Furies (5 page)

In 1633, not many miles from Munich, angry peasants murdered several soldiers—freebooters—in two separate incidents. In the first incident, finding two Swedish soldiers concealed in chests of grain in the village of Erling, they killed one and buried the other alive with his dead companion. Then one night, in December, about eight months later, “fifty armed peasants from Seefeld went to Aschering, where they surprised a band of mounted thieves [soldiers], who had made off in the early morning with five of their horses. They shot the leader dead, put the others to flight, and went back home with their horses.” Germany was traversing the bloodiest decade of the Thirty Years War.

Fighting on the Protestant side in this war, the Scottish colonel Robert Monro (c. 1590–1680) served for seven years with Swedish forces in the 1620s and 1630s. He found that peasants “are ever enemies to Souldiers.” In April 1632, he was with the army of King
Gustavus Adolphus near Freisingen and Memmingen, in Bavaria. Commanders had imposed “contributions” (war levies) on two walled towns, Hohnwart and Pfafenhowen. Responding violently, the neighboring peasantry “on the march cruelly used our Souldiers (that went aside to plunder) in cutting off their noses and eares, hands and feete, pulling out their eyes, with sundry other cruelties which they used, being justly repayed by the Souldiers, in the burning of many Dorpes [villages] on the march, leaving also the Boores [peasants] dead where they were found.”

The peasants were doing little more than responding with the cruelties which the laws of princely authority had used on them in the past. A punishment widely and often used against rebellious peasants was that of mutilating the face by cutting off the nose and ears. Revenge brought some satisfaction. One report had it, in 1620, that armed villagers had killed four hundred of the Count Ernst of Mansfeld's soldiers—an entirely believable claim. And an experienced officer would not have left a wounded soldier in a village, expecting the villagers to look after him. He knew that they would probably murder the man.

Since bands of mounted outlaws had plagued many parts of early modern Europe long before the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, propertied peasants almost everywhere had learned how to use firearms, and many of them owned guns.

In an entry of December 1633, at the height of the Thirty Years War, the diary of a Benedictine monk, Maurus Friesenegger, arrests us with a haunting image.

Witness to a formal mustering of Italian and Spanish regiments in a Bavarian village, he observed that the ordinary soldiers, with their “blackened and yellowed faces, were emaciated, only half dressed or in tatters, and in some cases even looked like masked figures in stolen
women's garments. This,” he says, “was the visage of hunger and suffering. But next to them were the officers, handsomely and splendidly dressed.”

The armies of Louis XIV were often speckled with men in rags. In 1673, one of his war commissaries took notice of a company “which had 26 or 27 men as naked as a hand and the majority without shoes or socks.” The like could easily have been encountered a century earlier. In 1573,when the king's commanders finally lifted the failed siege of the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle, the diseased besiegers were “covered with rags.” Three years later, a French army of ten thousand men, commanded by the Duke of Mayenne, moved around unpaid, unfed, and living off the countryside, “their clothing in rags.”

Badly shod soldiers in ragged dress were a commonplace in early modern Europe's wartime armies.

The scatter of images and pared-down details in this chapter range over a continent awash with pain and anxiety: suffering generated by war and by bigger, hungrier armies. The pivotal events lay in payment for war, in sieges, and in the snaking marches of large armies with their long columns of horses, pack animals, carts, wagons, artillery trains, camp followers, and roving bands of foraging horsemen. Here was the monster that forced taxes to climb relentlessly, testing the ways of princes and oligarchies, shattering the productive routines of farm life and urban labor, and creating avenues for wholesale corruption in the spending of public moneys.

But while prices, crop yields, and economic trends may be quantified and charted, human woe never can be. It has no mouths for a thermometer, no places for listening to heartbeats, and no numbers to be tabulated, except for the dead, though even these are too often
a matter of informed guesswork. The maimed and the mutilated of wartime Europe were never counted.

Aside from treating us to descriptions—and these can defeat novelists—historians of early modern Europe do not know how to deal with the human suffering caused by armies in action. Their narratives rely on abstract and prosaic turns of phrase, such as the “untold misery” of towns that were “horribly sacked.” They—historians—far prefer the technicalities of battles, weapons, logistics, prices, markets, or, even better, the close analysis of alliances, treaties, personalities, and foreign-policy discussions. Yet war is something more than a sequence of strategies, clever statesmen, or an event (“armed conflict”) in economics and international politics. Its effects weave through the moral and psychological life of communities, stamping the ways people see, compare, and judge human action. In the study of war, historians should also be positioned where questions of right and wrong move into view.

Europe's upper classes—whence officers came—tended to regard their soldiers as the scum of the earth. The evidence for this is conclusive in word and deed, resoundingly so in the way rulers and their ministers treated the rank and file of their armed men. King Louis XIV (d. 1715) wanted humble service in his armies to be regarded as honorable, as activity that a Frenchman could be proud of. But the force of tradition, the pressing needs of recruitment, and the conduct of officials made a mockery of his dream.

In a world of blood nobilities, of privileged castes and hallowed hierarchies, social identity was as if ordained. Elites and clergymen, Protestant and Catholic, argued that the stations of the high and mighty were anchored in the natural order of the cosmos. The blaspheming soldier—mostly illiterate, filthy, and easily insulted or kicked around by his superior officers—was bound to be seen as a lowly creature. Besides, was it not the case that he was also a thug, and likely to be a gambler, an idler, a drunk, or a former jailbird?

These claims and caricatures had their many exceptions, to be sure. Large armies often had a sprinkling of clerks, students, and the sons of sturdy farmers and small-time merchants. The ranks were even likely to conceal impoverished and illiterate noblemen, eager, by their contact with officers, to get their hands on booty and to better their status. Louis XIV would make it illegal for such men to
serve alongside commoners. The ranks of every army also included skilled artisans—varieties of smiths, leather workers, and carpenters. But these were men who performed humble work with their hands. They could not elevate the name and face of the soldier, and nor could the fragile lacing of recruits who came from people of “the better sort.” Only in religious warfare, when men appeared to be fighting for God, might lowly soldiering be perceived as honorable.

Late in 1552, at the disastrous siege of Metz, where his soldiers were dying by the thousands, the Emperor Charles V opined that since they were mostly poor commoners, no harm was being done because they were rather like caterpillars or grasshoppers, “which eat the buds and other good things of the earth … If they were men of worth, they would not be in his camp for [a pitiable] six
livres
a month.” He was talking to one of the leading generals of the age, the Duke of Alba, who looked upon most foot soldiers as “labourers and lackeys.” This was a commonplace view, shared by commanding officers almost everywhere.

At the end of the century, the eminent Spanish jurist Castillo de Bovadilla declared that “[war] is also useful because, with it, many men who are the feces and excrement of the Commonwealth are expelled and cast out as soldiers. If they were tolerated, they would corrupt, like the body's ill humors whose expulsion improves the good humors.” Nearly two hundred years later, in the 1780s, France's minister of war, the Count of Saint-Germain, observed: “As things are, the army must inevitably consist of the scum of people and of all those for whom society has no use.” And in the early nineteenth century, the Duke of Wellington considered that the army he led against Napoleon was composed of “the scum of the earth” and drunks—men best disciplined, he believed, by means of severe floggings.

It was a view—the soldier as scum—that refused to die.

At the beginning of our period, despite being feared and disliked, the small armies of fifteenth-century Italy were spared much of the later class venom. Commanded by private field officers (
condottieri
)
who served rulers on a contractual basis, they were troops of volunteers, more cavalry than foot soldiers: better dressed, less brutalized, and seldom forbiddingly hungry, because they were seldom wholly cut off from food supplies. They, too, now and then, went unpaid, but their campaigns nearly always had them close to thriving cities. The stinging contempt for soldiers was more a product of the later sixteenth century and after. It was tied to the century's galloping inflation, which aggravated poverty and the desperation of soldiers; but it was more especially a by-product of the spreading practice of “impressment,” the brutal pressing of men into armies. Which usually meant taking “the lowest of the low.”

In the 1620s, Thomas Barnes argued that impressment was the way “to cleanse the city and rid the country of such as may be struggling vagrants and lewd livers … which do swarm amongst us.” He felt that if they were pushed up close to death in wartime, men of this sort might be made to think about their souls. In Bristol, in 1635, the preacher Thomas Palmer also saw impressed men as “the scum of the seas” and “the excrement of the land.” But he wanted a different kind of army in the fight for Protestantism in Ireland: “It is no Christian policy to choose such sinful instruments for such a serious action.”

The cat was out of the bag. If the practice of forcing men to bear arms was not fairly and universally applied, it could easily turn into a policy of social cleansing.

HOW WERE MEN IDENTIFIED BY recruiters? Among Protestants as well as Catholics, the church was the great institutional avenue of control. Their records of baptisms and deaths, kept in the different parishes, provided names and identities for governments, the names too for the rosters of those fit to bear arms.

As long as Europe produced enough volunteers and mercenaries to fill the regiments of professional armies, rulers and their field officers had no reason to complain of manpower shortages. Where payment of some sort added up to a living wage, men were ready to
bear arms, a fact best thrown into relief by the sixteenth century's armies of Swiss pikemen and German pike infantry, the Landsknechts. Then and later, stark hunger also propelled men into Europe's swelling armies, where they hoped to find enough to eat, as in the ranks of the Dutch Republic's mercenaries in the early seventeenth century, or in Germany in the 1630s and 1640s.

On the whole, Europe's pool of volunteering men remained deep enough to satisfy demand until the mid-sixteenth century. Now the tide of princely ambitions and religious controversy began to turn and to require more soldiers, or to require them more often.

The need to force men into taking up arms was first sharply experienced in England, next in Spain in the late sixteenth century, then in Sweden in the 1620s, and thereafter in France and Germany in spite of the fact that states continued to hire armies of mercenaries. The Venetian and Dutch republics always depended on mercenary troops. They were reputed to be more generous with their disbursements, particularly in the seventeenth century, when they faced stiff competition for the hiring of troops on the international mercenary market. France, Spain, and the German princes were also casting about hungrily for men.

I propose to emphasize compulsory recruitment, because this policy, along with the capacity to go on raising the level of taxes and inventing new ones, marks the coercive trail of the emerging power state.

In the 1580s, when Queen Elizabeth I of England ramped up the campaign to impose her Protestant will on Catholic Ireland, her Privy Council began to ship more companies of pressed men across the Irish Sea. The war there had crossed over into something bitter beyond measure. Welsh and English soldiers saw Ireland as a graveyard, a place of hunger and fatal disease. Word of this had made the
rounds, and men resisted the summons to go there. They had to be strong-armed into serving her majesty. There was even a saying in Chester: “Better be hanged at home than die like dogs in Ireland.” And it was highlighted in 1600—to take one example—when a scant fifteen hundred men remained in the Derry garrisons out of the four thousand who had arrived at those outposts only the year before. The rest had been done away with by dysentery, typhus, and other causes. No wonder, then, that impressment for Ireland provoked mutinies “in the vicinity of Chester in 1574, 1578, 1580, 1581, 1594, and 1596.” Mutiny was the first act of determined resistance. The second took the form of mass desertions. Although well guarded and frequently locked up, large numbers of gang-pressed men found ways of absconding even before they set sail.

Estimates indicate that thirty to forty thousand men from England and Wales were shipped to Ireland in the years between 1585 and 1602. The numbers included a smattering of the sons of small farmers: volunteers seeking social advancement and eyeing the possibility of becoming officers. But the large majority were pressed men, and their condition, physical and moral, could be the despair of officials. Describing recent arrivals, one report from Bristol said that “most of them [were] either lame, diseased, boys, or common rogues. Few of them have any clothes; small weak starved bodies taken up in fairs, markets and highways to supply the places of better men kept at home.” Officers in charge of musters occasionally returned whole troops of men back to their dispatch points. One contemporary claimed that impressment was being used to purge parishes “of rogues, loyters, drunkards, and such as no other way can live.” Another observed that he would have liked to paint a group of recruits, and thus depict “so many strange decrepid people” who looked as though “they had been kept in hospitals.” In March 1595, about fifteen hundred men who had served in Brittany reached Waterford, Ireland. On looking them over in Dublin, the new lord deputy, William Russell, remarked, “What … are these the old soldiers we hear of? They look as if they came out of gaols in London.”
The search for men could indeed be so urgent that criminals were sometimes released from prison to be pressed directly into military service for action abroad.