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Sweden and then France. Most famously, Count Albrechtvon Wallenstein offered his services plus an army to Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II and eventually became the supreme commander of the Habsburg monarchy’s armies and the richest man in Europe. By the end of the war, the market had moved beyond oligarchs like Wallenstein to smaller actors, such as mercenary colonels and merchant financiers, empowered by credit and supply networks based in Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Genoa.
    Military enterprisers differ from mercenaries in significant ways and represent the median point in the gradual transition from private to public armies, as they were a hybrid of both. Like mercenaries, they are private sector actors involved in armed conflict and motivated chiefly by profit. Unlike mercenaries, they typically worked in monogamous public-private partnerships with a government client to build armies rather than deploying them. They are hybrids of private and public armies, imperfectly blending the profit motive of the former with the loyalty of the latter.
    Military enterprisers were attractive to states for two reasons. First, having private military actors generate but not control armed force is less threatening to the client, as medieval mercenaries sometimes operated as a security racket. Second, demanding that private military actors work exclusively for the client was safer, too, as it discouraged defections to the enemy. By the seventeenth century, states were sufficiently powerful to demand such concessions from the market.
    This arrangement also served private military actors, since they were often victims of faithless employers and preferred long-term, paying clients in perpetual need of armies. Military enterprisers had other reasons to remain faithful servants to their clients. According to historian David Parrott, they aspired to join the ranks of the military-obsessed European elite and therefore remained loyal to their aristocratic employers, because this bequeathed cultural and social benefits associated with military involvement. Such benefits would be nullified if they were perceived to act against the ruler in whose state they wished to enjoy these benefits. Also, unlike the
condottieri
captains, military enterprisers were often victims of their own success. Employers often made it treasonous for able enterprisers to abandon their contracts and had the power to enforce this clause, causing the enterpriser to lose both fortune and head. 7 Such was the case of Wallenstein, who was perhaps falsely accused of treachery and killed in 1634. His death remains shrouded in controversy.
    Such public-private partnerships changed the business of war, transforming it from a free to a mediated market for force. In a free market, consumers and suppliers of warfare sought each other out, negotiated a price, and waged war. Both sides of the bargain were generally unconstrained, and the marketplace was laissez-faire in nature. For example, mercenaries such as
condottieri
often worked for the highest bidder, changed sides when it suited their purses, sought warsout, and occasionally started them. When business was slow, they often pillaged the countryside until they were hired by a client or paid to go away. In many ways, mercenaries and the free market for force perpetuated armed conflict.
    This contrasts with a mediated market, which imbued a modicum of restraint into force providers and their patrons. Long-term and exclusive public-private partnerships aligned the interests of client and mercenary, making it harder for either side to defect and infusing stability into the marketplace. For example, Wallenstein was not incentivized to betray Ferdinand II, because the ruler was his main source of profit. Nor was Ferdinand II motivated to break his contract with Wallenstein, as the enterpriser was his primary supplier of armed forces during a war of survival. In other words, they were codependent in ways that medieval mercenaries and their