In 1631, the widowed Countess Anna Maria of Hohenlohe addressed the Empire’s war agents with fervor, pleading for patience toward her subjects. But when were war and the unpaid hungry soldier ever the stuff of patience? And so no stop was put on the clawing away at Hohenlohe’s last resources. Bread began to disappear from public sale in 1632. When flour for bakery shops came to an end, the retailing of bread became a thing of the past. By July 1634, at least in some villages, there seems to have been no food at all, and people starved to death in the fields. The scenes that we have seen before were now replayed. “Those who survived,” as in the village of Bächlingen, “did so by eating cats, dogs, the bark of trees and stubble off the field.” But famine also had the company of plague, which had struck in 1633 and peaked in 1634–1635, with the result that the drop in the local population was catastrophic and “fields, pastures, and vineyards turned back into forests and swamps.”
The Thirty Years War called forth a run of fascinating diaries, one of the most remarkable being from the hand of a German Benedictine and covering the years from 1627 to 1648.
Born the son of a baker, Maurus Friesenegger (1590–1655) took holy vows in the mid-1620s. He was parish vicar of the Bavarian village of Erling, near Munich, from 1627 to 1638, and at the same time a monk in the Benedictine abbey of Andechs, a pilgrimage site on the hill above Erling. In 1640, he was elected abbot of Andechs—understandably, perhaps, since he seems to have been a brilliant speaker.
Friesenegger’s interest in the ravages of war took in Bavaria and eastern Swabia, stretching from Straubing to Augsburg and Memmingen. His diary is a chronicle of violence, of life lived in the path of traversing soldiers in a time of famine. Some of his more telling moments turn into narratives.
The region was afflicted by plague in 1627 and 1628. July of 1630 brought the outbreak of a “horrible cow and horse disease.” Large numbers of deer, “wild swine,” and other animals also died in the neighboring forests. The war, he noted, came ever closer. In October 1631, after defeating the Imperialists at Breitenfeld, the Swedish army moved south from Saxony, plundering castles, churches, and convents. Such a sweep of soldiers always involved assaults on the adjacent villages as well. In a warning of November 1631, the ducal government in Munich urged the convent of Andechs to deposit its treasures and valuables in certain strongholds, and demanded a loan of 6,000 florins for the support of soldiers.
In April and May of 1632, the plundering Swedish army began to close in on Freisenegger’s world, as it ate its way through the villages around Regensburg, Freising, Augsburg, and other points, leaving a spoor of death and destruction. On the eighteenth of May, a vanguard of eighteen horsemen reached Erling, broke into the convent, and for two hours heisted whatever pleased them. More soldiers arrived in the succeeding days, also in search of food, drink, and loot. They helped themselves to food stocks, cows, poultry, and fifty head of cattle, as well as to kitchen utensils, tableware, and all the bed linen, including pillows and cushions. Moved perhaps by anti-Catholic fury, they smashed doors and windows, chests, cabinets, and cupboards. After their departure, the dormitory, the refectory, and the corridors were littered with straw and excrement, horse and human. The stench and “horrors” were so awful that it took five men about ten days to clean up the worst of the filth. “But I can’t really say,” adds Friesenegger, “whether more was stolen by foreigners or by natives,” for there were so many mercenaries coming and going that the cloister “was always full of men and women, each stealing whatever they liked.”
Moving back and forth between “the Holy Mountain” (der heilige Berg), as Andechs was known, and his parish down below, the diarist also recorded the track of terror in Erling. Here, as in the neighboring castle of Mühlfeld, soldiers set fire to most of the houses and went off with wagons, plows, sheep, pigs, all the poultry, 137 of 140 horses, and 396 of 400 head of cattle.
From this time on, the region as a whole became a gateway for looting armies; and frequently, in their thieving, “Catholic” Imperialists turned out to be no less brutal than the “Protestant” Swedes and their German allies. Hunger, anger, and strident poverty in the armies on both sides made them equally rapacious. In July 1632, Erling still lay mostly in ashes. With the return of the Swedes in November, the Erlingers fled into the woods, preferring the ice of the forests to the hands of their tormenters. In late December it was the pillaging turn of the Croats, who ransacked every standing house in Erling and even carted off sheaves of grain. Days later, only a guarantee of protection from Munich enabled the village and convent to escape the looting of two hundred Imperial horsemen.
Erling went into that winter still half burned down, the standing houses without roofs and without much of the woodwork because soldiers had ripped it out for their cooking fires and heating needs. Strong winds in the new year tore away at trees and houses, and then in February the Croats returned, breaking into the local mill, where they grabbed all the grain and flour, despite Erling’s guarantee of protection.
The year 1633 brought more waves of freebooters and hungry companies of cavalry. In March the Erlingers had to take up arms to fight off a gang of mounted marauders. In early April, with their few horses, they began the springtime planting, while always keeping spotters on the vigil for horsemen. But by the middle of the month, the approach of Swedish soldiers drove them into the mountains; they no longer trusted the local woods because the enemy had taken to prowling there, too, in search of the Erlingers. Yet once more, the Swedes smashed all the woodwork in the Holy Mountain, while again stealing the tableware, clothing, wheat, oats, “and any of the villagers’ goods in the convent.” When the Swedes fled at the approach of Croat cavalry, two of them hid in empty chests of grain. Finding them later, the peasants killed one and buried the other alive with his dead partner.
Since Europe was experiencing a Little Ice Age, May came in with frost and killing cold. Grain and bread prices rocketed. Individuals or convoys, bearing loads of grain on the roads, were always in danger of being assaulted and seeing their guards killed. And the brigands might be Imperial soldiers or troops under Sweden’s banners. Throughout the summer and autumn, the theft of horses was rife, inexorable. Often poorly nourished, as we have previously observed, or forcibly overworked by cavalrymen and teamsters, the animals were dying on a massive scale. September ended in a wretched harvest, with peasants tying themselves to carts, pulling and hauling and doing the work of horses. On the thirtieth, a regiment of Imperial Spanish cavalry (one thousand horsemen) arrived in Erling, and again the villagers fled. November and December became a logbook of passing or fleeing troops, looters, and the persistent theft of yet more horses and cattle, frequently the work of rambling Swedish cavalry. Based in nearby Augsburg and backed by the city’s Protestants, the Swedes made raids into the surrounding lands, seeking out foods, fodder, and booty. Then, on the twenty-first of December, a whole army passed through Erling, taking up the whole day and part of the night.
As he looks into the faces of soldiers, Friesenegger is by turns inquiring, outraged, shocked, horrified, moved to pity, and fleetingly meditative. One thing he knew, and this was that “continuous war turns men into beasts.” Keeping an eye unflinchingly on the shifting path of the war in Bavaria and eastern Swabia, he strained to understand the returning tides of military cruelty; and when he saw as much misery in soldiers as in his peasants, detecting there one of the causes of their brutality, he achieved that understanding. Yet he could not but condemn them. They were the invaders, the strangers. His first concern had to be the safety of his parishioners, the people of Erling. He concentrated therefore on the wreckage of war, the collapse of farming, the effects of hunger and disease, the spectacle of immiseration, and hence on half-naked peasants, hungry and ragged soldiers, the theft of seed corn, and deserted villages in the path of war.
One late-December scene would perhaps long live with him: the arrival of a troop of soldiers in Erling. When they found “nothing but empty houses and no
people [nor any food], something terrifying took place. The whole village seemed to go up in flames. They took the stools and benches out of the houses, tore down the roofs, built terrifying fires in the streets, and filled the village with screams and shouts, which could only have been caused by hunger and despair.”
Now and then Friesenegger’s diary expresses his own haunting fears, and brings in fleetingly the names of generals, lesser officers, and many others; but it never offers a sustained, individual portrait. His interests took in events, the classic stuff of local chronicles, not the gossipy portraits of individuals. And who could blame him if, in the endless stream of plundering strangers, one face blurred or faded into another?
Made in the midst of famine, an extraordinary claim troubled him, particularly because it was voiced by Imperial colonels. One had flatly declared that “the goods of the peasants belong to the soldiers as much to the peasants themselves.” And an Italian colonel, a Milanese count, had later repeated the asseveration: “What belongs to the peasants belongs to the soldiers, and they are extremely hungry.” Friesenegger could not accept the implication—how otherwise to explain it?—that the soldiers were in some sense fighting for the peasants, and that they thus had a natural right to local food supplies, however scant. Two soldiers had just starved to death.
It was January 1634, and our diarist was now seeing the juggernaut of the Thirty Years War. Andechs had more than one thousand soldiers crammed into its outer buildings. That winter, like the last, had turned into an icy nightmare. Soldiers tore away at all visible wood in the cloister, as in the houses of the village, to use for their warming fires. They had been promised food supplies from headquarters in Munich, but none arrived. Maddened with hunger, they pounced on the remaining food of the local peasants, and not just the food—in some cases on their shoes and stockings as well. When they finally departed, later in the month, peasants as well as monks were faced, says Friesenegger, with “a horror” of filth and waste and stench both in the cloister and in Erling. In the village itself, beds, benches, chests, and the wood stripped from wagons, carts, and plows had all been burned. But now, with the soldiers gone, “the evil only changed,” as disease made its assault: “dysentery, Hungarian fever, strange pustules, pains in the limbs, and swellings.” Many villagers died, but “how could it be otherwise! There were no medicines, no tranquillity, no bread, no beds, no straw, no ovens, no wood, and all this in the middle of the greatest cold that lasted from November to February, with all the houses standing open to the winds and winter.”
Yet soldiers continued to troop into Erling. In July plague struck. One household was wiped out; others lost four or five members, and the dead often lay unburied. The living were afraid to go near them. In the nearby village of Kerschlach, “eight or more people lay dead in one house for six weeks, some half-eaten by dogs.” By the end of the year, Erling’s five hundred souls had fallen to 190, “and out of 87 married couples, only 20 remained.”
It is hard to know where to cut off the flow of Friesenegger’s diary, the woes of which went on, with ups and downs, to the end of the war. In the early 1640s, Erling was beginning to piece life together again, when the last years of the war again produced a deadly harvest of the old evils. Along the way, new ones had appeared. Packs of wolves, long vanished, returned to race through the countryside, preying on livestock, and the peasants were unable to check their onslaughts. More surprisingly, the entire region had to live for some years with hordes of tenacious “mice of different kinds and colours,” particularly rampant at harvest time. Other sources speak of mice “as big as cats.” But Friesenegger, making no distinctions, must have been referring to voles and wood mice, too, which also helped to swell the periodic explosions of rodent populations. The creatures survived the icy winters by overrunning fields of wheat and other grains and stowing away their pickings beneath the ground, so that peasants even took to digging up the buried spoils.
The fate of a village like Erling, small and of absolutely no strategic value, rarely troubles historians. In this sense, Friesenegger’s record of events has very little significance in historical terms. Yet most of Europe lived in such villages, and many suffered Erling’s fate. The diocese of Augsburg alone had four hundred different parishes, and when armies streamed over the countryside, the soldiers spread out widely, working their way through hamlets, searching out food, fodder, horses, livestock, and loot.
Inadvertently, then, our diarist was speaking for hundreds of other villages in Bavaria and Swabia, and for that matter in Württemberg, in the Rhenish Palatinate, Hesse, Brandenburg, southern Saxony, and many other places. All fell prey to the violence and atrocities of passing armies, Imperial and Swedish, or French in the later stages of the war.
FRIESENEGGER’S DESCRIPTIONS OF WARTIME VILLAGE life are fully echoed in other writings, one of the most memorable being the chronicle-like diary (1618–1672) of the shoemaker Hans Heberle.
A confirmed Protestant and member of the district militia, conservative, married, and a family man, Heberle came from the Swabian village of Neenstetten, in territory ruled by the city of Ulm. His wake-up call to the realities of war was sounded in 1625, when Imperial troops invaded territorial Ulm and tore through various villages. They were back in 1628, together with their “whores and boys” and other camp followers, at one point seeking billets in almost every village. Army discipline was still rather strict then, and the violence of soldiers was punished, now and then, by the death penalty. But billeted cavalry were already demanding more than the straw, hay, wood, salt, and candles of their official rations.
Heberle’s sobering education in the homicidal character of hungry soldiers really came in the 1630s, after Imperial troops returned to the Ulm district in 1631 and swept through villages, pillaging, burning, extorting ransom moneys, and causing Ulm to levy special war taxes. The next two years also brought plagues of Imperial troops. But the surprising poison came in August 1634, with the arrival of a Protestant army under the command of Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. Being a Protestant village, Weidenstetten—Heberle was now living there—took no precautions when informed that Bernhard and his troops were on their way. He was certainly not regarded as an enemy, even if, as a soldier in wartime, he could not truly be called a friend. But what the villagers did not know was that Bernhard was a hugely ambitious warlord who depended on the plunder of war to hold on to his troops; and he could not do without these, because he was intent on using armed force to carve a state out for himself.
There they were, then, the people of Weidenstetten, having failed to hide their goods or to move their livestock away. Hungry and unpaid, Bernhard’s troops fell on them, stealing horses and other animals, “bread, flour, salt, lard, clothing, [stocks of] cloth, and all our wretched things. They beat and shot and stabbed people, killing a few of them,” and carted off whatever they could carry. Since Bernhard’s army had spread out in order to pillage as much as possible, the same scenes of violence were unfolding in other villages, where armed resistance was met with arson and destruction. In Weidenstetten, five houses and five barns went up in flames.
Territorial Ulm now became a wide avenue for retreating or advancing armies, especially after the defeat of the Swedes at Nördlingen in early September 1634. From this time on, the Weidenstetten villagers no longer waited for the arrival of terror on horse and foot. The moment they got news of the approach of troops, they would pack their carts and wagons and flee over the twelve miles to Ulm, where thousands of peasants from other villages also collected, they too having abandoned their houses and few possessions. During the long course of the war, Heberle and his neighbors were to make thirty different escapes to that city, where they might remain for a week or two, or for months at a time, with their families crammed into wagons: filthy, hungry, too poor for the risen price of many foods, freezing in the winter, and exposed to disease. The duration of their stay depended entirely on the danger posed by armies. In 1634–1635, an attack of the plague ate aw
ay at Ulm. Heberle lost two sons, a stepmother, three sisters, and a brother. Yet soldiers continued to come and go in the villages, and each time the locals paid with their poor goods, with beatings, with flight, with their lives.
A picture of the shaky foundations of peasant life comes from a study of the county of Hohenlohe. Here, in remarkably fertile land, one measure of seed grain could produce seven or eight measures of harvested grain. With eight acres of this land, a family of three could produce enough grain to feed itself for a year—no surplus envisaged. A family of eight to ten people required about twenty-five acres of that land for their subsistence. Thomas Robisheaux found that in his Hohenlohe sample region, 52 percent of households “never produced enough grain on their small plots of land to feed themselves,” while another 20 percent or more lived on the margins of self-sufficiency. Hence in bad years, with prices soaring, these families had to buy grain in order to survive. Clearly, then, only a minority of families ever produced sizable surpluses for the market.
If we transfer these findings to areas where the land, more commonly, was not nearly as fertile as in Hohenlohe, and where in fact the yield ratio might be four or even three to one, we realize at once that the German countryside was a world of poverty for most people. But this was generally true of the whole of agrarian Europe. A tenacious German peasantry held on to life by doing paid farm labor, keeping a kitchen garden, raising a pig or two for the market, or growing and spinning flax into thread for sale. Yet overnight that poor life could be put on the edge of a precipice, even for an enterprising peasantry. For the moment soldiers began to touch it, hunger and then famine spread in the wake of their plundering, arson, and calamitous impact on farming. Often, indeed, in their hunger, they even stole the seed grain. No wonder, then, that both soldiers and peasants starved.
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