Force
Swiss Guard
Swiss mercenaries whose pike squares dominated 15th-century battlefields; the Papal Swiss Guard still serves with halberd and sword.
Swiss soldiers were the Renaissance's most valuable export. The cantons' pike squares — citizen levies drilled to move like machines — destroyed Charles the Bold's Burgundian army three times running in the 1470s, and every crown in Europe bid for Swiss regiments after. 'Pas d'argent, pas de Suisses' — no money, no Swiss — became diplomatic proverb, and Swiss mercenaries anchored French royal armies for three centuries.
The Papal Swiss Guard, founded when Julius II hired 150 Swiss in 1506, is the surviving institution of that world. Its defining hour came at the Sack of Rome on 6 May 1527: 147 of 189 guardsmen died on the steps of St. Peter's holding the Landsknecht assault long enough for Clement VII to escape down the fortified corridor to Castel Sant'Angelo. Recruits still swear their oath each May 6th.
Today's Guard — Swiss Catholic males, sworn to the Renaissance halberd and trained on modern sidearms — is the world's smallest and oldest continuously serving army, its striped blue-red-yellow gala uniform a Renaissance survival (Michelangelo's design by legend only). Behind the pageantry stands the memory of 1527 and the Halberd-armed pike world of the cantons that made the word 'Swiss' mean unbreakable infantry across Europe.