Furies

by Lauro Martines

  The Army of Flanders was at this point about one quarter Spanish. Most of the others were Germans and Walloons; the rest were Italian, English, French, and even Albanian mercenaries. When the unpaid Germans, summoned to Antwerp, reached the city in late October, they arrived shouting, “Money! Money!” Their commander, Count Otto Eberstein, dithered between Sánchez d’Avila on the one side and Champaigney on the other. At the last minute he chose the latter, whereupon early on the third of November, contrary to a previous agreement, Champaigney allowed the troops of the estates to enter Antwerp. Feeling betrayed, some of Eberstein’s officers and men marched into the citadel and joined the Spaniards.

  That day, a Saturday, in thick fog and in the face of light cannon shot from the citadel, about eleven thousand citizens worked on defensive trenches and ramparts, all dug or erected in a day, and stretching along the ends of the three streets that led to the esplanade in front of the fortress. Cannons, their muzzles pointed at the citadel, were also put into place. The temporary ramparts were raised to the height of pikes, fifteen to eighteen feet. Roda and Sánchez d’Avila, meanwhile, had been in touch with soldiers at Lier, Maastricht, and Breda; and some of those men were already in the citadel or on their way. A summons went out to the Aalst mutineers, Walloons mainly, and a forced march of six to seven hours had these men in Antwerp by nine o’clock on the morning of Sunday, November 4. A ghastly lack of foresight among Champaigney’s men allowed the soldiers of the Army of Flanders, using an upper gate, to steal into the citadel from the eastern side of the city.

  As we look back to those events, our democratic sympathies go out to the people of Antwerp. Their leaders had put the necks of all inhabitants into a noose by in effect inviting a sack, unless they could engage and defeat the tiny but thoroughly professional army up in the citadel. Champaigney’s forces numbered eight to ten thousand troops, including one thousand horse. Many were veterans, seasoned in the Army of Flanders. Furthermore, a local militia of fourteen thousand men stood by. Figures for Sánchez d’Avila’s troops in the citadel put their number at nearly five thousand men, about one fifth of them being cavalry. The fortress’s two hundred men had been joined by more than four thousand other mercenaries—a mix of Germans, Spaniards, Walloons, Italians, Englishmen, and others.

  Once they had their desired men, the commanders in the citadel struck almost at once. The Aalst mutineers were the most ardent about making the first attack, and they charged out of the fortress before noon, their “blasphemous” flag—says a nineteenth-century Protestant historian, M. P. Génard—showing the Virgin and Child on one side and Christ crucified on the other. On reaching the new trenches, where their captain was killed, they were momentarily forced to slow down. Yet an English witness, George Gascoigne, noted, “It was a thing miraculous to consider how trenches of such a height should be entered, passed over, and won, both by footmen and horsemen.” A unit of German soldiers from the citadel, in the next wave of assault, was already on the heels of the Aalst mutineers.

  On Champaigney’s side, a regiment of Germans now threw down their weapons, while others simply passed over and joined their former comrades. The militiamen were nowhere to be seen, although many must have been among the firing arquebusiers and musketeers at the windows of the Town Hall. Some of the Walloons and Eberstein’s Germans, the ones who had chosen to fight for the city, put up a fierce battle for fifteen or twenty minutes, before they were overwhelmed.

  Many of Champaigney’s mercenaries must have regarded the speed and spirit of the assault from the citadel as unstoppable. But they were also prey to disorder and lack of planning, caused partly by the fact that some of them had spent the night drinking and carousing. They even robbed and abused citizens, forcing Champaigney, sword in hand and in danger to himself, to step in among them. He wanted them in the trenches. Count Eberstein, moreover, a heavy drinker, was possibly drunk on that fatal morning.

  The pitched battles, including cavalry charges, took place around the great town hall, the Bourse, in the main marketplace, and on several streets. Heavy firing from the town hall windows provoked the Spanish commanders to order the building set on fire. It was seriously damaged, and the fire spread to the adjoining grand houses. In just over two hours, the defeat of Champaigney’s army was complete. He and others escaped by making for the Scheldt to board one of the Prince of Orange’s waiting boats. Eberstein, however, weighted down by armor, drowned in his efforts to get on board.

  From this point on, the sources—already thin in their descriptions of the fighting—offer conflicting accounts of the atrocities in the days following. Although Antwerp was a Catholic city, it was in revolt; hence priests and religious houses were not spared. Roda ordered an end to the sacking after a day or two, and then renewed the order more effectively on November 8—too late. The violence of the human storm peaked in the first three days. Some accounts see the conduct of English mercenaries, former soldiers in the Duke of Alba’s army, as the most savage. But it would be folly to try to apportion blame among the different groups of soldiers. Citizens were bludgeoned into revealing hidden valuables. Women and girls, some taken into the citadel, were sexually assaulted. Houses were ransomed, not just people. But we get no palpable sense of the scale of violence. And accounts vary sharply as to the numbers of people killed (from seventy-five hundred to eighteen thousand) and the houses or dwellings destroyed by fire (from six to fourteen hundred).

  Although we may take for granted that the value of the plunder was colossal, estimates of the “spoil” of Antwerp are best treated with some degree of skepticism. The most important commercial center in the Low Countries, with a large colony of foreign merchants and bankers, Antwerp was one of the four or five richest cities in Europe. Consequently, in their looting orgy, the Spanish and German captains seem to have picked and worked separate parts of the city. George Gascoigne, an eyewitness, testified that three days after the storming, Antwerp had “no money nor treasure to be found therein, but only in the hands of murderers and strumpets. For every Don Diego must walk jetting up and down the streets, with his harlot by him, in her chain and bracelets of gold.” One account held that the soldiers got their hands on two million florins in gold and silver coin, in addition to more than again as much in gold and silver objects, plus furnishings. The lot added up, conceivably, to more than two years of Spain’s royal revenue from the wealth of the Indies, as recorded in the late 1570s. An official report of the Magistrat, now lost, relied on notes that put the comprehensive value of the Antwerp plunder at five million florins. No house, it appears, was spared in the sack. The spoils from Champaigney’s house alone were reportedly worth—in a different coin—about 60,000 crowns.

  For many of the looters the take was fairy gold, a delusion, inasmuch as gambling and carelessness among mercenaries were rife, especially in the face of a cascade of coin. In the first few days of the sack, enormous quantities of money and valuables passed very probably through many hands.

  We touch here on a Europe-wide pattern. Wherever towns and cities were sacked, goods of all sorts quickly went up for sale cheaply, because plundering soldiers wanted cash first and foremost, or jewelry and precious objects that could easily be sold or traded. Hence merchants and pawnbrokers from the larger region, amongst them local tradesmen, would close in at once on such treasure. They knew that most of that spoil, even when snatched from their own homes, would flood markets nearby or in more distant towns. And although foreigners in Antwerp were also despoiled, Spanish and Portuguese merchants amongst them, they too were in on the take, along with Florentines, Genoese, and others. Precious tapestries seem to have passed out of Antwerp through the hands of a Spanish merchant. In short, once the shock of the first days of violence began to pass—on November 7 baptisms were already being recorded all over the city—lots of men were prepared to recoup their losses by trading in loot. They found themselves in a moral climate that had been suddenly and dramatically altered.

  If rich traders and moneyl
enders 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.

  MAGDEBURG (1631)

  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 st
uff 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.