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Brigandage is the life and practice of highway robbery and plunder.Oxford English Dictionary second edition, 1989. "Brigandage" The first recorded usage of the word was by "Clive Holland Livy XXXVIII. xlv. 1011e, A privat brigandage and robberie." It is practiced by a brigand, a person who is typically part of a gang and lives by pillage and robbery.Oxford English Dictionary second edition, 1989. "Brigand.2" first recorded usage of the word was by "H. LUTTRELL in Ellis Orig. Lett. II. 27 I. 85 Ther ys no steryng of none evyl doers, saf byonde the rivere of Sayne..of certains brigaunts."
The word brigand entered English as brigant via French from Italian as early as 1400. Under the laws of war, soldiers acting on their own recognizance without operating in chain of command are brigands, liable to be tried under civilian laws as common criminals. However, on occasions brigands are not mere malefactors, but may be rebels against a state or union perceived as the enemy.
Bad administration and suitable terrain encourage the development of brigands. Historical examples of brigands (often called so by their enemies) have existed in territories of France, Greece and the Balkans, India, Italy, Mexico and Spain, as well as certain regions of the United States.
For a bandito or bando a man declared outlaw by proclamation, see the article Bandit.
The Calabrians who fought for Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, and the Spain irregular Conscription, which maintained the national resistance against the French from 1808 to 1814, were called brigands by their enemies. " It is you who are the thieves", was the defense of the who was tried as a brigand by a France court-martial during the reign of Joachim Murat in Naples.
In the Balkans, under Ottoman Empire rule, the brigands (called by the Greeks and hayduks or haydutzi by the South Slavs) had some claim to believe themselves the representatives of their people against oppressors. The only approach to an attempt to maintain order was the permission given to part of the population to carry arms in order to repress the klephts. They were hence called armatoli. In fact the armatole tended to act more as allies than enemies of the klephts.
The Scottish Marches supplied a theatre for the Border Reivers. After the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651), policing the Scottish tied up many English soldiers of the occupying New Model Army. Their contemporaries in Ireland became known as "tories". Rapparees, Irish guerrillas of a later generation, fought for King James II after the Revolution of 1688 and on his defeat degenerated into brigands.
The Apennines, the mountains of Calabria, the Sierras of Spain, were the homes of the Italian banditi, and the Spanish bandoleros (member of a gang) and salteadores (raiders). The great haunts of brigands in Europe have been central and southern Italy and parts of Spain.
In the years preceding the French Revolution, the royal government was defied by the troops of Smuggling and brigands known as faux saulniers, unauthorized salt-sellers, and gangs of Poaching haunted the king's preserves round Paris. The salt monopoly and the excessive preservation of the game were so oppressive that the peasantry were provoked to violent resistance and to brigandage. The offenders enjoyed a large measure of public sympathy, and were warned or concealed by the population, even when they were not actively supported.
writing in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica stated that in "Corsica the maquis has never been without its brigand hero, because industry has been stagnant, family feuds persist, and the government has never quite succeeded in persuading the people to support the law. The brigand is always a hero to at least one faction of Corsican people."
In the Balkan peninsula, under Turkish rule, brigandage continued to exist in connection with Christian revolt against the Turks. In Bulgaria famous brigand like irregulars were the Haiduti and Haiduci. The difference between the two is somewhat nuanced but essentially the Haiduti robbed mainly prominent Ottoman Citizens, Ottoman Tax collectors and fought mainly the Ottoman Bazhi-Bouzouks and Ottoman Garrisons, at some points known for liberating villages around the Stata Planina mountain range. They usually had support from the local Bulgarian population. The Haiduci were considered brigands by both the Ottoman Sultanate and by most local populations being seen as less freedom fighters and more common bandits. Haiduts were active from the XVIIth to the XIXth century playing an active role in securing finances for the Bulgarian national movements.
Marco Sciarra was the follower and imitator of Benedetto Mangone, who was documented to have stopped a party of travellers which included Torquato Tasso. Sciarrae allowed them to pass unharmed out of his reverence for poets and poetry. Mangone was finally taken and beaten to death with hammers at Naples. He and his like are the heroes of much popular verse, written in ottava rima beginning with the traditional epic invocation to the muse. A fine example is The most beautiful history of the life and death of Pietro Mancino, chief of Banditi, which begins:
In the Kingdom of Naples, every successive revolutionary disturbance saw a recrudescence of brigandage down to the unification of 1860–1861. The source of the trouble was the supporters of brigands (like Carmine Crocco from Basilicata, the most famous outlaw during the Italian unification) received from various kinds of manuténgoli (maintainers) – great men, corrupt officials, political parties, and the peasants who were terrorized, or who profited by selling the brigands food and clothes.
In the Campagna in 1866, two English travellers, William John Charles Möens and the Rev. John Cruger Murray Aynsley, were captured and held for ransom; Aynsley was released shortly thereafter. Möens found that the manuténgoli of the brigands among the peasants charged famine prices for food, and extortionate prices for clothes and cartridges.
In Catalonia, where brigands are called bandolers, it began in the strife of the peasants against the feudal exactions of the landlords. It had its traditional hero, Roc Guinart, who figures in the second part of Don Quixote. The revolt against the house of Austria in 1640 and the War of the Succession (1700–1714) greatly stimulated Catalan brigandage. A country gentleman named Pere Veciana, hereditary balio (military and civil lieutenant) of the archbishop of Tarragona in the town of Valls, armed his farm-servants and resisted the attacks of the brigands. With the help of neighbouring country gentlemen he formed a strong band, known as the Mossos (Boys) of Veciana, the precedent of current Catalan police, the Mossos d'Esquadra. The brigands combined to get rid of him by making an attack on the town of Valls, but were repulsed with great loss. The government of Philip V then commissioned Veciana to raise a special corps of police, the Esquadra de Catalunya. For five generations the colonel of the esquadra was always a Veciana. Since the organization of Guardia Civil by the Duke of Ahumada, about 1844, brigandage has been well kept down. At the close of the Carlist War in 1874 a few bands again infested Catalonia.
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