Subject: infantry bodyguard
Culture: Italo-Swiss
Setting: Papacy 16-17thc
Context (Event Photos, Primary Sources, Secondary Sources, Field Notes)
* Royal 2006 p29-30
"The year 1506 was marked by several special events, special even for so rich a cultural period as the Italian Renaissance. It was in the spring of that year that Pope Julius II laid the cornerstone for the magnificent new basilica of St. Peter, whose basic design had been created by the well-known artist Donato Bramante (Michelangelo and other famous artistic figures would revise or add to the design in the century and a half that it would take to complete the new structure). The new church was meant to replace the crumbling older basilica whose origins, on the traditional site of the apostle Peter's martyrdom, went back over a thousand years. The ambitious project also reflected the pope's vision of restored prestige for the entire Roman Catholic Church. In the same year that the new church was begun, Julius planned and executed a military campaign to retake lands lost from the Papal States (the wide swath of territory across the middle of Italy ruled by the popes) in recent decades, including their second most important city after Rome, Bologna. Michelangelo was commissioned soon after the city fell to case a huge equestrian statue in bronze of the 'warrior pope.' And with Julius as he approached Bologna and entered the city was the special corps of soldiers he had recruited from Switzerland and received in Rome in January of 1506, the Papal Swiss Guard.
"The Swiss were a logical choice for this service. From the end of the thirteenth century until well into the eighteenth century, they were regarded as among the bravest and most reliable of fighting men in all of Europe. Just fifteen years before Julius created his papal guards, King Louis XI of France had decided that he too needed a special bodyguard and selected one hundred Swiss, who officially became his Garde de Cent Suisses. For hundreds of years after, armies in several European nations imitated Swiss mercenaries, ... so much so that the Swiss government had to take care that its own men fighting abroad would not become a threat to their own country -- or to one another if they ended up fighting on opposing sides in foreign wars. To possess an elite group of Swiss bodyguards in that age was the rough equivalent of having at your disposal a highly skilled modern secret service or even a special forces unit such as the U.S. Delta Force or Navy Seals."
Costume
*
"
Halberd
* Armes et armures de Charlemagne à Louis XIV 1967 p239
"A la fin du XVIIe siècle la hallebarde servait encore, avant la bataille, à mesurer la distance d'un rang à l'autre, qui devait être de la longueur de deux de ses hampes. Elle est, aujourd'hui encore, l'arme de service des Suisses du Vatican. Leurs hallebardes élégantes et bien entretenues, qui remontent toutes au XVIIe siècle, ajoutent, dans leur exercice pacifique, au faste des cérémonies religieuses à Saint-Pierre de Rome."
