Furies (38 page)

Meanwhile, all the getting and spending went on in the embrace of social structures and religious ideals that promoted authority, deference, and obedience. This, too, affected prices by acting to keep down labor costs.

My intellectual debt to a large number of historians is immense. The bibliography, and my notes in particular, tell the tale. If seriously done, the writing of history is always, in some respects, a collective enterprise.

No historian, I assume, ever perfects his craft, just as no novelist ever takes the art of fiction to the peak of perfection. This is as it should be, but it is also reason enough to seek the discernment and judgment of seasoned editors. In this light, I single out my publisher and editor, Peter Ginna, whose faith pulled me through a difficult time and whose keen sense of the architecture in historical argument has my grateful acknowledgment.

Led by her novelist's eye, Julia O'Faolain, the first reader of
Furies
, deserves, as ever, my affectionate gratitude. And I cannot thank my second reader enough, Dr. H. M. Serros, whose voyage through the text was made with a view to noting obscurities and infelicities of style.

Finally I must acknowledge, with grateful thanks, the work of a very wise proofreader, Mr. Michael O'Connor.

With its flashing white horse, circular bridge, and plumes of smoke, Philips Wouwerman's vision of war here removes us from the immediate carnage of battle.
Copy after Philips Wouwerman
(1619–1668): Cavalry Battle on a Bridge, 1665–1668
(© Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana/De Agostini/Getty Images)

Louis XIV surveys his men, who look like an army of ants as they cross the Rhine.
Louis XIV, King of France, known as the Sun King, and the French army crossing the Rhine, June 12, 1672, engraving (©Getty Images / Leemage)

Although this scene is cast around frozen postures, it manages to convey the violence of St. Bartholomew's Night, August 23–24, 1572. In Reformation Europe, religion added to the intensity of conflict.
François Dubois
(1529–1584): St. Bartholomew's Night
(De Agostini/Getty Images)

In Dürer's
Death Riding
of 1505 the horse itself is dying of starvation. For all the carnage of warfare in this period, famine and disease took more lives.
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)
: Death Riding,
1505 (Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library)

The Execution of Twenty Noble Leaders including Counts Egmont and Horn by the Duke of Alva in Brussels, 1568
. Note the muskets on the left and the length of the pikes in the semicircle of soldiers.
School of Zacharias Dolendo (1561–c. 1604) (Private Collection/The Stapleton Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library)

The resistance of walled-in Naarden ended in the town's being stormed and barbarously sacked. The savagery in Europe's wars often peaked when long-besieged cities fell to invaders.
Franz Hogenberg (1540–c. 1590):
Massacre in Flanders during the Government of Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, 30th November 1572
(Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Fire and smoke attest to the conquest and burning of Magdeburg (May 1631), as Imperial soldiers break into the city through a breach in the walls.
German school (seventeenth century)
: The Sack of Magdeburg by the Imperial Army, November 1630–20, May 1631, between 1726–27
(Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, Germany/© DHM/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Homicidal assaults on villages, farms, and country folk constituted a universal aspect of war in Europe.
French school (seventeenth century):
The Pillage of a Farm
(Musée Bargoin, Clermont-Ferrand, France/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Peasants ambush and massacre soldiers in revenge for what soldiers had done to them.
Engraving by Israel Henriet after Jacques Callot (1592–1635):
The Peasants' Revenge;
plate 17 from
The Miseries and Misfortunes of War,
1633 (Grosjean Collection, Paris, France/The Bridgeman Art Library)

A picture of the wartime rape and murder that might go on in the countryside. The mounted soldier in the foreground is clearly an officer.
Sebastian Vrancx (1573–1647):
Pillage of a Village
(Louvre, Paris, France/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library)