves in a foreign army. Most troops at this time served in the country in which they were raised. So they were professional soldiers, not mercenaries.

There were exceptions. IIRC the condottieri of the fourteenth/fifteenth centuries were almost always Italians themselves, but still known as mercenaries. For Germany, Fritz Redlich in his "The German Military Enterpriser and his Work Force" talks about the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries, but does look at the antecedents of mercenary use in the fourteenth/fifteenth centuries. All the employees of the above were German.

Troops of the late Middle Ages and the early modern era serving for pay, rather than to fulfill a feudal obligation, tended to be known as mercenaries despite their national origins.