Prigozhin Should Study Europe’s Greatest Mercenary
Albrecht von Wallenstein was the Holy Roman Empire’s power broker—until he clashed with his superior.
Foreign policy, JULY 2, 2023, 7:00 AM
Over a 24-hour period last weekend, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the commander of Russia’s Wagner Group, called for an uprising against Russia’s military leaders and advanced most of the way to Moscow at the head of his mercenary army before abruptly stopping. Prigozhin and Russian President Vladimir Putin looked each other in the eye, and both blinked.
Commenters have been likening this incident to a spat among gangsters, harking back to Prigozhin’s rise from a petty crook to, until recently, a close crony of Putin. This is more apposite than they might realize. The political theorist Charles Tilly famously compared state-making and war-making to organized crime. Both are human networks that extract resources, use these resources to promulgate violence, and attempt to monopolize violence in areas they control.
Putin and Prigozhin are fighting as a late medieval or early modern head of state and one of his mercenary generals might fight: Social networks of violent men tend to act in remarkably similar ways in many different contexts. One interpretation of Prigozhin’s actions suggests that they were intended more as an elaborate protest than as a serious threat; although this is by no means certain, this kind of mutiny is well attested in early modern Europe.
In 1973, the historian Geoffrey Parker analyzed the mutinies of the Spanish Army of Flanders, arguably the greatest infantry army of its age, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Their mutinies were forms of protest against harsh conditions or lack of pay, they followed a ritualized formula of work stoppage and presentation of demands, and the authorities often met them with negotiation rather than draconian punishment.
These protests were not bloodless: Antwerp has never fully recovered from its sack in 1576 during one of these events. But they and other large mutinies in the early modern Swedish or Parliamentarian armies demonstrate that the relationship between mercenary and master operated according to what the social historian E.P. Thompson called a moral economy, according to which proper behavior was expected on either side. This relationship could be extraordinarily vexed. The career of Europe’s last and greatest early modern mercenary general, a man whose eventual fall may offer insights into Russia’s future today, demonstrates this well.
Albrecht von Wallenstein was born in 1583 in Bohemia, then a kingdom of the Holy Roman Empire. When the Thirty Years’ War broke out with a rebellion in Bohemia, he was a minor Bohemian noble with military experience. He remained loyal to the Holy Roman Empire’s establishment and became a colonel in the Imperial Army of Emperor Ferdinand II. He also became extremely wealthy during the early years of the war by expropriating the confiscated properties of rebels who fled or were defeated. This is also how Prigozhin’s generation of Russian kleptocrats rose after the fall of the Soviet Union, which was followed by a massive sell-off of state-owned property.
Wallenstein used his financial base to make himself essential to Ferdinand by raising and financing armies on his own while also advancing immense loans to the crown. He was repeatedly ennobled and eventually given command of the Imperial Army. Centuries later, Prigozhin echoed him in his own fusion of public war-making and private finance but in a different form. Wagner was funded by the Russian defense ministry, but Prigozhin’s companies also made large sums of money through government contracts. In return, until Prigozhin’s rebellion, the Wagner Group not only acted as an extralegal army but also helped strengthen the Russian economy by extracting natural resources in Africa.
Military enterprise and state activity have been intertwined in many states, at many times. Early modern political entities relied on this public-private cooperation because they were not yet able to finance warfare on their own or handle other essential activities such as minting coinage, an ambiguously crooked enterprise in which Wallenstein also participated. The public, the private, and the potentially criminal were intertwined in Wallenstein’s career because the prince he served was not yet powerful enough to do what he relied on Wallenstein to do for him.
In contrast, they were and are intertwined in Russia because the Russian state in the Weberian sense is weakening. The Russian institutions of state are substantially interpenetrated with private and criminal interests, and functions such as universal suffrage and the rule of law are compromised. Most importantly for this essay, in both the early modern Holy Roman Empire and contemporary Russia, the central authority lacks the monopoly on legitimate lethal force.
This has become brutally clear in Russia over the past few days, as Prigozhin’s men seized Rostov-on-Don and shot down Russian army helicopters while other forces avoided engaging them. Their mutiny has damaged the image Putin cultivated of himself as the most powerful warlord, the man whose extra-state rule was acceptable because it was effective. But this rule laid the structural foundations that made the mutiny possible.
Like Prigozhin and Putin, Wallenstein and Ferdinand were tied inextricably to each other: Wallenstein was both the emperor’s creditor and his creature and owed his social position solely to the emperor’s promotion. The Imperialists may not have been able to win without him, just as the use of mercenaries such as Wagner is one way Russia is effacing the true costs of the war in Ukraine.
Yet politically Wallenstein was troublingly independent. Like Prigozhin, Wallenstein clashed repeatedly with his government over strategies that he was responsible for implementing but on which he had little influence, and he attempted to broker peace on his own. He was dismissed twice and eventually accused of treason, lured into a meeting with the connivance of some of his officers, and assassinated in early 1634. Like Prigozhin, Wallenstein’s contacts with his government’s enemies were ambiguous; unlike him, he probably was not planning armed rebellion until he figured out that the emperor had put out a warrant on him.
Both Prigozhin and Wallenstein were powerful military leaders acting within a fusion of public and private. Such men were both subjects of their head of state and mercenary generals, neither purely dependent nor purely independent. This is one reason they chafed against their respective heads of state. But militarily, Wallenstein was the most powerful man in the empire, and the army he commanded was the largest in Europe since classical Rome. The Imperialists literally could not fight without him. Wagner is tiny: Prigozhin is not, in terms of military force, a serious rival to the Russian army.
But Wallenstein’s rise and fall illustrate not only Prigozhin’s weakness but also Putin’s. Although Wallenstein was probably not a traitor, once Ferdinand became convinced that he was, he acted decisively and authorized Wallenstein’s apprehension, dead or alive. In contrast, Putin has let Prigozhin live so far.
Wallenstein’s end suggests two possibilities. The first is that Ferdinand may have been a colder operator than Putin, despite the former’s lace collar and the latter’s tough-guy image. The second is that Putin is planning to kill Prigozhin—perhaps with the compliance of some of his own men, much like Wallenstein. Alive, especially in an independent base in Belarus, he will be a threat.
Lucian Staiano-Daniels is a visiting assistant professor at Colgate University. His book on the historical social anthropology of early seventeenth century common soldiers is upcoming from Cambridge University Press.
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