Furies (30 page)

Made in the midst of famine, an extraordinary claim troubled him, particularly because it was voiced by Imperial colonels. One had flatly declared that “the goods of the peasants belong to the soldiers as much to the peasants themselves.” And an Italian colonel, a Milanese count, had later repeated the asseveration: “What belongs to the peasants belongs to the soldiers, and they are extremely hungry.” Friesenegger could not accept the implication—how otherwise to explain it?—that the soldiers were in some sense fighting for the peasants, and that they thus had a natural right to local food supplies, however scant. Two soldiers had just starved to death.

It was January 1634, and our diarist was now seeing the juggernaut of the Thirty Years War. Andechs had more than one thousand soldiers crammed into its outer buildings. That winter, like the last, had turned into an icy nightmare. Soldiers tore away at all visible wood in the cloister, as in the houses of the village, to use for their warming fires. They had been promised food supplies from headquarters in Munich, but none arrived. Maddened with hunger, they pounced on the remaining food of the local peasants, and not just the food—in some cases on their shoes and stockings as well. When they finally departed, later in the month, peasants as well as monks were faced, says Friesenegger, with “a horror” of filth and waste and stench both in the cloister and in Erling. In the village itself, beds,
benches, chests, and the wood stripped from wagons, carts, and plows had all been burned. But now, with the soldiers gone, “the evil only changed,” as disease made its assault: “dysentery, Hungarian fever, strange pustules, pains in the limbs, and swellings.” Many villagers died, but “how could it be otherwise! There were no medicines, no tranquillity, no bread, no beds, no straw, no ovens, no wood, and all this in the middle of the greatest cold that lasted from November to February, with all the houses standing open to the winds and winter.”

Yet soldiers continued to troop into Erling. In July plague struck. One household was wiped out; others lost four or five members, and the dead often lay unburied. The living were afraid to go near them. In the nearby village of Kerschlach, “eight or more people lay dead in one house for six weeks, some half-eaten by dogs.” By the end of the year, Erling's five hundred souls had fallen to 190, “and out of 87 married couples, only 20 remained.”

It is hard to know where to cut off the flow of Friesenegger's diary, the woes of which went on, with ups and downs, to the end of the war. In the early 1640s, Erling was beginning to piece life together again, when the last years of the war again produced a deadly harvest of the old evils. Along the way, new ones had appeared. Packs of wolves, long vanished, returned to race through the countryside, preying on livestock, and the peasants were unable to check their onslaughts. More surprisingly, the entire region had to live for some years with hordes of tenacious “mice of different kinds and colours,” particularly rampant at harvest time. Other sources speak of mice “as big as cats.” But Friesenegger, making no distinctions, must have been referring to voles and wood mice, too, which also helped to swell the periodic explosions of rodent populations. The creatures survived the icy winters by overrunning fields of wheat and other grains and stowing away their pickings beneath the ground, so that peasants even took to digging up the buried spoils.

The fate of a village like Erling, small and of absolutely no strategic value, rarely troubles historians. In this sense, Friesenegger's record
of events has very little significance in
historical
terms. Yet most of Europe lived in such villages, and many suffered Erling's fate. The diocese of Augsburg alone had four hundred different parishes, and when armies streamed over the countryside, the soldiers spread out widely, working their way through hamlets, searching out food, fodder, horses, livestock, and loot.

Inadvertently, then, our diarist was speaking for hundreds of other villages in Bavaria and Swabia, and for that matter in Württemberg, in the Rhenish Palatinate, Hesse, Brandenburg, southern Saxony, and many other places. All fell prey to the violence and atrocities of passing armies, Imperial and Swedish, or French in the later stages of the war.

FRIESENEGGER'S DESCRIPTIONS OF WARTIME VILLAGE life are fully echoed in other writings, one of the most memorable being the chronicle-like diary (1618–1672) of the shoemaker Hans Heberle.

A confirmed Protestant and member of the district militia, conservative, married, and a family man, Heberle came from the Swabian village of Neenstetten, in territory ruled by the city of Ulm. His wake-up call to the realities of war was sounded in 1625, when Imperial troops invaded territorial Ulm and tore through various villages. They were back in 1628, together with their “whores and boys” and other camp followers, at one point seeking billets in almost every village. Army discipline was still rather strict then, and the violence of soldiers was punished, now and then, by the death penalty. But billeted cavalry were already demanding more than the straw, hay, wood, salt, and candles of their official rations.

Heberle's sobering education in the homicidal character of hungry soldiers really came in the 1630s, after Imperial troops returned to the Ulm district in 1631 and swept through villages, pillaging, burning, extorting ransom moneys, and causing Ulm to levy special war taxes. The next two years also brought plagues of Imperial troops. But the surprising poison came in August 1634, with the arrival of a Protestant army under the command of Duke Bernhard of
Saxe-Weimar. Being a Protestant village, Weidenstetten—Heberle was now living there—took no precautions when informed that Bernhard and his troops were on their way. He was certainly not regarded as an enemy, even if, as a soldier in wartime, he could not truly be called a friend. But what the villagers did not know was that Bernhard was a hugely ambitious warlord who depended on the plunder of war to hold on to his troops; and he could not do without these, because he was intent on using armed force to carve a state out for himself.

There they were, then, the people of Weidenstetten, having failed to hide their goods or to move their livestock away. Hungry and unpaid, Bernhard's troops fell on them, stealing horses and other animals, “bread, flour, salt, lard, clothing, [stocks of] cloth, and all our wretched things. They beat and shot and stabbed people, killing a few of them,” and carted off whatever they could carry. Since Bernhard's army had spread out in order to pillage as much as possible, the same scenes of violence were unfolding in other villages, where armed resistance was met with arson and destruction. In Weidenstetten, five houses and five barns went up in flames.

Territorial Ulm now became a wide avenue for retreating or advancing armies, especially after the defeat of the Swedes at Nördlingen in early September 1634. From this time on, the Weidenstetten villagers no longer waited for the arrival of terror on horse and foot. The moment they got news of the approach of troops, they would pack their carts and wagons and flee over the twelve miles to Ulm, where thousands of peasants from other villages also collected, they too having abandoned their houses and few possessions. During the long course of the war, Heberle and his neighbors were to make thirty different escapes to that city, where they might remain for a week or two, or for months at a time, with their families crammed into wagons: filthy, hungry, too poor for the risen price of many foods, freezing in the winter, and exposed to disease. The duration of their stay depended entirely on the danger posed by armies. In 1634–1635, an attack of the plague ate away at Ulm. Heberle lost
two sons, a stepmother, three sisters, and a brother. Yet soldiers continued to come and go in the villages, and each time the locals paid with their poor goods, with beatings, with flight, with their lives.

A picture of the shaky foundations of peasant life comes from a study of the county of Hohenlohe. Here, in remarkably fertile land, one measure of seed grain could produce seven or eight measures of harvested grain. With eight acres of this land, a family of three could produce enough grain to feed itself for a year—no surplus envisaged. A family of eight to ten people required about twenty-five acres of that land for their subsistence. Thomas Robisheaux found that in his Hohenlohe sample region, 52 percent of households “never produced enough grain on their small plots of land to feed themselves,” while another 20 percent or more lived on the margins of self-sufficiency. Hence in bad years, with prices soaring, these families had to buy grain in order to survive. Clearly, then, only a minority of families ever produced sizable surpluses for the market.

If we transfer these findings to areas where the land, more commonly, was not nearly as fertile as in Hohenlohe, and where in fact the yield ratio might be four or even three to one, we realize at once that the German countryside was a world of poverty for most people. But this was generally true of the whole of agrarian Europe. A tenacious German peasantry held on to life by doing paid farm labor, keeping a kitchen garden, raising a pig or two for the market, or growing and spinning flax into thread for sale. Yet overnight that poor life could be put on the edge of a precipice, even for an enterprising peasantry. For the moment soldiers began to touch it, hunger and then famine spread in the wake of their plundering, arson, and calamitous impact on farming. Often, indeed, in their hunger, they even stole the seed grain. No wonder, then, that both soldiers and peasants starved.

IN CAMPAIGNS AGAINST CIVILIAN POPULATIONS—and this was the ordinary business of war for armies—fighting around the walls of cities, in the midst of a siege, constituted one of war's bloodiest edges:
echoes of
The Iliad.
And if that edge elicited the utmost cruelty from soldiers, it had the same effect on the besieged civilians, who felt that they were fighting for their lives.

Between besiegers and besieged, every kind of foul exchange was bound to take place at the city walls, with soldiers on the outside declaring that they would rape mothers, wives, and daughters once they stormed the city, and defenders firing back vows to castrate and skin or decapitate any would-be invaders. In religious conflict, the abuse settled on saints and popes, or on the alleged special God of the evangelicals. Two fleeting scenes give point to the extremes.

At the siege of La Rochelle in the spring of 1573, many of the city's women distinguished themselves by their bravery at the walls. Some of them slipped out of the city occasionally “to strip dead enemies of arms and equipment.” But in their most blistering role, they also helped to front defense right at the walls, particularly by “casting cauldrons of boiling pitch and tar into the midst of storming royal troops.”

A more dramatic—and vengeful—feature of defense was put into play around Turin's walls in late August, 1706, in a war provoked by the Duke of Savoy's personal problems with King Louis XIV. Following a siege of several months, French forces finally moved to scale or burst through the city's walls. The most spirited assault was repelled on August 27, when the French lost thirteen hundred men and the
Savoyards
about four hundred. At the end of that day, hundreds of wounded French soldiers lay wailing and pleading for help in the ditches around the walls. Turin's defenders proceeded to throw tons of firewood, pitch, and oil down into the trenches, on top of the wounded men. They then set fire to that mix of man and matter, and from the walls and ramparts snipers targeted the wounded who tried to squirm away. We can be sure that neither Louis XIV nor the Duke of Savoy would carry that scene around in his conscience.

The incandescence of feeling at the walls of cities under attack, with fire or boiling pitch crowning the most painful deaths, had its
match in the hell of villages, in peasant hatred for soldiers. On August 20 and 23, 1617, some twenty kilometers to the northwest of Turin, the Leipzig colonel, Caspar von Widmarckter (1566–1621), left hundreds of sick soldiers in two tiny towns, evidently abandoning them while affecting to believe that they would be looked after. When his regiment departed, the townsfolk, villagers really, chased the sick men away, and in one case put some of them onto hay carts and set fire to them.

It was the spring of 1562, marking the outbreak of the Wars of Religion in France. The air for many townsmen crackled with anxiety. Talk about murder and violence over questions of worship punctured daily conversation. People would soon flee from anxious Rouen, the country's largest city after Paris. Some of its inhabitants tried to hide at home, while others would beg relatives or friends to protect them. Fear and hatred over religious differences were all but palpable.

Rouen's ominous moral climate also enveloped Toulouse, Lyon, La Rochelle, Tours, Blois, Troyes, and other French cities. In the late 1550s, the Reformed (Calvinist) Church had found legions of converts with such speed—critically so in the ranks of certain of the country's elites—that many Huguenots, the new devotees, believed that they would soon snatch the entire kingdom away from the old Roman Catholic Church. Their violence was launched in 1560, with the smashing and defacing of religious images at La Rochelle and elsewhere.

Religious tempers had first flared years before, in 1534, when people in Paris and at least five other cities woke up on a Sunday morning, October 18, to espy printed placards on their way to Mass, posted in the most visible places. In Amboise, one had been tacked to the door of the king's bedchamber. Such was the bold new
Word of God. It was headed, “True Articles concerning the horrible, gross, and intolerable abuses of the papal mass, concocted directly against the Holy Supper of our Lord.” In their contemptuous dismissal of priests, the four paragraphs of the communication highlighted four hard-hitting points, adding up to a scorching indictment of the Mass. The violence of the placards was a dagger in the bosom of traditional religious beliefs.