Black Company
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The Black Company or the Black Troops (Schwarze Haufen) was a unit of
Name
The original German name of the Black Company was Schwarzer Haufen. The term Schwarz (black) pointed out the ideological distance of the company from the large peasant army at that time, which called itself the Heller Haufen (Hell meaning "light-colored"). The German word
It was never used again for an army, possibly because the word Haufen means "heap" in German and was used to refer to loosely organised armed rabbles.
Formation
The Black Company was formed in 1525 in
The leader of the Black Company, at least nominally, was nobleman Florian Geyer.
Geyer managed to shape the Black Company into something like a company of real soldiers, instead of just an armed mob. Some of the knights were probably his vassals.
History
After the Company took over the area around Rothenburg, it proceeded to
In the Battle of Ingolstadt, in May 1525, the Black Company found itself alone against the forces of the Swabian League after its allies had been destroyed. The Black Company fought its way back to Ingolstadt and occupied the ruins of the castle, the main buildings of which the members of the Company had themselves burned down some months before. The troops of the League encircled the castle and started their attack. The castle's occupants fought off two assaults but during the third attack, and after the League's heavy artillery breached the massive walls, they were killed.
Geyer himself wasn't there during the last battle.[citation needed] He waited for an escort in Rothenburg, but was banned from the city before it arrived. Geyer traveled North and was robbed and killed by two servants of his brother-in-law Wilhelm von Grumbach in the night of June 9–10 in the forest near Rimpar.
Legacy
The Black Company has remained very popular to the present day, although Swabian rulers did everything to nullify its fame in the years after the uprising, through publishing a number of "facts" about the crimes the peasants supposedly had committed.
The actions of the Black Company has been memorialised in the song "Wir sind des Geyers schwarzer Haufen", a World War I-era composition by Fritz Sotke with lyrics from Heinrich von Reder. The song has a strong anti-clerical and anti-noble theme, and it is remains popular in modern day Germany, with contemporary bands offering different performances and reinterpretations of the lyrics.
See also
- Peasants' Revolt, England, 1381
- Popular revolt in late-medieval Europe
- List of peasant revolts
Notes
References
| This article includes a improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (February 2015) ) |
- Engels, Friedrich. The Peasant War in Germany, Germany, 1850; contained in the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Volume 10, International Publishers, New York, 1978, pp. 397–482
- Franz, Günther. Der deutsche Bauernkrieg [The German Peasants' War], Darmstadt, 1987, ISBN 3-534-03424-4(in German)