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clientele were not. Such relationships had existed in the past, as with Hawkwood and Florence, but by Wallenstein’s time, they were dominant. The presence of shared, long-term interests restrained corrupt behaviors and therefore mediated the market for force.
    However, this did not necessarily make the market safer. While monarchs found the loyalty of military enterprisers attractive, populations were less enamored with their contractor armies. The havoc wreaked by these behemoth forces was not limited to the battlefield. They sustained themselves by pilfering the countryside, sometimes violently and often lawlessly, and the tyranny of plunder wore heavily on civilian populations. Rectifying the social damage caused by en masse larceny was expensive for employers, who consequently attempted to station troops away from population centers and ideally to deploy them in offensive campaigns in foreign lands. However, this was not always possible. The inhabitants of Brandenburg complained bitterly that the mercenaries guarding them were far more terrible than the enemy Swedes outside the city walls, and they begged their ruler, Frederick William, the Great Elector, to disband the unruly companies. Assessing the situation, the elector wrote in April 1641: “We find that our military forces have cost the country a great deal and done much wanton damage. The enemy could not have done worse. We do not see that we have had, or are likely to have, the least benefit from their services. Therefore we have resolved to keep only what is necessary as a garrison for our fortresses.” 8
    The elector’s sentiments were not unique. The unrestrained actions of mercenaries caused widespread destruction and misery in the course of the Thirty Years War. These mercenary companies were often intractable and could usurp their employers if left unchecked. Additionally, because they were recruited only during a military emergency and dismissed immediately at its conclusion, they frequently roamed the countryside like brigands of the Middle Ages while awaiting new contracts. These and other bitter experiences taught both rulers and ruled that they could not entrust the protection of their homeland to unreliable mercenaries. At the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, leadersof all sides tacitly agreed that an open market for force was too destructive and expensive to continue and that public armies should replace private ones; that is, the state should take over.
The State Monopolizes Force
    Shortly after the Peace of Westphalia, the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III established the first peacetime field army in the history of the monarchy. He issued a decree in 1649 announcing that of the fifty-two regiments raised during the great war, nine infantry (including both pike and shot) and ten cavalry (one of dragoons and nine of cuirassiers) would not be demobilized with the rest but would remain as permanent units. Previously, there had been small attempts to create standing public armies. The force of King Charles VII of France in 1445 consisted of nine thousand French soldiers. Rudolf II of Austria had three winter regiments in 1598 at key fortifications along his frontier. Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus’s Fekete Sereg, or Black Army, captured parts of Austria and Bohemia in the fifteenth century. However, these antecedents did not attempt to dislodge private armies and take over the market for force. The size, scale, and scope of Ferdinand’s ambitions were unprecedented, as he sought to expunge the need for mercenaries and thus began the state’s monopoly on violence, the end of private armies, and the beginning of modern public armies.
    The transition from private to public armies was gradual, spanning centuries. It arguably began in the sixteenth century, and by 1650, it was clear that on-demand military services were no longer economical to rulers, given the destruction that mercenaries wrought upon the countryside and the threat