Mercenary, hired professional soldier who fights for any state or nation without regard to political interests or issues.
In Terry Jones's 1980 book Chaucer's Knight, he demonstrates that the supposedly gentlemanly knight is nothing but a mercenary, a professional killer, and his tale a crude parody of Boccaccio's Teseida that reveals the Knight's own lack of education and little understanding of the tenets of chivalry.
Although brought up in the military tradition of Frederick the Great, he was one of the first to realize the necessity for conscripted citizen armies rather than small, long-service, professional mercenary forces.
Permanent embassies were accredited between sovereigns, and on the battlefield standing armies of professional and mercenary soldiers took the place of the feudal array that had reflected the social structure of the past.
They work on relatively meagre fees that bear no relation to the figures that the "wealthy lawyers" charge individuals and companies, and the best are driven not by mercenary business sense but professional pride and a passion for what they do.
According to Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale, and Alan Hirsch, a freelance writer, the term "Armies" in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution actually means a mercenary corps of paid professionals, recruited either at home or abroad.
The same was true if you were a Carian mercenary, an educated Greek, a professional sailor, or a member of the Pharaonic court.
Why, with a professional black-ops mercenary helicopter scooting back into Mali to finish a murderous job on a loyal Uncle Sam squad, didn't they count the resultant bodies?
Pritsak identified the Kylfings as a "professional trading and mercenary organization" that organized expeditions northward, into the Saami lands, as distinct from other Varangian and viking groups whose expeditions focussed on lands to the west and east of Scandinavia.
In 1303 Andronicus hired a professional army of mercenaries, the Grand Catalan Company.
"This is war … using professional diversionary groups, mercenaries, volunteers and the local population.
