6 - Elizabeth Sanner and the Dead Men

Summary

This chapter analyzes interactions between the Mansfeld Regiment and its surroundings, including confessional conflict, fights, burials, and the regiment’s effect on local demographics. The Mansfelders were both Protestant and Catholic, but the regiment was quartered in a Catholic land. Its members fought with or plundered locals. However, its effects on baptism, marriage, and death rates in most of the areas I analyzed were ambiguous. The exception is tiny Pontestura: Not only was the effect of numerous armies magnified in such a small town, but wrongdoings there were less likely to come to the attention of the authorities. I also locate a woman who may have been the wife of the enigmatic regimental secretary Mattheus Steiner in local baptismal records, exemplifying that interactions between Mansfelders and locals were not solely hostile. This chapter examines military death rates, which were awful even outside of combat, and may find evidence of the great Italian plague of 1629–1631 in the deaths of soldiers and other marginal men.