Summary: Through eyewitness accounts and harrowing detail, Lauro Martines’ book paints a grim portrait of premodern warfare, not as grand battles between armies but as prolonged campaigns of starvation, pillaging, and social collapse. Armies devastated both enemy and friendly territory alike, consuming entire regions’ food supplies and triggering waves of famine, cannibalism, and mass civilian death.
Lauro Martines’ book Furies: War in Europe, 1450–1700 powerfully illustrates the impact of war and war-driven famines. In 1633, during the Thirty Years War, Benedictine monk Maurus Friesenegger described Italian and Spanish soldiers with “blackened and yellowed faces,” who were “emaciated, only half dressed or in tatters.” In 1636, the archbishop of Burgos wrote to King Philip IV that most conscripts from his diocese “die of hunger before they reach the garrisons.”
Civilians also died of hunger as armies passed through their villages. To the agricultural laborers along an army’s route, even friendly (as opposed to enemy) troops could cause a food shortage. In Friesenegger’s firsthand account, he notes, “I can’t really say whether more was stolen by foreigners or by natives.”
In the Early Modern Era, “an army of twenty thousand men . . . exceeded the population of most European cities; and when that winding horde of soldiers, with ten to fifteen thousand horses, set out on campaign, it could easily eat up, in a few days, all the food and fodder in the adjacent villages and countryside for many miles around.” Armed runaway conscripts also ate their way through villages. “Desertion was rife, and in the early eighteenth century gangs of disciplined deserters occasionally terrorized rural communities.”
Foreign armies also famously pillaged without mercy. In 1710, an army composed of more than ten thousand of the Dutch Republic’s mercenaries descended upon Rumegies in France, and the diarist Alexandre Dubois recorded that “they destroyed everything. They took fifty cows and thirty horses; and having stolen things at will . . . they violated some of the women and killed several villagers with staff blows.” He observed that in less than three months, 180 villagers died, many from malnutrition rather than direct violence. Dubois wrote that survivors turned in desperation to eating the sort of bread “that dogs would not have eaten the year before.” In the 1630s, “the Hessian countryside was made desolate. Meat became a rarity, while ‘meager handfuls of grain’ were about as much of this substance as villagers were likely to see.”
Fearing pillaging soldiers, peasants and rural folk often fled to the nearest walled city—but these offered little protection from starvation if they were sieged. In the siege of the port city of La Rochelle in 1628, “some fifteen thousand Rochelais perished, mostly from starvation, out of a population of eighteen to twenty thousand inhabitants.”
From late 1572 to August 1573, the hilltop town of Sancerre in central France endured a brutal nine-month siege by a royal army during the war between France’s Catholics and Huguenot Protestants. Jean de Léry, a Huguenot pastor who lived through the siege, documented the ordeal. Léry relates how, after the people of Sancerre finished eating their working animals such mules and horses, they consumed their pets:
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 Lery 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.”
Léry also wrote of how the starving denizens of Sancerre ate nonfood objects of many kinds: weeds, shrubbery, straw, candle fat, and “not only white parchment, but also letters, title deeds, printed books, and manuscripts.”
[Léry] tells his readers how the Sancerrois, in their feverish search for food, cooked animal skins and leather, including harnesses, parchment, letters, books, and the membranes of drums. Some of the people who perished in Sancerre also ate pulverized bones and the hooves of horses. The skins, he tells us, including drumheads, were soaked for a day or two . . . They were then well scraped with a knife and boiled for the better part of a day, until they became tender and soft. This was determined “by scratching at the skins with your fingers” . . . Now, like tripe, they could be cut up into little pieces.
Many ate horse excrement “with great avidity,” according to Léry, combing the streets for “every kind of ordure,” whose “stink alone was enough to poison those who handled it, let alone the ones who ate it.” “I can affirm that human excrement was collected to be eaten,” Léry further laments.
Finally, some people turned to cannibalism. Léry wrote of how a grape-grower named Simon Potard, his wife, and an old woman in their household, had together eaten the brains, liver, and innards of Simon’s daughter, who was about three years old. Léry personally saw “the cooked tongue, finger” and other bodily remains of the toddler in a cooking pot, “mixed with vinegar, salt, and spices, and about to be put on the fire and cooked.” The cannibals claimed they only dismembered and ate the little girl after she had died of hunger, although many suspected she had been killed to be eaten. The townspeople had Simon “burned alive, his wife . . . strangled, and [the] body [of the old woman in their household] was dug out of its grave and burned. She had died on the day after their arrest.” Presumably the old woman died of starvation, despite her cannibalistic attempt to ward off that fate.
The harsh punishment was enacted because, as Léry put it, “it was to be feared—we had already seen the signs—that with the famine getting ever worse, the soldiers and the people would have given themselves not only to eating the bodies of those who had died a natural death, and those who had been killed in war or in other ways, but also to killing one another for food.”
The pattern of escalating desperation as starvation set in unfolded in every city under siege. During the Siege of Augsburg (1634–1635),
Pack animals, horses, and pets had disappeared from streets and houses. Eaten. Animal skins had gone the same way. All eatable greenery must also have disappeared before the onset of that icy winter, when the waters of the encircling moat, outside the city walls, froze over. As for eating carrion, some time earlier, the famine-stricken had been seen to gnaw at dead horses rotting in the streets. The eating of human flesh was inevitable. And the subject now broke into reports and conversation. Grave diggers complained that many bodies were brought to them missing breasts and other fleshy parts. What to make of this was only too obvious. “To his horror . . . a Swedish soldier who had stolen a woman’s shopping basket discovered flesh from a corpse.
Johann Georg Mayer, a neighboring village’s pastor who was staying in Augsburg, noted that due to widespread cannibalism “the bodies of the living had thus become the graves of the dead.”
Similarly, during the 1590 Siege of Paris, “hunger turned into keening famine” and dogs and cats were soon consumed, eventually followed by cannibalism.
[Bernardino de Mendoza], the Spanish ambassador who had witnessed strident hunger among Spain’s soldiers in the Netherlands in the 1570s, made a remarkable proposal to the city council. Thinking of food for the needy, he recommended that they mill and grind the bones of the dead in the Cemetery of the Innocents, mix the bone meal with water, and turn it into a breadlike substance. No one present appears to have objected to the recipe. It was also on this occasion, probably, that Mendoza spoke of a recent incident in which the Persians had reduced a Turkish fortress to the eating of a substance “made of ground-down and powdered bone.” With so many of the city’s poor having already eaten cooked animal skins, grass, weeds, garbage, vermin, the skulls of cats and dogs, and every kind of ordure, Parisians now ate the bones of their dead in the form of bone-meal bread. Reports of cannibalism surfaced insistently. The anonymous witness gives an account—one of the most detailed—of a Parisian lady whose two children . . . had starved to death. She dismembered, cooked, and ate them.
Amid the siege, Paris likely saw “ thirty thousand casualties: the results of starvation, malnutrition, sickness, and the violence of soldiers outside the city gates, where the starving often scurried about in search of something to eat.”
As food ran out, a besieged city would often expel residents deemed to be mere “useless mouths.” In 1554, a group of children fleeing besieged Siena, orphans from that city’s Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, were killed when “a company of Spanish and German mercenaries pounced on one of the convoys and its charge of more than 250 children, ranging in ages from six to ten.” More expelled starving peasants tried to escape the city, but “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.” Soldiers often cut the ears and noses from people trying to escape sieges. The starving women expelled in 1406 from the besieged city of Pisa met that gruesome fate:
When the first group of poor women, now expelled from Pisa, appeared outside the city walls, Florence’s mercenaries refrained from killing them, in a show of mercy, but cut off the backs of their skirts and all the clothing over their backsides. They then proceeded to brand their buttocks with the fleur-de-lis, one of the devices on Florence’s coat of arms . . . When branding failed to stop the exit of poor women, the soldiers took to cutting off their noses and then driving them back again.
After the siege succeeded and the Florentines entered Pisa, they were faced with a terrifying scene of starvation:
Florentine reported that the appearance of the Pisans “was repugnant and frightening, with all their faces hollowed out by hunger.” Some of the soldiers went into the city carrying bread. They threw it at the starving inhabitants, at children in particular, and the reactions they got were shocking. They were seeing, they thought, “ravenous birds of prey,” with siblings tearing at each other for chunks of bread, and children fighting with their parents.
The food blockades were enforced with an iron fist. In 1634, a young peasant boy was killed outside the besieged city of Augsburg and his corpse was put on display with three larks tied to his belt; he was executed for the crime of attempting to sneak those larks into the city as food. During the Siege of Siena in 1554, the Marquis of Marignano, had surrounding trees “festooned with the bodies” of men executed by hanging for breaking the blockade.
The soldiers themselves often died of starvation, too. For example, in 1648, the Earl of Inchiquin, complained that “divers [sic] of my men have dyed [sic] of hunger after they lived a while upon catts [sic] and dogs.” In fact, “the mortality rate in French armies, even in peacetime, could attain a yearly average of 25 percent, while, for the entire century, European armies in general seem to have been ravaged at the rate of about 20 to 25 percent per year.”
The soldiers shared much in common with those they pillaged and starved. “Since more than 60 percent of soldiers came from humble rural and market-town stock, peasants in wartime were likely to be the victims, for the most part, of men who were much like themselves.”
