States absorbed the autonomous regions that had supplied their mercenaries

Evidence

Since one function and result of the work of these mercenaries was the suppression of subject peoples, the degree of their success is directly indicated by their own absence, for the most part, from the political geography of modern Europe. The Absolute State (or its direct successors), the instrument that propelled them into prominence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (for France, into the late eighteenth century), ultimately absorbed the autonomous sectors from which the mercenaries originated. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 191