| dc.description.abstract |
<p>This dissertation is a study of lordship and its expression through the Catholic
League army's institutions during the early years of the Thirty Years War. It draws
on letters, reports and other chancery documents from the Bavarian State Archive to
examine how duke Maximilian I of Bavaria [r 1597-1651] and his officers re-negotiated
their respective command privileges within the army so as to better accommodate each
other's practices of lordship through its operations. In exchange for their continued
investment in his military power the duke's officers, that is, his military contractors,
bargained to preserve, and then expand, customary lordly prerogatives within their
commands. </p><p>More broadly the dissertation argues that Maximilian's negotiations
with his contractors reflected deeper struggles among the Holy Roman Empire's nobilities
over how to incorporate their own lordship within the evolving structures of the imperial
state. Nobles who fought in Maximilian's service staked their wealth and landed power
on his success in securing a preeminent position relative to the monarchy and, with
it, their own place among the empire's governing elite. </p><p>In the process the
dissertation probes and questions the role historians have usually assigned military
contractors within wider processes of state-formation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Europe and, in particular, the Holy Roman Empire. It views contractors not as profiteering
mercenaries who pursued war for gain at the state's expense, but rather as elites
who sought to invest in modes of power-sharing that would preserve and strengthen
their military role in governance.</p>
|
|
