Furies (19 page)

For all their notoriety, the well-known sieges of Sancerre and Siena had failed to convey a fundamental lesson. When faced with the prospect of a long-term blockade, no large European city, with the possible exception of Turin in 1706, seems ever to have stocked enough food to achieve the planned resistance of local authority. And the scantiness of public funds was the primary reason. Urban revenue could not afford the charges; the tax base was too thin and porous; debt was also a likely barrier; and the haves could be shamed into paying out only so much, but no more, to help feed the have-nots.

In July, having somehow managed to get his hands on extra funds, despite his ragged and murmuring troops, Henry was able to add two thousand foot (Gascons) and eight hundred horse to his besieging army. These helped to tighten his noose around the capital. On July 9, his soldiers captured a major suburb and Catholic League garrison, St. Denis, where the effects of starvation had obliterated resistance. Here was the determining force, hunger, not Henry's siege guns, which were too sparsely distributed, too far from the important targets, and doing little serious damage inside the city.

Paris's hungry throngs had begun their lamentations ten to twelve days from the start of the siege, hence not later than early May. The ruling elite realized at once that flaring anxieties should be met with religious processions, all-night public prayers, and special services in the parish churches. As hunger turned into keening famine, there was no retreat from the compensations of litany and ritual. And we are informed by an anonymous witness that the ambassador Mendoza, a pillar of the Catholic League in Paris, took to minting large quantities “of half-pennies, stamped with the arms of Spain, which he then had thrown into crowds at street crossings, causing the populace to cry out, ‘Long live the king of Spain!'” To stiffen resistance,
the papal legate in Paris, Cardinal Gondi, began to grant generous indulgences and remissions of sin.

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.

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.