They are forbidden to remain for more than twenty-four hours within the communal fortress, and are driven out of other cities; the citizens themselves are forbidden to shelter them under pain of stif fines. The Hundred Years' War will put an end to these great migrations. Already artillery was revolutionizing the battlefield.
But from the twelfth century onward, the influence of monetary media had grown considerably, announcing the end of the medieval status quo, that highly praised equilibrium of political and military organizations. The traditional ost-system is accompanied by remunerations. Knights soon receive wages. For a time, the military personnel is chosen primarily from among the gentry-the youngest son, for example, serving as a private servant and receiving a sizable salaryuntil the necessities of recruitment finally render the origins of the mercenaries rather dubious. Highwaymen and swashbucklers, descendants of Plautus' anti-heroes, "enemies common to al humanity," as Isocrates caled them-these itinerant market objects are like the rest of the peasantry. Since antiquity, their condition has been scarcely better than that of the slave, who, at least, might be freed in wartime and drafted into the armed forces, especially the Navy, which required a large number of coordinated mechanical maneuvers, while land warfare was still considered a thing of "free men."
The military proletariat finds itself mixed in with the permanent exodus of the mobile masses; it issues from them as did the migrant worker of the nineteenth century or the ilegal alien of the twentieth. The highwayman circulates; as his name suggests, he roams the highway. This is his class space as he travels in search of uncertain, seasonal employment. Callot will later depict him as a "capitano de baroni," a ragged and mutilated braggart, a fearsome, pitiful vagabond still sporting plume and banner in the interminable procession of the miseries of war.
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I Speed and Politics