Baggage Train of European Armies
by As European armies expanded during the 16th and 17th centuries, so too did the baggage trains which followed them in the field and into camp. These required an enormous effort in organized transportation that strained to the limits the logistical capabilities of the day.
Thus, in 1602, Maurits of Nassau needed over 3,000 four-horse wagons to support a field army of just 24,000 men, and even this great land convoy carted only about 10 percent of the food or fodder which his troops consumed. The rest was bought or plundered from the countryside, from peasants and from villages or towns so unfortunate as to reside along the chosen route of march.
Aristocratic officers used to a pampered life of personal servants and luxury goods were a particularly heavy logistical burden on armies. For instance, on his 1610 campaign, Maurits requisitioned 942 wagons of which just under 130 were devoted to hauling goods and baggage for staff officers and his own household. As to camp followers, Martin Van Creveld estimates that a typical 16th-century European army of some 30,000 troops (principally homeless mercenaries reliant on the army for their pay, food, and shelter) needed 4 horses to each 15 men, and was likely followed by a throng of servants, sutlers, prostitutes, and wives and children of the troops, totaling perhaps 150 percent the size of the actual army.
The women of the train were wholly dependent on the men for their living, some as wives who might become prostitutes if their husband was killed, others as prostitutes who hoped to become wives. One bit of crucial military work done by the train, in particular by women and children, was to dig field works which European (though not Ottoman) professional soldiers in this period regarded as beneath their dignity. This attitude to the spade was not changed until the reforms of Gustavus Adolphus.
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