Along came a rational solution: payment in food, the basic stipend of Sweden’s armies in Germany during the Thirty Years War. This policy was frankly laid down by Gustavus Adolphus in 1632. Running short of the needed cash, he saw no better way out of his fix. But there was also another, if more devious, route. It was described by the Swedish chancellor Axel Oxenstierna in 1633. He estimated that if the army’s seventy-eight thousand men were paid on a monthly basis, as was their due, the yearly wage bill would be in the region of 9.8 million Reichstalers. But if he paid them for a mere month, holding on to the rest, and dispensed one pound of bread per day to each soldier, plus occasional small sums of money, he would then be able to keep the yearly bill down to 5.4 million Reichstalers. And this is what he tried to do. Within two years, however, in 1635, though having already confronted a major mutiny, Oxenstierna was again faced with an army in a state of mass mutiny, and he had to rush into negotiations with the officers.
In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the mercenary armies of the Dutch were alleged to be the best paid in Europe. Yet “the pay was half that of a day labourer,” and the Dutch were capable of callously dismissing, without pay, newly recruited mercenary companies on suddenly finding that they no longer needed them, as happened in 1658. The ruling elites of the United (Dutch) Provinces were not in the least generous with their armies; no European state ever was, because paying wartime soldiers was the dearest by far of all government expenses. Hence the Scottish, English, and German mercenaries of the Dutch occasionally bordered on mutiny, their cries a litany against arrears in pay. Still, by managing to pay more regularly than princes, thanks to a booming seventeenth-century economy, the Dutch were nearly always able to attract mercenaries. Even local journeymen, who often lived on the verge of unemployment, despite the boom, might join a home regiment for the simple reason that it “held the prospect of continuous income.” But just as temporary hard times could bring this on, so better times were likely to result in mass desertions. Army life was a choice of last resort.
Military historians point out that when the opportunity arose, soldiers in garrisons were allowed to work at their trades, if they had one, with an eye to extra earnings. But only peace could impart substance to this rosy view, and even then the working soldier might have to share that extramural income with his commanding officer. War itself—the actual ground and times of warfare—offered few opportunities for workaday labor.
The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), ending the Italian Wars, released thousands of French soldiers, including officers, back into civilian life, and many would soon be sucked into the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). In this “higher” conflict, the will to provide soldiers with a living wage quickly floundered. Within weeks of the start of a campaign, Catholic and Protestant princes would find themselves unable to go on paying the sums due. Their armies now began to go hungry, or to strike out in search of edible plunder. The practical solution—and this occurred repeatedly, on the government side especially—was to call a truce and disband the troops. Crown and Huguenot opposition would then begin to cast about for ways to raise more funds for a new round of warfare.
But such proceedings could pave the way to horror. In October 1562, over three days, contrary to the pleas of the queen mother, Catherine de Médicis, an unpaid and resentful royal army sacked Rouen, the second-largest city in France. Some of the captains simply stole away with the silver for the wages of the soldiers.
If we turn to the late fifteenth century, to Renaissance Italy and the world of the Sforza dukes of Milan, we come on one of the best organized of the peninsula’s mercenary armies. Yet Sforza soldiers were so poorly paid, and often partly paid in bales of cloth, that they were allowed to top up their earnings with plunder and contraband. The dukes complained about this, but it was also in their fiscal interest to look the other way.
In the early sixteenth century, on paper at least, the German Landsknecht seemed able to have a more comfortable material life than many journeymen: craftsmen who were not their own masters. Volunteer recruits came forward in numbers. But their initial expenses for kit put them immediately into debt. Costs ran to something like one gulden for a long pike, three gulden for a helmet, three and a half gulden for an arquebus in the latter part of the century, and all of twelve gulden for simple armor. Meanwhile they paid for their own food, clothing, and shoes out of their monthly wage of four gulden, the value of which was whittled down by the extraordinary inflation of the sixteenth century. In due course, when going into a company of Landsknechts, German youths were likely to be enticed by the promise of loot alone. Their plan was to live on booty.
THE INABILITY OF STATES TO keep paying the wages of their mercenaries was far from being the whole story. We have seen that military entrepreneurs could ply their trade only in the shadows of war, and that their regiments were organized to bring in—like business firms—as much profit as possible. A lesser tale now comes up, linked to the individual companies and to the captains who regarded them as their property.
Owing to the scantiness of government cash, rulers often assumed—or wanted to believe—that captains would have enough capital on hand, when the need arose, to pay recruitment bonuses, to lend money to soldiers for equipment (not seldom even for shoes), and to pay for food and fodder when the due funds failed to arrive. Regimental bosses (colonels), who might own several companies, were also seen in this light, and not seldom they were titled men with landed estates. Yet in meeting the needs of their men out of their own pockets, captains and colonels turned themselves into moneylenders, and so they sought to collect interest on their loans. But they also expected a return on the primary business ventures: their companies and regiments.
In this jigsaw of operations, always anxious about delayed government payment, our military enterprisers looked for every profitable angle, particularly officers in pursuit of higher place, more servants, better dress, a more generous table, or a surplus for the needs of family and land back home. Some of them, indeed, had incurred debt for the initial outlays of capital, so as to pay for dress, food, and horses, or even to buy a company of soldiers. Every coin that came into their hands raised the question: Was it one that could be kept? The same consideration went into the sums that they paid out in wages, and for food, arms, pack animals, and other needs. These were the occasions when the hands of captains might engage in sleight of hand. Sources abound in comments about starving soldiers standing next to well-fed officers dressed to the nines. At the peak of France’s wars of conscience and religion, officers were capable, as we have seen, of galloping off with the wages of soldiers. Fighting for God did not necessarily reinforce honesty. Not surprisingly, recruits were known to desert en masse, as occurred in Spain, when a group of them saw that their captain was crudely seeking his own profit at their expense.
Fraud among army officers was most glaringly connected with the mustering of troops for review by a government official. A specific sum—the soldier’s wage—would then be due to the company commander for every foot soldier and horseman present at the muster, as confirmed by the official inspector. Almost everywhere, it seems, impostors (passe-volants) checkered the mustered ranks: men fetched in and paid a tiny sum for the walk-on part. The Germans had a saying, “Not all men who carry pikes are pikemen.” Rulers knew all about this trickery, knew it was rife, but were unable to put a stop to it; and the commanding officers battened. When possible, such as on campaign or after skirmishes and battles, officers were also likely to submit muster lists that included dead men and deserters; and if they owned their companies, this temptation became urgent.
Many other forms of fraud also flourished, as we may glimpse in one of the most detailed inquiries ever made of soldierly corruption in early modern Europe: a study of Milan’s garrison during the early 1580s.
Milan was headquarters for the troops of Spanish Italy, although its great fortress, the castello, held a garrison of only little more than one thousand men, of w
hom just over six hundred were soldiers. Favoritism and bribery were rampant in that tight community. Guard duty was de rigueur, but not for favorites. Food in the fortress was dearer than in town and not nearly as good, in spite of being free of excise taxes. But since their wages were nearly always far in arrears, most of the soldiers had to buy their food on credit and hence in the castello. They were in debt perpetually. A sum was regularly deducted from their wages for a hospital in the city, but most of that money was pocketed by the castellan. First arrivals at the fortress, arriving with a weapon of their own, were forced nonetheless to buy an overpriced second one, often touched up to look like new. Soldiers even had to buy monthly amounts of gunpowder, sold at a profit, to be used in gun salutes for the arrival and honoring of important people.
The villains of the scene were the castellan, Don Sancho de Guevara Padilla, and Lieutenant Bartolomé Palomeque. The lieutenant had even forced the castello taverner to borrow 200 gold scudi from him at 30 percent interest, payable monthly. Alas for justice, at the end of the inquiry (1586), the castellan was found not guilty of corruption, and the lieutenant died before he could suffer penalties, so much time had passed before judicial proceedings were finally complete.
We cannot say that conditions in the Milan garrison were typical. But with the galloping inflation of the sixteenth century, and the cost of bread sometimes on a seesaw, conduct at the castello reveals the hard cynicism and abuse of a time and place of dearth. Milan itself was not even directly in a war zone. Still, officers everywhere were driven to sniff out opportunities for dishonesty, and ruling elites, manipulated by privileged castes, were unable to block the avenues to temptation.
And yet there was something to be said for the officers—a mitigating word, above all in wartime, when government funds ran out fast. For all their finery, officers too could go hungry in the field, and even find themselves reduced to poverty by the state’s inability to honor its contracts with them. France especially, in the seventeenth century, had cases of captains and colonels whose heavy investments in their units carried them toward ruin and encouraged fraud if, as they saw it, they were to save themselves financially. The cancer of corruption thus went back, to a large extent, to the failures of the emerging tax-and-power state.
THE MILITARY ENTERPRISER was passing out of the picture by the late seventeenth century. But the quest for private gain from the finances of regiments and companies ran through the eighteenth century. Modest Prussian noblemen, as army officers, built careers and attained wealth on that coveted income. Noblemen in France bought and sold companies for the sake of gain. And Spanish colonels in the Low Countries turned the cushier positions in their regiments into places for clients, relatives, retainers, friends, and servants from back home.
3
Sacking Cities
The root metaphor here, in the word sack (Latin: saccus), is in the notion of putting a city into a sack and going off with it. An extravagant image. Yet the sense of it was close enough to the essential reality. At Brescia in 1512, Antwerp in 1576, and Magdeburg in 1631, as we shall see, soldiers left the scenes of their violence with as much booty as they could carry or transport by cart, wagon, and horse.
To sack a city, however, was not only to loot it, leaving behind a spoor of destruction, but also to murder at will, to violate women, and to batter inhabitants until they revealed the whereabouts of their concealed valuables—money, jewelry, plate, silks, and prized furnishings. Another source of rich plunder—often the most lucrative—was in ransom moneys squeezed from as many people as possible, particularly the rich and well connected.
Looking back to Renaissance Italy, we find that the peninsula fell victim to four extraordinary sackings. The most notorious of them ripped through papal Rome in 1527, when unpaid soldiers, mostly Spanish and German, paid themselves with the wealth of cardinals, noblemen, bankers, ambassadors, and rich citizens. But up in Lombardy, Brescia, fifty miles east of Milan, was the first big city to be stormed after 1500. Next came Genoa, on the Ligurian coast, in 1522. And princely Mantua would suffer a similar fate in 1630, in an assault that dispersed the remains of one of Europe’s most famous art collections, assembled over more than two centuries by the ruling Gonzaga family.
But lesser sacks, though not for the victims, invested other places: Ravenna and Prato in 1512, Lodi in 1516, Como in 1521, and Pavia in 1528. Italy’s luminous cities seduced Europe’s leading monarchs. And the peninsula was turned into the main “theater of operation” for the territorial claims of the Valois kings of France and the Habsburg princes of Spain and of Germany’s Holy Roman Empire.
BRESCIA (1512)
The makings of Brescia’s nightmare went back to January 1512, with a conspiracy organized by Brescian noblemen and directed against the occupying French governor. The aim of the conspirators was to return the city to the control of the Venetian Republic. Prominent local noblemen had never ceased to figure in public life, and now they were about to plunge the city and themselves into horror.
An old city, with roots reaching back to ancient Rome, Brescia had long known how to prosper. And with a population of about thirty-five thousand souls—London then had about sixty thousand—it was one of Europe’s largest urban centers, home to busy cloth, iron, and metal-working industries. The Visconti dukes of Milan had ruled Brescia until it was torn away from them by the Venetians in the 1420s. The city’s new link with seafaring Venice proved to have trade advantages, and while one of the noble factions accepted the regime change, the other, being high-profile and anti-Venetian, turned in favor of the French.
In the tale before us, Brescia had passed to the hands of the French only three years before, in the spring of 1509, when a remarkable European alliance against Venice briefly dismantled the Venetian mainland empire. French armies grabbed Brescia, Bergamo, and Cremona, then restored these cities to the puppet government of the duchy of Milan, which was now in the grasp of the king of France.
The French got wind of the 1512 plot a day before the planned assault on them. They fanned out at once, on January 21 and 22, to arrest, interrogate, and behead scores of plotters, while also confiscating their properties in the process. The leader of the conspiracy, an old warrior, Count Luigi Avogadro, managed to escape. Fleeing from the city, he rushed to meet his Venetian accomplices and his own mercenaries, who were already on their way to Brescia. The plan had been to open one of the gates of the city in the middle of the night and to let Venice’s soldiers and the other mercenaries steal in to catch the defending garrison by surprise.
Knowing that the French had reduced their troop numbers in Brescia to a mere nine hundred men, Avogadro and the Venetian commander, Andrea Gritti, decided to press on to the city, despite having lost the benefit of a surprise attack. They were then joined along the way by several thousand peasants. Alerted, the governing French official assembled the Brescian nobility and made a plea for their help to defend the city. He seems to have been met mostly with silence, whereupon the pro-French families urged him to provide them with arms, but he turned down their request, no longer trusting even them.
To the sound of drums and trumpets, Avogadro’s own mercenaries, backed by volunteers, made the first attack on Brescia on February 2 and were afterward joined by Venice’s troops. Peasants scaled the city walls after two hours of fierce fighting, and the plotters broke into Brescia, while the French retreated to the castello, the upper fortress overlooking the city. Avogadro’s supporters now assaulted and sacked the houses of Milanese merchants and of the pro-French Gambareschi, noble satellites of the Gambara counts. So it was now civil war as well. Gritti’s cannons, however, did not have the firepower to silence the upper fortress, from which the French now used their artillery to rain terror on the city.
In Bologna, meanwhile, the supreme commander of French forces, the young Gaston de Foix, getting word of the debacle, moved his army out at once and made a race for Brescia. Stung by the humiliating coup there, in the midst of a war with Spain’s a
rmy in Italy, and resenting the Italian propaganda campaign against the “barbarian” French, de Foix was in no mood to be merciful. On the sixteenth of February, he was already outside the walls of Brescia, laying waste to the suburbs and killing about eight hundred men on the Venetian side. He waited two days, then sent a trumpeter into the city with a call for its surrender and the promise of security for life and property. The invitation was spurned in the belief that a Spanish army, commanded by Raimondo Cardona, was on its way to engage the French forces. A fatal mistake, for in the customary rules then governing the conduct of war, if a city rejected the terms of surrender and was then taken by storm, it was liable ipso facto to a sacking.
During the night of February 18 and 19, more than six thousand French, Swiss, and German mercenaries, using an emergency stairway and moving two abreast, climbed slowly up into the upper fortress. Dawn found five hundred French cavalry positioned just outside the Gate of San Nazzaro; but all the gates were now surrounded, and the soldiers had been given license to sack and kill, sparing only the “Ghibelline” (pro-French) families. Ghoulishly, it was the week of carnival.
Four hours later, French fighters, bearing “the flag of death,” started their descent into the city from the castello. Meeting heavy arquebus firing, they pushed forward anyway. Some of them fought their way to the Torlonga gate, opened it, and let in a new wave of French mercenaries. Picking up the scent of defeat, the light cavalry of the Venetians, crossbowmen from Dalmatia, panicked, whereupon they made for the Gate of San Nazzaro, forced it open, and a few of them managed to escape. But the waiting French horsemen now waded in, slaughtering many of them at will. Avogadro and his fighters fought on bravely, only to be overwhelmed, while Gritti and his men were surrounded on three sides. The battle was soon over. Prisoners were taken; the “gentlemen” and officers on the Venetian side, including the rich Andrea Gritti, were picked out to be held for ransoming. But Avogadro and the other Brescian “traitors” were not about to be spared for money. They were beheaded, along with two of Avogadro’s sons, and then quartered—each body hacked into four parts. The parts were fixed to the city gates and to prominent points in the government square, low enough, however, to be got and torn at by dogs. An express reminder to traitors.
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