Furies (2 page)

The massive bleeding of money that went with the movement of armies gradually altered the anatomy of Europe's emerging states: Spain and France first, then the Dutch Republic, Sweden, Austria under the Habsburgs, Russia, and Brandenburg-Prussia. In wartime, these states saw their cargo of debt all but driven out of control even as they levied new taxes, hired more contractors and administrators, created new departments, and gave rise to a civil service. But war and princely ambitions remained the impelling forces in the state, and they were seldom restrained for long by the scantiness of money or the complaints of their desperate armies.

After 1500, as rivalries and conflicting claims among princes were ramped up and war was intensified, armies swelled or were held in the field for longer periods. They became a common sight on the roads and rivers of Europe's most populous regions. In the course of the sixteenth century, a mix of mercenary, conscripted, and forcibly impressed soldiers began to appear on the scene. The traditional reserves of volunteer mercenaries no longer sufficed to meet the demand. War was depleting them. The conscripted and impressed men could not begin to match the battle skills of the professionals, but they were not nearly so expensive. The hard men were the backbone of the mixed armies and commanded higher rates of pay.

By their surprising capacity to go on fielding large numbers of troops, the developing “power” states acquired a thickening carapace of authority. They used it to extend their power over the institutional churches, over regional assemblies of citizens, over private income, over commoners, and over the lesser nobility. The great nobility long retained special privileges, but by the end of the seventeenth century these too were being sharply whittled away. Soldiers were sometimes deployed to impose compliance.

Most of the foregoing observations are scattered throughout the better war studies of the period 1450 to 1700. But they are seldom, if ever, drawn together into an overall view. I take them from a rich body of scholarship that is often cited in my endnotes, and I owe a debt of gratitude to the authors. Over the past generation, the new social history of war has shifted the direction of study away from narrow military concerns and out to a quest for richer contexts, for the condition of the common soldier, and for the voices of civilians caught up in the tangles of war. But an immense amount of research remains to be done, above all with regard to the magnitudes of violence, the outbreak of diseases, the practice of quartering soldiers on civilians, the place of women in the society of the wagon trains, relations between officers and their men, and essential logistical questions. These major gaps in the scholarship justify the assertion that in the ongoing work on war and armies, there is still too much devotion—at least for me—to the fine details of the great battles, as well as to the lofty designs of foreign policies. Not one of the major battles of the Thirty Years War was politically decisive, and much the same may certainly be said about the Italian Wars (1494–1559), the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598), and the wars of the Spanish crown in the Low Countries (1567–1648).

What, then, to say about what is new or different in this book?

In the supply and transport conditions of the day, raising an army of twenty thousand men was always an undertaking of awesome difficulty. The task depended first of all upon hundreds of captains and colonels and contact men, fanning out to find recruits. Next came the need to move and supply the enlisted men, and this called for careful organization, along with ready access to massive amounts of labor and capital. Only a great prince or a wealthy republic (Venice, the United Provinces) could aspire to such a venture.

These considerations are seldom far from the unfolding picture in
Furies
. They take cognizance of the fact that in the final analysis, the large armies of early modern Europe were frail monsters subject to diseases, desertion, lack of pay, mutinies, and wild episodes of violence.

I have also given considerable attention to a strange paradox: the spectacle of states that are able to raise exterminating armies, while also nursing financial black holes at the center of their being. The contradiction was resolved, as we shall see, by the use of ingenious expedients and credit mechanisms. Now bankers come forward as key figures in the business of war.

If we define the ground of war as being in those places where military violence is taking place, then the history of war in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should concentrate on relations between soldiers and civilians, and particularly on their ugly encounters. For European warfare in that period was directed overwhelmingly against civilians in town and country. Which is why
Furies
is focused on the siege and sacking of cities, on the incidence of plunder and killing in the countryside, on the wretched condition of the ordinary soldier, the terror of forced recruitment, and the rampant incidence of disease. In a sense, the point of such a wide-angled view is to transform the abstractions of social and political analysis into their flesh-and-blood results on the plains of war.

It only remains to add that weaving horror into a true narrative is a matter of measure, pace, and shifting stresses. I found this the most difficult part of the composition of
Furies
. War stretches the resources of writers to their limits.

The incidents and mini-tales that follow will at first seem disjointed, because they break up the arrow of time by moving sharply back and forth over countries and over more than two centuries. But taken together, they glide into a pattern: the undreamedof pattern of war in Europe between about 1450 and 1700. Suffering civilians, cruel hunger, penniless soldiers, dying armies, and merciless conduct push forward to dominate the view. Wonder will play its part, if not pity. War has many faces, yet one face everywhere: anguish for the victims in the middle of it.

If it can be told at all in a single book, a history of diverse wars must be a mosaic, or, in a different key, an X-ray of war, of what the major wars of the age had in common. This is all the more true of a time when gunpowder, swollen armies, blundering princes, and flaring costs transformed the nature of warfare.

At the height of the Thirty Years War in Germany, the Imperial city of Augsburg suffered a punishing siege of more than seven months. One of the richest “free” cities in southern Germany, it was home to the Fuggers, Hochstetters, and Welsers, international bankers to kings and emperors. Two armies, Catholic mainly, surrounded the city in September 1634. Made up of Bavarian and other German
units, they also included companies of Croatians, Spaniards, Poles, Italians, and soldiers from other parts of Europe. The siege began with work that aimed to cut off all incoming food supplies and to block the River Lech, whose waters flowed toward the city.

Sometime in late October, on the outskirts of Augsburg, a peasant boy was caught carrying three larks, with a view, it was claimed, to smuggling them into the city. He was forthwith hanged, almost certainly within sight of the city walls, and the larks were tied ostentatiously to his belt. The exhibit carried a warning to travelers and onlookers of the hazards of trying to sneak foodstuffs into the beleaguered city.

The officer who ordered the boy executed may have been more severe with him than with others who had tried to run the blockade. Life-sparing but bloodier, a lesser penalty involved cutting off the noses and ears of people who were caught breaching the ban.

Jakob Wagner, the Augsburger who noted the incident in his chronicle, does not comment on it. Nor does he record the name of the youth, despite the fact that he is a stickler for names. In this case, understandably, he was unable to provide the identity of a simple peasant. But his recording of the incident fell into line with his chronicling of other cruelties. Of these, indeed, he was to see and hear about many more in the course of the Thirty Years War.

On the twenty-first of April, 1705, somewhere in the heart of France, Pierre La Sire, an illiterate countryman, was condemned by a court-martial for having deserted his infantry company. He was sentenced to have his nose and ears cut off, and to be branded on one cheek with the royal fleur-de-lis. The rest of the sentence was worse, arguably, than the penalty of death: commitment to the galleys as a slave and oarsman for the rest of his life.

The case could be regarded as typical, even if La Sire's judges seemed to shatter the bonds of reason. Desertion from the French army was rife in those years, and the punishments directed against it varied, because the laws governing desertion were changed several times. Royal authority dithered. But capital punishment, mutilating the face, and slavery at the oars were the principal penalties. Sentences might also be less extreme, such as when branded deserters were pressed back into military service.

La Sire's fate points to the omnivorous manpower needs of the French army around 1700. In some cases, men were even allowed to enter the army in order to evade trial for murder. France had long provided ample pools of volunteers for its armies, but the foreign policies of Cardinal Richelieu first, and then of King Louis XIV, demanded bigger armies. The result was that by the early 1690s, France's standing land forces had risen to a total of 320,000 men from about ten or twelve thousand in the 1620s. The only way to reach the new figure was to dispatch recruiters and press-gangs out into the rural districts, where they frequently used deceit and violence to ensnare the recalcitrant. And Pierre La Sire had almost surely been one of the young men spirited forcibly away from his village.

In the seventeenth century, Sweden's peasantry would face harrowing recruitment calls. England, Spain, and Germany also experienced the like. Two fleeting vignettes from other parts of Europe illustrate the savage extremes of the need for soldiers.

In 1712, straining to halt desertion from his armies, Peter the Great of Russia brought in “the practice of branding recruits in much the same way as common criminals … the mark of a cross was burned into their left arm and the wound rubbed with gunpowder.”

In northern Italy, just a few years earlier (1707), Prince Eugene of Savoy, commander of Imperial forces, laid it down “that any soldier found more than a hundred paces away from the army on the march … should be hanged.”

Early in 1406, an army of mercenaries closed in on the old seaport of Pisa, using boats and carting in supplies for a stubborn siege. The paymaster of the professionals, located forty-five miles east of Pisa, was Europe's most literate city, the Republic of Florence.

Pisa had once ranked as a near rival to the two seafaring republics, Genoa and Venice. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Pisan boats, laden with goods and merchants, had sailed regularly across the Mediterranean to Acre, Constantinople, Alexandria, Tunis, and then, closer to home, to Sardinia and Sicily. Now, however, an ancient hostility, pitting two close neighbors against each other, was at fever pitch. Pisa, a dwarf republic, had in effect been sold by its temporary overlords; and Florence, seeking possession of it in the late summer of 1405, had paid out part of the 206,000 gold florins demanded by the bosses of the unhappy city.

But the buyers had ignored the pluck of the Pisans. Having occupied the fortress on the fringes of the city, Florence suddenly saw itself robbed of this prize by a surprise attack, and thus far had not been able to make good its claim. The people of Florence already saw themselves as the rightful owners of Pisa, although no one had consulted the Pisans.

Between November 1405 and June 1406, the steely resistance of the
Pisani
repeatedly repelled the besiegers, preventing them from fording the great moat and storming a curtain of defensive walls. By the middle of May, a stranglehold had cut off the entry of food supplies into the embattled city. Neither by land nor sea could any provisions be got past the ring of soldiers on horse and foot. The seaport was in the grip of starvation. Cats, dogs, vermin, roots, and every scrap of greenery in the city ended by being devoured: “The grass in market places had been torn up, dried, and ground into a powdery dust for bread.” Ships, loaded with Sicilian grain for the Pisans, were halted near the mouth of the Arno River and their cargoes resold, instead, to the Florentine enemy. The price of grain in Pisa
jumped to such heights that smugglers from Lucca, clutching small loads of it, risked their lives by trying to steal into the city in the watches of the night.

Owing to the horrendous costs of the siege for the Florentines, there was always a chance that Florence would call it off. In late April, making a desperate new bid to hold out, Pisa's commanders began to expel “the destitute and useless people” (beggars and poor folk) from the city, in the effort to stretch the remaining stores of food for the defending soldiers and for the better-off. Charitable handouts to the starving had continued, hastening the depletion of food stocks.

Florence's “commissaries”—the civilian bosses in the field—reacted to the Pisan decision with an equal lack of pity. They ruled that anyone coming out of Pisa was to be hanged. Heralded by trumpet blasts, this ordinance was read out, or rather cried out, at Pisa's city gates. The besiegers were counting on starvation to force a swift surrender. Moments of dramatic cruelty had already been seen. Some weeks earlier, a captured Pisan soldier had been trussed up and turned “like a stone” into a projectile; he was catapulted over Pisa's ramparts, on to one of the streets, his shattered corpse bearing a sign that said something like, THIS IS THE KIND OF DEATH AWAITING ANYONE ELSE WHO COMES OUT OF PISA.

Digging in, each side was determined to have its way. When the first group of poor women, now expelled from Pisa, appeared outside the city walls, Florence's mercenaries refrained from killing them, in a show of mercy, but cut off the backs of their skirts and all the clothing over their backsides. They then proceeded to brand their buttocks with the fleur-de-lis, one of the devices on Florence's coat of arms, and pushed them back toward the walls. When branding failed to stop the exit of poor women, the soldiers took to cutting off their noses and then driving them back again. Pisan men—the few expelled from the city—were instead either hanged on the spot or at select points up high: a sight and a lesson for those looking on over the top of Pisa's ramparts.