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A mercenary is a private individual who joins an armed conflict for personal profit, is otherwise an outsider to the conflict, and is not a member of any other official military.
The definition originally applied only to commanders of mercenary companies, condottiero in medieval Italian meaning 'contractor' and condotta being the contract by which the condottieri put themselves in the service of a city or lord.
Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, pirates, and sovereigns: state-building and extraterritorial violence in early modern Europe Princeton University Press, 1994. ISBN 1-4008-0801-4 Describes the building of the modern state system through the states' "monopolization of extraterritorial violence."
Mercenary is an adjective meaning "motivated by private gain". It is also a noun: a mercenary is a person primarily concerned with making money at the expense of ethics, most often used to refer to a soldier who fights for hire.
(a) Is specially recruited locally or abroad in order to fight in an armed conflict; (b) Is motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and, in fact, is promised, by or on behalf of a party to the conflict, material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar rank and functions in the armed forces of that party;
Saracen was a term used both in Greek and Latin writings between the 5th and 15th centuries to refer to the people who lived in and near what was designated by the Romans as Arabia Petraea and Arabia Deserta. The term's meaning evolved during its history of usage. During the Early Middle Ages, the term came to be associated with the tribes of Arabia. The oldest known source mentioning ...
Police in Hartford, Connecticut, are searching for the suspect who opened fire at a 12-year-old who threw a snowball at a car. Officers responded to a report of a shooting around 7:15 p.m ...
In an interstate conflict, the definition of "combatant" is found in Article 43 (2) of Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions: "Members of the armed forces of a Party to a conflict (other than medical personnel and chaplains covered by Article 33 of the Third [Geneva] Convention) are combatants, that is to say, they have the right ...