Mercenary recruitment was one instance of a broader pattern of marginalization

Evidence

Important as the formation of these armies was for the construction of the states that dominated Europe for more than 200 years, we must not be diverted from their more historical importance by the romantic richness of the social and political drama to which they contributed. Louis XI’s innovation in 1474, of organizing a “French infantry without Frenchmen” was revolutionary in scale, not in character. The tactic of composing armies from mercenaries and from marginal peoples and social strata extended back into the Middle Ages and earlier. Imperial armies, republican armies, bandit armies, invading armies and defending armies, the armies of rebellious slaves, of nobles, and even of the chauvinist medieval cities, all laid claim to, or incorporated to some extent, souls for whom they had at best few considerations in less intense times. More significantly, in reviewing this phenomenon for the sixteenth and later centuries, the point is not that mercenaries were recruited from the outside and from among those least secure internally; this is simply the best documented form of a more generalized pattern of structural formation and social integration. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 193

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes that assembling armies from outsiders is part of a ‘generalized pattern of structural formation and social integration,’ a key concept for understanding the racial ordering of capitalism.