Furies Read online

  Contents

  Prelude

  1. A War Mosaic

  2. Soldiers: Plebeians and Nobles

  3. Sacking Cities

  4. Weapons and Princes

  5. Siege

  6. Armies: Ambulant Cities, Dying Cities

  7. Plunder

  8. Hell in the Villages

  9. Killing for God

  10. The State: Emerging Leviathan

  Afterword

  Appendix: Money

  Acknowledgments

  Plate Section

  Notes

  Bibliography

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Prelude

  A WORLD AT WAR

  In 1570, at the end of the third of France’s Wars of Religion (1562–1598), the king’s troops were at one point crossing the Loire River at the Pont-de-Cé, near Angers. As they went over the bridge, their progress was being cramped by more than eight hundred women, all camp followers. Sometime previously, Piero Strozzi, one of the premier generals of the age, had ordered that the women be dispersed. Now, in an outburst of angry impatience, he passed on the command that they be pushed off the bridge into the waters below.

  We can only imagine the ensuing scene of panic, screaming, struggles, and violence. Strozzi was obeyed and the women drowned.

  The reporter of this incident, Pierre de Bourdeille, refers to the women as “sluts and whores” (“garces et putains”). Many of them were perhaps prostitutes, but some—in keeping with the age and its customs—must have been companions or even concubines of some of the soldiers. However, it was a moment of crisis, and although Strozzi’s solution came close to touching off a mutiny, his officers managed to control the exploding commotion. His luck held. He might have had to face a small army run amuck.

  Female camp followers in the train of armies were a common feature of wartime, early modern Europe. But with their emphasis on factions at court and on the leading role of noblemen in the ranks of the Protestant rebels, standard accounts of the civil wars rarely even mention this fact.

  Famine, too, could produce stupefying incidents, and the following event, like the preceding one, may be adduced to throw light on the way we write the history of war.

  In the winter of 1630, a group of Italian villagers, subjects of the Duke of Mantua, caught a few disbanded soldiers out in the Mantuan countryside. The expert on the subject tells us that they proceeded to skin the captured men alive, to roast them, and then to eat what they had cooked.

  An event like this, belonging to the moral setting of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), is bound to trail an immediate, grievous history. And so it did. Floods and bad weather had stymied farming in Lombardy for nearly two years. The Po Valley lay steeped in famine. In September 1629, a few months before the grisly incident, thirty-six thousand Imperial soldiers had trekked down into Italy from Germany, intent on capturing Mantua. Two attacks on the city were bloodily repelled. The siege was lifted in late December. In the meantime, however, the soldiers laid waste to fields, plundered meager food supplies, set fire to houses, and treated peasants like pack animals by tying them to carts, using whips, and forcing them to pull loads.

  When the villagers got their hands on the demobbed soldiers, their choking rage and hunger dictated the ensuing savagery. Skinning, roasting, and eating them became a ritual of revenge and nutrition.

  A conclusion may be reeled out here. If we choose to write the history of war from the standpoint of diplomacy and high politics, the incidents at the bridge and in the Mantuan countryside need never be mentioned. For rulers and their ministers, affairs of state in early modern Europe were never about “little people”: camp followers, peasants, commoners in cities, or the rank-and-file soldier.

  When the historical analysis of war is masterminded by the ideas of “reason” and praxis in diplomacy and foreign affairs, war is negotiated into a rational and perfectly normal activity. Historians who see war in this light would seem to be taking a stance that puts them too close to the princes and ruling elites of past time. There were other voices, other testimonials, and so there must be other ways to take hold of the history of war.

  “A WAR MOSAIC”—MY OPENING CHAPTER—shows that from 1450 to 1700, Europe tended to be one world when it came to war. Professional armies of mercenaries were recruited all over the Continent. In the fifteenth century, Poland hired German, Spanish, Bohemian, Hungarian, and Scottish soldiers. Later, Sweden fought in Muscovy with Irish, English, Scottish, French, and German troops. Units of Croats, Germans, Walloons, Albanians, and especially Swiss served in French armies. In the Netherlands, Italians and Spaniards fought beside Irishmen, Germans, Dalmatians, and Walloons. Regiments of Swiss pikemen fought for Spain, France, and Venice, as well as for German and Italian princes. Companies of Poles, Hungarians, and Croatians fought in German regiments. And when it came to leadership in wartime, Italian generals—Piccolomini, Montecuccoli, Colloredo—distinguished themselves at the head of German Imperial armies. The famous Sack of Rome (1527) was the plundering work of Germans, Spaniards, and Italians.

  In November 1494, as ten thousand mercenaries marched into Florence, Florentines looked into a polyglot of faces. They wanted to think of them as “barbarians,” even though there were Italians among the Swiss, Dalmatians, Scots, and others, all marching under the banners of the king of France.

  But it was more than the multiethnic stripe of soldiers that made Europe a single world in wartime. It was also the spin-off from the ascetic tradition of medieval Christianity: a tradition and a culture that promoted the punishment of the flesh as a beneficial action, not only in self-scourging (penitential) brotherhoods and in extremes of fasting, but also in the message-bearing images and icons of its bleeding, martyred saints. The sinister obverse of these images of heroic pain was the spreading use of torture: official violence against the person. As a way of ascertaining guilt, local authorities turned to it increasingly, and it came to be used everywhere in Europe by the middle of the thirteenth century, along with penalties that included branding, the lopping off of limbs, mutilation of the face, burning, and the spectacle of public execution. If pain was good for those who scourged themselves (good men), it was better for bad men, and might even serve to straighten them out.

  When regarded in the light of confession to a priest once yearly, a requirement laid down by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, extorted confession in cases of capital crime looked very much like part of the same ritual of conscience.

  It followed that war could easily be seen as punishment for sin. Preachers in wartime were only too ready to point this out. It was grist to their mill. And the great Martin Luther would give his authority to this claim. In the meantime, as heir to the proceedings of torture, Renaissance Europe would be no stranger to gore and carnage. By the testimony of their actions, princes and statesmen gave a voice to the assumption that war was the most natural ground in the world for barbarous activity.

  Launched in the early 1520s, the Protestant Reformation would split Christianity and unleash new reasons for war. In fact, late-medieval heresy had already been met with pitiless military campaigns, notably against the Cathars in the early thirteenth century and the Czech Hussites of the 1420s and 1430s.

  From the 1520s to the middle of the seventeenth century, as Protestants and Catholics clashed over questions of doctrine, many of them found that they could kill with a better conscience, because they were killing for God. When a town was stormed in religious strife, soldiers often shattered the bells of its churches, or took them down to sell as booty, or even awarded them to their master gunners. One of the messages behind such action held that it was wrong for bells to summon parishioners to ungodly church services.

  Yet the persisting cause of
atrocity in warfare was neither religious fervor nor the distorted, punish-the-body message of asceticism. It was the physical and mental condition of the common soldier. He often went unpaid and hungry, because those who had put him into the field and promised to pay him enough to feed himself were failing to do so. Nor did they then necessarily provide food as payment in kind. The result was that the wartime armies of princes could turn into a rabble of angry men, and this ugly mood was likely to be shared by their officers—noblemen, for the most part. Any ensuing consolation came from taking their rage out on the surrounding populace.

  Fused to the question of paying soldiers was the problem of getting supplies to the needed military points: logistics. Above all, this meant the availability of bread or biscuit, rations of meat or fish, of beer or wine, and one other crucial need—forage for the horses and pack animals. Was it the case, however, that all this could be got for money? An army of twenty thousand men, even without camp followers, exceeded the population of most European cities; and when that winding horde of soldiers, with ten to fifteen thousand horses, set out on campaign, it could easily eat up, in a few days, all the food and fodder in the adjacent villages and countryside for many miles around. Such an army could not stay put; it had to move; it had to go on seeking new pastures and more stocks of food.

  Stocks of food? Chapter 6 will show the awesome scale of the logistical problems embedded in any idea of supply depots, or of preparing armies to carry their own food and fodder. Columns of fifteen to twenty thousand men, foot soldiers and cavalry, generated such transport and food-supply problems that rulers came to be hounded by the need to change their ways. The outcome would alter the anatomy of the emerging state.

  Either rulers turned to more realistic policies and stopped trying to assemble gigantic armies, or storms of unprecedented violence and brutality would reshape the nature of the state, leaving a trail marked by terror and blood.

  * * *

  NOT ALL OF EUROPE WOULD suffer the impact of armies. Even as the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) ravaged Germany, large parts of the country escaped the killing sprees of soldiers. All the same, the Continent’s most populated areas—the river valleys, as well as its urban and more fertile regions—were always the primary ground of war. Here armies more easily found food, supplies, warmth, and the spoils of war.

  We come to the question of “total war.” This mode of warfare was certainly not an innovation of the twentieth century. Campaigns against civilian populations were already the ordinary business of wartime armies in the late middle ages. But after 1500, the new gunpowder weapons took destruction out to everything on the horizons: towns, villages, countryside, churches, livestock, and—with showers of explosive missiles—into the very middle of fortified cities. The ways of erecting a protective curtain of walls around cities had to be revolutionized. War was never a clean or simple matter of battles between armies. The besieging of towns and cities put the life of all people, over a radius of twenty to thirty miles in all directions, into grave danger.

  Early modern Europe was the theater for “total war” in another sense as well. When engaged in armed conflict on a major scale, all the fiscal resources of the leading states, as we shall see, were pitched into armies and weapons.

  THE ARGUMENT

  Before proceeding to “A War Mosaic,” I want to set forth the principal claims and themes that run through this book and guide its narrative.

  War was by far the dearest of all government expenses in early modern Europe, and the ready income to pay for it never sufficed. The array of taxes could be complex, but it was also strikingly inefficient and easily corrupted. As a result, the big war-making states, tilting chronically into debt, verged not seldom on bankruptcy. But even when they were more or less solvent, the necessary life-giving funds (or credit) failed at times to reach the needy soldiers in the thick of war. Now, in hungry desperation, troops were likely to pounce on civilians for bread and other foods.

  The massive bleeding of money that went with the movement of armies gradually altered the anatomy of Europe’s emerging states: Spain and France first, then the Dutch Republic, Sweden, Austria under the Habsburgs, Russia, and Brandenburg-Prussia. In wartime, these states saw their cargo of debt all but driven out of control even as they levied new taxes, hired more contractors and administrators, created new departments, and gave rise to a civil service. But war and princely ambitions remained the impelling forces in the state, and they were seldom restrained for long by the scantiness of money or the complaints of their desperate armies.

  After 1500, as rivalries and conflicting claims among princes were ramped up and war was intensified, armies swelled or were held in the field for longer periods. They became a common sight on the roads and rivers of Europe’s most populous regions. In the course of the sixteenth century, a mix of mercenary, conscripted, and forcibly impressed soldiers began to appear on the scene. The traditional reserves of volunteer mercenaries no longer sufficed to meet the demand. War was depleting them. The conscripted and impressed men could not begin to match the battle skills of the professionals, but they were not nearly so expensive. The hard men were the backbone of the mixed armies and commanded higher rates of pay.

  By their surprising capacity to go on fielding large numbers of troops, the developing “power” states acquired a thickening carapace of authority. They used it to extend their power over the institutional churches, over regional assemblies of citizens, over private income, over commoners, and over the lesser nobility. The great nobility long retained special privileges, but by the end of the seventeenth century these too were being sharply whittled away. Soldiers were sometimes deployed to impose compliance.

  Most of the foregoing observations are scattered throughout the better war studies of the period 1450 to 1700. But they are seldom, if ever, drawn together into an overall view. I take them from a rich body of scholarship that is often cited in my endnotes, and I owe a debt of gratitude to the authors. Over the past generation, the new social history of war has shifted the direction of study away from narrow military concerns and out to a quest for richer contexts, for the condition of the common soldier, and for the voices of civilians caught up in the tangles of war. But an immense amount of research remains to be done, above all with regard to the magnitudes of violence, the outbreak of diseases, the practice of quartering soldiers on civilians, the place of women in the society of the wagon trains, relations between officers and their men, and essential logistical questions. These major gaps in the scholarship justify the assertion that in the ongoing work on war and armies, there is still too much devotion—at least for me—to the fine details of the great battles, as well as to the lofty designs of foreign policies. Not one of the major battles of the Thirty Years War was politically decisive, and much the same may certainly be said about the Italian Wars (1494–1559), the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598), and the wars of the Spanish crown in the Low Countries (1567–1648).

  What, then, to say about what is new or different in this book?

  In the supply and transport conditions of the day, raising an army of twenty thousand men was always an undertaking of awesome difficulty. The task depended first of all upon hundreds of captains and colonels and contact men, fanning out to find recruits. Next came the need to move and supply the enlisted men, and this called for careful organization, along with ready access to massive amounts of labor and capital. Only a great prince or a wealthy republic (Venice, the United Provinces) could aspire to such a venture.

  These considerations are seldom far from the unfolding picture in Furies. They take cognizance of the fact that in the final analysis, the large armies of early modern Europe were frail monsters subject to diseases, desertion, lack of pay, mutinies, and wild episodes of violence.

  I have also given considerable attention to a strange paradox: the spectacle of states that are able to raise exterminating armies, while also nursing financial black holes at the center of their being. The contradiction
was resolved, as we shall see, by the use of ingenious expedients and credit mechanisms. Now bankers come forward as key figures in the business of war.

  If we define the ground of war as being in those places where military violence is taking place, then the history of war in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should concentrate on relations between soldiers and civilians, and particularly on their ugly encounters. For European warfare in that period was directed overwhelmingly against civilians in town and country. Which is why Furies is focused on the siege and sacking of cities, on the incidence of plunder and killing in the countryside, on the wretched condition of the ordinary soldier, the terror of forced recruitment, and the rampant incidence of disease. In a sense, the point of such a wide-angled view is to transform the abstractions of social and political analysis into their flesh-and-blood results on the plains of war.

  It only remains to add that weaving horror into a true narrative is a matter of measure, pace, and shifting stresses. I found this the most difficult part of the composition of Furies. War stretches the resources of writers to their limits.

  1

  A War Mosaic

  The incidents and mini-tales that follow will at first seem disjointed, because they break up the arrow of time by moving sharply back and forth over countries and over more than two centuries. But taken together, they glide into a pattern: the undreamedof pattern of war in Europe between about 1450 and 1700. Suffering civilians, cruel hunger, penniless soldiers, dying armies, and merciless conduct push forward to dominate the view. Wonder will play its part, if not pity. War has many faces, yet one face everywhere: anguish for the victims in the middle of it.

  If it can be told at all in a single book, a history of diverse wars must be a mosaic, or, in a different key, an X-ray of war, of what the major wars of the age had in common. This is all the more true of a time when gunpowder, swollen armies, blundering princes, and flaring costs transformed the nature of warfare.