Knights of Steel : Landsknecht - Black T-Shirt

Disciplined centurions, medieval knights, furious Spartans, lethal Vikings, honorable samurai, untamed Celts, courageous Thirds, legendary native Indians, fearsome Aztecs... Warriors of the world who have changed history. Idealists and mercenaries faced almost always in cruel and unjust wars. Acts of heroism, bravery and honour are sullied by the most despicable and ruthless actions... The warrior by his activity of Justice, Fortitude and Temperance, has to avoid the effects of the wars, not to invent, to promote, to foment and to live of them.

"He was not the most honest or the most pious man, but he was a brave man" P. Reverte.

If you lived dangerously and your life was hanging by a thread, if you defied authority, defending your reason and rights with the proud point of your sword, if you sacrificed yourself and were generous and human, if you were fearless, reckless, arrogant, brave, adventurous, seductive, rogue, loyal, if you were capable of the most heroic but also the meanest actions, if you were guided by your code of honour, if you sought glory on the margins of society and the law, if you lost your innocence in the face of the harsh reality of mud and blood, and if, disenchanted, everyone abandoned you. .. then you were probably an Old Thirdsman, a tired hero in rusty armour, a forgotten anti-hero like a cursed Alatriste.

"He was not the most honest or the most pious man, but he was a brave man" P. Reverte.

If you lived dangerously and your life was hanging by a thread, if you defied authority, defending your reason and rights with the proud point of your sword, if you sacrificed yourself and were generous and human, if you were fearless, reckless, arrogant, brave, adventurous, seductive, rogue, loyal, if you were capable of the most heroic but also the meanest actions, if you were guided by your code of honour, if you sought glory on the margins of society and the law, if you lost your innocence in the face of the harsh reality of mud and blood, and if, disenchanted, everyone abandoned you. .. then you were probably an Old Thirdsman, a tired hero in rusty armour, a forgotten anti-hero like a cursed Alatriste.

If you are a warrior and you don't have a beard, have it looked at... Let's take a look at history: Leonidas looked impressive with his 300 men…but his bushy beard was equally scary, Ciro and Jerges combed their incredible long beards, while Attila the Hun, whore a very thin but fine beard, in the Ancient Mesopotamia they even wore ringlets on theirs beards!! Let's remember the white beards of the Samurai masters, and the presumptuous Vikings who placed their razor blades in their tombs, what about the gods of Ancient Greece, Zeus or Poseidon...? and then came Alexander the Great and he screwed up by forbidding his soldiers to wear them because in battle their enemies caught them by making them fall off their horses. Neither did the Romans, because they gave them to the gods in their ritual (depositio barbae) of their passage from childhood to adulthood, or the native Indians who shaved like maniacs, and what about the pharaohs who manscaped their balls but wore false beards?? Well, in spite of these and other exceptions, the beard has its own twist and turns and brings out the warrior that exist in each of everyone of us.

Ostentatious, fearless, brave and courageous warriors, so fearful that even the very devil closed the gates of hell because he was afraid of them... These knights of steel or servants of the land were the warrior elites of the Renaissance, recognizable by their striking features, colorful and extravagant clothing (until then reserved for the clergy and nobility, as they were exempted from the rules of the state and the sanctuary laws) their actions were recorded in legendary battles such as Pavia, San Quintín, the siege of Vienna, or the sack of Rome.

In a period, at the end of the 15th century, in which feudalism was dying —with it the caste system that determined by birth the roles in life— and the art of war was changing, the peasants, craftsmen or servants had the possibility to become by their own merits pikemen, arquebusiers or swordsmen within the new mercenary armies of the emperor. Without a noble title, lineage and ancestry, the Lansquenets were able to become highly paid land soldiers thanks to their impeccable combat technique, their high risk in the battlefield that made their lives "so short and brutal" (Maximilian I).

Under the reign of Carlos V, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and his son Felipe II, Spain became the first world power, the champion during the Golden Age of that vast empire in which "the sun did not set." He assumed the old idea of ​​establishing a universal Empire of supranational and spiritual unity, an ideal of an Empire successor to the European Tradition (the medieval Christianites, the Romanites of the Roman Empire) against the Protestant currents, the Europe of Nations and against the thriving Ottoman Empire.

While the “Civilizing Empire” spread across America and the world (Hispanity), the emperor managed to face the threat of the Turks (Vienna and Lepanto —Felipe—). But the expansion of the Protestant Lutheran Reformation and the hostility of France and other countries such as Belgium, Holland or England frustrated (Westphalia) the realization of the ideal of Empire - that continuation project of the wisdom tradition, the East / West Indo-European tradition and Pagan tradition through which we can transcend through the initiatory and warrior path, through grace, the fruit of our works. As a consequence, the predatory Empires and the Europe of the sovereign Nations of the modern world appear.