In Zug the mercenary soldiers were recruited for the French royal house. Print of the city from the 17th century.
Swiss National Museum

Maria Jakobea’s sister, ‘Frau Landammännin’ Maria Barbara Zurlauben (1660-1724), also recruited soldiers in Zug. Surviving documents show that she was also entrusted with the actual management of the company: she took receipt of the monthly accounts and reports sent in by the officers in France, and corresponded with them about current problems. The women were not simply stand-ins for absent men. Maria Jakobea Zurlauben paid for advertising from her own resources. After the death of Beat Heinrich Josef, she travelled to Paris to sift through his estate and claim her money. She also participated in the financial profits of the mercenary business, and her husband was given an officer’s post in his brother-in-law’s company. In return, Maria Jakobea had to take their aged mother into her household and look after her.

The portraits of highly decorated mercenary leaders, their ostentatious stately homes, heroic tales and genealogies extending centuries back into the past provide a glamorous backdrop for the seductively simple story of a dynastically organised mercenary business: within individual dynastic houses, companies of mercenaries were passed on, down the generations, to the eldest son, who as the new head of the family called the shots and demanded obedience from other relatives. However, a glance at the womenfolk shows that the story is more complicated. The mercenary business was in fact a type of collectively owned enterprise, embedded in a convoluted network of multi-faceted relationships and claims of numerous relatives amongst whom a balance had constantly to be struck.

Nathalie Büsser

Handsome men for ‘Frau Hauptmannin’