During the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), military regulations were created in the armies of individual European states, which codified the rights and obligations of army members. These orders responded to the usual happenings in the army, and above all to various offenses and vices that were spreading in it. It was not easy to maintain discipline in the army, because most recruits were not drawn to the army by ideals, but by economic need, a crisis in the family or even the threat of criminal prosecution. A number of conflicts were also caused by the fact that the soldiers came from different regions of Europe. In addition, the individual components of the army often did not get along well, conflicts mainly occurred between infantry and horsemen.

“In an annotated set of military regulations that applied to Catholic German mercenaries fighting in Holland during the Eighty Years’ War, the Bavarian patrician and military jurist Petrus Pappus von Tratzberg enumerated the various misdeeds that soldiers were forbidden to commit. The relevant code indicated that “all murder, rape of women, adultery, arson, theft, street robbery, public violence, [sexual] assault [Vbertrang], falseness, and other of the same wicked things and manifestly evil deeds, or unnatural abuse, should be punished by death.”30 Pappus proceeds to provide definitions and enumerate legal precedents for each of these prohibitions. Thus “unnatural abuse” includes parricide, incest, and sodomy, which he defines as same-sex copulation or copulation between a human and an animal. In his commentary on the “rape of women” [Frawenschenden], Pappus references law codes that date back to antiquity. He also includes descriptions of gruesome punishments Roman commanders meted out to soldiers who committed rapes. Pappus notes that Emperor Marcus Opellius Macrinus (r. 217-18) punished two of his soldiers who raped a virginal servant girl in the lodging in which they were quartered by sewing them alive into two oxen with just their heads protruding while maggots ate them alive.32 Pappus also includes the precedent of the Ostrogothic King Totila (r. 541-52) who executed a soldier for raping” a virgin, giving all of his possessions to the woman.” (Osgood, Armies in the Sexual Imaginary of France and the Holy Roman Empire, 1500-1650).

The first edition was published in 1632.