Furies

by Lauro Martines

  In August 1554, it was decreed that all people not from Siena had to get out, or face brutal punishment: the women with whips and scourging, the men by being dropped from pulleys (strappados), arms tied behind their backs, and then stopped with a jerk, which often resulted in dislocated shoulders. The city was sliding toward a harrowing food crisis. Some of the well-off, taking along their valuables, were buying their way out of the city, in some cases even securing safe-conducts from Duke Cosimo. By now, too, sneaking food into Siena could earn fortunes. But anyone caught at this was liable to an on-the-spot penalty of death. The Marquis of Marignano had nearby trees “festooned with the [hanged] bodies” of men caught breaking the blockade.

  Not knowing how long they might have to hold out against the siege, Strozzi and Monluc were thinking of food for their soldiers. They insisted that all the useless mouths be expelled from the city. For the civilian Council of Eight, however, this meant only the poor, all the more so in view of the fact that the armed escorts assigned to accompany the unwanted out of Siena were unable to prevent besieging soldiers from killing, maiming, torturing, and shaming the castout victims. And the terrible fear of the civilian bosses in Siena was that Strozzi and Monluc meant their purging of useless mouths to include “honorable” mouths: namely, the wives and children of men from the political and propertied class.

  Having met on this question, a special council of 150 of “the most honorable” Sienese citizens came back with a resounding reply. Strozzi’s blanket command, they declared, could not be accepted, “first from love of country, and next for the honor of their women and families … and if it be said that this is the way to ensure the security of our native land, and thus to be put above and before all other things, let the reply be that our fatherland is not the walls [of the city] but rather our families and their honor.” For the rest, they were all in favor of expelling “the dirt poor” (la poveraglia), who had neither honor nor a fatherland to safeguard and defend.

  The dispute went on as food supplies continued to dwindle. Muted voices soon began to talk about cutting a deal with the besiegers. But Strozzi and Monluc, professional soldiers and officers of the king of France, were in Tuscany to defend a city against the king’s enemies; and they were in no mood to compromise. Monluc was still rather ill. Worse still, in a battle at the beginning of August, Strozzi had lost four thousand men and as many more had been seriously wounded, including the general himself. Soldiers began to desert the French ranks, some, it seems, passing over to the Imperial side for food and money. The first commitment of the French commanders had to be to their men, and food stocks had to be at the top of their considerations. Which is why they kept returning to the rebarbative problem of ridding the city of its useless mouths.

  In the third week of September 1554, in spite of painful scenes, about twelve hundred poor folk were got out of the city. But the horror of a new round of expulsions soon halted the purge. Religious orders and large charitable foundations, in Italy as elsewhere in Europe, often kept their own grain supplies. Not surprisingly, then, thinking about the city’s famous Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala and its rich stores of grain, Strozzi had been calling for the ejection of the hospital’s orphans and poor people. On the night of October 5, about seven hundred of its inmates were led out of the city by escorts who were intended to guarantee their safety. Near the town of San Casciano, however, a company of Spanish and German mercenaries pounced on one of the convoys and its charge of more than 250 children, ranging in ages from six to ten. More than one hundred men, women, and children were killed. The Marquis of Marignano later claimed that he had sent them back to Siena.

  Scipione Venturi, the head of the hospital, now seems to have faced up to Strozzi, vowing that he would allow no other inmates to leave his premises until he could be absolutely certain of their safety. In the ensuing clash with the urban patriciate, Strozzi and Monluc, demanding more authority over the city, finally laid hands on part of Venturi’s stock of grain. They even tried to expel the hospital’s last forty-five boys and girls, aged ten to fifteen. But the screaming children were driven back into the city. In November, the daily bread ration in Siena fell to 250 grams for civilians and 400 for soldiers. Every house battered by cannon fire was stripped and turned into firewood for heating and cooking.

  Although Monluc’s forces in Siena were now down to twentyeight hundred foot and three hundred horse, the city was well fortified and resisted another bombardment in December. On Christmas night, Monluc’s men threw back the assault and scaling ladders of two thousand Germans. But the end must already have been in sight, for early in the second week of January, Monluc, getting up from his bed of pain, concealing the pallor in his cheeks with a smear of red wine, and flaunting fancy dress, addressed the city’s civilian authorities, urging them to ignore Duke Cosimo’s ultimatum and blandishments. Later on in January, a covert night operation underlined the food crisis in the city. In a move to reduce the number of “mouths,” eight hundred German soldiers slipped out of the city to join Strozzi in the fortress of Montalcino—a costly operation, for many of them were ambushed and killed on the way. And no wonder. Imperial and Medicean forces in the region greatly outnumbered the French, who were dispersed and numbered no more than five thousand foot, plus a few hundred horse. War, meanwhile, had reduced Siena’s rural hinterland to a waste where hungry, scavenging dogs gnawed at human corpses.

  Serious surrender talks with Cosimo—dealings at this point were with him, not with Charles V’s emissaries—began shortly after March 10. Yet there was no letup in the efforts to expel useless mouths from Siena, and those driven out were driven back to the walls in ugly, loathsome scenes. Ambassadors, meanwhile, stepped up the wheeling and dealing; vows were made; and on the night of April 5–6, in a secret agreement with the Marquis of Marignano, Monluc slipped out of the city with a large band of Florentine republican exiles and Imperial rebels—men who had been marked for execution, though not Monluc himself. Cosimo signed the surrender document on April 17, and four days later the remaining French troops marched out of Siena. Out, too, went 242 noblemen and their families, plus another group of 435 armed citizens, together with their families and servants. Making their way to the little Tuscan town and fortress of Montalcino, home of the Sienese Republic in exile, they were escorted by a squadron of horse and a company of Imperial infantry. From a population of about twenty thousand, not counting the outsiders or forenses who had flooded into the city, only six thousand people now remained in Siena. Some had perished in the fighting, but most of the rest had either fled or died of starvation.

  Marignano entered the supine city to the sound of trumpets, drums rolling, and flags waving.

  MONLUC’S MEMOIRS PROVIDE AN INSIDER’S view of happenings in Siena during the siege. He dictated his Commentaires, as he chose to call them, more than fifteen years after the events, and though he was something of a poseur and braggart, he offers fresh details.

  On his arrival in Siena, or soon after, he had a garrison of eight to ten thousand soldiers but ended with fewer than eighteen hundred men, most of the rest having been killed, like the German mercenaries, after their departure, and some (deserters) having taken to their heels. In the final weeks of the siege, Monluc’s daily food ration was a small loaf of bread (nine ounces), some boiled peas, a little bacon, and mallow (a leafy herb with hairy stems). So we can imagine what the food rations of most civilians must have been. Monluc saw people drop dead in the streets, felled by starvation.

  On the matter of expelling useless mouths from the city, he was as hard as Strozzi. Given dictatorial powers for a month, sometime after the first week of January 1555, Monluc went to work with a commission of six men and drew up a list of the “useless,” numbering forty-four hundred or more people. The vile job of expulsion was given to a Knight of Malta and a platoon of twenty-five to thirty soldiers. By rounding up the unwanted in groups, they got that weeping, wailing throng out of the city. Nearly all of them were poor folk “
who lived by the sweat of their brows.” Monluc admits that he was never again to witness so much misery. For time and again the besieging soldiers appear to have kicked, clubbed, and punched the unwanted “mouths” back to the walls in a pitiless and bloody seesaw that went on for eight days, their victims fighting to stay alive by eating herbs and grass. In the end, about three fourths of them starved or were killed, some dying without ears and noses. Of those who actually survived and got away, Monluc reveals, the large majority were the women who had been grabbed and taken by soldiers at night “for their own pleasure” and then secretly allowed to escape. “These are the consequences of war. To thwart the designs of the enemy, we are sometimes forced to be cruel. And so God has to show mercy to men of my sort [soldiers], who are guilty of many sins and cause so many miseries and ills.”

  He claims—and the claim has the support of the European experience of war—that Marignano’s troops also ran short of food. He means, I suspect, that they suffered moments of privation. Bread for them had to be delivered from afar. Mule trains with provisions from Florence and other points took five to six days to reach the front lines, and bad weather or mistakes easily delayed deliveries. For twenty miles in all directions around Siena, the countryside had been ravaged and mills destroyed. There was no fodder for horses. Cavalry units were paralyzed. The few horses for the use of leading officers had to be fed with forage hauled in from many miles away. That the Marquis of Marignano had lost more than a third of his men by the end of the siege, as Monluc alleges, is entirely credible—lost to desertion, disease, and death in battle. The claim is fully in line with wartime casualties in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Siena’s citizens and his own men, Monluc asserts, had long since started to eat the city’s pets and stray animals. Even rats were prized, and dear when put up for sale.

  He concluded: “Nothing in nature is so dreadful as famine.”

  The impact of costs and horrors was finally too much for the debt-ridden Duke of Florence; and from sometime in January 1555 he became almost as eager for peace as the Sienese themselves. Still, not until the end of March was he able to push negotiations hard enough to bring combat to a halt. The agreement—it turned out—displeased Charles V, who felt that the losers had been indulged. But Cosimo met the charge by correctly declaring, among other things, that hunger and the sword had killed ten thousand people in Siena.

  With the support of Piero Strozzi and the French, a Sienese Republic was now set up at Montalcino, where it claimed an existence until the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. Siena and its territories were formally handed over to Duke Cosimo in 1557.

  SANCERRE (1572–1573)

  Eighteen years after the battle for Siena, in a blistering moment of France’s Wars of Religion, the hilltop town of Sancerre would suffer an even more agonizing siege. It was a Huguenot stronghold, walled in and built around a fortress. Overlooking the Loire, the town was located about a hundred miles west of Dijon. The siege came at the end of a chain of murders involving the slaughter of more than three thousand Huguenots in different parts of France. But the killing orgy had started in Paris on August 23–24, 1572, the Eve of St. Bartholomew’s Day, with the massacre of about two thousand people.

  That autumn Sancerre took in five hundred Huguenot refugees—men, women, and children. The town’s remaining Catholics fell to a small minority. In late October, a prominent nobleman from the region, Monsieur de Fontaines, turned up suddenly, hoping to enter and seize control. Refusing to promise the Huguenots the right of worship, with the claim that he had no such charge from the king, he was refused entry to the town, whereupon he replied that he knew what he would have to do. It was war. Less than two weeks later, a tempestuous attack on the citadel was repelled.

  Now, fearing a siege, the Sancerrois began to examine their stocks of food and other resources. I draw the following narrative from one of the most remarkable eyewitness chronicles in the history of Europe: Jean de Léry’s Histoire memorable de la Ville de Sancerre, published in the Protestant seaport of La Rochelle less than two years after the siege.

  Born in Burgundy, at La Margelle, Jean de Léry (1534–1613) became a Protestant at the age of eighteen and spent the better part of two years (1556–1558) as a missionary in Brazil, about which he published a famous account, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil, autrement dite l’Amerique. Later, after a second stint of study in Geneva, he returned to France to preach the word of God as a Calvinist minister. Fearing for his life in the wake of the August massacres of 1572, he fled to Sancerre in September. And here Léry would become one of the foremost leaders in the Huguenot campaign of resistance.

  Since the kings of France were prime movers of the Italian Wars (1494–1559), Italy became a school of warfare for thousands of French noblemen, with the result that France’s religious wars would be captained by seasoned officers on both sides of the confessional divide. Sancerre had more than enough of these in November 1572, in addition to 300 professional soldiers and another 350 men who were being trained in the use of arms. There were also 150 smalltime wine producers who would serve as guardsmen along the town’s defensive walls and gates. At the peak of the fighting, the night watch would even include a number of bold-spirited women armed with halberds, half pikes, and iron bars. They concealed their sex by wearing hats or helmets to hide their long hair.

  From November onward, the countryside around Sancerre rang out with frequent and bloody skirmishes, provoked mostly by the Huguenot defenders, who made daring sorties into the surrounding country to fight the enemy, seize supplies, or gather provisions for the coming siege. By December they were stealing grain and livestock in night raids. On the night of January 1–2, for example, they broke into a neighboring village and returned to Sancerre with “the priest of the place as their prisoner and four carts loaded with wheat and wine, plus eight bullocks and cows for feeding the town.” Raids of this sort went on right through the winter, but became bloodier, less frequent, and more dangerous as the gathering royal army swelled and tightened its ring around Sancerre. Meanwhile, the town itself would know internal wrangling as the mass of refugees provoked disagreements, or blaspheming soldiers offended Huguenot ears, and the pride of competing officers clashed.

  By the end of January, the enemy forces massed around the base of the Sancerre “mountain” numbered about sixty-five hundred foot soldiers and more than five hundred horsemen, not counting volunteer gentlemen and others from the surrounding area. By January 11, the people of Sancerre had resolved, in a general assembly, “that the poor, a number of women and children, and all those who could not serve, apart from eating, should be put outside the town.” But the men charged with this repugnant task failed to carry it out, “partly because of giving way to the outcry raised. And so they put no one outside the town gates.” This, Léry observes, was a grave error, because at the time the unwanted could easily have departed and gone wherever they chose, “which would have prevented the great famine … and which [later on] caused so much suffering.”

  The Sancerrois did not even bother to answer the regional governor’s call to surrender, made on January 13. Claude de La Châtre informed them that his troops were there to subjugate Sancerre, in accord with the king’s orders, so he and his men now began to dig in seriously, both by building a network of trenches and fortifying the houses in the village of Fontenay, at the foot of towering Sancerre. They hauled in artillery early in February and soon began a daily bombing of the Huguenot fortress. In four days, from February 21 to 24, the town took more than thirty-five hundred cannon shots. Léry speaks of “a tempest” of bombs, debris, and house and wall fragments “flying through the air thicker than flies.” Yet very few people were killed—it was God’s doing, he opines—and the attackers were dumbfounded.

  That winter, Léry points out, the weather was dreadfully cold, with a great deal of ice and snow, and for this the Huguenots praised God, because it was especially hard on the encamped enemy soldiers. La Ch
âtre, nonetheless, was already having Sancerre undermined, with an eye to planting explosives and blasting breaches in the town walls.

  Léry’s comments on the weather were revelatory. In the Europe of that day, there was an all but universal feeling in towns under attack that time destroyed besieging armies by working through hunger, painful discomfort, disease, and desertion. Living in squalid conditions, mercenaries were likely to succumb to malnutrition, wounds, and sickness; and desertion was a tempting solution, particularly when men stole off in pairs or in small groups. One thing was almost certain: Though a besieging army might begin with money in its pockets, as the weeks passed, that money ran out and desertion became more and more enticing. So, when not negotiating an immediate surrender, the best hope for a besieged town was to hold out for as long as possible until, in despair, the ragged remainders of the besieging army pulled away. To hold out, however, the besieged had to have ample stores of food.

  WARNED BY A PRISONER, the Sancerrois were ready to receive and repel a major assault on March 19, preceded by mine explosions and a furious bombardment. The assault was repelled, and Léry, in his description, touches fleetingly on a girl who had been working near him, carrying loads of earth for the defenders, when she was hit by a cannon shot and disemboweled before his eyes, “her intestines and liver bursting through her ribs.” Dead on the spot. His own survival, he felt, was God’s work. The defenders lost seventeen soldiers and the girl, but enemy casualties amounted to 260 dead and 200 wounded.