Furies (3 page)

To the pincer of hunger in Pisa the Florentine army added death and injury from an occasional shower of missiles. Europe had first seen the tandem of gunpowder and artillery in the 1340s; and Pisans heard “bombards” in 1406. But the new weapon had no true accuracy until after 1450. Just as lethal in 1400, however, were huge stone-casting catapults (perriers). And the besiegers used these to spread terror inside Pisa. The claws of war also moved over the Pisan countryside, over great stretches of farmland, villages, and little towns, where mercenaries burned and plundered at will. Much of the loot, including stores of grain, found its way to Florence.

According to the civilian supervisor in the field, the Florentine politician Gino Capponi, Florence's mercenaries were driven by golden prospects. Their successful capture of Pisa—they had been promised—would be rewarded with double their wages, a sacking of the city, and a bounty of 100,000 florins. But during the summer, as it became clear that Pisa would be starved into a surrender, thus exposing its mobile wealth to freebooting soldiers, Florence drew back from the violence of a sack, in a retreat oiled by self-interest. Why let all that wealth fall into the hands of predatory mercenaries? Much of it would be taxable, disposable, useful.

The commissaries now issued strict orders. When Pisa fell, there was to be no looting, on pain of death. The takeover had to be disciplined and seemingly magnanimous. Months earlier, the first captain-general of the assault on the seaport, Bertoldo degli Orsini, a Roman nobleman, had turned out to be so much greedier for plunder in the countryside than for seizing Pisa that the Florentines had dismissed him and his little army.

In the end, Pisa was turned over to the Florentines by the treachery of the city's jumped-up lord and citizen, Giovanni Gambacorti, who was rewarded with 20,000 florins and properties in Florence. Tax-free Florentine citizenship was also thrown into the deal. All the treacherous arrangements had been wrapped in secrecy. Just before dawn, on October 9, 1406, with Pisa's inhabitants still asleep, the city gates were thrown open and in marched the Florentine
army, doubtless to the sound of drums and instantly waking the citizenry. Stunned at first, as they looked from their windows, how could they conceal the effects of starvation? One Florentine reported that the appearance of the Pisans “was repugnant and frightening, with all their faces hollowed out by hunger.” Some of the soldiers went into the city carrying bread. They threw it at the starving inhabitants, at children in particular, and the reactions they got were shocking. They were seeing, they thought, “ravenous birds of prey,” with siblings tearing at each other for chunks of bread, and children fighting with their parents.

Back in Florence, news of the surrender caused a burst of exaltation and mad glee. The city's many church bells resounded. Then came three days of celebration, with bonfires, processions, parties, jousts, and a solemn Mass in the Baptistry, the church of San Giovanni, where special thanks were offered up to God for the glorious, heavensent destiny of the Florentines. Now at last they had a great seaport of their own, one to match, as it were, their literary prowess. Florence, after all, by 1400 had already produced a literature that whole nations could be proud of, not to speak of a single city: Dante's
Divine Comedy
, Petrarch's
Canzoniere
(his great sonnet sequence), and Boccaccio's hundred tales,
The Decameron.
Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and other luminaries still lay in Florence's future.

Pisa's hatred of the Florentines would burn brightly for more than a century and would be vividly displayed in 1494, with the outbreak of the Italian Wars (1494–1559), in the city's spirited revolt against Florence.

At the end of the seventeenth century, one of the major lanes of warfare ran through the French-speaking village of Rumegies, near Lille, on the border between Flanders and France. Alexandre Dubois, a local man and the keeper of a journal, was the parish priest of
Rumegies, a community of eighty-four families. His journal captures the voice of a sharp, committed, ironic, wise, and likable cleric. He was also remarkably well-informed about European events.

The region was crisscrossed by armies, domestic and foreign, for about twenty years, in wars between the France of Louis XIV and the Dutch Netherlands allied with England, Spain, and a league of German princes. Dubois's pages provide a record of what happened in and around Rumegies.

The money pinch on the village began in 1691, with the royal creation of new local offices, solely with the intent of selling them to raise cash for the crown. The village itself was rather forced to buy the offices.

In 1693, the Duke of Württemberg arrived on the scene, at the head of twenty thousand men, and at once demanded “contributions.” Rumegies was assigned a staggering levy of 30,000 florins. Hostages were rounded up, picked from the larger district, and dispatched to Ghent, to be held there until payment was made. But a French victory at Neerwinden, “the glory of France and the ruin of our village,” diverted the contributions into French hands, and although these were now lowered to 18,000 florins, cries of bitterness rang out. Food prices had soared; the well-off saw their surpluses vanish in the contributions; and the poor agonized, with the price of bread itself beyond their reach. No grain had been harvested locally that year. Yet the Nine Years War (1688–1697) went on.

With people dying of hunger in the winter and spring of 1694, every day brought a stream of strangers to Rumegies, to the church, to beg Dubois for bread. In 1695, the crown levied a general head or poll tax to help pay for the war, despite the fact that all “contributions” also went for the upkeep of the king's armies. In June of that year, driven by hunger, seventeen Spanish soldiers—almost certainly deserters from the anti-French ranks—were caught in the Rumegies wheat fields, evidently stripping off stalks. The villagers killed one, but the other sixteen got away.

Grain prices in the Rumegies region remained too dear for most
people, and Dubois lashes out at the “new rich” who had battened on the profits made from the hoarding and timely sale of grains. The year 1697 resulted in a terrible harvest for the village, owing to torrents of rain. Rye was the only cereal to be reaped. In his entries for 1698, Dubois calls attention to the three brothers of a difficult local family. One was hanged for stealing a horse; another was serving out his life as a galley slave; and the third—weaving with the fortunes of war—had soldiered in both French and Spanish armies but had deserted five times, on each occasion pocketing the join-up money.

The famine of 1699 would long be remembered. Every day the poor lined up “by the hundreds” to beg for bread. Yet not long after, in preparations for war (1701), the poll tax was again levied, now in perpetuity, and five local boys were taken into a militia, while three others were pressed into the king's army.

A few years later (1708), a Dutch army, with strong British support, lay siege to Lille, and the entire region was overrun by scouring French soldiers, horsemen foraging for hay from August to December. That difficult year was followed by the wet and freezing winter of 1709, lasting until April. Then, too soon, the relief promised by spring died in Rumegies. The French army had been forced to retreat. On May 27, a pillaging army of more than ten thousand of the Dutch Republic's mercenaries entered the diocese of Saint-Amand, which included the parish of Rumegies. In less than three months, 180 villagers would perish. Alexandre Dubois sees the invaders in the imagery of the Last Judgment. Speaking a language incomprehensible to the village, the Dutch “were armed with pistols, bayonets, swords, and great staffs … and they destroyed everything. They took fifty cows and thirty horses; and having stolen things at will … they violated some of the women and killed several villagers with staff blows.” Breaking into the parish church, they “pillaged and profaned it” and gave a beating to our diarist, Dubois. Showing “faces that breathed nothing but carnage … they delivered Rumegies to their fury.”

Dubois and the villagers fled. But when they returned two or
three days later, they found their houses with “nothing but walls—no doors, no windows, no glass, not a scrap of metal, and worse still not a single bale of hay. In fact, there wasn't one in the entire Tournai region, and that led to the death of nearly all livestock by the following winter.” Dubois noticed that malnutrition also killed villagers, for although many were dead by Christmas, not one, he observed, was from among those who had been well fed. “Most of the dead had neither money, nor underwear, nor even hay to sleep on.” And people were eating the sort of bread “that dogs would not have eaten the year before.”

Easter of 1710 came with an army that cut through Rumegies on its way to besiege Douai. The soldiers robbed whatever pleased them. A year later, for six weeks, the village had to offer food and lodging to soldiers from a Hanoverian infantry regiment. In March 1712, it was saddled for ten days with demanding French horsemen who took wood, carts, horses, and hay. “Had they stayed any longer, we would have been forced to abandon the village. These gentlemen take all the horses … keep them as long as they like, till they wear them out, giving them nothing to eat and nothing to the owners either. They are the despair of our poor peasants.”

Between 1709 and 1713, the neighboring town of Saint-Amand changed hands several times, passing back and forth between Dutch and French armies, and each time Rumegies had to cough up hay, tools, money, and food in measures that kept the villagers destitute. In the end, to feed the poor folk of the parish, Rumegies, like all neighboring villages, had to sell off some of its common lands at prices fallen to less than half of their normal value.

The priest closes his chronicle of the 1709 fury by fixing on the efforts of Dutch soldiers to dismantle and cart away the three bells of the village church. Giving up in frustration, they tried to shatter them. Failing in this, too, they swung and half-threw one of the bells out of the belfry. But when it failed to break after striking the ground, they dropped another down on top of the first. Now the two bells
ended with fine cracks, so that in time they had to be melted down and recast. This expensive work was done in Tournai, and the bells got their final blessing on Sunday, October 29, 1713.

The scene of violence over the bells had in it something of the religious fumes of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), or even of the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). Louis XIV's soldiers had seized the Protestant city of Strasbourg in 1681, forcibly restoring Catholicism there; and in 1685 his revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1598) put all French Protestants outside the law. When, therefore, confronting the “papist” church bells of Rumegies, the wild anger of the Dutch soldiers was a likely reaction to the suppression of the Protestant church in France. No doubt French Huguenots marched in their ranks.

Let's go back to the late sixteenth century, to consider the face of famine.

Over an anxious stretch of nine months, ending in late August 1573, the hilltop town of Sancerre, near Bourges in central France, lay under the siege of a royal army. A religious civil war raged between Catholics and Protestants (“Huguenots”), and fortified Sancerre, teeming with Huguenot refugees, had been reduced to the most desperate measures because its food supplies were all but gone.

Jean de Léry, a Huguenot pastor, produced an account of the experience almost at once. He was in the town throughout the length of the siege. Chapter 10 of his story, dealing with the impact of famine on the little town, ranks as one of the most harrowing stretches of narrative in the chronicles of Europe. Here, for the moment, suffice it to say that he tells his readers how the
Sancerrois
, in their feverish search for food, cooked animal skins and leather, including harnesses, parchment, letters, books, and the membranes of drums.
Some of the people who perished in Sancerre also ate pulverized bones and the hooves of horses.

The skins, he tells us, including drumheads, were soaked for a day or two, and the water was often changed. They were then well scraped with a knife and boiled for the better part of a day, until they became tender and soft. This was determined “by scratching at the skins with your fingers and seeing if they were glutinous.” Now, like tripe, they could be cut up into little pieces and mixed with herbs and spices.

In proceedings of this sort, the impact of war speaks for itself.

In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, “pioneers” accompanied armies as diggers, excavators, and miners. From the moment an army laid siege to a city, working in the most dangerous circumstances, hundreds or even thousands of pioneers would be called in to excavate trenches around the besieged city and, if the need arose, to dig mines under the great curtain of walls. At select points in the mines, they would deposit barrels of gunpowder and then explode the lot so as to shatter the walls above, opening the way for the besieging army to burst into the beleaguered city.

Astonishingly, we know almost nothing about pioneers, mainly because their lowliness and the presumed inferiority of their labors condemned them to a near silence in the historical record. Even foot soldiers looked down upon them as noncombatants who drew a more pitiable wage than the common soldier himself. Combing through the indexes of books by military historians and the social historians of war, we look in vain for entries on “pioneers.”

In June 1573, when the royal siege of the great Protestant seaport of La Rochelle was lifted, following a five-month blockade, more than 50 percent of an army of eighteen thousand men lay dead, dying, or had fled in desertion. But of the two thousand lowly trench
and mine diggers at the start of the siege, only two hundred were still alive.