IN CAMPAIGNS AGAINST CIVILIAN POPULATIONS—and this was the ordinary business of war for armies—fighting around the walls of cities, in the midst of a siege, constituted one of war’s bloodiest edges: echoes of The Iliad. And if that edge elicited the utmost cruelty from soldiers, it had the same effect on the besieged civilians, who felt that they were fighting for their lives.
Between besiegers and besieged, every kind of foul exchange was bound to take place at the city walls, with soldiers on the outside declaring that they would rape mothers, wives, and daughters once they stormed the city, and defenders firing back vows to castrate and skin or decapitate any would-be invaders. In religious conflict, the abuse settled on saints and popes, or on the alleged special God of the evangelicals. Two fleeting scenes give point to the extremes.
At the siege of La Rochelle in the spring of 1573, many of the city’s women distinguished themselves by their bravery at the walls. Some of them slipped out of the city occasionally “to strip dead enemies of arms and equipment.” But in their most blistering role, they also helped to front defense right at the walls, particularly by “casting cauldrons of boiling pitch and tar into the midst of storming royal troops.”
A more dramatic—and vengeful—feature of defense was put into play around Turin’s walls in late August, 1706, in a war provoked by the Duke of Savoy’s personal problems with King Louis XIV. Following a siege of several months, French forces finally moved to scale or burst through the city’s walls. The most spirited assault was repelled on August 27, when the French lost thirteen hundred men and the Savoyards about four hundred. At the end of that day, hundreds of wounded French soldiers lay wailing and pleading for help in the ditches around the walls. Turin’s defenders proceeded to throw tons of firewood, pitch, and oil down into the trenches, on top of the wounded men. They then set fire to that mix of man and matter, and from the walls and ramparts snipers targeted the wounded who tried to squirm away. We can be sure that neither Louis XIV nor the Duke of Savoy would carry that scene around in his conscience.
The incandescence of feeling at the walls of cities under attack, with fire or boiling pitch crowning the most painful deaths, had its match in the hell of villages, in peasant hatred for soldiers. On August 20 and 23, 1617, some twenty kilometers to the northwest of Turin, the Leipzig colonel, Caspar von Widmarckter (1566–1621), left hundreds of sick soldiers in two tiny towns, evidently abandoning them while affecting to believe that they would be looked after. When his regiment departed, the townsfolk, villagers really, chased the sick men away, and in one case put some of them onto hay carts and set fire to them.
9
Killing for God
BEGINNINGS
It was the spring of 1562, marking the outbreak of the Wars of Religion in France. The air for many townsmen crackled with anxiety. Talk about murder and violence over questions of worship punctured daily conversation. People would soon flee from anxious Rouen, the country’s largest city after Paris. Some of its inhabitants tried to hide at home, while others would beg relatives or friends to protect them. Fear and hatred over religious differences were all but palpable.
Rouen’s ominous moral climate also enveloped Toulouse, Lyon, La Rochelle, Tours, Blois, Troyes, and other French cities. In the late 1550s, the Reformed (Calvinist) Church had found legions of converts with such speed—critically so in the ranks of certain of the country’s elites—that many Huguenots, the new devotees, believed that they would soon snatch the entire kingdom away from the old Roman Catholic Church. Their violence was launched in 1560, with the smashing and defacing of religious images at La Rochelle and elsewhere.
Religious tempers had first flared years before, in 1534, when people in Paris and at least five other cities woke up on a Sunday morning, October 18, to espy printed placards on their way to Mass, posted in the most visible places. In Amboise, one had been tacked to the door of the king’s bedchamber. Such was the bold new Word of God. It was headed, “True Articles concerning the horrible, gross, and intolerable abuses of the papal mass, concocted directly against the Holy Supper of our Lord.” In their contemptuous dismissal of priests, the four paragraphs of the communication highlighted four hard-hitting points, adding up to a scorching indictment of the Mass. The violence of the placards was a dagger in the bosom of traditional religious beliefs.
Huguenots were never to number more than about 10 percent of the French population. But in March 1562, horrified by a massacre of Huguenots in Champagne, near the town of Vassy, the more militant of them opted to seize power. They did so at Rouen, Lyon, Blois, Tours, Orléans, Bourges, Poitiers, and lesser places. At Bordeaux, however, and at Dijon, Aix-en-Provence, and Toulouse, they were defeated in bloody skirmishes, in the last of these after five days of fierce fighting in the streets. The incandescent passions made it clear that religion and politics could not be split apart, not in the ordinary beliefs of the age. Already in December 1559, a leading Paris magistrate, the Calvinist-minded Anne du Bourg, had been burned at the stake for heresy. More than a whisper of sedition had passed through his actions. He had published a pamphlet claiming, essentially, that no French subject was bound to accept the legitimacy of a king who contravened the will of God: in effect, a king who did not share Anne du Bourg’s religious views.
Early in 1560, Rouen’s Protestants began to abandon their covert meetings and to go public. By July, several thousand of them, it seems, were assembling regularly to listen to preachers in front of the magnificent cathedral. Then, on April 15, 1562, about six weeks after the killings at Vassy and days after a massacre of Protestants in nearby Sens, the Huguenots suddenly and surprisingly seized control of the city, with its population of about seventy thousand inhabitants. A major center of international trade on the Seine River, Rouen lay within reach of oceangoing vessels. Moments of frenzied change would follow. On May 3 and 4, armed Huguenots went about, aiming to convert the entire city by force. They passed from one church to another, smashing baptismal fonts and altars, pilfering the objects in precious metal, shattering statuary, defacing images, and building bonfires in the streets, into which they threw music books, tapestries, pews, lecterns, and other wooden items. Catholic services came to a halt. Priests, Catholic merchants, and local officials got out of the city. In June, Rouen’s doctrinal violence was replicated by Catholics in Paris: All Huguenots were expelled from the city.
Catholic and Protestant armies took the field, captained by and consisting of professional soldiers, veterans of the Italian Wars—which had ended in 1559, leaving them unemployed. These servants of the “warriors of God” wasted no time in revealing their credentials as masters in the art of wholesale plunder and ransoming. When given the chance to loot, they often ignored distinctions between Catholic and Protestant.
In the summer of 1562, as Catholic armies began to close in on the new Huguenot strongholds—Lyon, Blois, Tours, and the others—the besieged sent out pleas for help from other Protestant cities. By early October, Rouen’s Huguenots were praying for the arrival of a promised six thousand soldiers from England (they never came), for the very good reason that they were confronting a royal army of thirty thousand men. On October 21, the besiegers broke through the walls and stormed the city, as Calvinist leaders and pastors fled for their lives. Although officers tried, allegedly, to restrain them, the king’s soldiers threw themselves into a three-day sack. They looted the houses of Huguenots, ransomed the houses of Catholics, and even plundered Catholic churches. About a thousand people lost their lives in the assault, more than at the sack of Antwerp, “the Spanish fury” of 1576. The quantities of loot were such that merchants from Paris swooped in to the city to buy it up at prices that would be turned into handsome profits.
That was Rouen. But during the summer of 1562, similar events unfolded in the other cities won back by royal armies.
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THE FRENCH HAD TURNED IN a wild fury against the iconoclasm of the new believers, converts who despised the Catholic Mass and the old pantheon of sai
nts. Here, Catholics felt, was a doctrinal arrogance which had also spurred that enemy on to seize power in the principal cities. When the men on each side fought because they saw themselves responding to a summons from God, they were engaged in a holy war, driven by “a promise of divine aid that would lead to victory even in the face of great odds.” Yet it was war of a sort which, in its searing intensity, made every atrocity possible, including the murder of children, the disemboweling of pregnant women, and the bizarre configuring of massacred body parts. Strangely, God did not seem to intervene against the inflicting of gruesome mutilations.
Europe had seen the spilling of blood in the name of religious causes long before. Late in the eleventh century, the clash between popes and emperors, fighting over the appointment of bishops, put armies into the field; and piercing voices were raised against a corrupt “cardinal” clergy. In France, the thirteenth century began with a merciless crusade against the communities of Christian dualists, Albigensians or Cathars, in the southern part of the kingdom. Seen as dangerous heretics, they were wiped out. In the third decade of the fifteenth century, pope and princes unleashed a sequence of vicious onslaughts against “Hussites” in Bohemia, the Czech-speaking lands, targeting their views of communion, of an acceptable clergy, and of sin-remitting indulgences. The “heretics” rose to the challenge. Again and again, between 1420 and 1432, the Hussite Czechs inflicted startling defeats on their invaders, Germans chiefly, by cunningly deploying famous “war carts” and new gunpowder weapons. In the end, however, they were driven to make an accommodation with orthodoxy, but only after having split into radical (Taborite) and more moderate sects. The moderates defeated the Taborites in sanguinary battles and were then able to make peace with their neighbors.
COMBATIVE HOLINESS
The votaries of militant Calvinism and the outbreak of holy war in France, with its flights of refugees, carried the Protestant cause into the Low Countries. Here, too, the decade of the 1560s became pivotal in the fortunes of war. Geneva, the school of complete Calvinism, was sending out scores of ardent pastors and preachers, trained to spread the Reformed word of God and determined to overturn all the structures of the old Church. The supposed summons from God, in clashing Protestant and Catholic intonations, was heard by men from across the social spectrum, from mean Flanders cobblers and tailors to the Habsburg King of Spain Philip II (1556–1598), and the Emperor Ferdinand II (1619–1637). The latter “swore a solemn vow at Loreto to uproot Protestantism in his realms.”
King Philip II had been warned about heretics by his father, Charles V, who saw them as rebels engaged in treason. Deeply religious and something of a true ascetic, Philip was never to acknowledge anything but strict orthodoxy in matters of religion. When “heresy” began to infect his subjects in the Netherlands, he became inconsolable and swore that he would never rule over heretics. Rather than do that, he said, he would prefer to be stripped of his crown. He must carry out God’s will, and hence saw himself as the instrument of God.
IN A TIME OF NEAR famine (1565–1566), with bread prices beyond the reach of the poor, the stern claims of Calvinism were taken up by people in western Flanders. The opulent laxity of the old Church became an easy target of criticism, particularly because its lucrative posts were held mostly by men from well-heeled or well-connected families. Orthodoxy and all its trappings took on the appearance of outrageous comfort. In June and July of 1566, many towns in the Netherlands witnessed assemblies of people outside their walls, gathered to listen to Calvinist preachers. In mid-August tensions snapped, and bursts of iconoclasm ripped through “more than 400 churches and chapels.” By the twenty-second, the big cities of the southern Netherlands buckled, giving way to similar scenes, and the iconoclastic hurricane then swept north into Holland. Antwerp’s churches, all forty-two of them, were pillaged, and great piles of objects were “hauled out into the streets to be smashed.”
The assault on churches and their paraphernalia was the work of organized gangs, each numbering anywhere from twenty to fifty rioters. In some cases, the poor artisans among them were paid to do the defacing and smashing of images and statuary. Their attacks were usually followed by a gorging on the food and drink found in the premises. But interestingly, unlike iconoclasts in France, they refrained from the murder of priests and from attacks on the symbols of political authority. No matter. Spanish governors saw the mutineers in a political light, and the iconoclastic orgies became the triggers of the so-called Eighty Years War. A year later, over the Alps, came one of the best generals of the age, the Duke of Alba, leading an army of ten thousand Spanish and Italian soldiers with a long tail of camp followers. They reached the southern Netherlands in August 1567, to be billeted in Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp, and lesser places.
The story of Spain’s military occupation of the Low Countries has been brilliantly told by Geoffrey Parker and others. Suffice it here to stress the fact that a war with clamorous religious beginnings was turned into a struggle for independence from Spain. But the religious underpinnings were to be there always, and they should be borne in mind, because they added a cruel twist to the struggle. In Holland and other northern provinces, the Catholic Church was uprooted and outlawed. And in the southern provinces, under Spanish rule, governors worked to hound Calvinism out of existence. Roughly half of Antwerp’s population, about thirty-eight thousand Protestants, emigrated to the north in the late 1580s, having first been forced to sell “their homes and immoveable possessions.”
The war had passed instantly into the hands of professional soldiers, many of whom—time would reveal—had no real interest in the “correct” forms of worship. They were soldiers first and foremost, seeking to survive and profit. This meant that in their plundering and violence, the armies on both sides, when unpaid, when hungry, when in dire need, were likely to show little regard for religious differences. Some of the English and Scottish mercenaries who fought on the Dutch side did so, it is true, for confessional reasons more than for the lousy pay. But they were not typical fighters. The remorseless violence that often marked the capture of garrison towns, such as Haarlem, Zutphen, Naarden, and Maastricht, conformed with the so-called “laws of war” and was not the mere result of religious animosity. If a town failed to surrender when called upon to do so, it lost all hope of mercy if the attacking army then stormed it. Cruelties in the wars between Spain and the United Provinces were always bound to include a religious ingredient, but that ingredient could not be easily picked out of the stew of other motives.
In the “bloodlands” of the French civil wars and the Thirty Years War, on the contrary, the unyielding claims of religion and even of holy war stood out nakedly. This was never more clearly visible than in the sieges of La Rochelle, Sancerre, Paris, Magdeburg, and Augsburg. Here, as we have seen, war was taken to such extremes that it appeared, at moments, as though the people under siege were prepared to commit collective suicide in the name of God and correct worship. They conceived of holy war as a struggle that might require a fight to the last man, woman, and child. In the five sieges, an urban oligarchy, backed by army officers, set the agenda and saw it as right, as godly, for people to starve to death in the defense of “true” religion. Paris aside, those in command of the other beleaguered cities had the support of Protestant pastors who readily took up the task of preaching holy war. And any resistance to this call—looked upon as treason—was made subject to the penalty of death.
In the summer of 1590, Paris offered a different visage of war à l’outrance—war to the last degree. Here starving men were spied upon, searched, arrested, jailed, and even hanged for expressly wanting peace and a reconciliation with the man whose army was besieging the city, Henry of Navarre, the aspiring king of France. He had not yet renounced his Protestant faith. Paris had long been fanatically Catholic, and preachers were encouraged to argue that death was better than the rule of a heretic. But few people in Paris were ready for martyrdom. When the murderous siege broke the resisting will of the Parisia
n populace, the will to survive surfaced and began to clamor for a peace agreement. The city, however, was under the despotic control of the Council of Sixteen, and behind them loomed the chieftains of the powerful Catholic League, an aristocratic union whose members had sworn to keep Henry of Navarre away from the throne even if he should convert to Catholicism. They used processions, threats, food handouts, and fiery sermons to keep the people of Paris in line with the wishes of the League. Theatrical color was also added. In the great procession of May 14, early on in the siege, the bishop of Senlis and the prior of the Carthusians moved at the head of a column of “monks and friars armed with arquebuses, halberds, and daggers.” They were saying, in effect, that they themselves were ready to draw blood. To hammer the point home, “they marched in ranks, four deep,” their cassocks pulled up, their cowls “lowered down to their shoulders,” and “some wore a breastplate or a helmet.”
In the effort to keep the starving people of Paris from rebelling, the promises of men in holy orders knew no bounds. Preachers argued that it would “endear them to God” if they died of hunger. According to a leading, if hostile, witness, Pierre de l’Estoile, they even said “that it is better to kill one’s own children than to receive a heretic king.” He threw light on these words by claiming that he had heard a well-known Catholic argue that it was less dangerous in the hereafter to have eaten a child, if driven to do so by starvation, than to have recognized a heretic as king.
Holy war was the type of war, perhaps the only type, about which men could seriously say, with a good conscience, that it should be fought to the last degree.
THE TRIGGERS OF THE THIRTY Years War lay in religious belief, and first of all in the combative Catholicism of two princes: the Emperor Ferdinand II and Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria. They cooperated in the events (1618–1620) that led to a victory over Bohemia’s Protestant aristocracy at the Battle of White Mountain (1620). The losers, grandees, were treated as rebels, because they had sought to take the kingdom of Bohemia away from Ferdinand by offering it to a Calvinist, Frederick V, head of the Palatine Electorate. Ferdinand’s men and the Order of Jesuits now moved into the Czech-speaking kingdom, intent on bringing it back to the Roman fold. Twenty-six of the rebellious noblemen were executed, but all the others were also divested of their landed estates. Half of Bohemia’s lands passed to the possession of new owners: leading officers in Ferdinand’s army and aristocrats who had remained loyal to him and to the Roman church.
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