I had been fumbling for a symbol that might hit off this idiosyncrasy and suddenly I found it! In the girls’ flat in Stuttgart, turning over a picture book of German history, I stopped at a colour plate depicting three arresting figures. ‘Landsknechts in the time of the Emperor Maximilian I,’ was the caption. They were three blond giants. Challenging moustachios luxuriated over the jut of their bushy beards. Their floppy hats were worn at killing angles, and, under the curl of ostrich feathers, the segmented brims spread as incongruously as the petals of a periwinkle. Two of these men grasped pikes with elaborate blades, the third carried a musket; their hands on the hilts of their broadswords tilted up the scabbards behind them. Slashed doublets expanded their shoulders and quilted sleeves puffed out their arms like Zeppelins; but on top of all this, their torsos were wrapped slantwise in wide ribbons, loosely attached to their trunks by a row of bows at an opposite slant, and bright bands fluttered about their already-voluminous arms in similar contradictory spirals: scarlet, vermilion, orange, canary, Prussian blue, grass green, violet and ochre. From buttocks and cod piece to knee, their legs were subjected to the same contradictory ribbon-treatment, and, with cunning asymmetry, the bright bands were arranged differently askew on each leg. They were fluttering criss-cross cages of colour, like maypoles about to unfurl. The tights below, which ended in wide slash-toed duck-bill shoes, were striped and parti-coloured. One soldier, with a breast-plate over his finery, eschewed all ribbons below the fork. Instead, his legs were adorned with tiers of fringes as far as mid-calf—square-ended tapes that sprang out like the umbelliferous rings of foliage on those marsh plants called mare’s tails.

They were swashbuckling, exuberant and preposterous outfits, yet there was nothing foppish about the wearers: under the flutter of this blinding haberdashery, they were grim Teutonic soldiers, and mediaeval still. All this slashing which caught on everywhere, was a Teutonic thing. It began in the late fifteenth century, when miles of plundered silk were sliced up to patch the campaigning tatters of some lucky mercenaries: they went berserk among the bales; then, carried away, they started pulling their underlinen through the gaps and puffing it out. Once launched, the fashion spread to the courts of the Valois and Tudors and Stuarts and broke at last into its fullest flower at the field of the Cloth of Gold.[7] But the Landsknechts were objects of dread. They swore and hacked their way through all the religious and dynastic wars of the Empire; and, while they plied their pikes, buildings were beginning to go up. When Charles V succeeded Maximilian in 1519, the meridian splendour of the Landsknechts coincided with a generation of glory that the Holy Roman Empire had not seen since Charlemagne and would never see again. Through inheritence, conquest, marriage and discovery, Charles’ Empire reached north to the Baltic settlements of the Teutonic knights, to the old Hanseatic world and the Netherlands; it stretched south to include the Duchy of Milan and swallowed up the outpost kingdoms of Naples and Sicily; it marched with Turkey on the Middle Danube and expanded to western Burgundy; then, skipping France—whose King, however, was the Emperor’s prisoner in Madrid—it leapt the Atlantic from the Pyrenees to the Pacific shores of Peru.