David Black Mastro wrote: |
Wow, I haven't been around for a while.
Great thread, folks. A lot of good points have been brought up, and I'd like at add a few more. The word "landsknecht" literally means "servant of the land, but Douglas Miller noted that, as early as 1500, the word was being spelled as lanzknecht, which has a totally different meaning ("lance-servant"). This alternate spelling apparently continued for a pretty long time, as Sir John Smythe makes reference to the "lance-knights of Germany" in his Certain Discourses Military of 1590. Clearly, folks weren't as specific in their use of various terms back then. |
I'm not trying to be overly picky but one must unterstand that prior to Martin Luther and the Brothers Grimm there was no real orthography in what is now Germany. People were spelling words as they wanted to. Maybe Smythe just made a mistake by translating from German into English what he thought of as obvious. But things can be a bit tricky *g*
A "Lanze" (lance) is something to be used from horseback, a footsoldier uses a pike (= Spiess). I've stumbled several times across the term "Spiessknecht" (pike-servant) in texts. The term Lanzknecht/Landsknecht no matter how it was spelled has nothing to do with a lance. It's simply a mistake made by later historians and often also period people who got it wrong when they heard the word for the first time. It's (almost) impossible to hear the difference. And now imagine someone with a Swabian or Bavarian dialect saying that word *g*
But it is true that from 1500 on the misleading term Lanzknecht was widely used. That's probably why Smythe made that mistake :)
I hope I didn't sound too much like a know-it-all idiot *g*
Btw, WWII regulars were called "Landser". This term comes directly from Landsknecht.