In effect, then, the military wages and stipends that should have been paid out of Swedish taxes or foreign subsidies, in order to avoid robbery in the field, were extracted instead in the field from the peoples of occupied lands. War was turned into a self-funding activity.
MAXIMILIAN I OF BAVARIA HAD an outstanding art collection, rich particularly in German work, with pictures by Dürer, Holbein, and the Cranachs. When Gustavus Adolphus took Munich in May 1632, he cleaned out Maximilian’s palace, as well as the houses of the local nobility, and had much of the booty wheeled away. An assortment of items was put up for sale, and Golo Mann reports that “art dealers from Ulm, Nürnberg, and Frankfurt hurried to the capital to obtain the stolen goods at auctions.” After Gustavus’s death at Lützen, in November of the same year, what remained of the collection was dispersed, to be divided up apparently among some of his leading officers. Later, when Duke Maximilian tried desperately to have his treasures returned, his efforts came to nothing. And we must wonder if he was ever nagged by the fact that he himself did not have clean hands, as we are about to see.
Special collections at Stuttgart and Tübingen were looted by Imperial and Bavarian troops in 1634 and 1635. But the cardinal act of Catholic thievery involved the celebrated Palatine Library in the Castle of Heidelberg, the property of the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, the so-called “Winter King” of Bohemia. When Heidelberg was stormed in 1622, the library was claimed by the plundering Duke of Bavaria, Maximilian, and donated to Pope Gregory XV. The consequent convoy of mules, bearing 196 cases of books and accompanied by the papal librarian himself, left Heidelberg in February 1623, went up the Rhine, passed through Munich, and worked its way over the Alpine passes to Rome, to be received by the next pope, Urban VIII. All was fair in war at least, if not in love.
Many thousands of pictures and other art objects were stolen from private houses and churches in the war-torn parts of Germany, to be borne away and sold or cherished, when they were not lost or ruined. Art and books, however, were “elitist stuff.” Most officers and men, in a plundering frenzy, had eyes first of all for cash and the quick-sale objects in precious metal or studded with gems. For these, two cities in the path of war—centers of production and sale—topped the list: Nuremberg and Augsburg. The Swedish army occupied the first in 1632 and the second in 1634. Both then passed to the control of Imperial armies.
Nuremberg and Augsburg were at the heart of the goldsmith’s trade, especially the latter, which had 185 goldsmiths in 1615 and, by comparison, only 137 bakers. The variety of plate, gold, and silver objects that could be pillaged was remarkable; and all were frequently in use by town councils, by the families of patricians, and in churches. Suffice it to list platters, flagons, drinking cups, ceremonial vessels, pitchers, boxes, bowls, ewers, basins, beakers, chalices, candelabra, table fountains, and still more. Later, after the Thirty Years War ended and goldsmiths streamed back to Augsburg, orders for their work came down from Sweden—commissioning objects that would go into the new palaces of the Swedish officers who had found fortune and spoils in Germany.
IF WE SEEK AN EXAMPLE of plunder on a gigantic scale, the Sack of Rome (1527) must be the first on our list. For in a few days, a city replete with the magnificent wealth of many clerics and laymen was stripped of its caches of gold and silver coins, jewelery, plate, hangings, precious objects, church valuables, and resplendent dress.
Shortly after dawn, on May 6, 1527, the Emperor Charles V’s army in Italy, numbering upward of twenty thousand men and under the command of the Duke of Bourbon, breached the walls of the Trastevere part of Rome. Unpaid, ragged, hungry, living off the land, and desperate, here was a swarm that had started out from near Milan three months before, at the outset of February. They were ten thousand Germans, five thousand Spaniards, about three thousand Italians, plus lesser units of others, all of them hardened professionals. Some of the Landsknechts had strong Lutheran sympathies. And as those angry mercenaries made their way south, several mutinies had ended with the shouts, “Pay! Pay!” En route, bread was chronically scant; and when on occasion they could have had more, they found themselves short of the horses and wagons to get it to them. Logistics again. Wine they had, coming on it as they trekked through Emilia, the Romagna, and Tuscany, but it only served to make them more demanding. When their officers learned that Pope Clement was negotiating with Imperial officials, hoping to secure a peace or a long truce, they passed this information on to their men, and a mutiny erupted.
What, turn back—they evidently thought—and be denied the opportunity to sack either Florence or Rome? Florence too had been dangled as a target, and the fury of the soldiers mounted. Many of them were without shoes, their feet bundled in rags. The mutiny became so serious that Bourbon himself had to hide. His tent was plundered and one of his gentlemen killed, the work of Spanish soldiers. But the Germans too were up in arms. They threatened their captains with a show of pikes; and when their charismatic commander, the old George Frundsberg, famous for the discipline and bravery of his troops, addressed them in powerful and moving terms, they spurned his plea. He crashed down on a drum, the victim of a stroke. Taken to be treated in Ferrara, he would never soldier again.
Bourbon next realized that an attack on pro-papal Florence would be out of the question. His army was in no shape for a sustained siege. The terrified Florentines had been graced with just enough time to prepare their defenses and to bring a contingent of troops into the city. So the Imperial army now bypassed the road to Florence and made for Rome.
The assault on May 6 began at about four A.M., in thick fog. Before seven A.M., Rome’s walls were being scaled at two different points, straightaway exposing the city’s feeble defenses. The Duke of Bourbon himself moved in the front line of action, leading the attack. Attired in white, in keeping with the flashy officers’ fashion of the day and hence a perfect target for the defenders, he was holding a scaling ladder when killed by an arquebus shot, just as his men had broken through the walls. The command passed to the Prince of Orange and to Ferrante Gonzaga of Mantua. After an hour or two of fierce fighting in Trastevere, resistance collapsed. But Rome would not belong to the invaders until that evening. They were followed into the city by their camp followers, as well as by a tatty throng of ex-soldiers, deserters, thieves, vagrants, and other recent pickups: men who would seek the crumbs of booty. But soon, too, merchants and pawnbrokers would arrive on the scene, intent on buying up the best of the loot.
Although their killing of civilians commenced at once, the soldiers were so sure of themselves that they seem to have refrained from their hurricane of robbery until the army was in control. But once the storm broke, with officers leading the way, there was no checking them as they heaved themselves into the work of collecting their pay with a princely interest. The ransoming of prisoners passed into a frenzy. No ransom paid exempted the victim from the next wave of determined predators, and no rich man escaped their thuggery, not even neutral or friendly foreign ambassadors. If ransoming was usually governed by customary rules, all were broken. Soldiers strained for everything they could possibly extract, in the likely belief that here was the opportunity of a lifetime to become rich. They demanded ransoms from captive noblemen and wealthy clerics that far exceeded the yearly incomes of their victims: a standard scale in the business of war ransoming. Every house and almost every church and palace was ransacked, with the exception of the few palazzi that had been occupied by commanding officers for their own lodging; and even these had to be closely guarded to fend off plundering bands of soldiers.
Many of the noble and rich folk in the city had sought safety in the palaces of dignitaries, two of the most important being those of the Portuguese ambassador and the Marchioness of Mantua, Ferrante Gonzaga’s mother. But a ransom was put on these very palaces and on many others. Three or four palaces went, so to speak, for sums that varied from 35,000 to 45,000 gold ducats. Each of the refugees within had to pay his or her share of the total sum. Portugal’s
ambassador, however, also had a stash in his palace of 500,000 ducats in coin, goods, and valuables, deposited with him by rich merchants, bankers, and noblemen. The lot, all of it, was seized and hauled away. Other palaces lost goods valued at 150,000 and 200,000 ducats. And cardinals themselves went for the price of 10,000 to 20,000 ducats, or they were dragged around, humiliated, and killed.
The staggering magnitude of these sums may be gauged by the fact that in the early sixteenth century the richest Italian state, the Venetian Republic, counted on total yearly revenues of little more than one million ducats (1,150,000).
But aside from the looting of churches and convents, no act of plunder was more revelatory than the one suffered by refugees in the grand palace of the Santissimi Apostoli. The mother of one of the two Imperial commanders, Isabella d’Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, was lodged there. Yet even she was regarded as a prisoner. In a sack, the rules of war admitted no exceptions. She had taken twenty-two hundred well-connected people into the palace, including twelve hundred women, intending to offer them protection from the assaulting horde. Not a bit of it, at least not in the business of ransoming. Anxious negotiations and bargaining took place over the course of two days, with troops carefully guarding the palace. The final agreement required the prisoners to pay a total ransom of 52,000 ducats: 20,000 for the Spanish grandee officer, Don Alonso de Cordova; 20,000 for Alessandro Gonzaga; 2,000 for Landsknechts; and, it appears, 10,000 for none other than the marchioness’s son, General Ferrante Gonzaga. When the marchioness finally left the palace on May 18, it was almost immediately sacked.
One of the historians of the Sack claims that the Imperial commanders made nothing from the rape of Rome, because they were too busy lending money to ransomed friends and relatives. In her view, most of the loot went “to the common soldiers.” There can be no clinching evidence on this point. But judging by the military mores of the age, we may assume that the whole array of officers, if not the field commanders, got away with much of the loot. Quick money famously ran like water through the hands of Landsknechts and the men who fought in the Spanish tercios. Unpaid, they were all certainly in debt. In one hour, a year later, Sebastian Schertlin, a German officer and petty nobleman, gambled away 5,000 ducats. Nevertheless, in 1532 he bought the castle of Burtenbach in Germany, together with cattle and furnishings.
The end of the third day of plundering brought an order to halt the looting, but the command was ignored and the violence went on for another five days. In booty and ransom money, estimates of the spoils range from four to twelve million gold ducats—more than four times Venice’s annual public income. Modest parts of the loot would soon go up for sale in Rome’s Campo di Fiore: “gold-embroidered garments of silk and satin, woollen and linen cloths, rings, pearls, and other costly articles.”
I have not brought the Sack’s carnage into focus, because the subject here is plunder. Historians of the event hold that thousands of people were slain. Schertlin, the Landsknecht captain, said that six thousand people had been slaughtered. On the day of the assault, rushing through the streets just after their escalade, troops killed anyone they encountered. An Imperial commander, Prospero Colonna, arrived in Rome on May 10, to find his palace sacked and bodies strewn in the streets. As so often happened in the sack of cities, inhabitants now faced the ugly task of the collecting and disposing of bodies. Few men wanted the job, even if the smells and horrors called for the payment of a good wage.
ITALY SERVES AS OUR CENTER POINT for the large question of booty, and more exactly for booty of the sort that would have ransomed kings, as realized in the assaults on Brescia, Genoa, Rome, and lesser cities such as Prato and Como. For it was in the Italian Wars (1494–1559), with Italy’s rich northern cities constantly in view, that Europe’s armies learned not to loot—this was rife in medieval warfare—but rather to go into battle, when in view of large cities, with the hope or even the expectation that the treasure of kings lay in wait for them. The same hope was taken back to Germany by Landsknechts, and to France by officers of the royal army. Many of the French returnees, including common soldiers, would be drawn into France’s Wars of Religion (1562–1598), and the lesson of Italian loot would pass from there directly into the Thirty Years War, borne by the many Landsknechts who fought as well for Catholics as for Protestants in France.
Speaking of the assault on Brescia in 1512, an informed contemporary estimated the value of the French haul at three million écus. He alleged that most of the plundering soldiers went home with so much booty that they gave up soldiering. Even if the smack of exaggeration weakens this claim, we can easily imagine that some of the returning soldiers used their spoils to buy land, to invest in family châteaux, or to set up somewhere as tradesmen.
Genoa was the next big city, before Rome, to be pillaged. The assault on the great seaport followed directly from the victory of an Imperial army at the Battle of Bicocca, near Milan, over the main body of French forces in Italy. On April 27, 1522, employing arquebus and cannon, Imperial troops tore apart two packed squares of fifteen thousand Swiss pikemen, newly hired by the king of France. Next, after a short delay, the triumphant army went on to attack French-controlled Genoa and its garrison of sixty-two hundred defenders.
But something extraordinary was now about to happen. The Genoese ruling class was split into two noble factions. One revolved around the Fregoso clan, and they held power in the city with the support of the French. The other faction—its leaders in exile—was captained by another noble house, the Adorno, and they, along with many of their followers, were now serving in the ranks of the approaching Imperial army. Moreover, as they reached the outskirts of Genoa, they were joined by hundreds of armed country folk, local tenants and supporters of the Adorno clan.
Made up of twenty thousand German, Spanish, and Italian soldiers, commanded by the Marquis of Pescara and by the Roman nobleman Prospero Colonna, the Imperial army smashed its way into Genoa on the evening of May 30, 1522, entering through the shattered Gate of San Michele. All resistance had been broken. The battle had started even as the Genoese doge, Ottaviano Fregoso, was seeking to negotiate a surrender. When Pescara’s Spaniards burst into the city, Colonna, who had been dealing separately with Fregoso’s emissaries, was driven to add his German troops to the attack.
Now for the unexampled event. Thanks to the critical influence of the Adorno exiles in the ranks of the invading army, a strict command had gone out to the Imperial soldiers, ordering them to confine their passions to the looting proper. There was to be no killing, no raping; and the sources report none. Pescara and Colonna were somehow able to rein in their mercenaries. The booty alone sufficed. One of Genoa’s chief chroniclers, Uberto Foglietta, described the booty: “a great quantity of silver and gold jewellery, precious stones, and apart from furnishings of surpassing value—bettered by no other Italian city—the looters took immense sums of money from citizens for ransoming them, their houses, and their children.”
The sack lasted two or three days, from the night of May 30 to June 2. All citizens were quarry. The army made no allowance for party or faction, meaning that the pro-Adorno houses in the city were also rifled and ransomed. Foglietta added a startling detail. He noted “with shame” that the Genoese citizens in the Imperial ranks “put on the same garment of the soul as the foreign enemy, like a plague picked up from contact with them. They concealed their faces with masks and broke into the houses of their fellow citizens to rob them, just as if they were searching for booty in a strange city, one given over to plunder by reason of war.” One timely song of the sack of Genoa said that even the “laundry cauldrons” had been stolen from the houses. With all the more reason did much of the city’s “art and movable wealth disappear.” An extraordinary arrangement, however, rescued a few major sites from the orgy of theft, most notably the customhouse and the palace of the great bank of San Giorgio.
Under the looming threat of a new French army, which had just crossed the Alps, the Imperial commanders
led their booty-laden men out of Genoa on June 4, but with the Adorno now occupying city hall. They moved north into Piedmont to keep an eye on the French and to live off the countryside. Too much of Lombardy had been devastated for the easy scrounging of food and fodder.
IN NORTHERN EUROPE, THE STORMING of Magdeburg (1631) issued in a great fire, with the loss therefore of much of the coveted booty, as reported in Chapter 3. But the sack of Antwerp (1576), a city of international bankers, merchants, and shippers, offered wealth on a scale that approached the Roman plunder of 1527. An official estimate put a price tag of five million gold florins on the spoils.
The sack of Mantua (1630) comes into view here next, not only because of the nature of the plunder but also because the event, coming in the middle of the Thirty Years War, brought two horrors together: plague and a plundering army. The story begins in 1629, with a clash between two different branches of the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua, Nevers and Guastalla. Charles of Nevers, head of the French branch of the house, had seized control of the city. Title to the duchy required the approval and seal of the Emperor Ferdinand II, and Nevers did not have this. He had, however, the support of King Louis XIII of France.
Imperial troops—thirty thousand foot and six thousand horse—entered Lombardy in the autumn of 1629, and in late October about ten thousand of them, mostly infantry, began to put a noose around Mantua. During the previous year, the entire region had suffered an agricultural collapse. The Po Valley lay in the shadow of famine. Little grain had been harvested; heavy rains had flooded and retarded the working of mills; and the large presence of German soldiers had put an intolerable strain on food supplies. Imperial assaults on Mantua in December were bloodily thrown back. The siege was raised at Christmas, and the besiegers settled into the surrounding countryside during the winter and spring, exacting heavy contributions from the landed nobility and living mainly off the land.
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