The scene of violence over the bells had in it something of the religious fumes of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), or even of the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). Louis XIV’s soldiers had seized the Protestant city of Strasbourg in 1681, forcibly restoring Catholicism there; and in 1685 his revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1598) put all French Protestants outside the law. When, therefore, confronting the “papist” church bells of Rumegies, the wild anger of the Dutch soldiers was a likely reaction to the suppression of the Protestant church in France. No doubt French Huguenots marched in their ranks.
ANIMAL SKINS
Let’s go back to the late sixteenth century, to consider the face of famine.
Over an anxious stretch of nine months, ending in late August 1573, the hilltop town of Sancerre, near Bourges in central France, lay under the siege of a royal army. A religious civil war raged between Catholics and Protestants (“Huguenots”), and fortified Sancerre, teeming with Huguenot refugees, had been reduced to the most desperate measures because its food supplies were all but gone.
Jean de Léry, a Huguenot pastor, produced an account of the experience almost at once. He was in the town throughout the length of the siege. Chapter 10 of his story, dealing with the impact of famine on the little town, ranks as one of the most harrowing stretches of narrative in the chronicles of Europe. Here, for the moment, suffice it to say that he tells his readers how the Sancerrois, in their feverish search for food, cooked animal skins and leather, including harnesses, parchment, letters, books, and the membranes of drums. Some of the people who perished in Sancerre also ate pulverized bones and the hooves of horses.
The skins, he tells us, including drumheads, were soaked for a day or two, and the water was often changed. They were then well scraped with a knife and boiled for the better part of a day, until they became tender and soft. This was determined “by scratching at the skins with your fingers and seeing if they were glutinous.” Now, like tripe, they could be cut up into little pieces and mixed with herbs and spices.
In proceedings of this sort, the impact of war speaks for itself.
PIONEERS
In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, “pioneers” accompanied armies as diggers, excavators, and miners. From the moment an army laid siege to a city, working in the most dangerous circumstances, hundreds or even thousands of pioneers would be called in to excavate trenches around the besieged city and, if the need arose, to dig mines under the great curtain of walls. At select points in the mines, they would deposit barrels of gunpowder and then explode the lot so as to shatter the walls above, opening the way for the besieging army to burst into the beleaguered city.
Astonishingly, we know almost nothing about pioneers, mainly because their lowliness and the presumed inferiority of their labors condemned them to a near silence in the historical record. Even foot soldiers looked down upon them as noncombatants who drew a more pitiable wage than the common soldier himself. Combing through the indexes of books by military historians and the social historians of war, we look in vain for entries on “pioneers.”
In June 1573, when the royal siege of the great Protestant seaport of La Rochelle was lifted, following a five-month blockade, more than 50 percent of an army of eighteen thousand men lay dead, dying, or had fled in desertion. But of the two thousand lowly trench and mine diggers at the start of the siege, only two hundred were still alive.
A GERMAN SHOEMAKER (1630s)
Alexandre Dubois’s chronicle of woe in the village of Rumegies had been prefigured by the diary of Hans Heberle, a shoemaker from the village of Neenstetten, about twelve miles north of Ulm, one of the largest cities in southern Germany.
As the Thirty Years War peaked, the wide territory of Ulm, with its rich sprinkle of villages, was crisscrossed repeatedly by Swedish and Imperial armies with their many units of foreign Soldateska: Finns, Scots, Irishmen, Spaniards, Poles, Czechs, Croats, Hungarians, Italians, and others. The shoemaker reveals that Neenstetten and the adjoining village of Weidenstetten were assaulted time and time again by plundering soldiers on horse and foot. Their raids frequently ended in the mass theft of livestock, fodder, grain, tools, carts, and horses. Villagers were beaten, killed, and held to ransom; and women were sometimes raped or occasionally abducted. Arson was frequent, employed most particularly against obstinate peasants.
Local folk could handle random freebooters, but the approach of regimented units often terrified them. They would then sweep up the best of their movable goods, foodstuffs included, pack their carts or wagons, and make for Ulm, to seek protection inside the city’s defensive walls. Heberle, our shoemaker, counted no fewer than thirty such flights in the course of the 1630s and 1640s. Hunger, malnutrition, sickness, exposure to freezing winters, and living in crammed wagons—sometimes for many weeks on end—became a way of life. In those circumstances, relations between refugee peasants and Ulm’s burghers were bound to be charged with acute strains, especially if the refugees showed signs of disease, or if their food supplies ran out and they became beggars.
But soldiers, too, were prey to fortune. They could be punished. The Imperial armies had commanders who worked, when possible, to establish a climate of control, and these officers could impose harsh justice on their men. Hans Heberle, a Lutheran for whom priests were “ravenous animals,” witnessed the doling out of justice by Catholic officers. He saw soldiers condemned to capital punishment—on one occasion a group of ten, some of them “distinguished and high-ranking officers. They were beheaded in the [Geislingen] marketplace.”
As a victim, what Heberle could not possibly see was the fact that the horrific cruelty of soldiers in wartime had a story behind it, a story driven by the necessities of life itself. It will be told in a later chapter.
WIPING OUT A MALE POPULATION
The great Protestant hero of the Thirty Years War, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (d. 1632), was the prime mover of policies that bled his country’s farming communities of their able-bodied men. Like King Louis XIV, he needed soldiers, and he needed them desperately to pursue his grand policies. Six wars with Denmark alone in the seventeenth century, not to mention the country’s major role in the Thirty Years War, turned Sweden into a “tax and power” state, as well as into a great recruiting ground. In 1648, “there were 127 Swedish garrisons, scattered all over Germany.”
Yet Sweden, a country of farmers mainly, was sparsely populated. Peasants comprised more than 90 percent of the population. Their farms were small, suitable for the labor of individual households, and many of the plots were located on the estates of noblemen. From the 1620s onward, every parish in Sweden had to maintain and equip specified numbers of soldiers, as fixed by the crown on a year-by-year basis. The conscripts were selected by the parishes themselves.
A study of the community of Bygdea reveals that in the eighteen years from 1621 to 1639, the male population there, ranging in ages from fifteen to sixty, fell from 472 to 294 men—a drop of nearly 40 percent. The drop was caused by the great loss of life in Sweden’s wars, mainly from diseases picked up in garrisons. Thus, of the men conscripted in 1638, numbering twenty-seven, “all but one died prematurely abroad.” In Geoffrey Parker’s words, “Enlistment … had become a sentence of death.” To satisfy its conscription quota, the parish of Bygdea had to scoop into the teenage pool, with the result, in 1639, that half of the conscripts “were only fifteen years old and all but two were under eighteen.”
In effect, war losses “led to an almost catastrophic shortage of adult males in the parish. By the end of the 1630s, there were 1.5 women per man in Bygdea.” Indeed, if we omit children and old men from the count, the figures reveal that “there were about three women to each grown man.” In other words, much of the arable land was without adult male labor, and “women were in charge of a growing number of farms.”
The example of Bygdea had affinities in other parts of Europe: in the heart of Spain from the late sixteenth century onward, as its Habsburg kings str
uggled to hold on to the Netherlands; in Germany, during the Thirty Years War, as rampant disease and armed violence decimated populations, males especially; and in France, after about 1685, as Louis XIV’s wars ate up more and more men.
But war could also eliminate the men unwanted by their communities: sturdy beggars, the idling poor, troublemakers, vagrants, and others on society’s margins. The coercion of neighbors and local authority put the undesirables into the hands of the recruiters who came around to take men by force, in chains if need be. Between 1627 and 1631, about twenty-five thousand men were shipped from Scotland to Germany to serve in Danish and Swedish armies, and among these were many “masterless men” who had been kidnapped or otherwise forcibly seized. The rigors of Scottish Calvinism called for a disciplined life, and the men grabbed for war in Germany—unemployed and seen as shiftless—would no doubt have been numbered among the undisciplined.
VANISHING ARMIES
In late June 1406, as a Florentine army was attempting to scale the walls of Pisa, an outbreak of disease suddenly cut through its ranks. Swarms of flies seemed to come out of nowhere. That was the first sign. Then came an assault of fleas and lice, followed by a plague of mice and frogs, but of a sort that “even the filthiest peasant” could not have tolerated. A brutal heat had settled into Pisa’s river valley. “The contagion in the air was such that even the healthiest bodies were afflicted by violent fevers. And the soldiers were overtaken by so disabling a weakness and such exhaustion, that all they could do was to lie about on the ground.” Surprisingly, the symptoms, reminiscent of typhus, seem not to have been fatal. The commanding officers were able to separate the different units and to move them about. Overcoming the malady, the army returned to the siege.
But soldiers were not usually so fortunate in their encounters with disease. The unforgiving cause of dying armies was any infectious, fatal malady, likely to turn rampant in a few days.
In April 1528, in the middle of the Italian Wars, the distinguished French general, the vicomte de Lautrec, arrived outside of Naples with an army of twenty-eight thousand men. He laid siege to the city, proposing to take it from the occupying Spanish and Italian soldiers. In the heat of July, typhus—caused by the feces of body lice—suddenly began to wind through Lautrec’s ranks. More than half of his army was dead within thirty days, and some accounts claim that “of 25,000 men, only 4,000 remained.” Lautrec himself perished, along with most of the other commanders and an array of French noblemen. The retreat of the besiegers began on August 29, but they surrendered on the thirtieth, as they were being cut to pieces. Without horses or pack animals, the survivors, when not killed by local peasants, were forced to walk back to France, begging for alms and bread along the way.
Even more dramatic perhaps, nearly one hundred years later, was a campaign that miscarried for one of the great generals of the Thirty Years War—Wallenstein. In August 1626, in a mere twenty-two days, he marched an army from Zerbst in Germany to Olmütz in Moravia, for a distance of 370 miles. “Twenty thousand men started from Zerbst. Five thousand … were left by the end of the campaign.” Plague, dysentery, exhaustion, and desertion had eliminated the rest. Dying armies were vanishing armies.
BILLETS
In July 1649, to the east of Paris, near Chalons-sur-Saône, a French regiment demanded billets in a village that claimed to be exempt from the quartering of soldiers. When the regiment met resistance from the villagers, and the commander, a baron, was wounded by a musket shot, the soldiers threw themselves on the village, intent on sacking it. They stormed the church, where most of the villagers had taken refuge, killed one man, and then tried to hang the peasant suspected of shooting the officer. Next, grabbing thirty to forty of the villagers, they carted them off to Verdun to be held for ransom.
The unit was soon dissolved, and the soldiers were transferred to other companies. But no other punishment was meted out. The village had either bought the exemption from billeting or had contacts in high places, for the practice in seventeenth-century France was to quarter soldiers on civilians. But of course officers, too, might have lofty contacts. In the winter of 1640–1641, a regiment billeted in the town of Moulins went on the rampage while the commanding officer, Roger de Rabutin, Count of Bussy, was off having a love affair with the Countess Helénè de Busset. His penalty for failing to control his men was a prison term in the Bastille. But calling on his roundabout connections with the most powerful politician in France, Cardinal Richelieu, he was set free three months later.
A COMMANDING OFFICER: BLAISE DE MONLUC (c. 1500–1577)
The eldest of eleven children, Blaise de Lasseran Massencome, seigneur de Monluc, was born into Gascony’s nobility. The family had a château near Condom, eighty miles south of Bordeaux, and although down-at-heel, they had grand connections. Monluc’s brother Jean rose to become the bishop of Valence.
When the family decided that Monluc’s future lay in soldiering—their income from properties being too skimpy for a life to be lived in style—he was thirteen years old and straightway sent to Antoine, the Duke of Lorraine, who took him on first as a page, then as an archer (an aide to a heavy cavalryman) in one of his companies. By the age of twenty, Monluc was campaigning in the Italian Wars and taken prisoner at the battle of Bicocca (April 1522). From this point on, his life would be all arms, campaigns, horses, and deployments, except for intervals when string-pulling got him snubbed at the royal court, or when he was sidelined in disgrace for being too out-spoken. But he always rebounded; he served in Italy with the well-known general Lautrec (Odet de Foix); and meanwhile he was forging a reputation.
Captured again at the battle of Pavia (February 1525), where the king of France was also taken prisoner, Monluc’s captors demanded ransom money, in keeping with practice that lasted down to the eighteenth century. All noblemen generally, when captured in battle, had to buy their release, and ransoms were dear, often adding up to a year of the captive’s annual income. On this occasion, however, exceptionally, Monluc seems to have got away without payment. Thereafter, he turned up as an officer or in combat at Naples, Marseille, in Artois, Perpignan, Cérisoles, Boulogne, Moncalieri, Siena, La Rochelle, Thionville, and many other places. His combat experience took him through five battles, nineteen assaults on fortresses, eleven sieges, and about two hundred skirmishes.
In time, Monluc’s fame collected around his actions as commander of the besieged city of Siena in 1554–1555, but even more so around his feral activity in the 1560s and 1570s, in the clutch of the French Wars of Religion. A pitiless fighter for both the king and the Catholic Church, he peopled “trees with hangings” and put “the inhabitants of entire Huguenot towns to the sword,” such as at Monségur, Targon, and Vergt in 1562.
His body ended as a map of war wounds. He came very close to losing an arm, owing to an act of foolish bravery; a shoulder and wrist took serious gunshot wounds; one hip was knocked out of line; and after 1570 he wore a leather mask, cut and sewn to conceal the oozing results and horror of an arquebus shot that tore away his nose and part of his face. Yet he did not therefore try to keep his family away from war. His ways suggest that he could imagine no other life. Widowed at the age of about sixty-four, he had four sons and three daughters by his first marriage. Three of the sons, soldiers, were killed in battle; the fourth entered a military order, the Knights of Malta, and later became bishop of Condom. But two of his daughters went into convents. King Henry III made him a field marshal (Maréchal de France) in 1574.
In the early 1570s, provoked by an inquiry into his financial doings as governor of Guyenne, Monluc dictated a long, self-justifying letter, which he then expanded and recast as Commentaires. The work is an absorbing memoir, while also profiling a life that was typical in many respects of the kind of noblemen who embraced the profession of arms with a lasting passion. He appears to have been unhappy and fidgety only when forced to be away from armed men, cavalcades, battles and battle dress, positions of command, and grand gestures.
&nb
sp; As a young man and even later, King Henry IV (d. 1610) of France was rather like Monluc: He loved horses, companies of armed men, and the hurly-burly of war. So too did King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. They thrilled to the galloping plunge into battle, and were usually flanked by men from the ancient lineages.
Europe’s armies, however, pulled in every kind of man, from the hardened criminal to the cavalier who proposed to fight for his religious faith, his king, his honor, money, or a sprint in status. Noble causes and “base” self-interest marched hand in hand. Motives were blurred, protean. And if acute necessity, such as hunger, pulled many a poor man from town and country into the ranks, this was not usually the case with well-born officers. The exceptional cases of this sort—such as in Sweden, Spain, or Germany—involved mercenaries who came from the gentry’s social margins, wretched “gentlemen” without the income to outfit a horse or themselves. But even these men, like their comfortable brethren, went to war to improve their financial lot, dreaming of “higher” causes, in search of adventure, or even—more sociably—to be able in time to show off their scars. The Danish general Count Josias Rantzau boasted sixty wounds and “certainly lost an eye, foot, hand, and an ear over [the course of] his career.” Prowess in battle had been a mark of the nobleman since time out of mind.
REVENGE
Furies Page 3