[Visigodo]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

What's the source of this?

Please buy and read TERCIOS DE ESPAÑA by Fernando Martínez Laínez and José María Sánchez de Toca y Catalá. The last man is Infantry General and diplomated from the “Estado Mayor” who has served in several destinies in Europa and Africa. Former president of the “Comité Alfa” and General of the Salamandre division in Bosnia. Co-author on the Spanish edition of the Historia de la Infantería Española and has puplished several articles in Defensa y Ejercito, Military Review and Rivista Militare.

We had a related discussion some time ago, where I noticed that you presumed that the average soldier of the glorious Spanish Tercios were mostly of Gothic descent. I'll say here the same thing that I told you then:

I am not sure or just can not remember that I have said that but if I said such statement probably was because my Gothicism (that is not the same as Nordicism as you know ) and some beer’s effect make me say that. The most probably thing is that I told you that a good number of “Hidalgos” served in the glorious “Tercios de España”.

Having served in the army in a time when it was not a bed of roses and a complete waste like it is today, and in a unit which was considered as elite and hard enough to provoke serious psychiatric problems and even suicides, I can assure you that the soldiers there would have eaten up the world if they had been ordered to do so.

Most of my comrades there did not come from accommodated social classes, but from the roughest neighbourhoods or from small villages. One would assume then that the pay was what made the unit and the longer term attractive to those men, as opposed to the symbolic pay that the men serving in conscripted units had. But again, it was only a little less miserable and it would only allow us to afford one or two days and nights out per month.. if we were lucky to be allowed out. And you can be sure that the background of the Spanish soldiers of the Tercios was at large similar to those, in a different time.

Well I do not doubt about the military qualities and value of your comrades but I have serious doubts that the background of the Spanish soldiers of the Tercios was similar at to those of the unit in that you served. I was serving in the "Military Police" in Valladolid and saw many Spanish soldiers from all over Spain even elite units.
It is true that in the "Tercios" served all type of men and every "Tercio" was a school of fame and a tribunal of merits. In the "Tercios" what worked was a meritocracy, where nobody is more than other, if he doesn't make more and knows more than another. But we have to keep in mind that in the "Tercios" served Grandes de España an great number of people from the noblest houses of Spain like Juan of Leyva, Antonio of Isunza, Juan of Gamboa, etc. and thousands of Castilian "hidalgos" and "infanzones" and "caballeros" from the Crown of Aragon also served. Let me say that it was plenty of men from small nobility (pequeña nobleza) that was especially abundant in Spain at that time not like nowadays (during the Austrias epoch about ten percent of the population was noble descent, see "La nobleza en la España moderna" by David García Hernán). One of the Spanish characteristics of those times is that for example people like Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, Ercilla, Hugo of Montcada etc. were soldiers, not like in other countries were for example people like Shakespeare, Corneille or Goethe, never fight as soldiers. And for astonishment of the European nobility, the Spanish nobility didn't scorn to serve his king on foot in the infantry.

Undoubtedly not all the men of the "Tercios" had such "quality" and also had peasants, artisans or simple and humble villainous but with "clean lineage" after all. But frankly speaking I believe that nowadays neither in Spain neither in any other country the world one could find men of that class.

But never mind, let me ask you this. You say: "There was even a late ordinance that prohibited the soldiers expressly to marry (unfortunately probably we got lost good blood because descendant lack as losses during the wars)."

I have never heard of such an ordinance. Not that I say that it didn't exist, but I would like to see it. Are you sure that you are not referring to the ordinance that forbid the soldiers from carrying their families with the Tercios?


By the way, look what I found in this forum of Galician genealogy. Anything in squared brackets are my comments:Also interesting to a discussion about the Tercios, it would be to classify El Gran Capitán, don Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the second son of the 5th Lord of Aguilar de la Frontera and of a noble lady who was the great-grandauther of the Infante don Fadrique Alfonso of Castille, and a Knight of the Order of Santiago.

Such ordinace exists and limited the limited the marriage to a sixth part of the men but as I say before was a late ordinance (See the work I have recommended) . In fact to not encouraging the marriage of the soldiers it was tolerated in the “Tercios” a contingent of prostitutes that some columnist estimates by ten percent. In all ways a thing is the law and other the life and the estimation is that more or less half of the men of the “Tercios” they were married. According to the mentioned book "the Spanish soldiers generally married women of the country where they resided and, they made good weddings." For that reason seems probably that not much women and children could go to Spain as most of them they went to the countries where they were from loosing Spain such a good lineages