For women, war presented additional dangers: the high risk of being raped or abducted. Some suffered through a deliberate effort by the victors to dishonour a community, to prove it could not ‘protect its women'; others became the victims of lust. At Yangzhou in 1645, Wang Xiuchu watched a group of soldiers argue over the fate of five women whom they had captured:
Suddenly one of them hoisted one of the women and copulated with her under a tree. Then the two other younger ones were sullied while the two older ones wailed and begged to be spared. The three younger ones shamelessly thought nothing of it when about a dozen men took turns raping them before handing them over to the two soldiers who'd run up later.
Thousands of Chinese women committed suicide after they had been raped.11 Rape also featured prominently during the sack of Magdeburg. Some monks watched horrified as six Catholic soldiers gang-raped a 12-year-old girl until she died in the courtyard of their convent; while Otto von Guericke, an eyewitness who survived to become a skilled inventor, reported that ‘Things went very badly for many of those women, girls, daughters and maids who either had no men, parents or relatives who could pay a ransom on their behalf, or could not appeal to high officers for help or advice. Some were defiled and disgraced, and some were kept as concubines.‘12
The diary of a Catholic soldier, Peter Hagendorf, shows what might happen next. He described how at the sack of a Bavarian town in 1634, ‘Here I got a pretty girl as my booty as well as 12 thalers in cash, some clothes and a lot of linen.’ A few weeks later, he participated in the sack of another town ‘and here again I got a young girl out of it’. If the rest of the ‘enlisted men’ received similar ‘booty’, a very large number of ‘women, girls, daughters and maids’ from these two towns must have been abducted and, presumably, ‘defiled and disgraced’.13 Hagendorf's ‘girls’ were relatively lucky: he released each of them when the army moved on. Three years later, 20 Swedish soldiers rode into the small village of Linden, in central Germany, one afternoon, and violently demanded food and wine. Two of them, a ‘fat soldier’ from Finland and a ‘white-haired young soldier’, broke down the door of a farmer's cottage, where they raped his wife and then chased her, screaming, through the village. During the Irish rebellion of 1641, a Protestant prisoner claimed to have heard his Catholic captors
Often in the night tyme with their pistolls come into the Chamber where the women servants were, and attempted their chastities, making them skrike and cry out; and, as the said woman affirmed, threatened to pistoll them if they wold not consent to their lustfull desires; and this deponent thincketh that those wicked rebells did assault them untill they had forced them to their lustful wills.
In Poland, finally, after the town of Graudiądz was ‘taken by storme’ in 1659, many inhabitants managed to swim across a river to safety but the ‘others of all sexes and ages were taken to the leaguer (the besiegers’ camp) and stripped of all, and the women abused’.14
The victims of such violent acts suffered psychological as well as physical damage. In Germany, soldiers raped Anna Hurter of Hawangen in 1633, and when she died in 1657 her parish priest noted in the burial register that ‘for twenty-four years she had not had one sane hour until suddenly she expired’. In Ireland in 1641, during a brutal rape of a young woman, ‘to prevent her crying out, one of (the) souldjers thrust a napkin into her mowth and held her fast by the haire of her head till the wicked act was performed’. Afterwards the victim could not move ‘for three or four days’, and even four years later ‘thought shee should never bee well nor bee in her right mynd againe, the fact was soe fowle and grievous unto her’. Four years later, Wang Xiuchu noted that ‘one of the younger women’ he had watched being gang-raped at Yangzhou ‘couldn't even get up to walk’.15 Although in all ages and in all places war produces personal tragedies like these, the proliferation of conflict in the seventeenth century multiplied them. The profoundly disturbing alabaster sculpture by Leonhard Kern, which shows an officer abducting a naked girl, significantly called ‘Scene from the Thirty Years War’, no doubt commemorates a common occurrence (Plate 2).
‘Feeding Mars’
Contemporaries also blamed war for the cost to them of maintaining the armies and navies of their rulers. The expenses associated with fighting wars, whether against neighbours or rebels, constantly increased – and not just because of their duration. Europe's Atlantic states built huge fleets of ‘floating fortresses’: sailing warships, each of them larger than a country house and carrying as many guns as a fort on land, that cost £33,000 each to build and £13,000 to keep at sea for a campaign. Europe's naval wars during the second half of the century saw battleships deployed in lines that stretched for 10 miles, with 3,000 heavy guns firing broadsides at each other, sometimes for several days – an enormous financial outlay. Naval arsenals and dockyards were the largest industrial plants in early modern Europe, whether they produced sailing ships or, as in the Mediterranean, galleys. Mediterranean warfare was labour-intensive. Each galley carried about 400 oarsmen and soldiers, so that (in the words of a French sailor) ‘an infinite number of villages are far from having as large a number of inhabitants’ as a single galley.16
Normally, land warfare cost even more than naval operations. Apart from raising and maintaining soldiers, most states also invested heavily in fortifications. The two largest states in the world, China and Russia, constructed continuous defences along their most vulnerable frontiers. The late Ming emperors extensively rebuilt the Great Wall of China in stone to take account of gunpowder technology, and although the Manchus breached it in both 1629 and 1642, it still reduced small-scale raiding. Meanwhile, the Russian empire constructed a ‘Great Wall’ consisting of fortified towns linked by earthen ramparts which, by 1658, ran for 800 miles along the steppe frontier from the Dnieper to the Volga (see Fig. 19). As in China, although the fortified line did not bring complete security, it compelled invaders from the south – whether Crimean Tatars or Cossack rebels – to follow certain paths where the tsar's troops could more easily intercept them.
Other European states eschewed ‘lines’ but invested in a network of ‘artillery fortresses’: each one a star-shaped complex with extremely thick walls protected by angled bastions, moats and outposts. When in a good state of repair, and defended by sufficient heavy guns and an adequate garrison, such positions could seldom be taken by assault, and so sieges played a crucial role in conflicts: the Russo–Polish wars of 1632–4 and 1654–5 hinged on control of the bastions around Smolensk, while the turning point in the Habsburg–Turkish wars came with the failed Ottoman blockade of Vienna in 1683. Further west, artillery fortresses proliferated in many contested areas: the north Italian plain; the borders of France; the lands around the Baltic; within the Iberian Peninsula as well as in Britain and Ireland after the civil wars began; and above all in the Netherlands, which contained by far the largest density of artillery fortresses anywhere in the world. When the Dutch Revolt against Spain began in 1572, 12 towns already possessed a complete set of the new defences, while 18 more had been partially updated; but when the Revolt ended in 1648, the same area boasted at least 50 artillery fortresses and a further 60 towns with partially modernized walls. Each one cost millions of pounds to construct.
Laying siege to these state-of-the-art fortifications formed the largest engineering enterprise of the age – trenches might stretch for 25 miles and operations could last for months – and their outcome dominated most campaigns. ‘Battles do not now decide national quarrels, and expose countries to the pillage of conquerors, as formerly,’ observed an Irish general who learned his craft during the wars of the mid-century, ‘for we make war more like foxes, than lions; and you will have twenty sieges for one battle.’ ‘One scarcely talks any more about battles,’ a German military instructor concurred: ‘Indeed, the whole art of war now consists only of cunning attacks and good fortification.‘17 The Spanish and Dutch governments each maintained around 100,000 soldiers in the Netherlands from the moment war
between them resumed in 1621 until they made peace in 1648 – and yet the two sides never fought a pitched battle. Instead, each year's campaign consisted of sieges.
Perhaps one million men served simultaneously in the various armies and navies of seventeenth-century Europe. Philip IV of Spain boasted that ‘In the year of 1625 just past, we can count around 300,000 infantry drawing wages and more than 500,000 militiamen’. Louis XIII of France ordered the mobilization of over 150,000 men when he declared war on Spain in 1635, and he and his successor maintained at least 100,000 soldiers in arms until making peace 24 years later. Between 1672 and 1678, Louis XIV commanded about 250,000 troops.18 In Germany, some 300,000 troops took part in each campaign between 1631 and 1634; and at least 200,000 men remained in arms when the Thirty Years’ War ended in 1648. Over 100,000 soldiers fought the civil wars in England, Scotland and Ireland during the 1640s, and throughout the 1650s over 50,000 men served in the army and navy of the British Republic.
All these soldiers required training and equipment, as well as food and clothes. From the 1620s onwards, up to half of each army in western Europe carried muskets, and fought in parallel lines firing repeated ‘broadsides’ at their enemies. This tactic called for a level of proficiency and discipline from each individual soldier that only prolonged training could provide, leading to the creation of a ‘standing army’ of veterans who would form the backbone of the larger forces required in wartime. Some of the regiments raised by Emperor Ferdinand II to suppress the Bohemian revolt in 1618 remained in the imperial Habsburg army until the dynasty fell three centuries later; General George Monck's regiment of foot, formed in 1650 and now known as the Coldstream Guards, boasts the longest continuous service of any unit in the British Army (or indeed any army) today.
Many non-Western states adopted at least some of these expensive European innovations. Both the Ottoman and the Russian empires recruited infantry armed with muskets: the Janissaries (literally ‘new troops’) fought for the sultan in ranks with muskets; while Western instructors recruited by the tsars trained New Formation Regiments. Although the Mughal and Chinese emperors also made use of Western firearms and Western military experts, they normally fought wars that were labour-intensive (by mobilizing overwhelming numbers) rather than capital-intensive (by investing in new technology). Shah Jahan normally travelled with an army of 200,000 cavalry and 40,000 infantry, 50–60 heavy guns and numerous war elephants; the last Ming emperors, at least in theory, could call on 500,000 men and 100,000 cavalry horses; while to repress the Three Feudatories rebellion in the 1670s the Kangxi emperor mobilized over 150,000 ‘bannermen’ (elite Manchu troops) seconded by 400,000 loyal Chinese troops. Even in times of peace, the Qing maintained 80,000 bannermen as a rapid reaction force, garrisoned in citadels specially created in China's major cities. All of them had to be paid.
The ‘unit cost’ of waging war rose inexorably. The Italian political theorist Giovanni Botero complained in 1605 that ‘[Nowadays] war is dragged out for as long as possible, and the object is not to smash but to tire, not to defeat but to wear down the enemy. This form of warfare is entirely dependent upon money.’ ‘The manner of making war at the present time,’ echoed a Spanish commander in the 1630s, ‘is reduced to a sort of traffic or commerce, in which he who has most money wins.’ Six decades later, an English pamphleteer made exactly the same point:
War is quite changed from what it was in the time of our forefathers; when in a hasty expedition, and a pitch'd field, the matter was decided by courage. But now the whole Art of War is in a manner reduced to money; and nowadays that prince who can best find money to feed, cloath and pay his army, not he that has the most valiant troops, is surest of success and conquest.19
All this had crushing financial consequences for civilians. In France, the tax burden on a family of four rose from the equivalent of 14 days’ output a year to 34 days’ output by 1675; the Ottoman empire spent 75 per cent of its total budget on war; while, in Muscovy, ‘one-eighth of [all] productive resources went just to pay for the army’.20
Naturally, the diversion of so many resources to the pursuit of ‘success and conquest’ also involved indirect (or ‘opportunity’) costs. States that spent so much on war had little left for anything else – whether official salaries; goods and services; or welfare. Philip IV of Spain, who spent at least £30 million to finance his foreign wars between 1618 and 1648, claimed that he lacked the money to set up a national banking system; Charles I of Great Britain, whose wars between 1625 and 1630 cost £6 million, decided he could not afford to create public granaries for famine relief; and so on. Ming China offers perhaps the most graphic case of the ‘opportunity costs’ of prodigious military spending. After Manchu raiders broke through the Great Wall in 1629, the emperor's drastic reductions in non-defence spending included the closure of perhaps one-third of all courier and postal stations. Some of those who lost their livelihoods began to prey on those who used the routes they had once serviced: one of them was Li Zicheng, who became the leader of a bandit alliance and, briefly, emperor of all China.21
The Fiscal-Military State
Early modern governments resorted to a wide variety of expedients to fund their wars. The fiscal history of England, a relatively small country, was both striking and typical. Between 1605 and 1625, the government of James I (much criticized for its extravagance and corruption) raised and spent some £10 million, roughly 25 per cent of which went on military and naval spending; by contrast, between 1642, when the Civil War began, and 1660, when all soldiers and sailors then on foot laid down their arms, the London government raised and spent £34 million. The central government's defence spending thus rose twelve-fold – from an annual average of £117,000 in 1605–25 to an annual average of £1.5 million in 1642–60. Even so, debts of about £2 million remained unpaid in 1660, leaving subsequent generations of English taxpayers to amortize the cost of the Civil Wars.22
Such debts reflected the fact that, then as now, few governments can fund their wars from current revenues alone. In Europe, most states raised loans to bridge the gap between income and expenditure – but borrowing created a new set of problems, because bankers normally demanded a specific source of revenue as security for each loan, compelling governments to create new taxes. This vicious circle explains the apparently senseless fiscal decisions of so many rulers. Some stifled economic activity by taxing industrial production or exports just when conditions called for economic stimuli and ‘tax breaks'; while others taxed items in general use, such as foodstuffs, which not only reduced the disposable income of most consumers but also provoked both widespread hardship and resistance. Many revolts began with rioting at the point of sale when a new tax unexpectedly increased the price of everyday items such as a loaf of bread or a basket of fruit. Other revolts materialized when rulers increased taxes on areas that they believed to be unusually prosperous. Thus when war broke out with Spain in 1635, the French government abruptly doubled the taille (the principal direct tax) payable by the area around the thriving port of Bordeaux from one million livres to two. In 1644, although poor harvests had caused grain prices to soar, the government increased the taille to three million livres and then in 1648, coinciding with the worst harvest of the century, to four million livres. Not surprisingly, Bordeaux supported the Fronde revolt that year and before long considered secession as an independent republic (see chapter 10).
Apart from imposing excise duties and increasing direct taxes, early modern governments at war frequently exploited and extended state monopolies (often known as ‘regalian rights’), such as extracting minerals obtained from the sea or under the ground (including salt and coal, silver and copper), or maximizing the profits from minting coins. Currency manipulation became particularly common in the seventeenth century, with governments from Spain, through Russia, to China either adulterating silver coins with base metals, or issuing copper or paper money with little or no intrinsic value. Forcible devaluation could ruin whole societies. In 16
34 in exile Pavel Stránský recalled the devaluation in Bohemia a decade earlier as the most traumatic experience of his life: ‘Neither plague, nor war, nor hostile foreign incursions into our land, neither pillage nor fire however atrocious, could do so much harm to good people as frequent changes and reductions in the value of money’. Several major revolts broke out when governments manipulated the currency, notably in central Europe in 1621–3, in Spain in 1651, and in Russia in 1661–3.23
Nevertheless, as the Swedish historian Jan Glete reminds us, in early modern Europe ‘Wars were not decided by the existence of resources but by how these resources were organized’. The key to improved organization, Glete argues, was ‘the fiscal-military state’: a polity dedicated to extracting, centralizing and redistributing resources to finance the use of violence.24 Only its superior ability to organize available resources enabled Sweden, with scarcely a million inhabitants, to hold 20 million Germans to ransom during and after the Thirty Years War; and allowed the Dutch Republic, also with scarcely a million citizens, to defeat the Spanish Habsburgs, with over 30 million subjects. Yet even the Dutch Republic, the most successful fiscal-military state of the early modern world, experienced difficulties in funding its wars. The debt of the federal government rose from 5 million florins in 1618 to 16 million in 1670, and that of the richest province (Holland) from 5 million to 147 million. At the same time taxes, especially sales taxes, rose to dizzying levels both to pay for current wars and to service the debts created during previous wars: in the university town of Leiden, by the 1640s taxes accounted for 60 per cent of the price of beer and 25 per cent of the price of bread. When provinces fell into arrears with their quotas of the overall budget, the federal government imprisoned their citizens as hostages until the shortfall was made good.
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