Furies

by Lauro Martines

  Meanwhile, the entire city was a tumult of cries and screams and the swooping attacks of poorly paid foreign soldiers, speaking a mélange of tongues, their ranks already thinned out by casualties. Confronting a rich and rebellious city with a license to kill, they threw themselves on the civilian population.

  The sack lasted three days, from Thursday to Sunday. Eyewitness accounts report horrific scenes of torture, rape, butchery, and violent theft. A citizen from Bologna, Cesare Anselmi, who was with de Foix’s troops in Brescia, put together one of the fullest accounts, although here and there, in his reporting, he gave way to exaggeration and fiction.

  My soul all but leaves me when I think about it. There was no security in convents or other holy places … One saw armed men dividing the money and jewellery among themselves, while still wearing their helmets … In those three days they inflicted every kind of torment on the wretched inhabitants, men and women, to force them to reveal the hiding places of their money and valuables. Every dishonourable violence was used on women, and throughout the city, day and night, one heard nothing but the most wretched cries of the miserable … or of women resisting those who were trying to rape them, and many were seen to throw themselves from windows, seeking to die that way, rather than to satisfy with their bodies the wild lust of those who had killed their fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers, and who were still pillaging and burning and ruining their houses. Many women killed themselves with knives. Others, pretending contented acceptance, killed their ravishers, in many cases in bed, caring nothing about then being cruelly killed by others …

  Some, finding a dead loved one, would be there for hours, crying or tearing at themselves or praying over the corpse. And it was horrid to see many of those vile soldiers who, on catching sight of a good-looking woman weeping desperately over the body of a loved one, would go up to her, hike up her skirts, and try to dishonour her right then and there over the corpse.

  Observing again that many women were killed, disfigured, or had their garments ripped away, Anselmi concluded: “I swear to you [he was writing to a friend] that finding myself in that city, although loved by the French, being from Bologna, and having come along with them to see, to inform myself, and to write about the operation … I passed into such an anguish of the soul that not only did I deeply regret having come, I regretted ever having been born.” For a time, he claims, he wanted to die, because in any house he entered, “day and night, I would see nothing but desperate gentlemen and citizens, stripped of their clothing, tied, beaten on their genitals, placed with their feet over fire, with bits of wood driven between their teeth, or having their mouths poked into with a stick or a knife above the tongue and under the palate, until, unable to talk and using signs, they would show themselves ready to disclose the places of their hidden valuables.”

  When taking Brescia in battle on February 2, Avogadro’s men had peeled clothing and belongings away from dead and wounded French soldiers, and this had not endeared the people of Brescia to de Foix’s men.

  Everywhere in Europe, when a city was faced with the danger of a sack, the custom was for inhabitants to hide their prized possessions in churches and convents, in the desperate hope of finding security there. But soldiers were familiar with this dodge. An account written by the nobleman Innocenzo Casari, prior of the Convent of St. John the Baptist, tells us that the French killed more than one hundred people, both priests and laymen, in the cathedral, including three penitents and a priest directly in front of the main altar. Soldiers also charged into some of the parish churches, where they bloodied the floors with beatings and torture, determined to lay hands on the hidden jewelry, money, and small valuables of parishioners. The rector of the church of St. Agatha was brutally kicked about until he came out with the desired secret, and then “everything was stolen.” Casari himself, accosted by a French officer who seemed to choke with anger as he snarled out his demands, had to borrow one hundred pieces of gold to buy him off. But the sum provided no guarantee of protection, as he had hoped, for after the officer departed, a group of German soldiers broke into the convent and began to smash cabinets and chests, grabbing everything of value that they could carry away. They even tried to ransom some of the monks. In the end, they settled comfortably into the convent for seven days, “living it up,” bringing in prostitutes and other women, including “honorable girls,” and “violently forcing them to satisfy their disgraceful appetites.”

  Casari goes on: “The [charitable] Bank of the Monte di Pietà was robbed of more than 100,000 gold pieces.” The inmates of every monastery were beaten into paying a ransom for the house, with death otherwise as the penalty for some of the monks.

  A number of priests were burned alive. The nobleman Cristoforo Guaineri had his arms cut off and died on burning coal. A rich merchant named Antonio [del Sacro Fonte] was flayed alive. Two of my brothers, Ottobono and Girolamo, and Ottobono’s son Angelo, were strung up by their hands and feet and only escaped death by paying out 90 gold pieces … Rich in people, with wealth and amenities of all sorts, and second in this respect to no other city in Italy, at a stroke this flourishing city was reduced to something vile and squalid and abject and deserving of pity. The patricians and grand folk who used to be seen in the streets and squares, decked out in fine dress and with a train of servants and dependents, but now despoiled of everything, were ashamed to appear in public and would hide at home, locked away in their empty and ruined palazzi … The streets, once busy and full of people, the expressive image of the city’s prosperity, are now barren and empty of living souls.

  For some days, in the wake of the sack, “the city and its suburbs were cemeteries. Unburied and stinking corpses lay everywhere.” This claim by Casari was echoed by a Venetian soldier: “You couldn’t walk through the streets save by stepping on corpses.” A third witness provided the segue: “The dead were taken out of Brescia like dung on carts.”

  The numbers of dead in wartime and in catastrophes, even in our day, are often the stuff of speculation. Estimates put the dead—how to count the maimed and the mutilated?—at from six to sixteen thousand, although the second estimate, offered by the famous Venetian diarist Sanudo, purported to include the casualties on the French side. But if we must have a sum, a figure of eight thousand dead, nearly one quarter of the city’s population, stands out as the most reliable number.

  We come to the question of plunder, always a matter of considerable guesswork. When the French army raced to Brescia from Bologna, the officers had little reason to be thinking of plunder, and anyway there was no time to collect carts or wagons for the transport of loot. Soldiers would find these, along with pack animals, in and around Brescia. And they would reportedly leave the city with about four thousand vehicles, all loaded with booty. Most of the loot seems to have gone up for sale in towns along the way of their next march. Churches, convents, and houses, as we have seen, were despoiled of their hidden treasures. Ransoms brought in huge sums of cash. The officers, entitled to the lion’s share of the booty, had picked out all males over the age of eight, putting a price on the heads of those believed to be worth something. Victims were judged by their dress, but above all by where they lived.

  A week after the sack, French commanders capped their doings with a little more blood by executing another group of Brescian conspirators, and again their quartered remains were put on show at prominent points, until “the dogs ate most of them.”

  THERE IS A STRONG WHIFF of something literary in Cesare Anselmi’s claims concerning the heroism and willing martyrdom of Brescia’s women when threatened with sexual violence. It is not that suicide, or that the crafty killing of rapists, was impossible in the circumstances. Such action, however, was exceedingly rare. And no other source that I know of, when reporting similar events elsewhere in Italy or in other parts of Europe, provides instances of heroic suicidal resistance. Hence many of Anselmi’s claims must be taken with a grain of salt.

  But a tale of pathos may rightly close our e
vents of 1512.

  One of the most brilliant mathematicians of the sixteenth century, Niccolò Tartaglia, ironically also an expert in the field of military engineering, was twelve years old and in Brescia on the day of the exploding sack. Seeking cover and protection, he and his mother and sister, like many other Brescians, rushed to the cathedral. “Our house had been pillaged, though there was little to take.” He was tiny for a twelve-year-old, and there is no knowing what he did to provoke a cruel incident, which must have occurred just after the soldiers burst into the cathedral. Was it a simple act or word of resistance? His account is silent about this. He cuts straight to the violence:

  In my mother’s presence, I was dealt five very grave wounds, three on the head, in each of which you could see my brain, and two on the face, such that if my beard failed to hide them now, I would seem a monster. One [blow] passed through my mouth and teeth, splitting the jaw-bone and upper palate in two, and the same in the lower jaw. Because of this wound, not only could I not talk, except deep down in my throat like a magpie, I also could not eat, inasmuch as I could not in the least move my mouth or my jaws, everything there being shattered. I had to be fed with liquid foods only and with great labour. But more serious still was the fact that not having the money to buy the needed unguents, not to mention calling in a doctor, my mother had to tend and treat me with her own hands, and not with ointments but just by keeping my wounds constantly clean. She copied the example of dogs, which, when they are wounded, heal themselves by licking the wound clean with their tongues. With this care and prudence, my wounds healed after a few months.

  For some time after, when trying to speak, he used to stammer. Neighboring children gave him the nickname Tartaglia (“Stammerer”). Later, he would take this epithet as his surname, springing, as he did, from such humble circumstances that his father, Micheletto (“Little Michael”), had been without a family name.

  There was something fabulous about Niccolò Tartaglia’s brilliance. In all his life, he had only fourteen days of schooling with a tutor who taught him how to read. Yet he was the first Italian to translate Euclid’s Elements into the vernacular.

  ANTWERP (1576)

  In the 1560s and 1570s, northern Europe experienced a new wave of religious fervor. Calvinists—revolutionary Protestants—had entered their most combative period. Having edged France into religious civil war, they were stealing over borders into Germany and the Low Countries, aiming to root out “popery” and the “whore of Babylon,” the old Church. The king of Spain, Philip II, having inherited the Netherlands from his father, the Habsburg Emperor Charles V, had sworn that he would rather lose his kingdom many times over than be the ruler of “heretics.” His vow would turn into suffering for millions of people.

  Some of the glories of early modern Spain—conquistadores, political muscle, ambition, a global empire—were to find their first cemetery in the Low Countries. That graveyard was the Eighty Years War (1567–1648), fought on the one side to keep rebellious peoples under the rule of Spanish kings, and on the other to be free from foreign domination. At the critical moments, the royal share of all the gold and silver from the Indies would not suffice to pay for the armies raised against the “disobedience” of the Walloons, Flemings, and Dutch. Indeed, when converted into wages for soldiers, that fabled treasure hoard faded into paltry sums.

  The drawn-out tragedy of the Eighty Years War, though often interpreted in a political key by historians, was also in part propelled by a powerful social fuel: religion. In the early years of the war, it was a case of evangelical Calvinists in an all-out battle against Catholics who came—both leaders and rank and file—from a religious frontier: the Iberian peninsula. Here Spaniards had banished Jews and defeated Muslims, peoples who reject the use of images in religious worship. Now, suddenly, in the Netherlands the Spanish had to confront an image-smashing fury that broke out on the tenth of August, 1566, and seemed to spread like wildfire.

  Calvinist sermons in the countryside around cities, often attended by men with pikes and swords, preceded the iconoclastic assaults. But the fury began in little towns in western Flanders, swept east and then north to Antwerp, and passed on to neighboring cities, reaching Amsterdam, the Hague, and other urban centers by late August. Hundreds of churches and chapels were attacked, scarred, and ransacked by spearheading gangs of thirty to forty iconoclasts—a minority everywhere. But they were organized and skillfully led. In many cases, the workingmen amongst them were paid to use clubs, axes, knives, and hammers to destroy or deface statuary, altars, painted images, baptismal fonts, books of all sorts, vestments, and other objects. Laws, dating back to 1523, had identified the nascent heresies as capital crimes, but no one now dared to invoke them against the iconoclastic furies. Local authorities blanched, retreated, or were paralyzed by division. During the previous forty years, about thirteen hundred “heretics” had been executed, but most of them, Anabaptists, had been looked upon as “low-born” troublemakers. Calvinists, instead, were a different sort. Too many of them came from the respectable classes. Yet in law, the war on images constituted flagrant civil disorder and rebellion, a fusion of politics and religion. These would be indivisible for the next three generations.

  The image breakers took inspiration from events in neighboring France, where a civil war between Huguenots and Catholics had erupted in 1562 and where, in the space of a year or so, the evangelical reformers seized temporary political control of more than twenty cities. In fact, in the 1560s the Huguenots looked at times as though they might sweep across all of France in a wholesale victory for the cause of Calvinism. They were ready to let armies clinch their cause.

  WHEN THE NEW SPANISH GOVERNOR of the Netherlands, the Duke of Alba, reached Brussels in August 1567, his plan was to impose political and religious obedience. His enforcers? The ten thousand Spanish and Italian soldiers who had arrived with him; and he now began to hire thousands more by recruiting mercenaries from Germany and the Netherlands. Over the next fifteen months, Alba’s troops defeated four different armies and the inchoate breakaway state of Prince William “the Silent” of Orange, a moderate Protestant who then crossed over to an intransigent position. The Council of Troubles, appointed by Alba, would order more than one thousand executions as punishment for rebellion and treason. Most disturbing in that deferential world was the capital punishment of sixteen noblemen and the beheading of two Catholic counts, Egmont and Hornes. Their severed heads were affixed to the gallows on pikes. The revolt had transcended religious convictions and was now dominated by a political stance.

  A “grandee,” says the historian Israel, “well versed in Latin, French, and Italian, who also spoke some German,” Alba was removed from his post in 1573, a victim of court intrigue in Madrid. He legacy in the Low Countries was a swirl of anger over taxes, executions, brutal soldiers, and the merciless slaughter of civilians in the rebellious towns of Naarden, Zutphen, and Mechelen.

  Brussels was the capital of the Spanish Netherlands. But Antwerp, a flourishing port with a population of about ninety thousand inhabitants, was the largest city in the Low Countries and the hub of commerce. It handled about 75 percent of all trade there.

  The bloody events that would unfold in Antwerp were set off by the death of the governor general, Don Luis de Requeséns, in March 1576. King Philip II had declared bankruptcy the year before, with the result that most of the unpaid Army of Flanders disintegrated. Units verged on mutiny, ready to launch attacks on citizens; anxieties flared; and the Council of State in Brussels assumed full powers, purporting to speak for the king, until the arrival from Madrid of the next governor general.

  With only a single Spaniard, Gerónimo de Roda, serving on the Council of State, the Council and the army clashed. Late in July 1576, a contingent of Spanish soldiers—their wages unpaid for years—mutinied, passed into Brabant, and sacked Aalst, a little town not far from Brussels. Branding them outlaws and rebels against the king, the Council decreed that they could be killed on sight, whi
le also encouraging the local (Brabant) estates to raise soldiers to protect the province from the angry rebels. But Spanish officers in other garrisons, acutely short of men and fearing armed attacks from the estates, refused to turn their backs on the mutineers. The split between Council and army became a chasm.

  As the weeks passed, the actions of the Council began to strike the zealous supporters of the Prince of Orange as too moderate, too tame, with the result that on September 4, soldiers of the local estates suddenly struck. They arrested the members of the Council and raised a call for a meeting of all the states of the Low Countries. The more ambitious aim now, passing beyond religious differences, was to rid the Netherlands of Spain’s armed forces. Regiments of Walloons (French-speaking Belgians) deserted the army, passing over to the states, and efforts were also made to woo German mercenaries away from the royal ranks by offering them down payments on their wages.

  The lone Spanish Councillor, Gerónimo de Roda, escaped the arresting soldiers of September 4, alerted by the fact that his house had been plundered and a servant killed. Fleeing to Antwerp, he took refuge in the citadel, the city’s new fortress, which was occupied by two hundred Spanish soldiers. Hatred and resentment colored relations between the commander of the citadel, Sánchez d’Avila, and the governor of Antwerp, the Lord of Champaigney (Frederic Perrenot), himself a Catholic and a soldier. The Spanish financial crisis had brought about a near collapse of the Army of Flanders, reducing it, in the course of three years, from 54,500 troops to a mere 8,000. And now, in late September, all these men were being treated as “traitors” to the king of Spain by a fractious Council of State. In October, the boats of the Prince of Orange’s Protestant forces sailed into the Scheldt River, facing Antwerp, stood by for many days, and lobbed some cannon shot at the citadel.