Attila Barany, ed. <i>Mercenaries and Crusaders</i>

The crusading world is virtually synonymous with the Middle Ages in the popular imagination and has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention: the institutional dimension of the paid armies themselves that were frequently employed in these ventures, less so. This is partly due to the surviving evidence for such organizations, which is often scarce and unequally distributed across time and space, rendering the systematic study of the subject difficult. For this reason alone, the title of this collection edited by Prof. Bárány attracts great interest.The publication includes 25 articles that were originally presented by an internationally diverse selection of historians during the conference of the same name held at Debrecen University in June 2022. The studies tackle the titular topics in chronological order over a period ranging from the late eleventh to the early sixteenth century, through a vast geographic scope ranging from Portugal and France to Romania and the Baltics. Most articles tend to focus on the impact of mercenary companies and other forms of semi-autonomous military organizations on the political history of Eastern Europe during the Late Middle Ages (roughly thirteenth–fifteenth centuries), with a particular focus on the Kingdom of Hungary.The studies display several distinct though overlapping focuses for analysis. One line of inquiry approaches the mercenary phenomenon from a socioeconomic vantage, with Stojkovski, Tamas, Sebök, and Virágh looking at the financial and legal details of employment as a mercenary during various crusades, examining to this effect the evidence provided by sources like city archives, contract stipulations, and royal charters. These articles reveal professional armies as both a very expensive military investment and a very lucrative business that could become popular enough to require regulation. Other articles cover the sociopolitical dimension by exploring the roles mercenary companies could play as active political agents, such as Hunyadi’s work on the impact of Turcopole identity, and Coureas’s examination of the mercenaries in James II’s Cyprus; or as diplomatic intermediaries like those employed by the Teutonic Order discussed by Pósán. The most intriguing of these, particularly Toureille’s work on mercenary violence in mid-fifteenth-century France, demonstrate how the proliferation of private armies could lead to the progressive centralization of the state through a need to regulate them or could alternatively feed centrifugal tendencies putting pressure on centralized governments and even causing their collapse, as discussed in Petruska’s work on the Kingdom of Hungary in the period preceding Mohács.Another line of inquiry concerns the logistical and organizational aspects of both the crusades in general and private armies specifically. To this effect, Ónadi and Kiss inquire into the practical role of religious organizations in warfare, while Varga and Szokola evaluate the operational basis of managing mercenary groups and field armies in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Hungary. Finally, several studies work on the question of ideology. Novak deals with the question on its own terms as a methodological issue in the interpretation of source material, while other articles approach the question alongside the concept of crusading itself. Gomes and Véber treat the issue as an aspect of political rhetoric that could be used as a rallying point for military collaboration around religious values, while, for example, in Barabás, Boda, and Györkös, crusading can appear as a means for rendering legitimacy and mustering support to ends that may not have primarily been religious, particularly in later centuries.As such, many of the studies raise interesting questions, providing together a comprehensive appreciation for the changing role of mercenary activity over the course of the crusades. As Pósán frames it (p. 246), private soldiery was very different during the first period of the crusades (eleventh–thirteenth centuries), when it was more strictly framed by chivalric values, than in the Late Middle Ages, during which time the increase in demand for military personnel gave way to independent companies functioning along much more transactional lines.The changing relationship between the agents of private warfare and the rhetoric of holy war consequently raises a great number of sociological issues and theoretical lines of inquiry that are left only partially explored, constituting a lacuna in the collection, as the articles generally focus on either one or the other of the titular topics, without delving too deeply into their complex interrelationship. This is largely due to the framing of the work that could have benefited from some further polishing, either through a distribution of the articles into thematic sections or by including additional introductory commentary highlighting the common lines of inquiry shared by many of the studies. This would have allowed the very diverse material to be navigated more easily. Overall, the collection is commendable, offering many pieces that would be of great interest to students and scholars of late medieval European military history.