Furies (21 page)

WHY WERE THE CITY COUNCILLORS so determined to let the siege go on? What were they hoping for in negotiations that lasted two murderous months? In January and February, many hundreds of people died of hunger in the streets or froze to death. The will to rebel against the council was broken by the enervating effects of famine, and starving civilians were likely to be all but worthless as guardsmen at the walls. The danger of a revolt had passed. Then what about the hope of succor from Swedish forces? That army had been cut to pieces at Nördlingen; its remnants fled north into Saxony and Hesse, pursued or reconnoitered by the Catholic enemy. The siege of Augsburg was a mopping-up operation, around a city expected to fall to the juggernaut of starvation, not to thundering guns or a storming.

Yet the resisting hard men held their course. Lutheran preachers of an evangelical bent stepped up their reassuring words: God would come to the help of this godly city. Wanting a humane capitulation, opponents jumped on this litany but gave it an ironic twist and posed a rhetorical question: Was the council expecting citizens to become brave martyrs?

In view of the thousands of soldiers garrisoned in Augsburg, we must assume that Sweden's officers had a decisive voice in prolonging the stubborn defense, while at the same time seeking every kind of concession from General Matthias Gallas, the commander of Imperial forces. That the Swedes were able to keep this up for so long was remarkable, for if, as threatened, the city had been taken by storm, the entire garrison could have been put to the sword and only the officers ransomed—a mercy intended to secure the same kind of treatment for captured Imperial officers.

What were Gallas and the Imperial forces getting in return for their lenience? They expected to march into an intact Imperial city
and a peaceful situation. Besides, Augsburg was the home of many “papists.” But more concretely, Gallas was perhaps seeking to save the lives of hundreds of his men, who would have perished at the walls and just after scaling them. The sack of Magdeburg was fresh in the German public mind, a thorn now lodged in memory. And since Imperial officers were perfectly aware of the nightmarish conditions inside Augsburg, they would have had no trouble envisaging the consequences of bursting into the city in a wave of violence and blood.

THE SURRENDER TERMS OF THE Löwenberg agreement, March 22–24, 1635, confirmed the right of the city's Protestants to practice their faith. But this article, tellingly, had long been on offer. After the Catholic victory at Nördlingen, moderate Protestant princes crossed back to the support of the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II, and this change was soon clinched in the Peace of Prague (May 20). The question therefore has to be raised: Was Augsburg's fierce resistance to the siege worth the sacrifice of thousands of lives? Army officers and a dominant group of city councillors would perforce have said yes, whereas most residents would have said no.

In fact, the Löwenberg articles show that the officers had good reasons to insist on a stubborn resistance, for the articles throw a mantle of remarkable protection over the Swedish garrison. They authorize the soldiers to leave Augsburg with all their flags, weapons, wagons, and camp followers. They guarantee their safe departure from the city, along with anyone else who chose to leave with them. In addition, the departing soldiers would be allowed to march to their destination, Erfurt, at their own pace, to make stops where they wished, and to carry all their own food and fodder, inasmuch as the entire region lay in a sea of waste and scarcity. But if they managed to pick up any food or forage along the way, there was to be no payment for it. Any soldier who had previously served in the Imperial or Bavarian armies could now go back to them; and any other soldier who wanted to pass to that side was also free to go. There would be
an amicable exchange of prisoners. Finally, soldiers forced to remain in Augsburg out of injuries or illness were to be cared for until they could return to their regiments.

There was a certain comradely spirit among soldiers, and sometimes it crossed battle lines. Indeed, that sense of affinity grew stronger during the Thirty Years War, especially when it became the norm, from 1631, to press captured soldiers into the ranks of the winning side. When the Swedish army was shattered at Nördlingen, the victors found that many of their prisoners had previously served in the Imperial army. They were promptly taken back into the Habsburg and Bavarian ranks.

The Swedes had been hands-on witnesses to the effects of starvation, and they had known about the claims concerning cannibalism. Yet when they and the troops under their command left Augsburg, they could say that all things considered, affairs had gone well for them.

The people of the city could say no such thing. In the course of the war, the numbers of their dead climbed grimly. Credited with a population of about forty-five thousand souls at the beginning of the war in 1618, seventeen years later Augsburg had a mere 16,500. The city was still there physically, unlike Magdeburg, but it would have struck merchants and diplomats—travelers who had known it previously—as a specter, a pale eminence.

WAR WENT TO PEOPLE, to food, to supplies; it moved inevitably to the points where these abounded. Not surprisingly, then, all European cities and large towns came out of the late middle ages flanked by defensive walls, enabling them to repel marauding armies. The “laws of war”—and they were nothing more than custom—laid it down that a successful siege would be followed by a sack, unless preceded by a negotiated surrender. But a sack was unlikely, unless there had been sustained combat beforehand, as occurred even in Antwerp.

Yet all the unwritten rules could be broken, and a town might be sacked or spared, despite negotiated arrangements or stubborn resistance. The outcome hinged on the condition of the besieging forces and their officers. In the face of fragile, unruly armies, custom itself held a fragile status.

Loaves of bread are the face of God.
Lazarillo de Tormes
(1553)

In the mid-seventeenth century, an army of twenty thousand men, with their tail of ten to twenty thousand camp followers, had more people than most European cities. Hamburg, Germany's biggest metropolis, had fifty to sixty thousand inhabitants. So if we raise army numbers to thirty or forty thousand foot and horse, adding next their followers in the baggage train, we have a multitude that would have swamped all but Europe's six or seven largest urban clusters: London (with nearly 400,000 people), Paris (250,000), Naples (250,000), Amsterdam (135,000), or Seville and Rome (125,000 each).

In 1600, Europe already had 220 places of more than ten thousand souls each. Leipzig, for example, had fifteen thousand, Turin and Bristol twenty thousand, La Rochelle more than twenty thousand, and Ghent thirty thousand. All were walled in, and the same was true, at least in Germany, of some 40 percent of towns with populations of less than a thousand residents. Most of the rest, little towns and large villages, lay open to the battering of armies.

The numbers explain the title of this chapter. Even a small army, such as the ten thousand mercenaries who marched into Florence in
November 1494, was a walking city. The ten thousand were a moving community in daily need of bread, drink, and other foods; and on campaign they would include wagoners, smiths, carpenters, bakers, and other craftsmen. The people of Florence lined the streets to stare at that soldiery and at the king of France, Charles VIII, who rode into the city, “lance on hip and bare sword in hand.” The sound of drums and pipes heightened the strangeness of the scene, as the French crossed the city to receive a blessing in the cathedral. Visibly awed and internally terrified, Florentines knew that they would have to feed and lodge those invaders for days—ten, as it turned out. But the occupation might have lasted for weeks, and this prospect—an experience that would have required close physical contact—was simply unimaginable. The king's men were to be billeted in the city. Days before, many hundreds of houses, now marked up with chalk, had been carefully picked out to host the soldiers. To remove the marks was a capital crime. The matter was evidently serious. Apart from demanding the best beds—in accord with the known behavior of soldiers—that flood of strangers was very likely going to eat Florentines out of house and home. They had already been in the field for more than three months.

When Charles and his soldiers finally left the city on November 28, their hosts turned to intone grateful prayers. But what prayers of gratitude would theirs have been if, instead, they had managed to fend off, keeping it outside their city walls, an army like the one raised by the Emperor Charles V for his invasion of France in 1544? Here was a truly ambulant city: forty-seven thousand men in all, including eighteen thousand Landsknechts, ten thousand Spanish foot soldiers, another ten thousand foot from the Spanish Netherlands, five thousand heavy German cavalry, and another four thousand light horsemen drawn both from Italy and the Low Countries. This moving colony also included fourteen hundred pioneers, two hundred supply wagons with eight horses each, sixty-three large guns pulled by thirty-five hundred horses, and seventy river boats borne on wagons. The boats were designed to be turned into a bridge,
and their crews, too, were in the train. The supply wagons were probably for ammunition and food stocks. Officers and soldiers had their own hundreds of other wagons. And we have yet to mention teamsters, smiths, and camp followers. Moreover, all the men and camp followers to one side, we must not forget the great multitude of horses: twenty thousand at least, since heavy cavalry usually involved an extra two or three horses per knight.

Without detailed descriptions by close witnesses, no historian can turn the spectacle of that Imperial army into accurate historical images. The task passes from history and historians to fiction: the imagination of the novelist.

IN THE UNSANITARY CONDITIONS OF preindustrial Europe, our ambulant cities readily picked up and transmitted epidemic diseases such as plague and typhus. Now they became dying cities.

When an army passed through a village like a flood in, say, southern Germany or northern France, the event—depending upon numbers—might go on for a day or two. The soldiers moved no faster than their baggage and artillery trains, the latter often pulled by oxen. If the local peasants had not already fled in fear, they would never forget the sights and sounds and stink of that endless horde. And if it was an army stricken by disease, the sight would perhaps have struck some witnesses as a thing unearthly, a procession out of hell.

In its pressing search for food and billets, an army could also scatter. When on campaign in the winter, the ambulant cities of the Thirty Years War might have their troops spread out over many miles and, like Ambrogio Spinola's army of 1620–1621, wintering along the middle Rhine, near Mainz, be quartered on more than fifty little towns and villages.

IN THE LATE SPRING of 1704, France was at war with three adversaries: England, the Dutch Republic, and the Empire. The initiative had passed into the hands of the Duke of Marlborough. From a point just northwest of Cologne, he cut a path of 250 miles to the Danube
River, leading an army of nineteen thousand men, but picking up another ten thousand along the way. The march began on May 19 and was completed in a month. It counts as one of the more famous logistical feats in the history of modern warfare.

Getting supplies to Marlborough's army had been carefully planned. Owing to the danger posed by superior enemy forces, the march was meant to be as stealthy and as speedy as possible. Hence there was no question of a tail of camp followers. Three- and four-day stretches of hard marching were broken up by a day of cooking and complete rest. Along the way they were met with provisions supplied by allies. The duke led his army, comprised of British, Dutch, and other soldiers beyond the Moselle River, across the Rhine, through Mainz, past Heidelberg, to Eppingen, Geislingen, and then straight east to Donauwörth, on the Danube, to make contact with the supporting troops of the Emperor Leopold I. His final destination, to be reached in tandem with the emperor's field commander, Prince Eugene of Savoy, would be Blenheim (Blindheim) and his victory over a French army.

Bread, drink, and meat all along the way of that march kept spirits up, and Marlborough's men made good time, doing twelve to thirteen miles a day on their marching days, despite an episode of heavy rains and artillery mired in mud. Once they reached the Danube, to be joined there by the forces of Prince Louis of Baden, they fought and won a costly battle against the high fortress of Schellenburg at Donauwörth (July 2).

But now, having arrived and carrying no foodstuffs in their race to elude the enemy, they had to find their own victuals and fodder. The logistics of food supplies had come to an abrupt halt. Or rather, on the spot, the fundamental logistical problem was converted into a murderous, full-scale assault on Bavaria, whose ruler, the Elector Maximilian Emmanuel, was the ally of the king of France. Sources confirm that Marlborough authorized “free plunder.” And Mrs. Christian Davies, who was with the army disguised as a soldier, observed that “we miserably plundered the poor inhabitants … We spared nothing, killing, burning, or otherwise destroying whatever
we could [not] carry off. The bells of the churches we broke to pieces, that we might bring them away with us.” She grabbed “men's and women's clothes, some velvets, and about a hundred Dutch caps … plundered from a shop; all of which I sold by the lump to a Jew, who followed the army to purchase our pillage.” She also “got several pieces of plate, as spoons, cups, mugs, etc, all of which the same conscionable merchant had at his own price.”

Moving his troops swiftly over the Bavarian countryside and through some four hundred villages, Marlborough's campaign of plunder, sacking, and burning brought two satisfactions: booty (payment) and food for his soldiers, and the dispersal of Bavarian troops, who had been intended to link up with French forces and to fight the duke's army. In fact, the rape of Bavaria came close to splitting the elector away from his French allies.