Furies (37 page)

Yet one departure into extremes calls for a comment here: the formal execution of the king of England, Charles I, in 1649. Unless this event can in some fashion be counted as an assassination, it stands alone in the chronicles of the period. And yet it may be readily fitted into its larger political world, for in the anatomy of the state as a limited monarchy, king and representative council (diet or Parliament) were meant to come together as one in the leading affairs of state. Civil war, however, denoted a profound schism in the state; and this indeed was the pressing background to the beheading of Charles I. In the bloody clash between king and Parliament during the 1640s, Charles lost, was brought to trial, and sentenced to death. If he had triumphed in the civil war, heads would certainly have rolled on the other side, although less dramatically so. Compared to that of a king, the beheading of a clique of parliamentarians would
not have been seen as such a pointed challenge to the authority of “the state.”

Some fifty years earlier, France was the ground of a scene with affinities to the English event. In August 1589, with the assassination of King Henry III by a Dominican friar, the next man in line to the throne was the Protestant prince, Henry IV of Navarre. France's civil war now took a bloodier turn, and the new king—hard though the event is to imagine—might conceivably have ended on the scaffold if he had been defeated, like Charles I, and captured on the field of battle. He was opposed by a formidable alignment, including Paris, the Paris
Parlement
, the powerful Catholic League, the University of Paris, and an array of Catholic grandees, all with the external support of the pope and the king of Spain. The French state, in short, was divided against itself: the working relationship between king and representative elites had broken down. The divisions would not be healed until Henry IV made a public conversion to Catholicism.

IF PRINCES EXPOSED THE LIMITS of their authority by turning to the necessary assemblies or diets for more taxes, as warlords they were able to assert themselves more menacingly. For even with their limited means, they managed to provoke or start wars, then faced their people with the fait accompli. Once a war started or an invasion threatened, the all too convenient “facts on the ground” argument tended to constrain assemblies into voting for more revenue. Again and again in the Italian Wars, in the French Wars of Religion, in the Netherlands, in the Thirty Years War, and in the Northern Wars around the Baltic Sea, princes sent armies into the field, knowing perfectly well that they, the rulers, would quickly run out of what it took to keep them there: cash and credit. Now more tax money was likely to dribble in, but too slowly, never enough, and nor would any short-term loans suffice to keep their armies from mutating into swarms of desperate men. The inevitable came next: Their soldiers
ended by finding the wherewithal for war in the houses of enemy civilians, by scraping it from the backs of their own peasantry and modest townsfolk, or, in dire circumstances, by taking it from the pockets of their elites.

Many years ago, as a novice historian at Harvard University, I believed that the most demanding kind of history lay in tracking the ties that link high culture, social structure, and politics. Here, it seemed to me, was history of the sort that stretched the intellect and the historical imagination out to their limits. Other young historians at Harvard shared my views. We regarded “military history” as the realm of simplicity, and therefore not worth pursuing. Needless to say, I have lived to recognize the silliness of such an assumption.

I went on to spend my working life on historical problems far removed from the history of war and armies. But when at last I turned to war, that very distance or estrangement, I hoped, would enable me to see it freshly: from a vantage point that had not been fixed by grooming as a military historian.

Social structure, ideas, politics, literature, and art had dominated my interests for years. Yet it was these problematic concerns that led me, as in a search for substance or solidities, to approach war at the points where the armed violence was actually taking place. The venture turned into a study of soldiers and their victims. I had soon realized that the victims of war in early modern Europe were more likely to be civilians than soldiers. And the more I pursued my researches, the more clearly I saw that to analyze the dynamics of war in terms of the cartography of high politics, as is still done in textbooks and political histories, is to present it from the standpoint of
those who ruled. In this view of war, the story is taken over by dynastic rights, diplomacy, personalities, balance-of-power considerations, the strategies of generals, and major battles. War in these trappings
is
the business of princes and prime ministers; it is turned into rational and practical activity; and this hands a kind of carte blanche to the parties responsible for conflict. The gore and ugliness are pushed aside, despite the fact, as we have seen, that war was bound to issue in astounding impracticalities, mutating into a wholly irrational enterprise.

Fortunately, however, among its other tasks, the new military history has attempted to throw light on the life of people who were overrun by plagues of soldiers in villages, small towns, and the infernal points of combat around the walls of cities and fortresses. Yet war is always two wars: the bloody war on the ground and the paper war in the lofty business of strategies and high politics—that is, the war of the rulers and statesmen.

Looking back at the end of his life, Louis XIV confessed that he had “loved glory too much.” He meant—for this was how he saw his
gloire
—that he had been too much in love with war and its victories. Can we believe that such a man had any true sense of the horrendous doings of his armies out in the small market towns and country parishes, even in 1688–1689, after he and his minister Louvois ordered their army to torch all the cities and towns of the Palatinate, including Heidelberg, Tübingen, Speyer, Worms, Mannheim, Esslingen, and other places, with scores of thousands of people being driven from their homes? The event was extreme, but Louis's attitude suggests a great deal about the ways of European rulers. In their representations, they sought to avoid the imagery of suffering and carnage. They went to war, they claimed, to uphold supposed rights or justice, or in the name of European political stability. The announced causes seldom had anything to do with the well-being, safety, or industry of their people. And when, in the middle and later sixteenth century, they waged war for religious reasons or “freedom” of conscience, they were ready to impose their own beliefs on countless numbers
of subjects by armed force. This right was theirs—the reasoning dictated—by law and divine right, or as authorized by the religious Peace of Augsburg (1555).

The paper war, as I call it, removed the bloody ground war from probing moral questions. If these were raised, despite the political and military chessboard, ministers were there to belittle, contest, deny, excuse, or reason away alleged atrocities. We are thus back to reason of state, where the aims of politics and the “good” of sovereign authority ride above everything else, because sovereignty is the mark and legal condition of the large, self-determined community. As a form of the state, how can this be anything but good? Are not “failed states” places where civil horror is the order of the day? But successful states can also be the ground of horror.

Reducing a village to cinders was small beer in the grand design of a war fought to impose a dynastic right or to help restore the balance of power. If these reported aims—dynasty and the equipoise of military muscle—then turned out to be brazen lies, they nonetheless sufficed. They supplied in spades the arguments that justified military action. Meanwhile, nowhere did ministers of state see any grounds in wartime for relating armies to moral questions, despite the common assumption that princely authority was divinely ordained. God, after all, moved in mysterious ways.

A school of thinkers, beginning with the Jesuit Giovanni Botero in the late 1580s, sought to argue that Christian morality and hard-nosed political realism could be reconciled. In one form or another, this line of reasoning, which holds that war and moral goodness may be joined together, ghosts its way down to our own day, such as in the view that the ideals of freedom and self-determination, or the quest for “human rights” and security against terrorism, may justify war. In these claims, the implied moral agenda is obvious. But from the moment a war is launched on such grounds, the touted ideals are overwhelmed or infested by contentious political matter. Moral questions are elbowed to the sidelines, or they are simply infused with power politics.

Since the paper war put the desperate armies of early modern Europe outside the boundaries of all customary morality, when we approach that history as though we were foreign-office experts, we collaborate with the designs of
raison d'état.
We allow high politics to govern our view of war, and we take hold of armed violence in a world beyond good and evil. The result is that such a history has a great deal to say to the princes and warlords of past time, but nothing to say to the ordinary folk who suffered the onslaughts of desperate soldiers.

The alternative for me, as I planned this book, was to turn to the ground war: to write a history from the standpoint of the common soldier, of villagers, and of the inhabitants of cities under the battering of merciless sieges. I was also driven to fix attention on the sight of starving armies, on famine, cannibalism, the massive plundering of food and livestock, and on churches pillaged, children and women violated, farms laid waste, houses torn apart for firewood, and men butchered. This—not the claims of rulers—was the true face of war.

Yet to dwell on the exterminating impact of war cannot be done without the unwilled raising of moral questions. These press up quietly, but insistently, to cast a shadow over the politics of elites and princes. They press up at the sight of dying armies, as troops, angry and stricken with plague or typhus, lurch through towns and villages, infecting them. And if we are there as historians, there in imagination and close enough, we wonder why rulers did not make a more determined effort to control their soldiers.

Again, behind each army we make out a horde of camp followers, crying out for food and shelter. And along comes another question: Must the villagers feed and dress them too? Soldiers march into a town, looking for billets. They avoid some houses but not others. Why? In their wide-ranging searches, they ignore certain villages, but not others. Again, why? Is it because some places had contacts at court, or managed to pay for a privilege of immunity? Or was it that the officers in charge were bribed to keep their soldiers away? Day
after day, as soldiers come and go, we see villagers and townsfolk assaulted, robbed, and barked at, their faces bloodied.

In the middle of all this woe, for the historian as for the villagers, the skills of generals lose all meaning. The knowledge of “weapons systems” fades into irrelevance. Dynastic rights turn into legal abstractions. The “honor” of princes becomes palaver. “Reason of state”—the god of high politics—is drawn out and isolated, now fit to be put on trial. In short, from the moment we cut the social history of war away from the bonds of politics and diplomacy, down come all the barriers against the raising of moral questions.

Yet all at once here, strangely enough, there is a surprising reversal of intention, a return to politics. For moved and indeed liberated by the need to raise moral questions, historians are now free to cast these up against politics: free to challenge the political decisions of statesmen, to look into their tragic mistakes and moments of blind arrogance, and to pass judgment on their actions. There is nothing sacrosanct about the decisions of princes and their ministers, and there is no reason under the sun for us to assume that they were guided by political wisdom.

The gold and silver coins of preindustrial Europe cannot be converted into modern equivalents, with the aim of getting at a comparable standard of living, because the value of bullion fluctuates, and essential costs, such as for labor and bread, were then far too different from anything in our experience. A secondhand garment in silk brocade or velvet could fetch prices high enough to pay the wages of a skilled craftsman for two years. Lawyers, government clerks, university professors, and simple tradesmen had servants, in some cases teams of them. Europe was labor intensive. Unskilled and semiskilled workers (up to 35 or 40 percent of laboring populations) found it hard to pay for new shoes. And since the majority of people spent most of their earnings on food, if they saved anything at all, bad weather and a spike in grain prices easily wiped out their savings.

Europe's plethora of circulating coins, with their different gold and silver contents, forced merchants and bankers to keep their books in “moneys of account”: imaginary or fictional moneys, such as the pound sterling, the
lira
, or the
livre tournois
, which existed only in account keeping. Yet trade and banking could not do without them, because they assigned practical market values to the real currencies, such as the ducat, écu, groat, taler, or florin. These coins could now be readily exchanged, the exchange rates having been fixed by the fictional moneys of the bookkeepers.

Conclusion
: When encountering large sums of money in this book, readers must try to imagine values that moved alongside the cheapness
of labor, the instability of prices for bread grains, the costliness (for the many) of new shoes and often of bread, and the knowledge that only a tiny minority of traders, bankers amongst them, handled gold coins every day. Petty cash (“little money”) was the currency of most people: This meant coins struck from copper and from alloys of copper and silver, which always lost value in the face of the gold and silver coins of banking and big business.