From Killers to Peacekeepers: The Bloody History of Swiss Mercenaries

Every day, tourists crowd the Vatican courtyards snapping photographs of the Pontifical Swiss Guard. The guards stand motionless in their ridiculous uniforms—blue, red, and orange striped hose, white gloves, helmets that look like they belong in a Renaissance fair. They look ceremonial. Decorative. Like Swiss heritage theme park employees rather than soldiers.

But those uniforms tell a story. A story about blood, poverty, ambition, and the slow, painful realization that exporting death was not a sustainable business model.

For four centuries, Switzerland’s main export wasn’t chocolate or watches. It was war. Young Swiss men—desperate, ambitious, or simply hungry—left their mountain villages to become mercenaries for the kings of France, the Dukes of Milan, the emperors of Austria. They were called the Reisläufer (literally “those who go to war”). They were unstoppable. Legendary. Feared across Europe.

And then they lost. Decisively. At a place called Marignano.

The Swiss mercenary era didn’t end because Switzerland became peaceful. It ended because Switzerland realized that exporting warriors to foreign wars was a path to extinction. The guards at the Vatican are not a relic of pride. They’re a monument to guilt—the last survivors of an industry that nearly destroyed the nation that created it.

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When the Swiss Ruled the Battlefield

Walk through any Swiss museum, and you’ll see them: paintings of pike formations, helmets with elaborate decorations, accounts of battles across Italy, France, and Germany where Swiss soldiers dominated. These weren’t fantasies. For 200 years, the Swiss were genuinely unstoppable on the battlefield.

The reputation began in the late 13th century. Swiss forces—disciplined, organized, using new pike and halberd tactics—defeated the mounted cavalry of the Austrian Habsburgs repeatedly. Word spread across Europe: if you wanted to win a war, you hired Swiss.​

The result was an economy built on exportable violence. Switzerland was poor. The Alps produced almost nothing—no minerals, no trade routes, no agricultural surplus. Young men faced futures of subsistence farming in small villages. But they could fight. They trained relentlessly. And Europe’s wars provided unlimited opportunities.​

The Swiss cantons systematized this. They negotiated “capitulations”—formal contracts—with foreign powers. France, Milan, Venice, Austria: all paid premiums for Swiss contingents. The cantons took a cut. Individual soldiers received regular wages. It was capitalism applied to warfare.​

By 1740, France alone employed over 12,000 Swiss mercenaries. During the Austrian War of Succession, more than 20,000 Swiss soldiers operated across Europe simultaneously. These weren’t drafted conscripts. They were professionals. Career soldiers. Killers for hire.​

The economic impact on Switzerland was profound. Young men left their villages with nothing and returned with money—either to invest or to disappear into foreign graves. Cantons collected “pensions” (really payments from foreign powers for the right to recruit on Swiss soil), allowing them to keep taxes low at home. Switzerland became a military labor exporter—not unlike guest worker programs in the modern era, except the destination was war zones instead of factories.​

But something sinister lurked beneath the prosperity: the business was fundamentally extractive. It pulled young men away from building domestic economy or infrastructure. It kept Switzerland in a state of military volatility, where cantons competed to recruit soldiers and please foreign powers. And it created a culture where violence was an acceptable export commodity.

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The Turning Point: Marignano, 1515

September 13-14, 1515 was the worst day in Swiss military history up to that point.

A Swiss contingent of approximately 20,000 soldiers, hired by the Duke of Milan, faced a French army commanded by King Francis I near the town of Marignano (in modern-day Milan). The Swiss believed they were invincible. They had never been defeated in a major engagement. Their pike squares had crushed every cavalry charge, every infantry formation, every tactic thrown at them.​

But the French had artillery. Heavy cannons that could shatter pike formations from a distance where swords and pikes could not reach. And halfway through the battle, Venetian reinforcements arrived and attacked the Swiss from the rear.​

The result was catastrophic. Approximately 16,500 soldiers died—the overwhelming majority Swiss. It was a massacre, not a battle. The Swiss withdrew in complete defeat. The French took Milan. The age of Swiss military dominance on the European stage ended in a single afternoon.​

The immediate impact was economic: Switzerland lost a key client (the Duke of Milan lost his duchy). But the deeper impact was psychological. For the first time, the Swiss understood that their reputation was not invulnerable. Technology—specifically, artillery—had rendered their traditional tactics obsolete. Pikemen, no matter how disciplined, could not storm cannons.​

More profoundly, the defeat planted a seed of doubt. Was this worth it? Young men had died by the thousands, far from home, for a foreign duke’s political ambitions. The victory went to a French king. The money stayed with the canton officials who negotiated the contracts. The dead stayed in Italian soil.

The Swiss began to withdraw. Gradually, deliberately, they stepped back from Italian campaigns. They continued mercenary service in other contexts—in France, Austria, and elsewhere—but the assumption that Switzerland would dominate European wars was broken.​

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Swiss Mercenary History: From Warriors for Hire to Armed Neutrality (1315-Present) 

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The Lion of Lucerne: The Last Stand

Skip forward nearly 280 years. The year is 1792. The French Revolution is consuming itself. King Louis XVI—who had once commanded the loyalty of European monarchs—finds himself a prisoner in the Tuileries Palace in Paris, besieged by revolutionary forces demanding his death.

Inside the palace stands a contingent of Swiss Guards. Approximately 900 soldiers, elite, disciplined, the descendants of the very mercenaries who dominated Europe 200 years before. They are, ostensibly, servants of the French crown. But they are also Swiss—outsiders in a civil war that is not their war.

On August 10, 1792, revolutionary forces storm the Tuileries Palace.

The Swiss Guards fight. They follow their discipline, their training, their oath. They stand at their posts as mobs burn and slaughter. But there are thousands of revolutionaries and only hundreds of Swiss. The guards hold the palace as long as possible, then are told by the King to retreat and cease fire.​

They do. And then the massacre begins.

Approximately 760 Swiss Guards are killed during the storming and in the immediate aftermath. Additional guards are captured, imprisoned, and murdered in the September Massacres—a period of systematic killing of prisoners by revolutionary mobs. By the time the slaughter ends, nearly 900 Swiss Guards are dead. Only about 100 escape.​

The guards themselves died trying to protect a man who was not their king, fighting in a civil war that was not their business, for a cause that Switzerland had no stake in. They died because of an oath made generations before, in an era when Switzerland was still a mercenary nation selling its soldiers to whoever paid.​

It was the symbolic end of the Swiss mercenary era.

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The Lion That Mourned

In 1820, a Danish sculptor named Bertel Thorvaldsen arrived in Lucerne with a commission: create a monument to the Swiss Guards who died at the Tuileries Palace.

Thorvaldsen carved directly into the living rock of a former quarry, creating a sculpture approximately 10 meters tall and 6 meters wide. The sculpture depicts a lion—mortally wounded, dying. A broken spear sticks through its shoulder. The lion’s head is bowed. One paw rests gently on the lilies of France—the symbol of French royalty.​

The monument was dedicated on August 10, 1821—exactly 29 years after the massacre.​

The inscription reads: Helvetiorum Fidei ac Virtuti (“To the Loyalty and Courage of the Swiss”).​

The American writer Mark Twain visited the monument and wrote that it was “the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world.” This was not exaggeration. The sculpture is devastating. It shows not glory, not triumph, but defeat, sadness, and sacrifice for a cause that Swiss soldiers themselves knew was doomed.​

The Lion of Lucerne is a monument that mourns the Swiss mercenary era. It does not celebrate it. It grieves it.

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The Guard That Remains

If the Swiss mercenary era truly ended in 1792, one remnant persists: the Pontifical Swiss Guard.

The Guard was founded on January 22, 1506, when Pope Julius II (“the Warrior Pope”) established a permanent contingent of 150 Swiss soldiers under Captain Kaspar von Silenen to protect papal interests. The Swiss were hired because of their reputation: proven warriors, disciplined, loyal, not entangled in European noble politics.​

For over 500 years, the Guard has persisted. It remains the only official Swiss military unit operating in foreign territory. Today, approximately 110-160 Swiss soldiers serve as the Pope’s personal bodyguard. They wear the same striped uniforms that tourists photograph—uniforms that have remained essentially unchanged since the 16th century.​

Every year on May 6, the Swiss Guard holds a ceremony commemorating the Sack of Rome on May 6, 1527, when 147 Swiss Guards died protecting Pope Clement VII during a Habsburg-French conflict. This ceremony is, in a sense, an annual memorial to the costs of the mercenary business—the same costs the Lion of Lucerne memorializes 265 years later.​

The Pope’s Swiss Guard is not a relic of glorious militarism. It is a survivor. An exception. The proof of the rule that Switzerland abandoned the business of exporting warriors.

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From Export to Embargo: The Path to Neutrality

The transformation from mercenary nation to neutral nation was not sudden. It was gradual, painful, filled with reversals.

After Marignano, the Swiss continued mercenary service for another 250+ years. Swiss soldiers fought in the Thirty Years’ War, the Wars of Spanish Succession, the Austrian War of Succession, the Napoleonic Wars. They were still feared, still highly valued, still profitable.​

But the philosophy was shifting. The seed planted at Marignano—maybe wars fought far from home are not worth the cost—grew slowly. The Tuileries massacre accelerated it. The Lion of Lucerne gave it a monument.

In the 19th century, the final break came. Switzerland, having endured Napoleonic occupation and internal conflict (the Sonderbund War of 1847, which we explored in another post), decided: No more. No more exporting young men to foreign wars. No more treating violence as a business.

In 1851, the Federal Council officially banned all recruitment for foreign military service. The mercenary era was over.​

With it came the commitment to armed neutrality—Switzerland would maintain a defensive military to protect itself, but would not engage in foreign conflicts. It was a profound shift: from Switzerland as a mercenary exporter to Switzerland as a neutral observer.

This is why the Swiss Guard at the Vatican is an exception. It is permitted precisely because it is unique—a holdover from before the ban, approved because the Pope is not a foreign power in the traditional sense (no territory, no ongoing wars, no imperial ambitions). Every other mercenary service was closed.​

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The Paradox: Why Peace Requires Remembrance

Here is the paradox of Swiss history: Switzerland is famous today for peace, neutrality, and stability. It is not famous for being a warrior nation. Yet the Swiss mercenary era—the centuries of exporting elite soldiers to European wars—is essential to understanding modern Switzerland.

The Swiss chose neutrality not because they were weak. They chose it because they were strong enough to afford to say no. They had proven they could dominate battlefields. But they had also proven that dominating battlefields did not produce prosperity, stability, or meaning.

The Lion of Lucerne stands as a monument to this lesson. It says: We paid the price. Our sons died for foreign kings. We will not do this again.

The Pontifical Swiss Guard persists as proof that Switzerland still honors commitments made before the ban. But they are tourists in uniforms, ceremonial guards in a small Vatican. They are not an army. They are a memory.

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Frequently Asked Questions About Swiss Mercenary History

Sources & References

1. Wikipedia: Swiss Mercenaries
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_mercenaries
2. Oxford Academic: “The Swiss Cantons and Their Business of War”
   https://fiscalmilitary.history.ox.ac.uk/article/swiss-cantons-and-their-business-of-war-anything-just-business
3. Wikipedia: Battle of Marignano
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marignano
4. Wikipedia: Lion Monument (Lucerne)
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Monument
5. Britannica: Swiss Guards
   https://www.britannica.com/topic/Swiss-Guards