Word Finder - mercenary

definition

One motivated by gain, especially monetary.

definition

A person employed to fight in an armed conflict who is not a member of the state or military group for which they are fighting and whose primary motivation is private gain.

definition

One hired to engage in a figurative battle, as a corporate takeover, a lawsuit, or a political campaign.

definition

Motivated by private gain.

Not having received satisfaction he became a freebooter on land and sea, and mercenary soldier.

In Hungary it was applied to a class of mercenary foot-soldiers of Magyar stock.

The poverty-stricken and barbarous Nubians were strong and courageous, and gladly served in Egypt as mercenary soldiers and police.

Gauls, Samnites, Tyrrhenians, fought for him, while mercenary Greeks and Syracusan exiles fought for Carthage.

The conditions which have the five been described, of despotism, mercenary warfare and bourgeois prosperity, determined the character of this epoch, which was also the period when the great achievements of the Renaissance were prepared.

Above all he had to meet the difficulties caused by the arrival of the warriors of the First Crusade, which had been in a great degree initiated owing to the representations of his own ambassadors, though the help which he wanted from the West was simply mercenary forces and not the immense hosts which arrived to his consternation and embarrassment.

The mercenary troops at Elephantine mutinied and attempted to desert to Ethiopia, but were brought back and punished.

Silesia remained a principal objective of the various contending armies and was occupied almost continuously by a succession of ill-disciplined mercenary forces whose depredations and exactions, accentuated at times by religious fanaticism, reduced the country to a state of helpless misery.

A mercenary and a thief, Kano is the object of Sonya Blade's quest.

The office of voivode or hospodar was sold to the highest bidder at Stambul, to be farmed out from a purely mercenary point of view.

Then, too late, patriots like Machiavelli perceived the suicidal self-indulgence of the past, which, by substituting mercenary troops for national militias, left the Italians at the absolute discretion.

That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks!

The Netherlanders detested the Spaniards and everything Spanish, and this foreign mercenary force, together with the new bishops, was looked upon as part of a general plan for the gradual overthrow of their rights and liberties.

Having been recently defeated in Lincoln, they were hard pressed, and reinforcements were sent to them from Calais in a fleet commanded by a pirate and mercenary soldier called Eustace the Monk.

Or you can sneak up behind unsuspecting mercenary types and knife them in the spine, if you're a particularly malicious individual.

Giving him the title of senator, he sent him to Italy with the legate, Cardinal Albornoz, and having collected a few mercenary troops on the way, Rienzi entered Rome in August 13 54.

The former established himself in 64 at Panticapaeum, and was planning new campaigns against the Romans when his own troops revolted, and, after vainly trying to poison himself, he ordered a Gallic mercenary to kill him.

Mercenary troops are said to have been first levied from disbanded Germans, together with Breton and English adventurers, whom the Visconti and Castruccio took into their pay.

In the hands of able captains, like Francesco Sforza or Piccinino, these mercenary troops became moving despotisms, draining the country of its wealth, and always eager to fasten and found tyrannies upon the provinces they had been summoned to defend.

Immured in his castle at Pavia, accumulating wealth by systematic taxation and methodical economy, he organized the mercenary troops who eagerly took service under so good a paymaster; and, by directing their operations from his cabinet, he threatened the whole of Italy with conquest.

Formed for mercenary warfare, they proved a perilous instrument in the hands of those who used them, and were hardly less injurious to their friends than to their foes.

The Phocians, led by two capable generals, Philomelus and Onomarchus, replied by seizing Delphi and using its riches to hire a mercenary army.

The neighbouring lords attacked and ravaged the municipal territories; grave injuries were inflicted by the mercenary bands, especially by the Bretons and Gascons.

At this very time northern Hungary, including the wealthy mining towns, was in the possession of the Hussite mercenary Jan Giszkra, who held them nominally for the infant king Ladislaus V., still detained at Vienna by his kinsman the emperor.

The first grand characteristic of Hippocratic medicine is the high conception of the duties and status of the physician, shown in the celebrated "Oath of Hippocrates" and elsewhere - equally free from the mysticism of a priesthood and the vulgar pretensions of a mercenary craft.

Gentz has been very aptly described as a mercenary of the pen, and assuredly no other such mercenary has ever carved out for himself a more remarkable career.

The incessant conflicts among the Berber princes of northern Africa gave him employment as a mercenary, which he varied by piratical raids on the trade of the Christians.

He was familiar with the disadvantages under which republics laboured when they engaged professional captains of adventure and levied mercenary troops.

Hence the custom of fare, hiring mercenary troops was introduced, and a prince could never be certain, however numerous his vassals might be, that the advantage would not rest with his opponent.

In 409, at the head of a vast mercenary host, he sailed to Sicily, attacked Selinus (q.v.), and stormed the town after a murderous assault of nine days.

The question of the economic development of the state, and of trade to the Orient, the views of the mercenary labour-contractor and of the philanthropist, the factor of " upper-race " repugnance, the " economic-leech" argument, the " rat-rice-filth-and-opium " argument, have all entered into the problem.

It appears, then, that towards the middle of the second millennium before Christ, the Iranians made a great forward movement to the West, and that certain of their princesat first, probably in the role of mercenary leadersreached Mesopotamia and Syria and there founded principalities of their own., much as did the Germans under the Roman Empire, the Normans.

With an army mainly composed of mercenary Italians he invaded Sicily and Apulia, and although the progress of both these expeditions was arrested by defeats on land and sea, Manuel maintained a foothold in southern Italy, which was secured to him by a peace in 1155, and continued to interfere in Italian politics.

The expense of keeping up his mercenary establishment and the sumptuous magnificence of his court put a severe strain upon the financial resources of the state.

But he made head against it with the aid of mercenary bands, the loyal minority of the barons, and the shire-levies of his English subjects.

Indeed Johns few trusted confidants were nearly all foreigners, such men as the mercenary captains Gerard of Athies and Engelhart of Cigogn, whom he made sheriffs and castellans to the discontent of all Englishmen.

He found that he had no supporters save a handful of courtiers and officials and the leaders of his mercenary bands; wherefore in despair he accepted the terms forced upon.

Their worst enemies were those who during the civil war had beentheir best friends, the mercenary captains and upstart knights whom John had made sheriffs and castellans.

But this gave rise to chronic disorders and disputes, which led g p to armed intervention on the part of the Achaeans, who compelled the Spartans to submit to the overthrow of their city walls, the dismissal of their mercenary troops, the recall of all exiles, the abandonment of the old Lycurgan constitution and the adoption of the Achaean laws and institutions (188 B.C.).

Du Guesclin undertook to free France from the depredations of the "free companies," mercenary soldiers put out of employment by the cessation of the war.

Yet as the reality of Fenton's condition becomes clearer, he exhibits his own more mercenary, even callous, streak.

Described as a " mercenary little fortune hunter " .

Against that mercenary vision is Galileo's argument that " the only purpose of science is to relieve the hardship of life " .

Watling did not like him, calling him " a very mercenary, sordid person " .

Many of the biggest profiteers are in the ' private security ' - read ' mercenary ' - business.

Again we find the cult in Sicily, introduced, no doubt, by slaves and mercenary troops, who carried it even to the farthest northern limits of the Roman empire.

In this way he is led to regard the sophist successively - (t) as a practitioner of that branch of mercenary persuasion in private which professes to impart " virtue " and exacts payment in the shape of a fee, in opposition to the flatterer who offers pleasure, asking for sustenance in return; (2) as a practitioner of that branch of mental trading which purveys from city to city discourses and lessons about " virtue," in opposition to the artist who similarly purveys discourses and lessons about the arts; (3) and (4) as a practitioner of those branches of mental trading, retail and wholesale, which purvey discourses and lessons about " virtue " within a city, in opposition to the artists who similarly purvey discourses and lessons about the arts; (5) as a practitioner of that branch of eristic which brings to the professor pecuniary emolument, eristic being the systematic form of antilogic, and dealing with justice, injustice and other abstractions, and antilogic being that form of disputation which uses question and answer in private, in opposition to forensic, which uses continuous discourse in the law-courts; (6) as a practitioner of that branch of education which purges away the vain conceit of wisdom by means of crossexamination, in opposition to the traditional method of reproof or admonition.

You take the part of a mercenary pilot hired to quash a robotic rebellion on a lunar mining colony.

Also, most people have a mix of missionary and mercenary qualities; it's unusual to find someone who is 100% pure.

Go to the Pub and hire a high level mercenary.