Furies (13 page)

About twenty thousand people, including besiegers, perished in and around Magdeburg on May 20 and in the days that followed: “For a full fortnight the Elbe was choked with the corpses of victims.” Many were slain in battle or murdered. Many more perhaps were the victims of smoke and fire. The city's population seems to have plummeted, almost overnight, to something like five thousand inhabitants. Despite the fact that many of the dead were soldiers and other outsiders—such as neighboring villagers who had streamed into Magdeburg when the Imperial army began to surround the city—the catastrophe may have been even more devastating than hinted at in my extrapolation. A census of 1632 found only 449 residents on the ravaged site, “and a large part of the city remained rubble until 1720.” In the work of rebuilding, during the months following the sack, as survivors and others dug into the foundations of houses to get at burned-out cellars, they came on bodies and human remains, even those of entire families. These had apparently collected there, seeking to die together or to escape the violence of pillaging mercenaries.

Days after the tragic assault, pitchforks were used to spear and collect the parts of bodies torn apart by the havoc of angry soldiers or by collapsing buildings. The many random and scattered dead were put on carts, to be hauled to the river and dumped into its purging flow. But the Elbe—if I may so apostrophize—was not always a ready accomplice, for a few of the corpses seem to have floated about in a display of gruesome postures, with limbs or heads poking up out of the water.

I have focused on Brescia, Antwerp, and Magdeburg for the following reasons. The Brescian tragedy, overshadowed by the famous Sack of Rome (1527), is almost never discussed by historians, despite the fact that sources for Brescia are rich. It therefore seemed right to highlight the city on the map of European warfare. Antwerp and Magdeburg suffered the most destructive sackings of early modern Europe, and yet military historians skip over these too, usually by treating each to brief descriptions in a paragraph.

Looking back to the sack of the three cities, we can see that surviving victims might easily be drawn to exaggerate the evils of soldiers run riot, particularly when religious or linguistic divisions played a part. It is therefore well to be suspicious of reported numbers of casualties, as in a statement claiming, for example, ten thousand dead, when, on the grounds of demography, three thousand had to be closer to the true mark. Much more difficult to weigh are reports of the impaling or burning of children. Criminal action of this sort was not common, even if a good deal of evidence survives alleging that rural fortresses and village houses were sometimes set on fire, in full knowledge of the fact that entire families, children as well, were about to be incinerated. Then we remember that the popular culture of early modern Europe gave its approval to gory public executions, to torture as a matter of ordinary judicial procedure,
and to the display of pictures that depicted the torn bodies of martyred saints. Such exposure and official validation was likely to make people more prone to extremes of violence.

Polyglot armies were the occasion and ground for tragic misunderstandings. Menaced by a foreign tongue, victims were bound to call forth more violence by their muddled reactions. Yet the many-tongued army was a regular feature of war in Europe until the end of the eighteenth century.

Casting back to Brescia, Antwerp, and Magdeburg, we come on a pattern of angry soldiers, blundering political authority, violence run out of control, and horrendous mistakes by the governors of the assaulted cities. Unpaid soldiers pointed to the ruthless (and often unnecessary) policies of political leaders: the kings of Spain and France, Ferdinand II, Gustavus Adolphus, and the ministers around them. Wedded to the employment of massive military force, they were soon confronted, in any decision to go to war, by the fact that their resources were too meager, too desperate, too easily misappropriated, to pay the costs of mercenaries. They were thus more than complicit in the universal practice of preying on civilian populations. Their empty purses imposed it.

War in the three cities also shows that it was a mistake to rely on civilian militias and guardsmen. They were no match for professional soldiers in armed combat. Religious fanaticism (Magdeburg), internal party divisions (Brescia), and botched planning helped to thrust the three cities into their suicidal nightmares.

A state which acknowledges no superior in the conduct of its affairs: this was sovereignty in Roman law. Such a state did not truly exist in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and the tide of European politics would take another century to bring it fully forth. Although complexities and cavils may nag at this claim, it comes with the following second part, bearing even greater significance.

The ability to conduct major warfare was the decisive force in the making of the modern state. But this force, in turn, was predicated on the power to levy taxes and to command credit: that is, on the capacity to pay for war. We may reverse the claim by saying that the power to raise and increase taxes, or to conjure up new ones, called for a widening apparatus of officials, even when these were taken on as contractors. By these means the state was acquiring more foreign and domestic clout and becoming more invasive. Not surprisingly, then, in England, by the end of the seventeenth century, Parliament's control of the purse strings made it, in many ways, the decisive force in the state.

These are points to be borne in mind as we consider the new weapons of the Renaissance world. And consider them we must, for they would have sinister consequences for civilian populations.

THE USE OF GUNPOWDER IN EUROPEAN warfare was first seen in the fourteenth century. Two new weapons appeared on the scene: the
cannon and the small firearm. But the early history of explosive powder was joined mainly to artillery, particularly for use in the besieging of the coveted centers of wealth and action: cities. These were inevitably hedged in by great walls and defensive towers, unless they were flanked, like Venice or Antwerp, by protective waters. In sieges, giant catapults, epitomized by the trebuchet, had long been deployed against them. They could lob stones that weighed up to half a ton, but their usual load was closer to two or three hundred pounds, and they could cast seventy-five-pounders over a distance of some two hundred meters. The use of trebuchets was common until the early fifteenth century, when the irresistible spread of explosive artillery began to edge them out of action. They were pretty much gone by the end of the century.

The making of gunpowder—a mixture of charcoal, saltpeter, and sulphur—improved in the later fourteenth century, and there were later refinements, with the result that production costs fell by 80 percent in the fifteenth century, but never enough for the purses and taxes of kings and free cities. All the same, explosive artillery took wing, and a different kind of terror began to ghost through Europe's urban centers, as the puncturing blast of the new weapon—a sound that carried for miles—came to be heard more and more often.

At the start of the fifteenth century, bombards, the earliest big guns, emerged as rivals to the mammoth five-storied trebuchet. They were made of great wedges of wrought iron, clamped together by iron bands: hence “hooped bombards.” Weighing up to five tons or more, bombards fired carved or shaped stones. However, if inexpertly handled, the detonation could cause them to burst and kill the cannoneers. A half century later, they were being replaced by safer, muzzle-loading guns cast entirely in bronze. A new form of shot was also introduced: the iron ball, brought in by the French in the 1440s. This missile was denser but lighter, with a longer range and a more destructive impact. Yet with rulers trying to control expenses, stone shot continued in use and would be seen as late as the 1580s.

After 1450, the making of artillery began to zero in more selectively
on the question of sizes and calibers, of lighter field guns or of heavier ones for siege batteries. Experts also started to design them with a view to their fitting more mobile gun carriages. The point here, of course, was to be able to move artillery trains more swiftly. Interestingly, as an item in the culture of the age, the lightest guns came to be known as sakers, falcons, and falconets—names drawn from one of the signature pursuits of noblemen: falconry. Ranging in weight from five hundred to twenty-five hundred pounds, they shot cast-iron balls weighing from one to six pounds. The prince of heavy cannons, the royal or double cannon, with a payload of one hundred pounds per shot, could weigh up to twenty thousand pounds. Another heavy piece of artillery, the culverin, came in lighter versions and was to be much used on the battlefield. Having a small bore and a superior targeting range, the culverin was a long-barreled gun with a thicker tube; hence its name was rightly rooted in the Latin for snake,
colubra
.

Terrain, weather, circumstances, supplies, tactics: all these determined the varied use of artillery in warfare. And field generals often held conflicting views about when and how to deploy the different guns. Although efforts were made to standardize calibers in the interests of efficiency, remarkably, not much came of this. Combat in the Thirty Years War would see every kind of weapon in use. William Guthrie, one of the leading authorities on the battles of the war, found that its artillery was “a morass that no amount of research can clarify.” For “all weapons were essentially handmade and varied to a greater or less degree.” In effect, every gun was likely to be different, each “a unique work of art.” Europe had yet to enter the machine age.

The coming of heavy artillery added many more wagons and draft animals, oxen as well as horses, to the winding columns of armies. Yet the new weapons and technology, including the casting of bronze guns, were taken up everywhere and had reached the Russian steppes by 1500.

But if soldiers and horsemen could move no faster than artillery
trains, then the pace of armies was now greatly slowed down, particularly in muddy or hilly terrain. And this could lead to disaster or sudden hardship for innocent populations, because it meant that soldiers were more likely to prey on the civilians whose lands they were crossing.

If artillery determined the early career of gunpowder, small firearms—and first of all the arquebus, a microcannon—soon made their appearance. Once it was known that an explosive charge could eject a deadly missile from a tube, metalsmiths were able to make a handheld firearm. Right around 1430, Bohemia's Hussites, alleged heretics, were already using tubes with a powder charge in their victorious battles against German armies. In 1453, in the Battle of Castillon (near Bordeaux), the last of the Hundred Years War, the master gunner, Jean Bureau, seems to have deployed about three hundred such guns to help annihilate an English army of ten thousand men.

In 1496, the new arquebus turned up in the ranks of Spanish foot soldiers at the battle of Atella, and then, a few years later, at Cerignola. Joining a powder charge to a mode of ignition, the operating system of the matchlock arquebus was built around a small flash pan, a triggering device, and a slow-burning cord (the match) which had been saturated with saltpeter. The gun was fired by lowering the match into the flash pan or priming tray.

All early handheld firearms were unwieldy, heavy, and highly inaccurate at distances. But they were lethal at close quarters, or even at a distance if they happened to make direct hits. Field commanders therefore found them effective enough for use on the battlefield, and armies began to rely on them in large and ever-increasing numbers.

The true arquebus, a muzzle loader, seems to have been fashioned by German gunsmiths sometime after 1450. It was thirty-six to forty inches long, mounted on a heavy stock, and weighed around ten pounds. Firing iron or lead shot of about half an ounce in weight, its effective range was in the region of one hundred to two hundred yards.

While the arquebus was gripped with both hands and could be
fired from the shoulder, its immediate descendent, the matchlock musket, a heavier and more destructive weapon, was usually mounted on a forked prop and then fired. It was first used by Spanish troops in Italy at the outset of the sixteenth century, as early as the Battle of Cerignola in 1503. In 1591, an English observer reported “that a lead musket ball could penetrate the best armour at 200 yards, ordinary armour at 400, and kill an unarmoured man at 600.” But this advantage was offset by the fact that soldiers could fire the light arquebus—a kind of early carbine—from horseback, and so it was swiftly adapted for use by entire units of cavalry.

Meanwhile, right around 1500, enterprising German gunsmiths devised a proper handgun, the wheel-lock pistol. They must have had links with craftsmen of the sort who were doing meticulous metal work and who just then were making small clocks with coiled steel springs. First seen in Nuremberg, the pistol, about a foot long, was developed to be used against besiegers from the tops of city walls and parapets. Its mechanical workings were relatively simple. A wound-up spring, released by a trigger, would cause a serrated disk (the “wheel”) to spin against a piece of clamped flint, giving off sparks and igniting the powder charge. Since this weapon could be fired with one hand, it was soon taken up by horsemen, mounted pistoleers (
Reiters
) who carried at least two such pistols, and more often three or four, strapped or tucked away about themselves, as they rode into battle. By the middle of the sixteenth century, rulers were hiring large mercenary units of German pistoleers. Here at once we see an aspect of the changing face of cavalry, no longer the exclusive arm of noblemen.

But the fast-growing numbers of light horsemen, armed with arquebus or pistol, were not a mere fact of military science, locked away from people in town and country. In the wide vicinage of sieges and skirmishes, the new units also moved more swiftly over the countryside, where they killed and plundered with greater ease. In the Italian Wars, in France's religious civil wars, and in the Thirty Years
War, thousands of villages and little towns would feel the muscle of that rapacious cavalry.