Landsknechte: Maximilian's Pike Mercenaries, Zweihänder and the Snail

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The Landsknechte were German mercenaries who fought across Europe from the late 15th to the early 17th century, recruited from dispossessed craftsmen, landless younger sons, runaway serfs and impoverished nobles. They were created by Archduke Maximilian I, later Holy Roman Emperor, who had watched Swiss pike squares wreck Burgundian armies but could not hire the Swiss because France had locked up their services by treaty. In 1486 he hired Swiss instructors to train a German unit at Bruges, the Black Guard. A colonel raised a regiment of about 4,000 men under a letter patent setting pay and articles of war, divided into ten companies of 400, with small squads that elected their own leaders.

On the field they carried pikes about 14 feet long and drew short Katzbalger swords when pike blocks locked together. They helped crush the French and capture Francis I at Pavia in 1525 and held Vienna against the Ottomans in 1529. When Charles V could not pay them in 1527, some 14,000 Landsknechte among 34,000 mutinous imperial troops marched on Rome; their commander Georg von Frundsberg suffered a stroke, and the city was sacked for months. Spanish tercios with massed musketeers and state-controlled imperial foot soldiers later replaced them.

• Each regiment traveled with a baggage train of women, children and craftsmen, policed by an officer bluntly titled the whore's sergeant.
• A provost marshal enforced discipline with his own jailer, bailiff and executioner.
• Double-pay veterans fought in the front ranks, some swinging two-handed swords to cut or knock aside enemy pike shafts.
• The snail formation rotated men from the front to the rear of the block so fresh fighters kept rotating forward.
• Maximilian encouraged court dancing and fencing to train the footwork the rotating formations required.