I've been reading Peter H. Wilson's The Thirty Years' War: Europe's Tragedy, and throughout the book there seems to be a general theme of armies being extraordinarily expensive. More often than not simply having an army in the field put the responsible country into debt, one full army's yearly cost often doubling that of the yearly revenue for major powers like Denmark or Austria. Emperor Ferdinand was even forced to give up part of Austria to Maximilian of Bavaria to recuperate Bavaria's expenditures in the early stages of the war, since Ferdinand relied on Maximilian to raise the troops Ferdinand could not afford to raise! I'm used to ancient civilizations where Rome where armies were extremely cheap to maintain, albeit a large reason for that was the compulsory and non-paying nature of being a soldier. Nonetheless, why were armies so incredibly pricey? Was their price inflated for some reason or were monarchies extremely poor during this time period? When did this begin and when did maintaining a full sized army become more manageable once again in Europe?
Thank you.
A large standing army wasn't often done in the 16th and 17th Century until military reforms beginning in the 18th Century (Even then Armies were considered too expensive to actually fight battles), previously it was mainly done by overwhelming amounts of mercenaries and levies. For instance almost 15% of the adult male population of Scotland served as mercenaries[1].
The Dutch Republic in this time period however could fight wars because of is huge economic boom which allowed them to hire ridiculous amounts of mercenaries under the Dutch Estaates Army.[2]
[1] Europe in Crisis, 1598-1648, Geoffrey Parker
[2] The Dutch Republic, Johnathan Israel
A standing army is never easy to maintain. First you have to pay for logistics, like food, toiletries, barracks, armor, weapons, ammunition and then paying even more people to constantly supply or provide logistical services or support. And then, monarchs would run in to the problem of having to pay the standing army for their service as well as constantly training them even during peace time. As opposed to this, a levee army would be called on during war and dissolved after war so putting stress on the monarch's finance only during war time at the cost of having a very low quality troops of untrained peasants.
In the case of Stuart dynasty in England, the monarchy had to fight tooth and nails with the Parliament in order to increase tax(something that other monarchies did not have to deal with). It is not until popish plots and war fever against Catholics ran very high that Parliament does give in to the Stuarts demand for money to fight in the war(even then it is very little about 140,000 pounds, too little for Stuarts to fight and compete against other monarchs of Europe.). I also know that during the war the King had some prerogatives to bring back certain tax, like taxing coastal towns for protecting them against raiders and such.(A History of the Modern British Isles 1603-1707)
As for Europe in whole, keeping a standing army was just an unnecessary expenditure, not to mention it was never really cheap to begin with considering the price of the logistics of keeping them supplied, happy and able.