A PEASANT BOY (1634)
At the height of the Thirty Years War in Germany, the Imperial city of Augsburg suffered a punishing siege of more than seven months. One of the richest “free” cities in southern Germany, it was home to the Fuggers, Hochstetters, and Welsers, international bankers to kings and emperors. Two armies, Catholic mainly, surrounded the city in September 1634. Made up of Bavarian and other German units, they also included companies of Croatians, Spaniards, Poles, Italians, and soldiers from other parts of Europe. The siege began with work that aimed to cut off all incoming food supplies and to block the River Lech, whose waters flowed toward the city.
Sometime in late October, on the outskirts of Augsburg, a peasant boy was caught carrying three larks, with a view, it was claimed, to smuggling them into the city. He was forthwith hanged, almost certainly within sight of the city walls, and the larks were tied ostentatiously to his belt. The exhibit carried a warning to travelers and onlookers of the hazards of trying to sneak foodstuffs into the beleaguered city.
The officer who ordered the boy executed may have been more severe with him than with others who had tried to run the blockade. Life-sparing but bloodier, a lesser penalty involved cutting off the noses and ears of people who were caught breaching the ban.
Jakob Wagner, the Augsburger who noted the incident in his chronicle, does not comment on it. Nor does he record the name of the youth, despite the fact that he is a stickler for names. In this case, understandably, he was unable to provide the identity of a simple peasant. But his recording of the incident fell into line with his chronicling of other cruelties. Of these, indeed, he was to see and hear about many more in the course of the Thirty Years War.
DESERTERS
On the twenty-first of April, 1705, somewhere in the heart of France, Pierre La Sire, an illiterate countryman, was condemned by a court-martial for having deserted his infantry company. He was sentenced to have his nose and ears cut off, and to be branded on one cheek with the royal fleur-de-lis. The rest of the sentence was worse, arguably, than the penalty of death: commitment to the galleys as a slave and oarsman for the rest of his life.
The case could be regarded as typical, even if La Sire’s judges seemed to shatter the bonds of reason. Desertion from the French army was rife in those years, and the punishments directed against it varied, because the laws governing desertion were changed several times. Royal authority dithered. But capital punishment, mutilating the face, and slavery at the oars were the principal penalties. Sentences might also be less extreme, such as when branded deserters were pressed back into military service.
La Sire’s fate points to the omnivorous manpower needs of the French army around 1700. In some cases, men were even allowed to enter the army in order to evade trial for murder. France had long provided ample pools of volunteers for its armies, but the foreign policies of Cardinal Richelieu first, and then of King Louis XIV, demanded bigger armies. The result was that by the early 1690s, France’s standing land forces had risen to a total of 320,000 men from about ten or twelve thousand in the 1620s. The only way to reach the new figure was to dispatch recruiters and press-gangs out into the rural districts, where they frequently used deceit and violence to ensnare the recalcitrant. And Pierre La Sire had almost surely been one of the young men spirited forcibly away from his village.
In the seventeenth century, Sweden’s peasantry would face harrowing recruitment calls. England, Spain, and Germany also experienced the like. Two fleeting vignettes from other parts of Europe illustrate the savage extremes of the need for soldiers.
In 1712, straining to halt desertion from his armies, Peter the Great of Russia brought in “the practice of branding recruits in much the same way as common criminals … the mark of a cross was burned into their left arm and the wound rubbed with gunpowder.”
In northern Italy, just a few years earlier (1707), Prince Eugene of Savoy, commander of Imperial forces, laid it down “that any soldier found more than a hundred paces away from the army on the march … should be hanged.”
FLORENCE AGAINST PISA (1406)
Early in 1406, an army of mercenaries closed in on the old seaport of Pisa, using boats and carting in supplies for a stubborn siege. The paymaster of the professionals, located forty-five miles east of Pisa, was Europe’s most literate city, the Republic of Florence.
Pisa had once ranked as a near rival to the two seafaring republics, Genoa and Venice. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Pisan boats, laden with goods and merchants, had sailed regularly across the Mediterranean to Acre, Constantinople, Alexandria, Tunis, and then, closer to home, to Sardinia and Sicily. Now, however, an ancient hostility, pitting two close neighbors against each other, was at fever pitch. Pisa, a dwarf republic, had in effect been sold by its temporary overlords; and Florence, seeking possession of it in the late summer of 1405, had paid out part of the 206,000 gold florins demanded by the bosses of the unhappy city.
But the buyers had ignored the pluck of the Pisans. Having occupied the fortress on the fringes of the city, Florence suddenly saw itself robbed of this prize by a surprise attack, and thus far had not been able to make good its claim. The people of Florence already saw themselves as the rightful owners of Pisa, although no one had consulted the Pisans.
Between November 1405 and June 1406, the steely resistance of the Pisani repeatedly repelled the besiegers, preventing them from fording the great moat and storming a curtain of defensive walls. By the middle of May, a stranglehold had cut off the entry of food supplies into the embattled city. Neither by land nor sea could any provisions be got past the ring of soldiers on horse and foot. The seaport was in the grip of starvation. Cats, dogs, vermin, roots, and every scrap of greenery in the city ended by being devoured: “The grass in market places had been torn up, dried, and ground into a powdery dust for bread.” Ships, loaded with Sicilian grain for the Pisans, were halted near the mouth of the Arno River and their cargoes resold, instead, to the Florentine enemy. The price of grain in Pisa jumped to such heights that smugglers from Lucca, clutching small loads of it, risked their lives by trying to steal into the city in the watches of the night.
Owing to the horrendous costs of the siege for the Florentines, there was always a chance that Florence would call it off. In late April, making a desperate new bid to hold out, Pisa’s commanders began to expel “the destitute and useless people” (beggars and poor folk) from the city, in the effort to stretch the remaining stores of food for the defending soldiers and for the better-off. Charitable handouts to the starving had continued, hastening the depletion of food stocks.
Florence’s “commissaries”—the civilian bosses in the field—reacted to the Pisan decision with an equal lack of pity. They ruled that anyone coming out of Pisa was to be hanged. Heralded by trumpet blasts, this ordinance was read out, or rather cried out, at Pisa’s city gates. The besiegers were counting on starvation to force a swift surrender. Moments of dramatic cruelty had already been seen. Some weeks earlier, a captured Pisan soldier had been trussed up and turned “like a stone” into a projectile; he was catapulted over Pisa’s ramparts, on to one of the streets, his shattered corpse bearing a sign that said something like, THIS IS THE KIND OF DEATH AWAITING ANYONE ELSE WHO COMES OUT OF PISA.
Digging in, each side was determined to have its way. When the first group of poor women, now expelled from Pisa, appeared outside the city walls, Florence’s mercenaries refrained from killing them, in a show of mercy, but cut off the backs of their skirts and all the clothing over their backsides. They then proceeded to brand their buttocks with the fleur-de-lis, one of the devices on Florence’s coat of arms, and pushed them back toward the walls. When branding failed to stop the exit of poor women, the soldiers took to cutting off their noses and then driving them back again. Pisan men—the few expelled from the city—were instead either hanged on the spot or at select points up high: a sight and a lesson for those looking on over the top of Pisa’s ramparts.
To the pinc
er of hunger in Pisa the Florentine army added death and injury from an occasional shower of missiles. Europe had first seen the tandem of gunpowder and artillery in the 1340s; and Pisans heard “bombards” in 1406. But the new weapon had no true accuracy until after 1450. Just as lethal in 1400, however, were huge stone-casting catapults (perriers). And the besiegers used these to spread terror inside Pisa. The claws of war also moved over the Pisan countryside, over great stretches of farmland, villages, and little towns, where mercenaries burned and plundered at will. Much of the loot, including stores of grain, found its way to Florence.
According to the civilian supervisor in the field, the Florentine politician Gino Capponi, Florence’s mercenaries were driven by golden prospects. Their successful capture of Pisa—they had been promised—would be rewarded with double their wages, a sacking of the city, and a bounty of 100,000 florins. But during the summer, as it became clear that Pisa would be starved into a surrender, thus exposing its mobile wealth to freebooting soldiers, Florence drew back from the violence of a sack, in a retreat oiled by self-interest. Why let all that wealth fall into the hands of predatory mercenaries? Much of it would be taxable, disposable, useful.
The commissaries now issued strict orders. When Pisa fell, there was to be no looting, on pain of death. The takeover had to be disciplined and seemingly magnanimous. Months earlier, the first captain-general of the assault on the seaport, Bertoldo degli Orsini, a Roman nobleman, had turned out to be so much greedier for plunder in the countryside than for seizing Pisa that the Florentines had dismissed him and his little army.
In the end, Pisa was turned over to the Florentines by the treachery of the city’s jumped-up lord and citizen, Giovanni Gambacorti, who was rewarded with 20,000 florins and properties in Florence. Tax-free Florentine citizenship was also thrown into the deal. All the treacherous arrangements had been wrapped in secrecy. Just before dawn, on October 9, 1406, with Pisa’s inhabitants still asleep, the city gates were thrown open and in marched the Florentine army, doubtless to the sound of drums and instantly waking the citizenry. Stunned at first, as they looked from their windows, how could they conceal the effects of starvation? One Florentine reported that the appearance of the Pisans “was repugnant and frightening, with all their faces hollowed out by hunger.” Some of the soldiers went into the city carrying bread. They threw it at the starving inhabitants, at children in particular, and the reactions they got were shocking. They were seeing, they thought, “ravenous birds of prey,” with siblings tearing at each other for chunks of bread, and children fighting with their parents.
Back in Florence, news of the surrender caused a burst of exaltation and mad glee. The city’s many church bells resounded. Then came three days of celebration, with bonfires, processions, parties, jousts, and a solemn Mass in the Baptistry, the church of San Giovanni, where special thanks were offered up to God for the glorious, heavensent destiny of the Florentines. Now at last they had a great seaport of their own, one to match, as it were, their literary prowess. Florence, after all, by 1400 had already produced a literature that whole nations could be proud of, not to speak of a single city: Dante’s Divine Comedy, Petrarch’s Canzoniere (his great sonnet sequence), and Boccaccio’s hundred tales, The Decameron. Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and other luminaries still lay in Florence’s future.
Pisa’s hatred of the Florentines would burn brightly for more than a century and would be vividly displayed in 1494, with the outbreak of the Italian Wars (1494–1559), in the city’s spirited revolt against Florence.
IN THE PATH OF WAR: RUMEGIES (1693–1713)
At the end of the seventeenth century, one of the major lanes of warfare ran through the French-speaking village of Rumegies, near Lille, on the border between Flanders and France. Alexandre Dubois, a local man and the keeper of a journal, was the parish priest of Rumegies, a community of eighty-four families. His journal captures the voice of a sharp, committed, ironic, wise, and likable cleric. He was also remarkably well-informed about European events.
The region was crisscrossed by armies, domestic and foreign, for about twenty years, in wars between the France of Louis XIV and the Dutch Netherlands allied with England, Spain, and a league of German princes. Dubois’s pages provide a record of what happened in and around Rumegies.
The money pinch on the village began in 1691, with the royal creation of new local offices, solely with the intent of selling them to raise cash for the crown. The village itself was rather forced to buy the offices.
In 1693, the Duke of Württemberg arrived on the scene, at the head of twenty thousand men, and at once demanded “contributions.” Rumegies was assigned a staggering levy of 30,000 florins. Hostages were rounded up, picked from the larger district, and dispatched to Ghent, to be held there until payment was made. But a French victory at Neerwinden, “the glory of France and the ruin of our village,” diverted the contributions into French hands, and although these were now lowered to 18,000 florins, cries of bitterness rang out. Food prices had soared; the well-off saw their surpluses vanish in the contributions; and the poor agonized, with the price of bread itself beyond their reach. No grain had been harvested locally that year. Yet the Nine Years War (1688–1697) went on.
With people dying of hunger in the winter and spring of 1694, every day brought a stream of strangers to Rumegies, to the church, to beg Dubois for bread. In 1695, the crown levied a general head or poll tax to help pay for the war, despite the fact that all “contributions” also went for the upkeep of the king’s armies. In June of that year, driven by hunger, seventeen Spanish soldiers—almost certainly deserters from the anti-French ranks—were caught in the Rumegies wheat fields, evidently stripping off stalks. The villagers killed one, but the other sixteen got away.
Grain prices in the Rumegies region remained too dear for most people, and Dubois lashes out at the “new rich” who had battened on the profits made from the hoarding and timely sale of grains. The year 1697 resulted in a terrible harvest for the village, owing to torrents of rain. Rye was the only cereal to be reaped. In his entries for 1698, Dubois calls attention to the three brothers of a difficult local family. One was hanged for stealing a horse; another was serving out his life as a galley slave; and the third—weaving with the fortunes of war—had soldiered in both French and Spanish armies but had deserted five times, on each occasion pocketing the join-up money.
The famine of 1699 would long be remembered. Every day the poor lined up “by the hundreds” to beg for bread. Yet not long after, in preparations for war (1701), the poll tax was again levied, now in perpetuity, and five local boys were taken into a militia, while three others were pressed into the king’s army.
A few years later (1708), a Dutch army, with strong British support, lay siege to Lille, and the entire region was overrun by scouring French soldiers, horsemen foraging for hay from August to December. That difficult year was followed by the wet and freezing winter of 1709, lasting until April. Then, too soon, the relief promised by spring died in Rumegies. The French army had been forced to retreat. On May 27, a pillaging army of more than ten thousand of the Dutch Republic’s mercenaries entered the diocese of Saint-Amand, which included the parish of Rumegies. In less than three months, 180 villagers would perish. Alexandre Dubois sees the invaders in the imagery of the Last Judgment. Speaking a language incomprehensible to the village, the Dutch “were armed with pistols, bayonets, swords, and great staffs … and they destroyed everything. They took fifty cows and thirty horses; and having stolen things at will … they violated some of the women and killed several villagers with staff blows.” Breaking into the parish church, they “pillaged and profaned it” and gave a beating to our diarist, Dubois. Showing “faces that breathed nothing but carnage … they delivered Rumegies to their fury.”
Dubois and the villagers fled. But when they returned two or three days later, they found their houses with “nothing but walls—no doors, no windows, no glass, not a scrap of metal, and worse still not a single
bale of hay. In fact, there wasn’t one in the entire Tournai region, and that led to the death of nearly all livestock by the following winter.” Dubois noticed that malnutrition also killed villagers, for although many were dead by Christmas, not one, he observed, was from among those who had been well fed. “Most of the dead had neither money, nor underwear, nor even hay to sleep on.” And people were eating the sort of bread “that dogs would not have eaten the year before.”
Easter of 1710 came with an army that cut through Rumegies on its way to besiege Douai. The soldiers robbed whatever pleased them. A year later, for six weeks, the village had to offer food and lodging to soldiers from a Hanoverian infantry regiment. In March 1712, it was saddled for ten days with demanding French horsemen who took wood, carts, horses, and hay. “Had they stayed any longer, we would have been forced to abandon the village. These gentlemen take all the horses … keep them as long as they like, till they wear them out, giving them nothing to eat and nothing to the owners either. They are the despair of our poor peasants.”
Between 1709 and 1713, the neighboring town of Saint-Amand changed hands several times, passing back and forth between Dutch and French armies, and each time Rumegies had to cough up hay, tools, money, and food in measures that kept the villagers destitute. In the end, to feed the poor folk of the parish, Rumegies, like all neighboring villages, had to sell off some of its common lands at prices fallen to less than half of their normal value.
The priest closes his chronicle of the 1709 fury by fixing on the efforts of Dutch soldiers to dismantle and cart away the three bells of the village church. Giving up in frustration, they tried to shatter them. Failing in this, too, they swung and half-threw one of the bells out of the belfry. But when it failed to break after striking the ground, they dropped another down on top of the first. Now the two bells ended with fine cracks, so that in time they had to be melted down and recast. This expensive work was done in Tournai, and the bells got their final blessing on Sunday, October 29, 1713.
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