I'm not trying to claim it is acceptable or not. I'm just commenting about the time period used for examples.
As for the mercenary thing, I'm fairly certain that Tom has said in the past that the noble-led mercenary thing is not acceptable, and he has vetoed all attempts to allow such a thing to be easier or officially implemented. There's no way I'm going to be able to find a quote, so I'm going to stay out of the debate on this topic.
I would note that this can be seen in the fact that a mercenary army that's part of a realm will have a
very hard time actually operating as a mercenary army without
explicit diplomatic support from the realm—in other words, if you want to be at war with a realm that you've been hired to fight, you need your realm to declare war on them.
And if you've been hired to fight a realm that's an ally of an ally...what are you going to do?
(And that's not even considering the other side—how will you fight alongside someone you've been hired to defend without your realm allying with them?)
