Furies (17 page)

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.

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 Châtre, 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.

The bombardment of Sancerre continued, but always, Léry observes, with little loss of life in the town. When the royalists erected two towering, wheeled structures near the walls, with arquebusiers on the top, aiming volleys at the defenders on the walls, groups of Huguenot soldiers made stealthy nighttime attacks and set fire to them. Throughout their many armed engagements, seeking to maintain
unity and to keep up their spirits, the besieged Huguenots sang hymns, flagging their evangelical bent. Yet all the while a silent enemy was slowly taking shape, and it was to be more fatal than the daily cannonades of the royalists. It was taking form around their dwindling food supplies. There was wine galore, but beef, pork, cheese, and—most important—flour were running out, with the remaining stocks turning, in value, to gold.

The
Sancerrois
sent messengers to Protestant communities in Languedoc to plead for military help, but there, too, the Huguenots were at war. Step-by-step, in the teeth of shrill complaint, Sancerre's town council was forced to commandeer all wheat still in private hands and to put it into central storage for communal bread.

In March and April, they slaughtered and cooked their donkeys and mules, used for transport up the town's steep rise of more than 360 meters, until all had been eaten up by the end of April. Later, as the siege continued, they would regret having consumed their pack animals with such greedy abandon. In May, they began to kill their horses, the council ruling that these had to be slaughtered and sold by butchers. Prices were fixed at sums that were lower than would have been allowed for by the tightening pincers of supply and demand. But in July and August, as Sancerre went to the wall, prices for the remaining horse meat soared, despite strict policing; and every part of the horse was sold, including head and guts. Opinion held, Léry observes, that horse was better than donkey or mule, and better boiled than roasted. He was coldly reporting, but also, possibly, adding a sliver of gallows humor.

Then came the turn of the cats, “and soon all were eaten, the entire lot in fifteen days.” It followed that dogs “were not spared … and were eaten as routinely as sheep in other times.” These too were sold, and Léry lists prices. Cooked with herbs and spices, people ate the entire animal. “The thighs of roasted hunting dogs were found to be especially tender and were eaten like saddle of hare.” Many people “took to hunting rats, moles, and mice,” but poor children in
particular favored mice, “which they cooked on coal, mostly without skinning or gutting them, and—more than eating—they wolfed them down with immense greed. Every tail, foot, or skin of a rat was nourishment for a multitude of suffering poor people.”