Furies (11 page)

The drawn-out tragedy of the Eighty Years War, though often interpreted in a political key by historians, was also in part propelled by a powerful social fuel: religion. In the early years of the war, it was a case of evangelical Calvinists in an all-out battle against Catholics who came—both leaders and rank and file—from a religious frontier: the Iberian peninsula. Here Spaniards had banished Jews and defeated Muslims, peoples who reject the use of images in religious worship. Now, suddenly, in the Netherlands the Spanish had to confront an image-smashing fury that broke out on the tenth of August, 1566, and seemed to spread like wildfire.

Calvinist sermons in the countryside around cities, often attended by men with pikes and swords, preceded the iconoclastic assaults. But the fury began in little towns in western Flanders, swept east and then north to Antwerp, and passed on to neighboring cities, reaching Amsterdam, the Hague, and other urban centers by late August. Hundreds of churches and chapels were attacked, scarred, and ransacked by spearheading gangs of thirty to forty iconoclasts—a minority everywhere. But they were organized and skillfully led. In many cases, the workingmen amongst them were paid to use clubs, axes, knives, and hammers to destroy or deface statuary, altars, painted images, baptismal fonts, books of all sorts, vestments, and other objects. Laws, dating back to 1523, had identified the nascent heresies as capital crimes, but no one now dared to invoke them against the iconoclastic furies. Local authorities blanched, retreated, or were paralyzed by division. During the previous forty years, about thirteen
hundred “heretics” had been executed, but most of them, Anabaptists, had been looked upon as “low-born” troublemakers. Calvinists, instead, were a different sort. Too many of them came from the respectable classes. Yet in law, the war on images constituted flagrant civil disorder and rebellion, a fusion of politics and religion. These would be indivisible for the next three generations.

The image breakers took inspiration from events in neighboring France, where a civil war between Huguenots and Catholics had erupted in 1562 and where, in the space of a year or so, the evangelical reformers seized temporary political control of more than twenty cities. In fact, in the 1560s the Huguenots looked at times as though they might sweep across all of France in a wholesale victory for the cause of Calvinism. They were ready to let armies clinch their cause.

WHEN THE NEW SPANISH GOVERNOR of the Netherlands, the Duke of Alba, reached Brussels in August 1567, his plan was to impose political and religious obedience. His enforcers? The ten thousand Spanish and Italian soldiers who had arrived with him; and he now began to hire thousands more by recruiting mercenaries from Germany and the Netherlands. Over the next fifteen months, Alba's troops defeated four different armies and the inchoate breakaway state of Prince William “the Silent” of Orange, a moderate Protestant who then crossed over to an intransigent position. The Council of Troubles, appointed by Alba, would order more than one thousand executions as punishment for rebellion and treason. Most disturbing in that deferential world was the capital punishment of sixteen noblemen and the beheading of two Catholic counts, Egmont and Hornes. Their severed heads were affixed to the gallows on pikes. The revolt had transcended religious convictions and was now dominated by a political stance.

A “grandee,” says the historian Israel, “well versed in Latin, French, and Italian, who also spoke some German,” Alba was removed from his post in 1573, a victim of court intrigue in Madrid. He legacy in
the Low Countries was a swirl of anger over taxes, executions, brutal soldiers, and the merciless slaughter of civilians in the rebellious towns of Naarden, Zutphen, and Mechelen.

Brussels was the capital of the Spanish Netherlands. But Antwerp, a flourishing port with a population of about ninety thousand inhabitants, was the largest city in the Low Countries and the hub of commerce. It handled about 75 percent of all trade there.

The bloody events that would unfold in Antwerp were set off by the death of the governor general, Don Luis de Requeséns, in March 1576. King Philip II had declared bankruptcy the year before, with the result that most of the unpaid Army of Flanders disintegrated. Units verged on mutiny, ready to launch attacks on citizens; anxieties flared; and the Council of State in Brussels assumed full powers, purporting to speak for the king, until the arrival from Madrid of the next governor general.

With only a single Spaniard, Gerónimo de Roda, serving on the Council of State, the Council and the army clashed. Late in July 1576, a contingent of Spanish soldiers—their wages unpaid for years—mutinied, passed into Brabant, and sacked Aalst, a little town not far from Brussels. Branding them outlaws and rebels against the king, the Council decreed that they could be killed on sight, while also encouraging the local (Brabant) estates to raise soldiers to protect the province from the angry rebels. But Spanish officers in other garrisons, acutely short of men and fearing armed attacks from the estates, refused to turn their backs on the mutineers. The split between Council and army became a chasm.

As the weeks passed, the actions of the Council began to strike the zealous supporters of the Prince of Orange as too moderate, too tame, with the result that on September 4, soldiers of the local estates suddenly struck. They arrested the members of the Council and raised a call for a meeting of all the states of the Low Countries. The more ambitious aim now, passing beyond religious differences, was to rid the Netherlands of Spain's armed forces. Regiments of
Walloons (French-speaking Belgians) deserted the army, passing over to the states, and efforts were also made to woo German mercenaries away from the royal ranks by offering them down payments on their wages.

The lone Spanish Councillor, Gerónimo de Roda, escaped the arresting soldiers of September 4, alerted by the fact that his house had been plundered and a servant killed. Fleeing to Antwerp, he took refuge in the citadel, the city's new fortress, which was occupied by two hundred Spanish soldiers. Hatred and resentment colored relations between the commander of the citadel, Sánchez d'Avila, and the governor of Antwerp, the Lord of Champaigney (Frederic Perrenot), himself a Catholic and a soldier. The Spanish financial crisis had brought about a near collapse of the Army of Flanders, reducing it, in the course of three years, from 54,500 troops to a mere 8,000. And now, in late September, all these men were being treated as “traitors” to the king of Spain by a fractious Council of State. In October, the boats of the Prince of Orange's Protestant forces sailed into the Scheldt River, facing Antwerp, stood by for many days, and lobbed some cannon shot at the citadel.

The Army of Flanders was at this point about one quarter Spanish. Most of the others were Germans and Walloons; the rest were Italian, English, French, and even Albanian mercenaries. When the unpaid Germans, summoned to Antwerp, reached the city in late October, they arrived shouting, “Money! Money!” Their commander, Count Otto Eberstein, dithered between Sánchez d'Avila on the one side and Champaigney on the other. At the last minute he chose the latter, whereupon early on the third of November, contrary to a previous agreement, Champaigney allowed the troops of the estates to enter Antwerp. Feeling betrayed, some of Eberstein's officers and men marched into the citadel and joined the Spaniards.

That day, a Saturday, in thick fog and in the face of light cannon shot from the citadel, about eleven thousand citizens worked on defensive trenches and ramparts, all dug or erected in a day, and stretching
along the ends of the three streets that led to the esplanade in front of the fortress. Cannons, their muzzles pointed at the citadel, were also put into place. The temporary ramparts were raised to the height of pikes, fifteen to eighteen feet. Roda and Sánchez d'Avila, meanwhile, had been in touch with soldiers at Lier, Maastricht, and Breda; and some of those men were already in the citadel or on their way. A summons went out to the Aalst mutineers, Walloons mainly, and a forced march of six to seven hours had these men in Antwerp by nine o'clock on the morning of Sunday, November 4. A ghastly lack of foresight among Champaigney's men allowed the soldiers of the Army of Flanders, using an upper gate, to steal into the citadel from the eastern side of the city.

As we look back to those events, our democratic sympathies go out to the people of Antwerp. Their leaders had put the necks of all inhabitants into a noose by in effect inviting a sack, unless they could engage and defeat the tiny but thoroughly professional army up in the citadel. Champaigney's forces numbered eight to ten thousand troops, including one thousand horse. Many were veterans, seasoned in the Army of Flanders. Furthermore, a local militia of fourteen thousand men stood by. Figures for Sánchez d'Avila's troops in the citadel put their number at nearly five thousand men, about one fifth of them being cavalry. The fortress's two hundred men had been joined by more than four thousand other mercenaries—a mix of Germans, Spaniards, Walloons, Italians, Englishmen, and others.

Once they had their desired men, the commanders in the citadel struck almost at once. The Aalst mutineers were the most ardent about making the first attack, and they charged out of the fortress before noon, their “blasphemous” flag—says a nineteenth-century Protestant historian, M. P. Génard—showing the Virgin and Child on one side and Christ crucified on the other. On reaching the new trenches, where their captain was killed, they were momentarily forced to slow down. Yet an English witness, George Gascoigne, noted, “It was a thing miraculous to consider how trenches of such
a height should be entered, passed over, and won, both by footmen and horsemen.” A unit of German soldiers from the citadel, in the next wave of assault, was already on the heels of the Aalst mutineers.

On Champaigney's side, a regiment of Germans now threw down their weapons, while others simply passed over and joined their former comrades. The militiamen were nowhere to be seen, although many must have been among the firing arquebusiers and musketeers at the windows of the Town Hall. Some of the Walloons and Eberstein's Germans, the ones who had chosen to fight for the city, put up a fierce battle for fifteen or twenty minutes, before they were overwhelmed.

Many of Champaigney's mercenaries must have regarded the speed and spirit of the assault from the citadel as unstoppable. But they were also prey to disorder and lack of planning, caused partly by the fact that some of them had spent the night drinking and carousing. They even robbed and abused citizens, forcing Champaigney, sword in hand and in danger to himself, to step in among them. He wanted them in the trenches. Count Eberstein, moreover, a heavy drinker, was possibly drunk on that fatal morning.

The pitched battles, including cavalry charges, took place around the great town hall, the Bourse, in the main marketplace, and on several streets. Heavy firing from the town hall windows provoked the Spanish commanders to order the building set on fire. It was seriously damaged, and the fire spread to the adjoining grand houses. In just over two hours, the defeat of Champaigney's army was complete. He and others escaped by making for the Scheldt to board one of the Prince of Orange's waiting boats. Eberstein, however, weighted down by armor, drowned in his efforts to get on board.

From this point on, the sources—already thin in their descriptions of the fighting—offer conflicting accounts of the atrocities in the days following. Although Antwerp was a Catholic city, it was in revolt; hence priests and religious houses were not spared. Roda ordered an end to the sacking after a day or two, and then renewed the order more effectively on November 8—too late. The violence
of the human storm peaked in the first three days. Some accounts see the conduct of English mercenaries, former soldiers in the Duke of Alba's army, as the most savage. But it would be folly to try to apportion blame among the different groups of soldiers. Citizens were bludgeoned into revealing hidden valuables. Women and girls, some taken into the citadel, were sexually assaulted. Houses were ransomed, not just people. But we get no palpable sense of the scale of violence. And accounts vary sharply as to the numbers of people killed (from seventy-five hundred to eighteen thousand) and the houses or dwellings destroyed by fire (from six to fourteen hundred).

Although we may take for granted that the value of the plunder was colossal, estimates of the “spoil” of Antwerp are best treated with some degree of skepticism. The most important commercial center in the Low Countries, with a large colony of foreign merchants and bankers, Antwerp was one of the four or five richest cities in Europe. Consequently, in their looting orgy, the Spanish and German captains seem to have picked and worked separate parts of the city. George Gascoigne, an eyewitness, testified that three days after the storming, Antwerp had “no money nor treasure to be found therein, but only in the hands of murderers and strumpets. For every Don Diego must walk jetting up and down the streets, with his harlot by him, in her chain and bracelets of gold.” One account held that the soldiers got their hands on two million florins in gold and silver coin, in addition to more than again as much in gold and silver objects, plus furnishings. The lot added up, conceivably, to more than two years of Spain's royal revenue from the wealth of the Indies, as recorded in the late 1570s. An official report of the
Magistrat
, now lost, relied on notes that put the comprehensive value of the Antwerp plunder at five million florins. No house, it appears, was spared in the sack. The spoils from Champaigney's house alone were reportedly worth—in a different coin—about 60,000 crowns.

For many of the looters the take was fairy gold, a delusion, inasmuch as gambling and carelessness among mercenaries were rife, especially in the face of a cascade of coin. In the first few days of the
sack, enormous quantities of money and valuables passed very probably through many hands.

We touch here on a Europe-wide pattern. Wherever towns and cities were sacked, goods of all sorts quickly went up for sale cheaply, because plundering soldiers wanted cash first and foremost, or jewelry and precious objects that could easily be sold or traded. Hence merchants and pawnbrokers from the larger region, amongst them local tradesmen, would close in at once on such treasure. They knew that most of that spoil, even when snatched from their own homes, would flood markets nearby or in more distant towns. And although foreigners in Antwerp were also despoiled, Spanish and Portuguese merchants amongst them, they too were in on the take, along with Florentines, Genoese, and others. Precious tapestries seem to have passed out of Antwerp through the hands of a Spanish merchant. In short, once the shock of the first days of violence began to pass—on November 7 baptisms were already being recorded all over the city—lots of men were prepared to recoup their losses by trading in loot. They found themselves in a moral climate that had been suddenly and dramatically altered.