I'd add that mercenaries were around, and were a serious problem, from the Late Middle Ages to 1648; some accounts I've read of the Hundred Years' War sound alm

I'd add that mercenaries were around, and were a serious problem, from the Late Middle Ages to 1648; some accounts I've read of the Hundred Years' War sound almost exactly like accounts of the Thirty Years' War 300 years later. France, like the Germanies, was reduced to a heap of ruins -- and not just because of the bubonic plague.