Furies (16 page)

War became the métier of the leading Habsburgs. Almost continually on the move for more than thirty-five years, traveling by horse, boat, and carriage, Charles V spent much of his reign and resources fighting the kings of France for the control of contested lands in Italy. His son, Philip II, and the next two Habsburg kings of Spain pushed Castile to the brink of economic ruin with their wars in the Netherlands. In the 1580s and 1590s, Philip's armies were also marched into the French Wars of Religion. Thereafter, two Habsburg emperors, Ferdinand II (d. 1637) and Ferdinand III (d. 1657), would be leading actors in an Empire bloodied and depopulated by the Thirty Years War.

FROM THE MOMENT THEY COULD touch bankers for enough money to field an army, princes took their lands into war with relative ease.
But once the enterprisers had mustered the ambulant city—that is, the desired army—cascades of additional cash and credit would be needed to keep it together, to move it, and to pursue the war. Now was the time for princes and their counselors to exhibit their vaunted leadership.

In degrees of violence and bloodletting, the sacking of cities would seem to be the fiery edge of war. For all its trauma, however, a three-day hurricane of torture, theft, and rape was not necessarily the measure of the utmost cruelty. Long sieges touched every aspect of war, including food supplies and the use of artillery. A prolonged attack on a city—adding the horrors of starvation to death by shot and sword—could turn into an even more murderous operation than a sacking.

Siena, our point of departure, provides a remarkable entry to the horrors of famine in the midst of sieges. Sancerre, a little French town (and home of that wine), will come next, borne into the chronicles of Europe by the pen of a brave Calvinist minister. But Paris was to be the scene of the deadliest siege of the age. And Augsburg, one of the chief victims of the Thirty Years War, lost more people to starvation than any other German city.

The Italian Wars (1494–1559) were dynastic conflicts between the kings of France and Spain. Each side claimed the rich duchy of Milan and the crown of Naples, but they were fighting in effect for political dominion over the Italian peninsula. The wealthy and populous cities of Italy, with their harvests of taxes and commercial
know-how, were scintillating prizes. And a peninsula divided into minor states was an open road—all but an invitation—for the mercenary armies of the Valois (French) and Habsburg (German-Spanish) royal houses. No Italian state—neither the proud Venetian Republic, nor the fragmented Papal State, still less Medicean Florence—could stand up to the armed might of the royal contenders, with their armies, when combined, of twenty-five to forty thousand foot soldiers, ten to fifteen thousand horsemen, and long artillery trains.

In the 1550s, Tuscany turned into the peninsula's flash point. Seeing the little republic of Siena, a client state, as a weak node in his web of controls against French designs, the Emperor Charles V decided to build muscle there by constructing a new fortress on the city's highest point. A hugely expensive operation, it was to be paid for by Siena itself, with its diminished population of twenty thousand people. They were fiercely opposed. Against the will of the city, nevertheless, construction of the fortress began at the end of 1550 and was relentlessly pursued. But in late July, 1552, with help from the French, the Sienese broke out in rebellion against the small garrison of Spanish soldiers and forced them to abandon the city. The rebels at once turned to obliterating the new fortress. It was war. And now Charles V's deputies in Italy scrambled to find the money for it.

Fearful of passing soldiers, peasants and other rural folk began to pour into Siena, nearly doubling its population. By late December, the city was also host to 10,500 defending mercenaries (five hundred of whom were cavalry), for a total amounting to roughly half of Siena's ordinary population. These numbers put tremendous strains on daily food supplies and raised the question, almost at once, of Siena's “unwanted” or “useless mouths” (
bocche inutili
): a pointed reference to the begging poor who would be a drain on foodstuffs once the enemy mounted the expected siege. The town council took steps to have new flour mills constructed and to lay in stores of grain, salted meat, and cheese. But keeping the enemy, too, in mind, the defenders also combed the country for twenty kilometers around
Siena, seeking to sequester or destroy all edible goods, with an eye to denying future provisions to the enemy soldiers, who would certainly be foraging for victuals.

Always short of money in his grand war aims, Charles V and his envoys forced a protégé, Cosimo I, Duke of Florence, to raise and pay for a small army of ten thousand men to assist in the assault on Siena. To do so, Cosimo had to break a secret agreement with the king of France, Henry II. More, he had to come out candidly in favor of Spain and the Empire, borrow large sums of money in different parts of Europe, and ramp up Florentine taxes. An extra spur for Cosimo lay in the fact that he feared and hated the small throng of Florentine republican exiles who were now gathering in Siena, in zealous support of the revolt against Charles V. They were aiming to bring Cosimo himself down, and to succeed his overthrow with the reestablishment of the Florentine Republic. In its lines of ramification, the battle for Siena stretched from bankers in Antwerp, Augsburg, Genoa, and Venice down to the Spanish viceroy in Naples. German mercenaries would soon be joining the Italian and Spanish troops directed against the French in Siena.

By March 1553, the Imperial forces in Tuscany had been raised to nearly twenty thousand foot and horse, and operations against Siena's territories were soon under way. Posted to serve as military governor of French forces in Tuscany, Piero Strozzi, one of Duke Cosimo's most bitter enemies, reached Siena on January 2, 1554. The new commander of troops in the city itself was to be a French nobleman, Blaise de Monluc; but he was very ill and did not arrive in Siena until mid-July. Under Strozzi and Monluc, everything was done to prepare the city for a prolonged siege. The sale of bread, for example, was put under strict controls, and all people without a store of flour had to apply for a special permit, allowing them to collect two small loaves of daily bread from a specified baker. Soon this ration was reduced to one loaf. Meanwhile, the Marquis of Marignano, the commander of Imperial and Medicean troops in Tuscany, was
conducting a scorched-earth policy designed to choke off any leakage of victuals into Siena. His troops were also assaulting and taking Sienese towns and villages. Anyone who dared to resist their advances was executed without further ado.

The summer of 1554 turned into a disaster for Strozzi. His fifteen thousand troops, mostly unpaid, were running short of food and even water; desertion was thinning his ranks; and he lost a major battle, near Marciano, at the beginning of August. Marignano's mercenaries, on the other hand, seemed to become more robust; they received daily bread supplies from Cosimo's territories. All the while, too, on both sides, the war in the countryside was turning more savage.

In Siena, for civilians as for soldiers, the tightening blockade continued to reduce the daily rations of the all-important foodstuff, bread. Looking at moments as though it might end in violence, bitter wrangling broke out between civil and military authorities over the matter of whether or not to expel the “useless” mouths from the city. What did “useless” mean? Were the mouths in question those of the mendicant poor only, or those of all children, women, the sick and the old? What about upper-class women: Were they “useless” as fighters or defensive workers against the besiegers?

Military theory, as represented, for example, by Bernardino Rocca's
De' discorsi di Guerra
(1582), did not touch fine points on this matter. Its ruthless assumption was that when a city came under siege and food supplies were short, you put the so-called useless or unnecessary mouths outside the great curtain of walls. Who the useless were exactly was evidently a decision for local authority, civilian and military. With equal ferocity, however, military theory also called for the besiegers, the army outside the walls, to kill or somehow drive back into the embattled city all the expelled refugees.

In August 1554, it was decreed that all people not from Siena had to get out, or face brutal punishment: the women with whips and scourging, the men by being dropped from pulleys (
strappados
), arms tied behind their backs, and then stopped with a jerk, which often resulted in dislocated shoulders. The city was sliding toward a harrowing
food crisis. Some of the well-off, taking along their valuables, were buying their way out of the city, in some cases even securing safe-conducts from Duke Cosimo. By now, too, sneaking food into Siena could earn fortunes. But anyone caught at this was liable to an on-the-spot penalty of death. The Marquis of Marignano had nearby trees “festooned with the [hanged] bodies” of men caught breaking the blockade.

Not knowing how long they might have to hold out against the siege, Strozzi and Monluc were thinking of food for their soldiers. They insisted that all the useless mouths be expelled from the city. For the civilian Council of Eight, however, this meant only the poor, all the more so in view of the fact that the armed escorts assigned to accompany the unwanted out of Siena were unable to prevent besieging soldiers from killing, maiming, torturing, and shaming the castout victims. And the terrible fear of the civilian bosses in Siena was that Strozzi and Monluc meant their purging of useless mouths to include “honorable” mouths: namely, the wives and children of men from the political and propertied class.

Having met on this question, a special council of 150 of “the most honorable” Sienese citizens came back with a resounding reply. Strozzi's blanket command, they declared, could not be accepted, “first from love of country, and next for the honor of their women and families … and if it be said that this is the way to ensure the security of our native land, and thus to be put above and before all other things, let the reply be that our fatherland is not the walls [of the city] but rather our families and their honor.” For the rest, they were all in favor of expelling “the dirt poor” (
la poveraglia
), who had neither honor nor a fatherland to safeguard and defend.

The dispute went on as food supplies continued to dwindle. Muted voices soon began to talk about cutting a deal with the besiegers. But Strozzi and Monluc, professional soldiers and officers of the king of France, were in Tuscany to defend a city against the king's enemies; and they were in no mood to compromise. Monluc was still rather ill. Worse still, in a battle at the beginning of August, Strozzi had lost
four thousand men and as many more had been seriously wounded, including the general himself. Soldiers began to desert the French ranks, some, it seems, passing over to the Imperial side for food and money. The first commitment of the French commanders had to be to their men, and food stocks had to be at the top of their considerations. Which is why they kept returning to the rebarbative problem of ridding the city of its useless mouths.

In the third week of September 1554, in spite of painful scenes, about twelve hundred poor folk were got out of the city. But the horror of a new round of expulsions soon halted the purge. Religious orders and large charitable foundations, in Italy as elsewhere in Europe, often kept their own grain supplies. Not surprisingly, then, thinking about the city's famous Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala and its rich stores of grain, Strozzi had been calling for the ejection of the hospital's orphans and poor people. On the night of October 5, about seven hundred of its inmates were led out of the city by escorts who were intended to guarantee their safety. Near the town of San Casciano, however, a company of Spanish and German mercenaries pounced on one of the convoys and its charge of more than 250 children, ranging in ages from six to ten. More than one hundred men, women, and children were killed. The Marquis of Marignano later claimed that he had sent them back to Siena.

Scipione Venturi, the head of the hospital, now seems to have faced up to Strozzi, vowing that he would allow no other inmates to leave his premises until he could be absolutely certain of their safety. In the ensuing clash with the urban patriciate, Strozzi and Monluc, demanding more authority over the city, finally laid hands on part of Venturi's stock of grain. They even tried to expel the hospital's last forty-five boys and girls, aged ten to fifteen. But the screaming children were driven back into the city. In November, the daily bread ration in Siena fell to 250 grams for civilians and 400 for soldiers. Every house battered by cannon fire was stripped and turned into firewood for heating and cooking.

Although Monluc's forces in Siena were now down to twentyeight
hundred foot and three hundred horse, the city was well fortified and resisted another bombardment in December. On Christmas night, Monluc's men threw back the assault and scaling ladders of two thousand Germans. But the end must already have been in sight, for early in the second week of January, Monluc, getting up from his bed of pain, concealing the pallor in his cheeks with a smear of red wine, and flaunting fancy dress, addressed the city's civilian authorities, urging them to ignore Duke Cosimo's ultimatum and blandishments. Later on in January, a covert night operation underlined the food crisis in the city. In a move to reduce the number of “mouths,” eight hundred German soldiers slipped out of the city to join Strozzi in the fortress of Montalcino—a costly operation, for many of them were ambushed and killed on the way. And no wonder. Imperial and Medicean forces in the region greatly outnumbered the French, who were dispersed and numbered no more than five thousand foot, plus a few hundred horse. War, meanwhile, had reduced Siena's rural hinterland to a waste where hungry, scavenging dogs gnawed at human corpses.

Serious surrender talks with Cosimo—dealings at this point were with him, not with Charles V's emissaries—began shortly after March 10. Yet there was no letup in the efforts to expel useless mouths from Siena, and those driven out were driven back to the walls in ugly, loathsome scenes. Ambassadors, meanwhile, stepped up the wheeling and dealing; vows were made; and on the night of April 5–6, in a secret agreement with the Marquis of Marignano, Monluc slipped out of the city with a large band of Florentine republican exiles and Imperial rebels—men who had been marked for execution, though not Monluc himself. Cosimo signed the surrender document on April 17, and four days later the remaining French troops marched out of Siena. Out, too, went 242 noblemen and their families, plus another group of 435 armed citizens, together with their families and servants. Making their way to the little Tuscan town and fortress of Montalcino, home of the Sienese Republic in exile, they were escorted by a squadron of horse and a company of Imperial infantry. From a
population of about twenty thousand, not counting the outsiders or
forenses
who had flooded into the city, only six thousand people now remained in Siena. Some had perished in the fighting, but most of the rest had either fled or died of starvation.