Furies

by Lauro Martines

  But the fast-growing numbers of light horsemen, armed with arquebus or pistol, were not a mere fact of military science, locked away from people in town and country. In the wide vicinage of sieges and skirmishes, the new units also moved more swiftly over the countryside, where they killed and plundered with greater ease. In the Italian Wars, in France’s religious civil wars, and in the Thirty Years War, thousands of villages and little towns would feel the muscle of that rapacious cavalry.

  ALL BULLET VELOCITIES OF THE early handguns broke the sound barrier. Tests have shown that the bullets of the wheel-lock pistol approached the speed of their modern equivalents. But the arquebus, like the musket, fired missiles at speeds about half as fast as those from the assault rifles of the late twentieth century.

  Only one other innovation need be mentioned here: the flintlock pistol and musket, a muzzle loader. Not much used until the late seventeenth century, when the bayonet was also introduced, the flintlock had a more effective triggering device. As a “fusile” or musket, it doubled the previous rate of fire, could be easily fired from the shoulder, and was lighter and more accurate. But it was really an eighteenth-century weapon.

  IN EUROPE’S VAST AND UNPOLICED rural world, where brigandage was at times common, small firearms and gunpowder soon found their way into the hands of civilians. Many a French and German farmer possessed an arquebus by the late sixteenth century. Brought back from the wars by relatives or by other local men, firearms could be readily put up for sale, although the foot-long pistol, being more expensive and trickier to operate, would not be seen regularly for some time to come. Despairingly, doctors observed that gunshot wounds were uglier and far more difficult to treat than the punctures or gashes of the edged and pointed weapons of tradition: pike, arrow, and sword. Civilians, too, would come to know this by experience.

  CHANGES IN OFFENSIVE WEAPONS AND tactics necessarily elicited changes in methods of defense, most especially in the defense of cities. Almost as soon as the heavy cannon became the cardinal wrecker of walls and ramparts, military architects turned to defensive needs and designed fresh modes of fortification. They found that a fortress with “angled” bastions constituted the most effective new form. It relied on lower and thicker walls, together with a great buildup of earthwork and sloping ground just outside and around the walled ring. The format included an encircling ditch, but also crucially, for crossfire, polygonal or angled defensive emplacements on the outside of the walls. On the inside, out-of-sight platforms were erected for defensive artillery, and this was a fundamental new addition: a battery of guns intended to fire back enough shot at the besiegers to neutralize or silence theirs.

  The men in command of cities soon realized, however, that the new styles of fortification were extraordinarily expensive, not only because of the costs of materials but also because of massive labor costs, despite the fact that humble manual labor—digging, hauling, breaking stone, masonry—was extremely cheap in Europe. Here again we touch on a change in technology that had a dire impact on rural populations. For any war or military emergency was likely to produce decrees that forced the peasantry around cities to labor without payment: coerced into tearing down trees, razing suburbs, or toiling to improve the defensive emplacements and earthworks that girded the curving sweep of city walls. Inevitably, too, enemy armies, intent on sieges, were also masters in the business of dragooning squadrons of neighboring peasants into hard labor.

  Owing, at any rate, to the enormity of costs, few cities were ever fully protected by the new forms of construction. Antwerp, Lille, and Turin would press far in that direction, but at the end of the sixteenth century, not one of Europe’s biggest cities “could boast a completed and fully bastioned enceinte.” As a result, defending them from sieges often became hellish; and in many cases, when seriously threatened by an army, towns would simply open their gates and surrender, to avoid being sacked.

  Medieval Europe already knew, and knew only too well, that war was never cheap. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were the great age for the walling in of suburbs, as more small armies took to the field. By about 1275, military costs had started to shatter the political hopes of scores of would-be princes, independent cities, and regional warlords. In Italy, the outcome was a scourge of local tyrants and several aristocratic republics. But after 1500 the costs of war again leaped, in payment for gunpowder weapons, the rebuilding of defensive structures, and the swelling demand for professional soldiers and their longer periods of service. Now, with few exceptions, only the stronger states—Spain, France, Habsburg Germany, and then the Dutch Republic and England—could successfully keep to the new direction of war. Nor was it enough for a prince, if he had little else, to concentrate on his artillery park and to build up a train of superior guns. The Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso d’Este, did just this in the early sixteenth century; but his artillery, in that changing world, gave no true independence to Ferrara. The Este dukes became the hirelings of popes and of the rulers of Spain, France, and the Empire, because it was impossible for them to field armies large enough to back up their guns. In the grasp of out-of-control princely ambitions, a Europe at war would require more manpower; and professional soldiers were exceedingly expensive, even—weirdly enough—when they went unpaid, as we shall see. If the old infantry arms, such as the longbow, the pike, the sword, and the crossbow demanded special skills, so too did the new weapons.

  IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY, archers and other foot soldiers had already started to challenge the primacy of lance and heavy cavalry, the distinctive arm of the old warrior nobility. In his classic stance, the nobleman required a horse, armor, and a lance. His glory lay in shock combat: the charging cavalcade. The later stages of the Hundred Years War (1337–1453), however, saw the passing of the heyday of the knight, like that of the trebuchet. He was having to get down from his horse more and more often, and to fight alongside foot soldiers. The turn in the composition of armies, with the center of gravity slowly shifting from horse to foot, was flagged in 1476 at the battles of Grandson and Morat, which pitted Swiss pikemen against the horsemen of Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy. Disciplined blocks of Swiss mercenaries, using pikes eighteen feet long, defeated a renowned cavalry and the duke’s gunpowder artillery. Evidently, then, the new artillery could not in itself bring victory in battle. It had to be successfully combined with sufficient numbers of foot soldiers and horsemen.

  With their lands as the arena of “the Italian Wars” for France and Spain, Italians were the first people to suffer the new style of warfare over many years (1494–1559). The best fighting forces of the sixteenth century were the Spanish tercio, the huge and dense squares of Swiss pikemen, and regiments of German Landsknechts. Like the selling of Swiss pikemen, “marketing” German mercenary pike (Landsknechts) was a flourishing business in the sixteenth century. The sound of their drums, to which they might march in step, could be thunderous enough to distress the ears; and townsfolk possibly felt at times that it was an eerie echo of the double cannons employed to batter the gates and walls of cities.

  All professional infantry units soon began to combine pike with shot. Well before the end of the sixteenth century, a company of Swiss fighters might consist of two hundred pikemen, thirty musketeers, and thirty arquebusiers. Mercenary units of Swiss and German pikemen attained celebrity by fighting for different princes—French, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, and German, but also, after 1570, for the new Dutch Republic. The feared arm of the king of Spain, the infantry regiment known as a tercio, saw its most sustained action first in Italy, then in the Netherlands and northern France.

  It was only in France that the mounted nobleman, heavily armored and with a lance, survived into the second half of the sixteenth century. Elsewhere he had disappeared almost entirely. In Spain, even before the Low Countries became a theater of martyrdom for Spanish troops, noblemen (some hidalgos apart) abandoned cavalry units except as officers. And in Germany, as we have seen, combat from the backs of horses passed into t
he hands of arquebusiers and pistoleers.

  Aside from the tactical use of artillery, the overall direction of change for infantry, now the decisive arm in battle, had mostly to do with the proportions of pikemen to musketeers. Approaching parity—meaning one to one—around 1600, by 1635, in the midst of the Thirty Years War, the ratio was sometimes two muskets for every pike. Yet even late in the century, Vauban, marshal of France and a leading military engineer, wanted infantry regiments to be made up of 25 percent pike, for the simple reason that musketeers, when not fronted by formations of pikemen, were too easily overwhelmed by charging, saber-wielding horsemen and pistoleer cavalry.

  Military historians have a good deal to say about the merits of the “old-fashioned” battle formations (dense blocks of infantry) versus the newer “linear” tactics of the Dutch and the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus. Seeking mobility, the newer approach to battle-field tactics employed longer lines of foot soldiers and fewer ranks in depth. Armed with the arquebus or light musket, the front row would fire a volley and then peel off to form a new row at the back of the formation while also reloading. But the implicit debate here, with all of its ifs and buts and possibilities—pitting, say, the tercio against the linear arrangement—is food for the battle experts and amateur tacticians.

  One point, however, regarding the shape and makeup of armies should be clarified, because it had an immediate impact on civilian populations. Wherever war was turned into raids and skirmishes, as in regions with acute scarcities of foodstuffs, armies stepped up their reliance on cavalry. Horsemen—dragoons and pistoleers—could more easily round up supplies. For this reason, after the devastating Imperial victory over the Swedish army at Nördlingen in 1634, the use of cavalry in the Thirty Years War rose from a figure of 30 percent to 50 percent or even more of the armies in action. As an engine of warfare, in short, cavalry remained absolutely fundamental.

  While it was true that master gunners faced the great walls of towns and cities with new powers, it was also true that the new fortifications, with their defensive artillery batteries, were able to hold off attacking armies. La Rochelle, Paris, Augsburg, Vienna, Turin, and many fortress towns, such as Metz and Casale, hurled back the attempted escalades of besiegers. These successes, however, were by and large the facade of events. In their surrounding, unexamined shadows lay the effects of starvation: the mass dying of the besieged civilians, as well as the deaths of many of the besiegers themselves, felled by epidemic diseases and even by hunger. In Flanders, the Spanish siege of Ostend (1601–1604) issued in eighty thousand casualties for Spain and sixty thousand for the Dutch defenders. In 1573, the royal siege of the great Protestant port of La Rochelle ended with the death of about ten thousand besiegers. But in the annihilating siege of 1628, some fifteen thousand Rochelais perished, mostly from starvation, out of a population of eighteen to twenty thousand inhabitants. And we shall see the results of the horrific siege of Mantua in 1630.

  THE MAKING OF WEAPONS, EVEN in preindustrial Europe, imposed a good deal of specialization, particularly because many of the required tasks called for precision work with metals and a range of operations involving mines, foundries, and workshops. These were enterprises, or their management, based in cities such as Augsburg, Nuremberg, Brescia, and the busy urban centers of the Low Countries. In Italy, the big arms buyers looked to Milan, Brescia, and Bergamo, the peninsula’s best producers of armor and weapons. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century, leadership in the manufacture of firearms and other weapons had passed to the Netherlands.

  The Dutch—those early stalwart republicans and enterprising merchants—made every type of weapon for the open market, from pikes, swords, and halberds to the wheel-lock pistol, hand grenades, the matchlock arquebus, and the full range of artillery. Wealthy Amsterdam was the foremost producer. Some of the lesser towns had their own specialties, such as Gouda for match, Utrecht for armor and grenades, or Delft and Dordrecht for small arms and gunpowder. Arms makers in the United Provinces also produced parts of weapons, such as gun barrels and firing mechanisms, and the guns would then be assembled elsewhere. But the Dutch also imported parts, among which sword blades from Germany.

  Everywhere in Europe, rulers and armies were buying weapons “off the shelf.” And two experts note, for example, that “as Siena prepared for war in the 1550s, arquebuses were purchased in lots of 500 at a time.” Although probably made in one of the north Italian cities, the five hundred guns are likely to have arrived in Siena via the agency of Venetian middlemen. But by 1590, they could easily have been purchased from the Dutch, who had gone on to develop an extraordinary export trade in arms. Their list of buyers was striking. They sold weapons of all sorts to buyers in Portugal, Poland, England, Russia, Denmark, Venice, even in Morocco, and of course in Sweden, France, and Germany. The range of their wares may be gauged from an Amsterdam sale of 1622:

  Count Christian of Brunswick bought everything to fit out a small army of 7000 men, to wit, 3000 muskets, 3000 suits of armour, 3000 pikes, 1000 suits of armour for cavalry, 1000 harquebuses with bandoliers, 10,000 pounds of gunpowder, 20,000 pounds of match and 10,000 pounds of musket balls at 20 per pound, totalling 200,000 balls, and also 1000 hand grenades.

  If we add that the market value of all this hardware exceeded 100,000 guilders, we are speaking of a sum which amounted, in 1620, to the monthly wages of more than three thousand skilled craftsmen, or, in other terms, to about 8.5 percent of the annual tax receipts of Friesland, the Dutch Republic’s second-richest province or ministate.

  EUROPE HAD EDGED ITS WAY into a new political world, a world made by the wars of aggressive princes and a few hustling but powerful cities, Venice and Amsterdam most notably. But first of all, for the principal war makers, it was a world which required that they be able to rely on credit or borrow money fast, great chests of it. Revenue from taxes and princely domains—the prime sources of income for German rulers and the crowned heads of Spain and France—always added up to a fraction of the sums needed to field and supply the armies of their bloated ambitions. Troops on campaign had to pay out ready cash for food and supplies. Local vendors demanded the sight of gold and silver coin, unless, relying on ironclad guarantees, they agreed to offer credit.

  So exit political posturing and enter the bankers: the gentlemen who could raise and lend the immediate cash. Their far-flung networks were the arteries for the transfer of money or credit from one part of Europe to another. They had the contacts and could reach out to depositors. But of course they were motivated by the promise of profit. Their loans were secured by the future income from varieties of taxes, by the sale of bonds, by the spoils of office, or, as in the case of the Fugger banking house in southern Germany, by lucrative rights over silver and copper mines.

  The ability to move money and credit across the face of Europe had a fundamental importance. Armies ranged far: French troops were dispatched to Italy, Germany, and Spain; Spanish regiments went to the Netherlands, to France, Italy, and Germany; Venetian and Dutch mercenaries were assigned to Germany and even sent into combat on the high seas; Swedish armies fought in Poland, Russia, and Germany; the mercenaries of the German Habsburgs found themselves in Italy, but also along the frontiers of Poland, France, and the Netherlands. And as soldiers trekked over long distances, their supply trains could not provide all they needed in the way of food and fodder. Local towns and villages became the suppliers.

  The nascent “sovereign” state was developing muscle and showing it along the way, pushing far beyond its frontiers with soldiers and keeping this up for years. Payment of the ensuing gigantic debts was then spread out over generations, as we shall see in some detail later. No medieval state had managed to do this. But neither had there been one which could rely on the resources of continuing fear, coercion, and degrees of loyalty. Early modern Europe had more than one such state, with France and Spain leading the way. Relying on just enough anxiety and loyalty among their subjects, these states were able to levy new r
ounds of taxes again and again. Indeed, their moneyed subjects got into the habit of investing in the “sovereign” debt by purchasing government bonds. Huge war debts could thus be borne for years.

  THE RIGHTS OF PRINCES

  A view of early modern Europe used to be glimpsed in what the old histories of the period called it: “The Age of the Renaissance and Reformation.” The implication was that two events had shaped the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: a) the rebirth of the arts and secular learning, along with a passionate new interest in the world of antiquity, and b) the Protestant revolt against the Roman Catholic Church, heralded by the breakaway Augustinian friar Martin Luther in 1517.

  Our view of that period has changed. Historians now situate the Renaissance and Reformation in a more comprehensive, densely woven narrative. In this reorientation, at least for some historians, the primacy of change belongs to the rise of sovereign states. War, debt, and unprecedented taxation loom up to overshadow the European scene.

  The matter of sovereign states may be approached through the question of coinage and currencies.

  Europe in 1500 was a wilderness of different currencies. I refer not only to a cascade of coins in gold, silver, copper, billon, and other alloys, but also to lines of coins minted and issued by myriad territorial governments. The Italian peninsula alone had more than a score of different currencies, coined in Venice, Milan, Genoa, Florence, Rome, and Naples, as well as in Lucca, Siena, Ferrara, Mantua, Bologna, Urbino, Perugia, and lesser places. Spain and France were crisscrossed by a variety of currencies, and Germany, under the Empire, minted scores of them. Lower Saxony alone, in the early seventeenth century, had thirty different mints. In the Low Countries, where circulating foreign coins were carefully tabulated, ordinances carried “engravings of upwards of 1000 different pieces.” The aim was to provide identifications.