In late May, 1630, the attack on Mantua was resumed. Now the emperor’s soldiers easily defeated a half-hearted Venetian army, allies of the upstart duke, and rapidly imposed a tight blockade around the ancient city. They finally stormed and took it on July 18. But it has to be emphasized that the entire operation was carried out in the midst of plague, the bacillus of which was very probably carried into the region in October 1629 by the soldiers themselves. By the spring of 1630, the disease was everywhere in town and country. In the city itself, during the four months between March and mid-July, about twenty-five thousand defending soldiers and inhabitants (refugees included) were killed by the malady. In the weeks leading up to the capture of the city, 250 to 300 people were dying every day, and bodies lay in the streets for days. Light winds carried the stench of the dead through windows. Yet so eager were the invaders to make good the emperor’s claims on the duchy, an Imperial fief, that they pursued the siege and seizure of the city right through the plague’s carnage. Or was it the case, rather, that they were steered and driven by the prospect of a sack? When at last entering Mantua, they found six to seven thousand sickly-looking survivors where once there had been thirty thousand souls. The appetite for booty seems to have been as ravenous among the officers, and especially the generals, as among the common soldiers, many of whom had died or deserted. Only twelve thousand of the original thirty thousand foot soldiers went into the city, but they were followed in by many hundreds of camp followers and scavenging hangers-on.
No sooner was the city taken than General Johann von Aldringen posted three thousand soldiers around the ducal palace to prevent all unwarranted entry or the exit of goods. Once the seat of the supreme European art collection, assembled over more than two hundred years, the palace had been despoiled of its most important pictures and statues by Duke Vincenzo II in 1627 and 1628. Working through a secret agent, he had sold them to the king of England to the disgust and anger of his subjects. But in July 1630, the palace was still replete with statuary and hundreds of important pictures, not to speak of carpets, tapestries, collections of arms, medals and cameos, or a golden dinner service, crystal and silver tableware, jewelry, stately furniture, and of course the great ducal library.
Everything was wheeled away, ostensibly for the emperor, in truth for the principal officers. The top general, the Italian Rambaldo Collalto, but particularly his man in the field, Aldringen, got the most valuable objects. Two other generals, the drunkard Mattia Galasso (aka Gallas) and Ottavio Piccolomini, also took possession of large shares of the loot. The remaining objects, in an orgy of dispersal, passed into the hands of the officers just under them, while some of the pictures and books were apparently dispensed in an offhanded fashion.
In the meantime, throughout the city, every palace and every house, however humble, was emptied of valuables. We can only guess at the fortunes that were carted away from the great houses. The ghetto and its five pawnbroking banks were totally looted; and Mantua’s eighteen hundred Jews—although allowed to return in October—were expelled from the city, each permitted to take along no more than three ducats. The five banks are thought to have lost about “800,000 scudi [ducats].”
Although the looting was meant to be limited to three days, the looters and buyers sold or removed booty from the city for the next fourteen months, the duration of the military occupation. Much of the plunder came from churches and convents. The Imperial army was acting for a fervent Catholic, the Emperor Ferdinand II; the generals were Catholic officers; and most of the men in the rank and file were supposed Catholics. Yet none of this modified the so-called “laws of war.” A city taken by storm was prey, all of it, for three days, unless, exceptionally, as in the case of Genoa, the victorious commanders agreed to exempt specific places.
The loot from the Gonzaga palace alone has been valued at eighteen million ducats, “equivalent to three times the tax revenue of the kingdom of Naples,” or “several times the value” of Spain’s royal share of the silver annually mined in Mexico.
Throughout the plague-stricken city, meanwhile, there was a frenetic rushing about. In certain cases this gave rise to unusual sights, such as soldiers’ wives or partners “shamelessly” flinging off their filthy garments in the streets and breaking into great houses to wrestle dresses away from resisting women; then, putting on their swag, racing back out to dance in the streets and mimic the bowing of grand folk. It was a show of triumph over death from plague. More important, for markets at all events, the buying up of booty was soon in full swing, pawnbrokers and merchants, especially from around Milan, having followed the soldiers into Mantua. Later, some of the loot would turn up in Milan, Cremona, Rome, Como, and other cities: furniture and tapestries, for example, in Brescia, and in 1635, ten pictures in Bergamo. Articles were even pilfered from General Aldringen’s booty wagons. A German colonel ended up with silver plate and portraits of Gonzaga princes. One of Aldringen’s relatives, a bishop, got the main part of the ducal library. But in the face of plague, in the summer heat, and in the scurry to complete the plundering in three days, it was impossible to keep track of the thousands of looted items. Excluding the most valuable objects, the big looters would have had only a rough idea of what exactly was being hauled away for them. Many pictures were thrown about or destroyed by soldiers, and some books—from one of the finest and oldest libraries in Europe—were sold by the sack in the marketplace.
Ferdinand II imposed tough conditions on Charles of Nevers, the French Gonzaga, before finally investing him with the duchy of Mantua. The new duke was forced to give up lands to the Italian branch of the family and to surrender various towns in Piedmont to the Duke of Savoy. But all he got in Mantua’s ducal palace was the barren palazzo itself and Mantegna’s frescoes, which no one, apparently, dared to hack away. The problem of carting all that off, including parts of walls, was perhaps too daunting.
ECONOMISTS AND HISTORIANS HAVE SOMETIMES looked upon war as an economic stimulus. Reflecting on the sack of cities, and more specifically on Antwerp, Rome, and Mantua, can we say that their plunder put large amounts of “surplus” capital into circulation, thereby stimulating business and work, such as in the building trades or in new enterprise? William H. McNeill held that war “intensified market exchange,” while the economic historian Richard Goldthwaite “emphasized the recycling of soldiers’ pay back into the economy.” To pursue the devious implication here, we may ask, Is the explosive dispersal of capital a positive material stimulus? Does it move wealth around, create work, and reconstruct capital, while also adding to it? If so, should we set about “constructively” destroying farms, villages, and cities in order to stimulate economies? Before 1628, the province of Mantua held a population of about three hundred thousand people. By its devastation, the result of plague and war, that province paid an incalculable material and moral price for the rape of Mantua. Should the survivors have thanked the Imperial army for giving them a chance to rebuild farms, houses, barns, and stables?
A chapter on the plundering ways of early modern armies should perhaps close with a statement about “silent” plunder: the sort that could not speak with an upper-class tongue, insinuating a sense of the “taste” that went into collecting objets d’art, or the presence of market values in stolen tapestries and jewelry. I mean the plunder of the foods, animal feed, horses, and livestock of villagers and country people. This was not booty of the sort whose worth rose high above subsistence levels; it held no great store of surplus value. It was existential plunder, swiftly consumed by the hungry soldiers themselves and by their horses. Yet here, too, all the same, there was true value. I almost want to say incalculable or “infinite” value, because the stolen foods gave life or, by their absence, death.
Human life itself must in some sense be the common denominator of all value. In their pursuit of a phantom objectivity, historians need not back away from the moral questions raised by the analysis of politics and diplomacy.
8
Hell in the V
illages
The single story of a rape or murder, committed in a village, may trouble us and be fixed in memory. Thousands of such crimes, spread over hundreds of villages, turn instead into numbers, and these are likely to leave us cold. The imagination is not able to grasp the shape of terror in such quantities. For this reason, the history of war in rural Europe is destined to remain sociology, a tale of numbers and abstractions, and in this sense to remain untold. Yet the front claws of war were always to be found at two points: around the walls of cities in the thick of sieges, and out in the country, moving with armies along a snaking line, bringing terror to villages and market towns.
In the 1620s, the favorite tactic in the Low Countries, in the war between Spain and the Dutch Republic, was to raise money for troops by sweeping deep into enemy territory and wresting it from the people there. If the local inhabitants refused to pay, their villages were reduced to ashes. In May 1622, Prince Fredrik Hendrik of Nassau “embarked on such an expedition, pillaging the southern Netherlands with 3000 horsemen, 2300 musketeers and six guns.” Pushing south as far as the walls of Brussels, that small army set fire to seventy villages, and the prince’s troops “returned to the Republic with booty, money and some hostages.” We see no faces.
And neither do we see any when a Florentine army conquered Pisa in 1406. The operation was a matter of all-out war against civilians. Florence’s mercenaries ravaged and plundered Pisa’s countryside at will, with much of the loot, such as grains and livestock, then finding its way to Florence for sale. Almost exactly 150 years later, in combat for the control of Siena (1554–1555), Florentine and Imperial forces bloodied and looted the farms and villages of the Sienese countryside in swaths of destruction that went on under the political eye of the much-admired patron of the arts, Cosimo I, the Medici Duke of Tuscany. He followed the events with keen interest, watching the costs of his mercenaries, and was well-informed about the tactics of his field commander, the Marquis of Marignano.
Since more than 60 percent of soldiers came from humble rural and market-town stock, peasants in wartime were likely to be the victims, for the most part, of men who were much like themselves. The policies behind the orgies of destruction in agrarian Europe issued from commanding officers and leaders who sprang from the territorial and urban nobilities; and they tended to regard peasants as slow-witted or basely cunning, brutish, and born to work in the fields so as to produce the food for their social betters. The Florentines had a saying: “The country makes good beasts and bad men.” In northern Europe, on the contrary, the nobility loved the woods, the open country, and hunting. But in competition with the tax-gathering state, they also sought to get their hands on as much as possible of what the peasantry produced in the way of surpluses.
SAINT-NICOLAS-DE-PORT WAS A LITTLE TOWN in the duchy of Lorraine. In the 1630s, the duchy was turned into a battleground in a war between France and Sweden on the one side and, on the other, the Duke of Lorraine and the Emperor Ferdinand II. On the morning of November 4, 1635, about three hundred horsemen rode into Saint-Nicolas-de-Port. Speaking “different tongues, some were dressed in the German manner, others like Croats.” They broke into houses and churches, using axes, and then attacked the inhabitants, stealing their clothing, stripping garments from their backs, and beating them with sword blows or “billy clubs” (nerfs de boeuf) to extract the whereabouts of their hiding places for valuables. They were just as brutal with nuns and priests. Three days later—the horsemen having departed—into the town rode the German Protestant and Swedish troops of Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. They burst into the church, where they “raped women and killed the celebrant priests by battering them with candle holders and chalices.” Not finding enough loot, they set fire to the roof of the church, having first wiped lard onto its supporting wooden beams to increase the intensity of the fire. The roof burned so fiercely that the lead melted, “pouring down like rain in a storm.” The bells, it seems, also melted, and the entire church was destroyed. Not yet content, and evidently in a raging fury, the soldiers set fire to the whole town, running down streets, igniting one house after another and killing anyone who got in their way.
In 1624, Saint-Nicolas-de-Port had 1,659 households. By 1639, the number had plunged to a mere 45.
If on occasion cities met the savagery of war face-to-face, as in sackings and sieges, villages in the lanes of war met it time and time again. Combing through episodes in the diary of the priest Alexandre Dubois, in the first chapter, we touched on soldierly hell in the village of Rumegies. Without food stocks, without a scrap of political clout, and too often without protective walls, villages and little market towns in war zones lay open not only to the passage of armies, but also to the “war rides” of armed horsemen: the scouts of an army nearby, or simply freebooting soldiers.
When in April 1634 Stephan Mayer, the parish priest of Unteregg, dived under the rushes and excrement of an outhouse, managing to conceal himself, he avoided the clutches of eight Swedish horsemen. The past few years had taught him that he would have found his death at their hands. Belonging to the estates of Ottobeuren, a monastery in southern Germany, near Memmigen, the village of Unteregg had been in the path of war for several years, as had most of that part of Upper Swabia. But the intolerable woes had arrived with the barbarities of Swedish troops in 1632. Soon Imperial armies, too, would arrive, equally given to atrocity, as in their bloody massacre of 1633 in the neighboring town of Kempten.
Stephan Mayer, however, was more fearful of the violence of the Swedes. He recalled—the historian of these events relates—that they had “bored through the leg” of the local miller and “roasted” the man’s wife “in her own oven.” They had also “whipped five- and six-year-old children with sticks and dragged them around on ropes like dogs.” At about the same time (1634–1635), large quantities of money, livestock, and food were extorted or pillaged from the Ottobeuren estates. “A single raid ended with sixty wagon-loads of booty hauled off from Günz and Rummeltshausen.” G. P. Sreenivisan goes on to observe that the lands of the monastery, including Unteregg and other villages, lost more than 95 percent of their horses and cattle. By September 1634, peasants and even some of the rich farmers were starving to death, on top of which came plague. (But what would it feed on?) As “peasants gave up tilling the fields and many took flight,” the “economy collapsed.” Meanwhile, villagers were already eating dogs, cats, mice, “horsehide, twigs, and rats,” no less than “the moss from old trees, nettles, and grass like beasts.” Reporting what one woman had said to her own father, Stephan Mayer quoted: “‘Father, you would not believe what good soup can be made from mice.’” Not surprisingly, Sreenivisan came on reports of cannibalism.
Ottobeuren’s peasants were winding through the same hell that enveloped thousands of other German villages during the Thirty Years War.
THE LITTLE ALSATIAN CITY OF Colmar was flanked by a countryside given to vines for the production of wine and brandy. Here, in the 1630s, the raids and assaults of soldiers brought ruin to farms and vineyards; they plundered grain and livestock; and peasants fled for their lives. Colmar itself lost 40 percent or more of its population.
War came to Hesse-Kassel, to villages near the Werra River, in 1623, and returned almost yearly in the form of passing or occupying armies. Billeting was an immediate and nasty burden for the peasantry. But once local authority had made an agreement with army officers, it was against the law for villagers to resist, however abusive the soldiers might be. Official complaints were usually ignored. By 1626, the strains of war had led to violence. Village inhabitants were killed; soldiers trooped in with plague and dysentery; nobles abandoned their lands; peasants fled. In the 1630s, according to the historian of these events, J. C. Theibault, “being caught by soldiers in the open was tantamount to a death sentence.” Villagers could suddenly disappear. In those years, the Hessian countryside was made desolate. Meat became a rarity, while “meager handfuls of grain” were about as much of this substance as village
rs were likely to see. Hordes of mice saw a good deal more, and while they multiplied, the population of Hesse-Kassel plummeted by 40 to 50 percent.
Hesse-Kassel’s “dark night of the soul” was to be the experience, again and again, in other parts of Germany. In the southwest, in the county of Hohenlohe, halfway between Frankfurt-am-Main and Augsburg, war taxes drove Langenburg into a fiscal nightmare. Poor harvests counted for nothing in pleas to lighten tax loads. From about 1627 to 1636, military commanders pitilessly forced the district to make payments on a monthly or even a weekly basis. And the orders might come from either side of the clashing war makers, depending upon the army in control: The “ruthless agents of the imperial and Swedish armies bore down savagely on peasant householders.” Now, as the historian Thomas Robisheaux tells the story, many villagers—rich tenant farmers amongst them—had to sell off capital assets to fuel the unforgiving motor of war taxation. They sold land parcels, “the last reserve stocks of grain,” herds of cattle, and later on nearly all of their livestock. By 1630, without “oxen, horses, or even cattle to pull the ploughs, the tenant farmers could no longer work their fields.” Even “supplies of seed grain vanished.” Soon “vineyards went untended” and many fields “returned to waste or pasture.”
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