With these words Olivier, a soldier friend of Von Grimmelshausen’s famous Simplicius Simplicissimus, referred to his stay in the Dutch army in the 1620s. Such a well-controlled army was obviously a rare phenomenon in early seventeenth-century Europe. Plunder and mutiny were familiar all over the continent, due above all to the impact of the increasingly large, uncontrolled armies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2