Swiss Mercenaries - Landsknechts and The Italian Wars

Landsknechts and The Italian Wars

Until roughly 1490, the Swiss had a virtual monopoly on pike-armed mercenary service. However, after that date, the Swiss mercenaries were increasingly supplemented by imitators, chiefly the Landsknechts. Landsknechts were Germans (at first largely from Swabia) and became proficient at Swiss tactics to produce a force that filled the ranks of European armies with mercenary regiments for decades. Although the Landsknechts were never quite as redoubtable as the Swiss, they were much more readily available for hire, as after 1515 the Swiss pledged themselves to neutrality, other than regarding Swiss soldiers serving in the ranks of the Royal French army. The Landsknecht, however, would serve any paymaster, even, at times, enemies of the Holy Roman Emperor (and Landsknechts at times even fought each other on the battlefield, something the Swiss flatly refused to do in mercenary service). The Landsknecht assumed the bright, garish soldier's outfits of the Swiss, and in fact soon outdid the Swiss in the flamboyance of their military dress.

The Swiss were not flattered by the imitation, and the two bodies of mercenaries immediately became bitter rivals over employment and on the battlefield, where they were often opposed during the major European conflict of the early sixteenth century, the Great Italian Wars. Although the Swiss generally had a significant edge in a simple "push of pike", the resulting combat was nonetheless quite savage, and known to Italian onlookers as "bad war". Period artists such as Hans Holbein attest to the fact that two such huge pike columns crashing into each other could result in a maelstrom of battle, and ghastly casualties on both sides.

Despite the competition from the Landsknechts, and imitation by other armies (most notably the Spanish, which adopted pike-handling as one element of its tercios), the Swiss fighting reputation reached its zenith between 1480 and 1525, and indeed the Battle of Novara, fought by Swiss mercenaries, is seen by some as the perfect Swiss battle. Even the close defeat at the terrible Battle of Marignano in 1515, the "Battle of Giants", was seen as a victory of sorts for Swiss arms due to the ferocity of the fighting and the good order of their withdrawal.

Nonetheless, the repulse at Marignano presaged the decline of the Swiss form of pike warfare—eventually, the two-century run of Swiss victories ended in 1522 with complete disaster at the Battle of Bicocca when combined Spanish Tercios and Landsknecht forces decisively defeated them using fortifications and new technology (i.e. handguns). It can be argued that it was arrogance—overconfidence in their own supposed invincibility—which defeated the Swiss as much as the armed forces of their enemies, for at Bicocca, the Swiss mercenaries, serving the French king, attempted repeatedly to frontally storm an impregnable defensive position, only to be mown down by small-arms and artillery fire. Never had the Swiss suffered such awful casualties while being unable to inflict much damage upon their foe. Arrogance and overconfidence were at play here, but another consideration was economic—many of the Swiss mercenaries were still farmers, and needed to return home from campaign quickly in order to work the fields. This meant they often rushed, unthinking, into ill-advised battles in the hopes they would crush the enemy of their employer, collect bounty, get paid, and march home to work their fields.