Scholarly interest in early modern European military entrepreneurship appears to be on the rise with recent publications by David Parrott, Rafael Torres Sánchez, and others. Suzanne Sutherland's detailed study of the Italian nobleman and imperial Habsburg general Raimondo Montecuccoli adds another important contribution to this growing body of literature by expanding our understanding of the transregional dimensions of military service during the Thirty Years’ War and beyond. Despite his name falling into obscurity in recent centuries, Montecuccoli lived an extraordinary life. He raised troops, managed logistics, commanded armies in pitched battles, partook in diplomatic missions, advised rulers, and composed military treatises—all while crisscrossing Central Europe, juggling multiple loyalties, and navigating court rivalries. These accomplishments, which Sutherland argues were reflected in the careers of many Italian military entrepreneurs, bolstered Austrian Habsburg power, and paved the way for the birth of military science. In pushing for greater recognition of the “diffused nature of power on the eve of modernity,” her book does not dispute state development narratives that draw correlations between the expanding scale of war and the increasing centralization of European governments (10). However, it does push back against Michael Roberts and Geoffrey Parker's framing of Europe's military revolution as an abrupt shift with origins in a specific time and place. Instead, Sutherland insists on the need to “decentralize” the study of military change to account for the pluralistic nature of early modern state power. This alternative approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of this change as a prolonged, non-linear process shaped by overlapping networks and the converging experiences, ideas, and practices of itinerant military entrepreneurs like Montecuccoli.
Over the course of six chapters, Sutherland weaves together the political developments, intellectual currents, and personal relationships that facilitated Montecuccoli's rise from minor nobleman to famed general and trusted military advisor to the emperor. The book begins in Renaissance Italy, a century before his birth, where aristocratic engagement in contractual warfare (as condottiere) and print culture led many to start prioritizing experience and expertise over rank and origin. Drawn by opportunities, honors, and rewards, Italian nobleman gravitated toward pro-Catholic Habsburg service in the Thirty Years’ War. For these military entrepreneurs, who comprised an influential transregional class, the war remained largely a family business. In joining the imperial army, Montecuccoli continued a proud tradition of Habsburg loyalty that he hoped would earn prestige, power, and wealth for himself and his dynasty. In turn, relatives provided him with lines of credit and built out patronage connections as part of “an aristocratic enterprise of coercion in which family members collaborated in the effort to expand their authority in new territories and political jurisdictions” (83). Even with familial support, the road to success for a military entrepreneur was difficult and fraught with danger. Montecuccoli endured financial hardships, gruelling campaigns, imprisonment, and personal attacks, pointing to the many pitfalls that could derail a promising career. However, through an acute sense of “loyalty, obedience, rationality, and the sacrifice of personal glory for the greater public good,” Montecuccoli avoided the fate of Albrecht von Wallenstein, Wenzel Lobkowitz, and others (118). He came to embody the versality of an ideal seventeenth-century nobleman, serving not only as a battlefield commander but also as a diplomat to Queen Christina of Sweden and a royal escort for Margarita Teresa of Spain. The twilight years of his life were spent synthesizing decades of experience and knowledge, arguing for the replacement of the very model of military entrepreneurship behind his meteoric rise with “a new military science oriented around managing the demands of a professional army” (153).
The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur greatly enhances our understanding of the role played by aristocratic networks in waging war, conducting diplomacy, and enhancing state power. Sutherland's ability to link Montecuccoli's career to the broader cultural and intellectual world will also appeal to scholars interested in the development of dynastic identity, political theory, and scientific methods. Surprisingly, the historical significance of imperial humanism is only lightly discussed, despite Sutherland recognizing it as a central component of Italian education and the formative impact it clearly had on Montecuccoli's personal “understanding of history as a succession of empires” extending from Rome through the Ottomans (163). If the Ottoman Empire did in fact shape European military development in hitherto unseen ways, as Sutherland claims, imperial humanism may very well be the key to understanding how. There is also room for comparative research to be done on military entrepreneurs in other kingdoms to corroborate the somewhat tenuous claim that the book's “conclusions relate to other armies and to aristocratic experiences more broadly” (9). If this is true, a thorough account of Montecuccoli's career may only be the first of many steps needed to truly understand the complex origins and features of military change across early modern Europe.
