Mercenary Behavior

[Furious Mental]

Actually the idea that mercenaries were liable to up and desert as soon as a battle seemed to be going the other way is to a large extent a myth. For a start, the most loyal and steadfast soldiers in a kingdom were frequently the members of the military household of the king and his tenants-in-chief, and military households often contained many mercenaries. The military households of the Anglo-Norman kings were almost entirely mercenaries and we know this because contemporary sources kept calling them "mercenarii". One of those sources, Orderic Vitalis, also gives examples of how even temporarily employed mercenaries could be determined in a war. First of all, he referred to Angevin mercenaries threatening to desert William the Conqueror in England, but that was after almost five years of deployment, and notably the rest of William's mercenaries were apparently willing to fight on as long as rewards were promised. Second, he also referred to an instance in 1102 where the castle of a rebel baron was surrendered to Henry I by its feudal constable, without the knowledge or consent of the mercenary portion of the garrison. This enraged them and they left the castle telling the besieging force that they and their employer had been betrayed by their commander. In actuality they might have just been annoyed that they weren't going to get paid, but either way it makes no difference. Mercenaries, being itinerant professional soldiers, had a stake in the victory of their employer, since that was often the only way they would get paid. The only alternative for them was to turn to banditry in which case they would often be hunted down and executed by whoever controlled the land they were looting, and hence it offered no advantage (in fact it was alot less lucrative).

"the fragile nature of a mercenary army and to make reliance on these forces somewhat of a risk."

Pretty much every army deployed by the English Kings from William I to Henry III was comprised substantially or even almost entirely of mercenaries of one kind or another, and I can assure you they were not characterised by "fragility". In fact said kings and their barons preferred to employ mercenaries because they
- Were full time rather than part time soldiers
- Had no conflicting seignurial loyalties
- Didn't object to serving overseas or for long periods of time, in fact they preferred this since it guaranteed employment

In fact for most of the period in question "feudal" soldiers were relatively scarce because almost from the time "knights' fees" were introduced to England a process began of dividing them up and simply having the sub-tenants pay a sum to the landlord which was used to employ mercenaries. Other countries may well have been completely different ways of raising armies but there is no way they could have relied on a fuedal system the same as England's and yet deployed armies of equal effectiveness. Such an army would have been too homogenous, politically divided and ephemeral to have achieved much.