3Zregiments. camp-followers, servants on the retinue of the officers and the local inhabitants. So numerous were 'paper recruits I (passevolants) that one historian has calculated that the effective strength of the seventeenth-century army may well have been as much as a third inferior to the numbers on paper. 3 The virtual absence of solidly-based state-controlled military institutions allowed such fraudulent practices to flourish as never before. Networks of financial, commercial and familial relations linked commanders, contractors and personages close to the centre of government in business cartels which made the fortunes of their members through cheating the state. There were, moreover, no keener enthusiasts of this form of activity than Richelieu and Mazarin who both flagrantly utilised their key position in the king's counsels as a means of personal enrichment. In addition, the notorious parsimony of the government in regard to its army also encouraged corruption. The huge standing army with which the state was waging war from the 1630s was immensely expensive and governments were obliged to have recourse to a plethora of extreme financial policies - tax-rises, creations of venal offices, the floating of huge loans, devaluations, revaluations, and the like - in order to ensure that their arIned forces remained in the field. In such fevered financial circumstances, the state often looked on the pay of the men as more of a luxury than a necessity. Moreover, in order to save money the governInent periodically disbanded some of the newer regiInents - which formed the Inajority - before their commanders had had sufficient time to amortize the investment they had made in purchasing a commission. This governmental stratagem inevitably had the effect of whetting commanders 1 appetites for a fast return on outlay by whatever means lay at hand.Z.The Initial Expansion of the Army: IncentivesThe most frequent victim of the whirligig of corruption and the cut-throat competition for fast profits and big savings which characterised the military machine created in the second quarter of the seventeenth century was the well-being of the soldiers. The increased size of the army presented unparallelled problems of control - not least of sani tary control. With regimental infirmaries still little more than a pipe-dream, for example, medical aid tended to be forthcoming either from charitably-disposed barber-surgeons on the retinue of the officers; froIn local quacks or charlatans; or from the prostitutes and campfollowers who were called on to justify their existence from time to time by acting as unpaid nurses. Health conditions were primitive in the extreme, especially in military camps, deaths in which always far exceeded deaths in battle: 'A body of troops which camps cannot remain for long in the same place', stated one government report in the early seventeenth century. iwithout an extreme infection occurring as a consequence of the dirtiness of the soldiers, the horses which die there and the beasts slaughtered '. 4
