Black Company

The Black Company or the Black Troops was a unit of Franconian mercenaries during the Peasant's Revolt in the 1520s during the Protestant Reformation in Germany.

The original German name of the Black Company was "Schwarzer Haufen". "Schwarz" (black) pointed out the ideological distance from the large peasant army at that time, which called itself the "Heller Haufen" ("Hell" meant "light-colored"). The German word "Haufen" was the common military description by the peasants for their armies. It was never used again in history for an army, possibly because the word "Haufen" means "heap" in German.

The Black Company was formed in 1525 in Rothenburg out of local home-guard farmers - maybe 600 of these men - and a company of mercenary knights.

The leader of the Black Company, at least nominally, was nobleman Florian Geyer. He managed to make the Black Company something like a company of real soldiers instead of just armed rabble. Some of the knights were probably his vassals.

When the Company had taken over the area around Rothenburg, it proceeded to Swabia to destroy fortified monasteries and castles to prevent their becoming strongholds of the Swabian League. All those who didn't attack the Black Company were not harmed during these actions. But in Sweinsburg, Swabia, another company, led by the peasant leader Jaecklein Rohrbach, executed about 50 local knights after they had opened fire on two negotiators. Geyer disapproved of this slaughtering and moved his troops back to Franconia but continued to fight. But Rohrbach's action had sealed the fate of captured peasants and of Geyer's Black Company. From this time, the Truchsess ("Steward") of Waldburg, commander of the Swabian League, showed little mercy to them and hunted them down ruthlessly throughout Swabia.

In the Battle of Ingolstadt in May, 1525, the Black Company found itself alone against the forces of the Swabian League after its allies had been destroyed. The Black Company fought its way back to Ingolstadt and occupied the ruins of the castle, the main buildings of which the members of the Company had themselves burned down some months before. The troops of the League encircled the castle and started their attack. The occupants fought off two assaults but were killed during the third, which followed shortly after the League's heavy artillery breached the massive walls.

Geyer himself wasn't there during the last battle. He waited for an escort in Rothenburg, but was banned from the city before it arrived. Geyer traveled North and was robbed and killed by two servants of his brother-in-law Wilhelm von Grumbach. He died in the night of June 9–10 in the forest near Rimpar.

The Black Company remained very popular to the present day, although Swabian rulers did everything to destroy its fame in the years after the uprising by publishing a lot of "facts" about the crimes the peasants supposedly had committed. The song Wir sind des Geyers schwarzer Haufen ("We are Geyer's Black Company") is still found in many German songbooks today.