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.
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.
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.
