Furies (29 page)

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 villagers 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.”

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?