The hard-liners, meanwhile, had to suffer embarrassments. When the Jesuit College was ordered to open up its store of food supplies for the compiling of an inventory, the head of the school went to the papal legate to request an exemption. Whereupon the top official of the society of merchants, quickly confronting the Jesuit, objected: “Why should you be exempted from the inventory? Is your life of greater worth than ours?” The priest relented. And it was discovered that the Jesuits had enough wheat and biscuit for a year. Their stores also contained “a large quantity of salted meat which had been dried, the better to preserve it, despite the fact that they had more food supplies in their house than the four best houses in Paris.” In fact, says the reporter of these details, every religious house in Paris had enough biscuit for at least a year. This included “even the Capuchins, who are alleged to live strictly on what they are given every day and who save nothing for tomorrow, because they [supposedly] distribute all their surplus to the poor. Well, they were found to be well-supplied, which astonished lots of people.”
Once clergy and religious houses were roped in to help feed the starving, officials looked into the condition of the poor. They found and counted two sorts of poor households: seventy-five hundred with some money, but unable to find bread cheap enough to buy, and five thousand without a penny. Now, for a period of fifteen days, the clergy agreed to feed the utterly destitute once a day, and to subsidize the others, those with a modicum of money, to help them buy a daily pound of cheap bread, also for fifteen days. But the cheap bread was to be stamped with “the arms of the city.” The poor, in other words, were meant to be thankful to the city’s ruling council too.
And here all of a sudden we touch on pets, on the city’s cat and dog population. All the poor—those about to receive the handouts—were ordered to take their cats and dogs to a given depot three days before the start of the food distributions. “A certain number were then killed and cooked with herbs and roots in large pots … and the soupy stew was doled out to the poor. To each a little piece of dog and cat meat, plus an ounce of bread. To the less poor one pound of common bread for six sols each, for as long as it lasts, and after that was finished, then biscuit for eight sols the pound. When the fifteen days expired, the clergy had met their obligations in the matter.”
This grudging account is offered by an observer who sympathized with King Henry and was critical of the Catholic Leaguers. But there was nothing distorted about his outline of events. July had come, and Paris was in the grip of an existential crisis.
Police agents were sent to the city walls to meet with Henry’s officials and “really to plead with his majesty that it please him to let some of the poor people out of the city.” The king rejected the plea and declared that “not a single person was to come out.” Later, however, moved by what he saw and heard, he authorized the exit of three thousand people, instead of which about four thousand of the starving pushed their way out. The besiegers had to use violence to stanch the flow of refugees.
Pierre Corneio (Cornejo), a resident Spaniard and strong supporter of the League, reported that the “comfortable rich” also suffered. Instead of their usual “delicate meats,” they were now eating “oatmeal bread, donkey, mule, and horsemeat, although there was little of this and very dear.” By late July or early August, as the depleting of food stocks quickened, “all the city’s glory and triumph, beautiful tapestries, silver plate, jewels and precious stones, handsome carriages, coaches, and horses of the sort for taking gentlemen and ladies about: these had been exchanged … for kettles of porridges, for cooked grass and weeds without salt, and pots of horsemeat, ass, and mule, on which these poor Christians now lived. The skins themselves and the hides of the said beasts were sold cooked, and they ate these with as much appetite as if they were the best meats in the world.”
The men in command of Paris carried their fight into the second week of September, so that they and their defending mercenaries, at least, had enough food to hold out against Henry’s harassing troops. By now, however, many who had once been well-off were also the victims of famine, and this extreme was splintering the will to resist. Grass and weeds had long since vanished from that great urban space, ripped up to be eaten; and private gardens had either been stripped of their greenery or were being protected—we may assume—by armed men. Reflecting on the hardships of the rich, Corneio remembers Léry’s memoir and the claim that the people of Sancerre seem to have eaten even powdered slate and stone mixed (he adds) with wine. But “they were few and nearly all were fighting folk and soldiers.”
Wailing for bread, the poor broke out in noisy street demonstrations. But as what they really wanted could only be got by capitulating to Henry IV, they were brutally dispersed. Another popular outburst on August 9 was also put down, and participants were accused of being seditious heretics. They were beaten, jailed, ransomed, and some were hanged. Paris’s prayers multiplied, but so did the numbers dying from starvation, especially after the clergy’s fifteen days of special relief expired. And now, says Corneio, “Some mornings there were 100, 150, and at times as many as 200 dead of hunger in the streets.”
The starving had taken to eating horrors. On June 15, the Spanish ambassador, who had witnessed strident hunger among Spain’s soldiers in the Netherlands in the 1570s, made a remarkable proposal to the city council. Thinking of food for the needy, he recommended that they mill and grind the bones of the dead in the Cemetery of the Innocents, mix the bone meal with water, and turn it into a breadlike substance. No one present appears to have objected to the recipe. It was also on this occasion, probably, that Mendoza spoke of a recent incident in which the Persians had reduced a Turkish fortress to the eating of a substance “made of ground-down and powdered bone.”
With so many of the city’s poor having already eaten cooked animal skins, grass, weeds, garbage, vermin, the skulls of cats and dogs, and every kind of ordure, Parisians now ate the bones of their dead in the form of bone-meal bread. Reports of cannibalism surfaced insistently. The anonymous witness gives an account—one of the most detailed—of a Parisian lady whose two children, despite her wealth, had starved to death. She dismembered, cooked, and ate them. The moral temper of the city had some men openly willing to discuss the question of cannibalism. Pierre de l’Estoile observes that “toward the end [of the siege] … the most barbarous … began to chase children as well as dogs in the streets … and three were actually eaten.” And he claims to have heard it argued “by a wellknown Catholic … that there was less danger [in the hereafter] by eating a child in such circumstances, than by recognizing … a heretic [Henry IV].”
With views borne to such extremes by the fears and furies of Catholic Leaguers, how were any rational decisions possible, and how could the diehards reach any understanding with Henry IV?
SINCE THE CITY APPEARED TO verge on suicide, with religious intransigents still in control, the end had to come soon, and it turned out to be in the twists of international politics.
Opposed to the “heretic” king and in favor of France’s Catholic Leaguers, the king of Spain had ordered his general, the Duke of Parma, to march the Army of Flanders down into France to engage Henry’s forces. Unwillingly, because of his Sisyphean labors in the north, Parma at first dispatched three to four thousand men to assist the Duke of Mayenne (Charles de Guise), whose Catholic League army was too small to be pitted against the troops encamped around Paris. Giving way to more insistent appeals, the Duke of Parma finally crossed into France about the middle of August, at the head of a fourteen-thousand-man army, and on the twenty-third he was at Meaux, where Mayenne met him with his ten thousand foot and two thousand horse. Suddenly, therefore, Henry IV had to pull away his tattered noose of twenty-seven thousand men from around Paris, although they were longing to sack the city. He moved out fast to engage Parma, hoping for a swift encounter and intent on then rushing back to the siege. Seeing Henry’s troops drawing away, Parisians bolted out of the city to look for foodstuffs, only to
be shocked by how little they could find, because the entire region, for many miles around, “had been eaten bare by the four months’ sojourn of the besieging army.”
Henry realized that he had met more than his match in the scion of a famous papal family (the Farnese), the Duke of Parma, the most brilliant general of his day. This man refused to do battle unless he believed that circumstances would enable him to deal out a crushing defeat. No contact between the two armies ensued. And by the first of September, the king saw that he would have to give up his dream of taking Paris. But with two thousand scaling ladders still in his baggage train, he could not refrain from making a desperate final attempt at an escalade. Striking between the gates of St. Jacques and St. Marcel on September 9, his assault was repelled. Dramatically, Henry’s army was met by a resisting front line of thirteen hundred armed priests, Jesuits, “and the ramparts soon swarmed with resolute defenders.” The king drew away in retreat, and Paris could now begin to count its dead. A few years later, in the wake of his public conversion to Catholicism (1593), Henry would get the allegiance of longed-for Paris; and France’s other cities, too, would soon fall into line.
In the course of the siege, no fewer than thirteen thousand people had starved to death. But the overarching casualty rate reached a figure, very probably, of thirty thousand or even more.
Generally speaking, in early modern Europe, 18 to 25 percent or more of people in cities lived from hand to mouth and were ranked as poor or destitute. In Florence in the fifteenth century, one fifth of the city’s population was listed as “wretched” (miserabili) in the urban tax records. Lübeck and Hamburg, in about 1500, had 20 to 25 percent of people living on public assistance. In 1618, Augsburg’s tax officials put 48 percent of residents into the class of the penniless. And in the Low Countries—as elsewhere in Europe—we have seen about “half the income of the average poor family” was likely to be spent on bread alone. In our day, by contrast, the poor in the United Kingdom spend about 20 percent of income on all their foods, while in the United States, this expense for the “average” American is closer to 7 percent of income.
But from the moment a city was subjected to a siege, bread and food prices climbed crazily. In a week or two, the poor could double in numbers as hunger reached out to turn shamefaced craftsmen and burghers into mendicants. With a population in the region of 220,000 people, Paris, in a siege, was ideal ground for thirty thousand casualties: the results of starvation, malnutrition, sickness, and the violence of soldiers outside the city gates, where the starving often scurried about in search of something to eat.
AUGSBURG (1634–1635)
In September 1634, when an Imperial army began its siege of Augsburg, King Gustavus Adolphus was already dead. His twenty-nine-month spree over the face of Germany had been stopped on the battlefield of Lützen, near Leipzig, in November 1632. Tilly and Pappenheim were also dead—Wallenstein as well, coldly assassinated in February 1634.
Several of the most brilliant generals of the Thirty Years War had thus disappeared halfway through the stretch of those years. It was a conflict that would be the graveyard of many generals and thousands of noblemen from all parts of Europe. How, therefore, could it have been anything but an abattoir for “little people”? In 1635, Louis XIII had taken France into the war, seeking to obstruct German and Spanish Habsburg ambitions by contributing subsidies to the freebooting Swedish army—the chief defender of the Protestant cause in Germany and enemy number one to the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II.
A city of about forty-five thousand people at the beginning of the war, Augsburg had lost more than fifteen thousand inhabitants by the time of the siege, victims of widespread crop failures, dearth, and disease. But it would take a stunted imagination to believe that the survivors had therefore got used to their woes. They had not. They gritted their teeth, fought their way, and showed immense human reserves.
A sharp divide between rich and poor ran through the city, with most of the population—petty craftsmen in the cloth industry—living on the margins of subsistence and tipping over into hunger when crops were poor. They kept an eye on the size of bread loaves, on changes in the weather, and on crop yields. Bread riots in January 1622 had led to the storming and plundering of bakery shops. In fear of serious civil disorder, the city council had taken to making occasional handouts of grain.
Despite the fact that the city was predominantly Protestant, Catholics had enjoyed a certain freedom of worship until the Edict of Restitution (1629) planted anxiety among Protestants by seeming to pose a menace to the property rights of Augsburg’s Lutheran churches. This anxiety was dispelled—only to be replaced by others—when the Swedish army seized the city in April 1632 and introduced a garrison of soldiers. The fist of military authority quickly brought in restrictions against Catholics. On April 23, they were removed from the city council by a Swedish royal order. On May 3, Swedish forces confiscated all arms from “papists.” In July, Catholics were ordered to stay at home until further notice, and anyone pursuing studies with the Order of Jesuits was given two days to get out of Augsburg or face the penalty of death. A few months later, in November, came a decree forbidding Catholics, on pain of death, to attend church, whatever their social condition. In other words, the rich and noble must also beware.
Meanwhile, the Swedes decided to reinforce the walls and defenses of the city by adding ravelins and other outworks. Some four thousand troops arrived on May 15, all to be quartered on citizens. Their wages would be used to pay for food and drink. Three days later, the new bosses began to arm Protestants and to organize all able-bodied men into a militia. In July, to speed up the work on the city’s defenses, they decreed that one person from every household had to go out daily to work on the construction sites. Here was a testament to the hustling ways of Swedish armies in Germany. In action so far away from their native land, Swedish officers knew that most of their soldiers and all their material resources, money or payment in kind included, had to come from wherever they found themselves. And if subsidies came in from abroad, such as from France, so much the better; but subsidies would not suffice to meet the needs of the Swedish-led armies.
The fact that the newly arrived soldiers would be spending their wages in Augsburg did not mean, therefore, that they were bringing in any kind of wealth. On the contrary, what they spent would be coming from increases in local excise taxes, from a new poll tax, from abuses in the system of billeting, and from the plundering of castles, houses, villages, and farms in the outlying districts, including towns as far as Memmingen, about fifty-five miles away. This booty, however, would slowly work against Augsburg’s benefit, because the theft and destruction of rural wealth led to spikes in the price of foodstuffs. The damage to crops and livestock added still more melancholy to the fact that war and bad weather, during the early 1630s, had already slashed the production of cereals in that part of Bavaria and eastern Swabia. So to have six thousand horsemen making a stop in the villages around Augsburg—as happened on May 27, 1632, to be billeted there for nearly a week—simply aggravated the district’s yawning poverty. In short, for two or three years before the siege of 1634–1635, famine, the stealthy destroyer, had been edging its way toward Augsburg, and those in command were turning the city itself into a little garrison state.
The link between hunger and the occupying soldiers is highlighted by a military command of July 26, 1632, which ordered the local peasantry to cut down the thousands of trees, many of them fruit-bearing, that formed a thick circle of greenery outside and around Augsburg. Logistically, their removal would deprive the Catholic enemy of protective cover, while also providing lumber for the work on the city’s defensive perimeters. The bitter resentment of the peasants over the destruction of so many trees was swept aside. They had to do as they were told. And then on January 3, 1633, out went a town cry ordering all refugee peasants to get out of the city. But if any chose to labor on the defensive works around the walls in return for one and a half pounds of bread
per day, they were permitted to remain. Eight days later, this order was overruled by the command that all foreign or refugee peasants leave Augsburg at once and go back to their lands. The shrinking food supply was creating anxieties. With four to five thousand soldiers quartered on citizens, the claims on foodstuffs—on grains in particular—had become fierce, now that 20 percent of the city’s population was made up of soldiers.
By April 1633, with the endless to-and-fro of troops, Augsburg’s rural hinterland had lost large numbers of horses and cows to pillaging Swedish troops. Many fields lay fallow. And though the sale of booty in the city had been outlawed, the ordinance was ignored, first of all by army officers. Augsburg’s streets and open spaces teemed with plundered horses and cattle, and with numerous carts and wagons, all loaded with copperware, pewter, bedding, linen, clothing, and heaps of personal items. Much of this spoil, now “selling for wretched, paltry sums,” had belonged to the peasantry. But there was more. Because of the rural violence of soldiers, a large number of peasants, fleeing danger to life and limb, had managed to steal into Augsburg, despite the decrees and town cries against their doing so. They arrived in wagons, carrying their families and all possible foodstuffs; and there they lived, parked in cramped spaces, in horrendous circumstances, straining to survive. Over the coming year or two, many of them would meet death inside or outside the city walls.
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