Furies (12 page)

If rich traders and moneylenders trafficked in plunder, poor people—laborers, maidservants, artisans—also succumbed, in some cases by helping to expose the wealth of neighboring acquaintances. Marie de Soeto, a Flemish maidservant in a Spanish household, led a troop of soldiers in the systematic pillage of certain houses. She may even have cooperated in the use of torture, applied to get confessions regarding hidden valuables. Kinks to one side, her behavior—disloyalty and cruelty—smacks of revenge, of a settling of scores. It belongs to a world of underlings, beatings, obedience, and servitude, and to a gulf between rich and poor.

HUNGRY SOLDIERS ARE ANGRY SOLDIERS, ready to vent their temper on innocent civilians. In Antwerp, the citadel was well stocked with provisions, and the soldiers were not hungry. They were, however, unpaid, and such men wanted loot. With their lives in danger, they
wanted their wages, but with as much interest—plunder—as possible. The license to sack meant that they were ready to kill, but not in the first instance, not if victims were ready to blurt out their secret hiding places. And the people of Antwerp knew that their attackers, headed by the Aalst mutineers, sprang from the ranks of an unpaid army.

Modern scholarship finds that the so-called “Spanish fury” in Antwerp resulted in about twenty-five hundred deaths, although Leon Voet and Jonathan Israel put the numbers of those murdered in the “hundreds.” Voet, again, having studied historical maps of the city, believes that “probably just over a hundred” dwellings were destroyed by fire.

Champaigney and the Council of State in Brussels made alarming political and logistical mistakes. Moreover, in the days leading up to the sack, Orange's Protestant fleet of a hundred boats, floating on the Scheldt and looking on, deepened the anxiety and anger in the citadel. Yet those boats did nothing to assist the city. It was as though the Protestant commanders wanted to teach that Catholic city a lesson.

It was the spring of 1631. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, the geographic heart of Europe, had been plunged into the middle of a religious and political blood storm, the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). A frugal backdrop may do for us here.

The war broke out in a clash between the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II, an arch-Catholic who was claiming the kingdom of Bohemia (today's Czech Republic), and a leading prince of the Empire, the Elector Palatine, Frederick V. This hardy Calvinist had grabbed at the Bohemian kingship when it was offered to him by the country's nobility. Religious differences between emperor and elector now turned toxic for the Empire. Frederick's allies were defeated at the Battle of White Mountain (1620), a catastrophe for the
Bohemian nobility, and there was next an astounding land transfer. About half of all landed property in Bohemia, wartime booty, passed into the hands of Habsburg courtiers and the leading officers of the Habsburg army.

But the need to pay and feed soldiers fast became the most nerve-racking of all matters. The chief banker of the war, Hans de Witte, lender to Wallenstein, the great Imperial general, would end in bankruptcy and commit suicide; and the general himself would be assassinated by colleagues, with the approval of the emperor. Wallenstein's flair for keeping armies together by means of ruthless financial expedients had rendered him independently dangerous.

Issued in March of 1629, the Emperor Ferdinand's infamous Edict of Restitution would hang like an evil star over northern Germany. Looking back to the famous Peace of Augsburg (1555), the edict called for the restitution to the Catholic Church of all the ecclesiastical properties and rights that had been seized—illegally was the presumption—by Protestant princes and towns, stretching back to 1552. The document posed a particular threat to Germany's great prince-bishops of the north.

In the early spring of 1631, the Lutheran city of Magdeburg, once the seat of a major bishopric, came under fire. Recently thinned out by plague, but still a dominant commercial center of twenty-five thousand inhabitants, “Maiden” Magdeburg (local wordplay) was extremely proud of having resisted two previous sieges, first by the Elector Moritz of Saxony, back in 1550–1551, and then by Wallenstein in 1629. When the Protestant Lion of the North, Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, entered the war in July 1630, Magdeburg was the first free city to side with him, thereby breaking the rule which barred all the Empire's princes and free cities from entering into alliances against the emperor. Gustavus was now leading an army through Brandenburg, wanting to press southwest into Saxony, just as the Imperialist and Catholic League generals, Tilly and Pappenheim, rounded on Magdeburg in April and May 1631, laying siege to it with an army of more than twenty-five thousand foot and
horse. The Swedish king already had a military governor there, the iron-willed Hessian nobleman Dietrich von Falkenberg, who had entered Magdeburg in the autumn of 1630. One of the many rumors held that he had sworn to see the city in ashes, rather than turned over to Catholics.

In 1629, at the time of Wallenstein's attack on Magdeburg, political schisms in the city had the upper class calling for loyalty to the emperor. A party of moderates rather went along with this call, but a militant constituency of radical Lutherans wanted a break with the Catholic emperor, and they seem at first to have found a good deal of support among the populace. By the spring of 1631, in the shadow of the Edict of Restitution, and with Gustavus Adolphus not far away, loyalist sympathy for the emperor had faded. Or his sympathizers had fallen silent. And the city's restructured ruling council—now in Falkenberg's grasp—was able to hold out to the very end against Tilly's pleas for a negotiated surrender.

In the early morning of May 20, even as Pappenheim's troops, primed with good wine, were storming the northeastern face of Magdeburg's great walls, grappling their way up four hundred ladders, the town council, unbelievably, was still debating the question of holding talks with the Imperial general Tilly. One of Pappenheim's officers, Jürgen Ackermann, described the assault: “There was such a thunder and crack of muskets, incendiary mortars and great cannon that no one could either see or hear, and many supporting troops followed us, so that the whole rampart was filled, covered and black with soldiers and storm ladders … After several hundred men had fallen, we broke in over the defences, putting the remainder to flight.”

In the face of Dietrich von Falkenberg's menacing presence, the town councillors had scuppered all talk of a surrender. But now, suddenly on that fatal morning, it was a case of sleepers waking on the precipice. The tocsin had been sounded from St. John's spire, and when the councillor, Otto von Guericke, rushed into the town hall to cry out that Croats were already in the city, running down Fischergasse, plundering, the council reacted with shock and wonder.
Only then did Falkenberg break away from the meeting and race out to his horse to take command of the defense.

Something had gone wrong, calamitously so, though not because of treason or the work of spies. In the predawn hours, the night watch had failed to pick out the final preparations of the besiegers before their all-out assault, despite the protective presence of Swedish officers in Magdeburg, in addition to twenty-five hundred troops and a local militia of five thousand men. The city's great moat had been partly drained, and Imperial engineers had got the army to coerce local peasants into filling parts of it with solid materials, with a view to easing the push to the city walls and the emplacement of scaling ladders. Even so, many of the Imperial foot soldiers would break into the city drenched with the moat's waters.

The siege had started in early April, with a gradual blocking of the Elbe River and a cutting off of the flow of supplies into the city. This had been done at the cost of bloody skirmishes and the death—in the Imperial camp too—of hundreds of mercenaries. In the first weeks of May, to aggravate the animosity already caused by the losses on both sides, lashings of hatred and resentment were added at Magdeburg's walls, as Catholic soldiers and evangelicals hurled insults at each other over parapets and ramparts, with one side abusing the Virgin Mary and the other promising, once they got into the city, to rape and enjoy the wives and daughters of the besieged. Insults of this sort were the stuff of sieges. Looking down from their walls, the civilian militia had also used gunfire and missiles to maim and kill besiegers.

The suburbs, meanwhile, had suffered bombardment. Day and night too, for two or three days in May, the city itself was battered by thirty big guns and six mortars, spewing forth some eighteen hundred missiles every day and inflicting heavy damage on certain houses, churches, and steeples. The defenders themselves used very little cannon fire. They had run grievously short of gunpowder.

Now, as the Empire's polyglot mercenaries—hungry, angry, unpaid—broke into Magdeburg, they bounded in with a license to
kill and sack because the town council had repeatedly rejected Tilly's call to surrender, in the belief that Gustavus Adolphus would come to their rescue. And for this, as for the ensuing carnage, Falkenberg, the city's military governor, carried much of the responsibility. For although suspecting and fearing that the Swedish king might not be able to come to the rescue of Magdeburg, he had plied citizens and council with promises about the king's imminent arrival, he himself possibly hoping that the Imperial army would despair and abandon the siege. The city's chorus of die-hard preachers and evangelicals had thus won his support when they argued that it was a far better thing to resist and to die heroically than to be yanked under the “papist yoke.” In the meantime, the city had resounded with conflicting rumors and claims, many based on alleged signs and portents regarding Magdeburg's history and destiny. Some of the claims promised salvation, while others hinted at the possibility of a cataclysm; and there was a bounty of references to Troy, Babylon, Thebes, Jerusalem, and other supposed ancient parallels.

Mortally wounded in the first hour of the street fighting, Falkenberg tried bravely to conceal the fact in order to keep from spreading panic in his ranks. He was soon dead. Once in the city, Pappenheim's soldiers fought their way to the Kröcken Gate, opened it to their horsemen, and in rode the Imperial cavalry, followed by more companies of foot soldiers. From windows and in the streets, the defenders fought back with startling spirit, killing hundreds of the attackers. And now, it seems, either Pappenheim's men or fighters in the Protestant ranks set fire to several buildings, possibly hoping that the blaze would distract the others from the fighting. The maneuver, however, had no effect on the raging street battles. Within two hours or little more, Pappenheim's troops had triumphed over the city's defenders, and a unit of Imperial cavalry rode down Lackenmacherstrasse to the sound of drums and trumpets.

Otto von Guericke, an eyewitness, described the actions of plundering soldiers: “When a band of looters broke into a house, if the master of the household was able to give them something, this served
to rescue him and his family from harm, but only until another soldier turned up, also making demands. In the end, after all the house's things [valuables] had been handed out and nothing else remained, that's when the woes really began. Now the soldiers would start to assault and terrify [their victims], shooting, hanging, and hacking at them,” and insisting that valuables had been hidden. The result was that in about two hours, thousands of “innocent” people, “men, women, and children were pitilessly murdered in different ways … and words can simply not do justice to what took place.”

The looting and killing were under way when a wind started up, gusting into the city. No one bothered to try to tame the fire, and it was now blown into and over the mass of clustered buildings. Twelve hours later, most of Magdeburg lay in smoldering ashes. The cathedral, a monastery, houses near the New Market, and a scatter of buildings somehow survived, but out of nineteen hundred buildings, only about two hundred remained. The town hall and all the churches of the old city were leveled by the flames: St. John's, St. Ulrich's (“the most beautiful of the churches … with its splendid paintings”), St. Catherine's, St. Jacob's, St. Peter's, and three other parish churches.

In the ardor of religious bias, historians have pinned the blame for the fire on one side or the other. Common sense would argue that plundering armies do not seek to destroy the fruits of their conquests. They want booty; they have a vested interest in the safety of the goods they covet. In the case of Magdeburg—and there was much talk about this at the time—the fire was more likely the work of local residents, determined to distract the enemy and, in their fanaticism, to keep the city and its wealth from falling into the hands of the hated Imperialists and Catholics. Some evangelicals even saw this as a kind of heroic martyrdom. But if, as was also claimed, Pappenheim called for a few houses to be set on fire, he was undoubtedly thinking of a swift and limited operation.

Even as the city burned, the “victors” raced through it in search of loot. And some of them, it seems, were driven by such a frenzy of greed that they ended by being trapped and killed in cellars, as
burning houses caved in on them, all their pillaging now in vain. Along with money and goods, women too were taken—as concubines. Death from starvation had already raked through the ranks of the poor. The entry of foodstuffs into the city had been cut off for weeks, putting the prices of basic victuals beyond the reach of the destitute. Hence the victors would not look for ransom money among the poor. These, instead, were pressed into the service of the rampaging looters and made to pick out the rich, or to help them gather and cart their plunder out of the city. But all people in Magdeburg who could be ransomed were, including the city councillors and the surviving Swedish officers. Armed with pikes fifteen to eighteen feet long, pikemen broke them in half to be able to search out booty with more ease. And in that many-tongued Imperial army, the officers were no less avid for booty than the common soldiers. Some of them helped whole families to get out of the city safely, but only at a price. There were also cases in which officers, as well as “low born” mercenaries, were able to show pity and to offer their help.