by Sean McGlynn
For all the adrenalin and bloodlust of soldiers storming a town, it is notable how often the ensuing sack was not utter mayhem. As we have discussed above, pillaging could be quite systematic, or even stopped altogether: when, in 1068, William the Conqueror took Exeter in south-western England, he posted guards on the city gates so that his own men could not plunder it. Four centuries later, in 1463, having taken Luxembourg, Philip the Good left his army outside the town while he went to give thanks in the main church; his men had to wait until he was finished for the order that allowed them to loot it. Of course, the prospect of booty could equally lead to a breakdown in discipline and the loss of a battle, as it did on many occasions. This loss of discipline – but not loss of victory – can be seen at Fronsac in 1451, when the lure of booty proved so strong that French soldiers fabricated a crisis to get their hands on it. The English had surrendered the southern French town on terms that guaranteed its protection against plunder. However, in the evening some French troops shouted out war cries and stampeded horses to feign cavalry movements, all to give the impression that hostilities had broken out again. As Maurice Keen relates the story, ‘The French soldiers flew to arms, and the town was escaladed, and by the time their officers got onto the scene looting was in full swing, and there was not much they could do except join in. No doubt they were quite willing to do so, but if they had not arrived there might easily have been a massacre.’67 (Note the difference from Béziers, where officers stopped the looting but not the massacre.)
Many soldiers were after not just money, but also women. The besieging forces anticipated free licence to rape following a storm. This might be actively encouraged by commanders as another way of terrorizing the enemy: submit or we will rape your wives and daughters. Alternatively, demonizing the enemy as rapists – as the Christian West did the Mongols – might encourage a more determined resistance. Sexual atrocity was also a manifestation of sadistic empowerment and revenge, as we have seen in the case discussed in the early part of this book from the Jacquerie, when a knight’s pregnant wife and daughter were raped before his eyes, before all three were killed. One of the best contemporary accounts of a city being taken and ransacked comes from Roger of Wendover’s detailed narrative of the fall of Lincoln in eastern England in 1217. Roger, who, as I have written elsewhere, is seriously under-utilized as a source on warfare, records what happened when royalist forces defeated the French and baronial rebels there. Note that there is no mention of bloodletting (and, like most writers of the time, Roger was never shy to lay on the gore); instead, what he gives us is perhaps a more typical example of a storm, in which booty and women take precedence:
Of the plunder and pillage of the city
After the battle was thus ended, the king’s soldiers found in the city the wagons of the barons and the French, with the packhorses, loaded with baggage, silver vessels, and various kinds of furniture and utensils, all which fell into their hands without opposition. Having then plundered the whole city to the last farthing, they next pillaged the churches throughout the city, and broke open the chests and storerooms with axes and hammers, seizing on the gold and silver in them, clothes of all colours, ornaments, gold rings, goblets and jewels. Nor did the cathedral church escape this destruction, but underwent the same punishment as the rest, for the legate had given orders to knights to treat all the clergy as excommunicated men…. This church lost eleven thousand marks of silver. When they had thus seized on every kind of property, so that nothing remained in any corner of the houses, they each returned to their lords as rich men…. Many of the women of the city were drowned in the river, for, to avoid shameful offence [rape], they took to small boats with their children, female servants and household property, and perished on their journey; but there was afterwards found in the river by the searchers, goblets of silver, and many other articles of great benefit to the finders.68
Roger was a local man, supremely well informed on the war in England and someone was always ready to highlight the sufferings of ordinary people. Yet the only deaths he mentions at Lincoln are accidental; nothing is said of the men whom the women and children left behind; had these been executed, Roger would have told us. (Of the two other sources next closest to events, both in Old French, only one mentions booty, but neither refers to the sack.) The nature of the conflict in England may have mitigated the more fatal excesses of some other wars, as may the fact that the castle still held out, but that the whole city was under anathema stripped away a thick layer of protection. It would seem that an order for no quarter was not given. As so often with the past, we simply do not know. The most famous storms are the ones that gained notoriety by shedding the most blood; but the Middle Ages has its share of other murderous sieges that we know nothing of either because they were not recorded or because their massacres are not mentioned. More often than not, the frequency of sieges, changes of lordship and pillaging of towns have meant that the occasion is marked without much comment; the execution of a garrison or of inhabitants is more noteworthy, but not in every situation. Slaughter following storm was common but, unlike plundering, not the norm; when it happened, it was likely to be a result of either a direct policy determined for the particular siege, or, occasionally, the absence of any set policy at all. Enforced homelessness and impoverishment were often punishment enough, as Enguerrand de Monstrelet makes clear after the orderly and negotiated submission of Harfleur to Henry V in 1415:
He then had all the nobles and men-at-arms who were in the town made prisoner, and shortly afterwards turned most of them out of the town dressed only in their doublets…. Next the greater part of the townsmen were made prisoner and forced to ransom themselves for large sums, then driven from the town with most of the women and children, each as they left being given five sous and part of their clothing. It was a pitiful sight to see the misery of these people as they left their town and belongings behind.69
The sparing of a captured place or of non-combatants was as likely to be driven by cynical motives as by humanitarian ones (much as the panegyrical apologists of princes and commanders would have us believe the latter). Carcassonne was needed as an economically viable administrative base for the crusade against the Cathars; Philip Augustus wanted the useless mouths out of the way at Château Gaillard; during his Scottish campaign of 1296, the infamously ruthless Edward I granted terms of life and limb to enemy garrisons, thereby successfully encouraging rapid capitulations on the grounds of clemency (although the citizens of Berwick were not so fortunate). But just as common was the pressure knights placed on their commanders for restraint. Until the later part of the period covered here, this can partially be explained by the fact that the knightly classes were so well known or even inter-related to each other (at Lincoln, many of the vanquished were allowed to escape because of these close connections); however, even more important was the case it made for self-preservation. Just as atrocity often became perpetuated in a spiral of vengeance, so it was hoped that clemency would be reciprocated in kind if roles were reversed at some later stage in the conflict.
Having spent nearly a year besieging Calais, Edward III was not in a merciful mood when the town fell in 1347. Sir Walter Mauny succeeded in changing his mind for purely pragmatic reasons: ‘My lord, you may well be mistaken, and you are setting a bad example for us. Suppose one day you sent us to defend one of your fortresses, we should go less cheerfully if you have these people put to death, for then they would do the same to us if they had the chance.’70 When Rochester castle fell to the ever-vindictive King John in 1215, he wanted to send the garrison to the gallows. He was advised against this move by a persuasive Savari de Mauléon, whose reasons reveal the fears and calculations of soldiers:
My lord king, our war is not yet over, therefore, you ought carefully to consider how the fortunes of war may turn; for if you now order us to hang these men, the barons, our enemies, will perhaps by a similar event take me or other nobles of your army, and, following your example, hang us; therefore do
not let this happen, for in such a case no one will fight in your cause.71
Quarter or no quarter: a strategy of either might be adopted for a whole campaign or just parts of it; it could change between the two on the turn of recent events or the mood of the commander; or the one could misplace the other purely by accident or circumstance. But there can be no denying that cruelty was a constant companion to siege warfare. The extent of massacres was certainly exaggerated on many occasions as chroniclers emphasized the horrible retribution of vengeful princes that awaited their enemies, but they were frequently severe enough to do their job: demoralize enemy garrisons and terrify them into submission. If the soldier did not hesitate to act brutally in siege situations, it might be because he himself could expect to be treated in the same way. Cruelty was not reserved for the intimidation of non-combatants alone. Garrisons were commonly threatened with the worst if they resisted.
These threats were not always carried out, but that was a big risk for a garrison to take. When the Duke of Bourbon arrived before the walls of the Poitevin town of Moléon in 1381, he offered the fortress one chance to surrender; if it did not do so immediately, all would be hung as an example to others who might consider resistance. The garrison did not hesitate to comply. In 1224 Henry III warned the garrison at Bedford that they faced the gallows if they continued to defend the castle. When the castle was stormed, the garrison was beaten and then hung. (The Dunstable annalist puts the figure at over eighty knights and sergeants, though it may have been as ‘low’ as twenty-four; three were cut down and spared on the intercession of Henry’s nobles.) Henry was nipping a potentially serious problem in the bud – Bedford offered a rallying point for discontents – by acting decisively and sending out a message of no compromise to opponents.
Minatory words were backed up with minatory action. William the Conqueror’s reputation as a ruthless war leader was built during his time fighting in his duchy of Normandy. In 1049, he took a fort by Alençon in north-western France and, in an act considered savage at the time, the defenders had their hands and feet amputated. As John Gillingham notes, ‘William’s ferocity persuaded the citizens of Alençon that, if they wished to retain their hands and feet, they had better surrender at once. Equally impressed, the garrison of Domfront also decided to yield.’72
Barbaric practices such as these can be seen being applied wherever and whenever Latin armies (or any others for that matter, be they Muslim, Mongol, Chinese or whomsoever) were engaged in siege warfare; there appear to be no geographical exceptions, only individual ones: England, for example, simply has fewer extreme examples recorded. This is not to say that cruelty was always used, but that it was employed regularly enough to be commonplace. On the First Crusade, crusaders stuck the heads of dead Muslims on poles in front of the garrisons at Nicaea and Antioch; Saladin similarly impaled crusaders’ heads at Tiberias during the Third Crusade. At Ascalon in 1153, defenders suspended the corpses of besiegers from the walls. In 1209 on the Albigensian Crusade, Simon de Montfort took the castle of Bram and mutilated its garrison by cutting off the upper lip and nose of each man, and putting out their eyes, except for one whom he left with a single eye to guide them to the next fortress that Montfort planned to besiege (see also chapter two). This was both a warning and a retaliation for similar treatment meted out to his own men. During the Reconquista in the thirteenth century, James I of Aragon catapulted the head of a Muslim captive over the walls of Palma before massacring its inhabitants, while at Lisbon the heads of eighty Muslims were impaled on stakes. At La Roche-Guyon in 1109, Louis VI had the castrated and disembowelled corpses of the garrison (the leader’s heart was stuck on a pole) floated on specially constructed rafts down the Seine to Rouen to demonstrate how the king extracted his vengeance. Edward III hung hostages before the eyes of Berwick’s citizens in 1333. And in 1344 a secret messenger from the English garrison at Auberoche in Gascony attempted to slip through French lines; he was caught and, while still alive, strapped to a siege machine and catapulted over the walls back into Auberoche.
The Hohenstaufen emperors of Germany seemed to have a particular penchant for cruelty at sieges. At Brescia in 1238, Frederick II tied hostages to his siege machines to try and prevent the besieged from bombarding them. Undeterred, the Brescians created a buffer zone by lowering live imperial prisoners down their walls directly in front of Frederick’s battering rams. The investment at Crema in Lombardy in 1159 was particularly horrific, and reveals how a cycle of atrocity fed on itself. Otto of Freising tells us what happened after Frederick Barbarossa’s imperial troops killed some of Crema’s garrison as they made a sortie: ‘It was a pitiable sight when those outside cut off the heads of the slain and played ball with them, tossing them from the right hand into the left, and used them in mocking display. But those in the town, thinking it shameful to dare less, afforded a heart-rending spectacle by tearing limb from limb upon their walls prisoners from our army, without mercy.’73
Frederick then ordered other captives to be hung on gallows in view of the town; the besieged did the same with their prisoners on their walls. Frederick then had forty more prisoners hung, including knights and others of high standing. It was said that the defenders carefully scalped a knight and, combing his hair carefully, attached it to his helmet; another had his hands and feet cut off, and was left to crawl in the streets. In a vain attempt to counter the missiles from the town’s mangonels destroying his own siege tower, Frederick had hostages tied to it as human shields, ‘And so several youths died miserably, struck by the stones, while others, though remaining alive, suffered yet more pitifully, hanging there and expecting a most cruel death and the horror of so dire a fate.’74 ‘In tears’, the defenders ‘struck the bodies of their comrades…. They crushed their chests, their stomachs and their heads, and bone and mushy brain were mixed together. It was a savage, horrid thing to see.’75 Despite all this, Frederick claimed he was acting ‘in all things in accordance with the laws of the war’76 which further goes to show just how meaningless – and flexible – these laws could be.
In this climate of extreme violence, it is not surprising that non-combatants struggled to evade the excesses of military operations. Their ordeal at a time of siege was highly precarious: blockade brought with it the fear of famine and disease; defeat the prospect of ransom and becoming a destitute refugee; and storming raised the spectre of widespread slaughter. That the last of these presented less of a possibility than the first two does not diminish its threat, as, if it did occur, it could claim as many – or even more – lives in one fell swoop. When towns and cities were besieged, the number of non-combatants exceeded the numbers making up the garrison, and so the miseries of siege warfare fell disproportionately on these citizens – an inversion of battles and a world away from the chivalric image of two knights engaged in single combat on a battlefield.
The fate of the ‘useless mouths’ at Château Gaillard reflects the agonies of hunger and frightened vulnerability that befell many besieged non-belligerents. Such scenes were repeated throughout the Middle Ages and were probably more common than massacres. We see the same thing happening at Faenza in Italy in 1240–1, at Calais in 1346–7 (where some refugees were allowed through the lines, but another 500 were trapped and left to their fate in front of the town walls), and at Rouen in 1418–19. In each case the commander refusing egress for the useless mouths in no-man’s-land – Frederick II, Edward III and Henry V – was regarded as a paragon of chivalric virtue, an exemplar of supreme knighthood. Yet their actions in war, and at sieges in particular, are a world away from the one inhabited by the idealized knight who protects women, the weak and the vulnerable. The victims who died of starvation in these situations were no less the victims of atrocity than those who were put to the sword after a sack; it was just easier to transfer all the responsibility to the enemy, especially to the garrison commander who ejected them, for it was his charge to protect these people.
Let us end this chapter with the plight o
f the people of Rouen, under siege by Henry V’s English forces through the winter of 1418 to January 1419. Henry’s blockade was rigorously enforced and the siege viciously prosecuted on both sides. Henry hung his prisoners from gallows. The French, more inventively, hung theirs from their battlements with dogs strung around their necks, or sewed them into sacks with dogs and cast them into the Seine (both common modes of executions for criminals, as discussed in chapter one). Famine and disease broke out in the city and corpses were piled high. The cost of food underwent hyperinflation. John Page, present at the siege, wrote of the inhabitants: ‘They ate up dogs, they ate up cats; / They ate up mice, horses and rats.’ Cats went for two nobles, a mouse for sixpence, a rat for thirty pennies, while a dog or horse’s head went for half a pound. Young girls offered themselves up for bread. There was talk of cannibalism. Like so many of the contemporary writers we have drawn on, Page expresses with real pity and feeling the plight of the citizens; that they represented the enemy in no way mitigates his sympathy for them, or his understanding of how the degrading, dehumanizing effect of hunger was as pernicious as the physical peril:
They died so fast on every day
That men could not all of them in earth lay.
Even if a child should otherwise be dead,
The mother would not give it bread.
Nor would a child to its mother give.
