108 Chapter Threeand became firmly institutionalized among the Spanish armies that
fought in the Dutch wars (1567–1609). Sixteenth-century mutinies
resembled industrial strikes of a later age and proved to be an effectual
way of bringing pressure to bear on the ever impecunious Spanish
court because the authorities could bring mutiny to an end only by
paying up. “Loyal” troops simply would not attack their mutinous
fellows; and since nearly every unit in the field had pay owing, it was
dangerous even to try to coerce an unruly unit by bringing others
against it.^38
Troop training and command in the field also rested in the captain’s
hands. He appointed subordinate officers at his pleasure and was ex
pected to supervise personally the apportionment of pay to his sol
diers, if and when it was forthcoming from higher headquarters. Be
tween paydays, he might advance sums of money to individual soldiers
from his own pocket for purchase of necessities and collect his loans
later when a payday made recovery of such debts feasible. All this
much resembled the relation between captain and crew on shipboard.
The difference between armed enterprise by land and by sea was
therefore one of degree. Eventually the limits of the capital market
made themselves felt in land enterprise too. But a king could constrain
bankers to give him loans they did not want to make—at least for a
while; and the argument that one more campaigning season would
bring victory and permit tax income to overtake emergency military
expenditure was often persuasive—in the short run. But deficit
financing had limits, as we have seen, and royal bankruptcies recur
rently brought military spending back within fiscal limits.
The hope that an army might somehow manage to pay for itself by
bringing new taxpayers under the victor’s jurisdiction nearly always
failed. European states were too evenly matched for easy conquests to
bring in such windfalls. Only occasionally, and on the periphery,
where European armed establishments encountered less militarily
sophisticated societies, was the exercise of force at all likely to become
a paying proposition. The Russians in Siberia, thanks to furs, and the
Spaniards in the Americas, thanks to silver, were the two empire
builders to profit conspicuously from their frontier position in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The self-supporting character of European seafaring was, in consid
- On mutiny in the Spanish army see the very enlightening discussion by Geoffrey
Parker, “Mutiny in the Spanish Army of Flanders,” Past and Present 58 (1973): 38–52;
and his Army of Flanders, chap. 7. Parker counts forty-six separate mutinies by troops in
the Spanish service between 1572 and 1607.