The World of the Tavern by Beat Kümin B. Ann Tlusty

Author:Beat Kümin, B. Ann Tlusty [Beat Kümin, B. Ann Tlusty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781351880275
Google: nTcrDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05T01:29:53+00:00

The Public House and Military Culture in Germany, 1500-1648

B. Ann Tlusty

According to local chronicles, when the mercenary captain Schertlin von Burtenbach entered the city of Augsburg during the Schmalkaldic War in 1546, he was accompanied by four thousand men, all of whom were quartered in the city and its environs.1 A year later, the victorious emperor Charles V entered the city 'with great strength of troops.'2 What would this many soldiers, many of whom were accompanied by their wives and children, mean to a city with a population of between thirty and forty thousand? Where did they stay and how did they get on with the local populace?

Since Michael Roberts published his theory of an early modern 'military revolution' in 1956, historians have debated the extent to which this period represents a turning point in the development of the professional military corps that gradually replaced local defence systems.3 The establishment of a standing army was an important step in the process of centralization and in the development of national identity, both of which attended the rise of absolutism. Studies of this process, however, tend to concentrate primarily on institutional aspects such as military organization, competing jurisdictions, improvements in technology, recruitment and financing of troops, and so on, and to pay little attention to parallel socio-cultural factors that also affected defence decisions.

Recent work that targets the social history of war has begun to correct this imbalance, initially by focusing attention on the primacy of the human needs of the soldiers as a factor affecting military decisions. Frank Tallet for example sees logistics, or the provisioning of troops, as a more crucial problem than the dangers faced in battle. Military leaders since antiquity had known that troop efficiency was tied to sufficient provisions, and by the seventeenth century, this was a major impetus in the development of standing national armies backed by state-controlled financing.4

Food for the soldiers, however, was only part of the problem. Soldiers also needed shelter to survive, particularly in winter. The public inn or tavern provided the obvious solution to both problems, for the provision of food, drink, and lodging in return for money was the basic form of economic exchange that defined the innkeeper's trade.5 Paralleling other forms of hospitality, the function of quartering soldiers was gradually taken away from private householders and assumed by inns over the course of the sixteenth century. Inns and taverns also furnished soldiers and military recruiters with space for both professional and social activities. Even the state financing of military operations was partially dependent on public houses, for they provided a significant amount of revenue in the form of taxes on alcohol sales.

This paper will explore the role of inns and taverns in defence systems and in the lives of soldiers in Germany from the sixteenth century through the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), primarily on the example of the imperial city of Augsburg and its environs. The importance of the inn to the highly mobile early modern soldier was related to its designation as a public form of household.

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