“The Democratic Republic of Congo and the M23 rebel group signed on Saturday a framework agreement for a peace deal aimed at ending fighting in eastern Congo that has killed thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands more this year.

The agreement was signed by representatives from both sides at a ceremony in the Qatari capital Doha.

It was the latest of several documents that have been signed in recent months as part of efforts, backed by the United States and Qatar, to end the decades-long conflict in Congo that has often threatened to escalate into a full-blown regional war.

The framework was described by U.S. and Qatari officials as an important step to peace but one of many that lie ahead.”

From Reuters.

“A purported letter of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), offering to give up arms in view of the changed world and country’s circumstances, albeit with certain conditions, appeared in Chhattisgarh on Tuesday (September 16, 2025)…

‘In order to take forward the process of peace talks, we are making it clear that, in view of the changed world and country’s circumstances, as well as the requests made by the Prime Minister, Home Minister and senior police officers to give up arms and join the mainstream, we have decided to give up arms. We have decided to declare a temporary halt to the armed struggle. In future, we will fight with all political parties and struggling organisations on public issues,’ the letter read.

It added that the banned outfit was ‘ready to talk to the Union Home Minister or persons appointed by him or a delegation on this subject’.”

From The Hindu.

Summary: Some influential voices today romanticize feudalism, but the reality of feudalism was misery for nearly everyone. Life under that system meant hunger, disease, violence, and lives cut brutally short. By contrast, modern societies have lifted billions out of poverty and extended life far beyond what kings and queens once knew. Progress comes from freedom, innovation, and hard work, not a return to the rule of lords and monarchs.

On a recent podcast, Tucker Carlson praised feudalism as “so much better than what we have now” because a ruler is “vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.” This romantic view of medieval hierarchy ignores a brutal reality: For most people, feudalism meant grinding poverty, disease, and early death.

As Gale L. Pooley and I found in our 2022 book Superabundance, society in preindustrial Europe was bifurcated between a small minority of the very rich and the vast majority of the very poor. One 17^th-century observer estimated that the French population consisted of “10 percent rich, 50 percent very poor, 30 percent who were nearly beggars, and 10 percent who were actually beggars.” In 16^th-century Spain, the Italian historian Francesco Guicciardini wrote, “except for a few Grandees of the Kingdom who live with great sumptuousness … others live in great poverty.”

An account from 18^th-century Naples recorded beggars finding “nocturnal asylum in a few caves, stables or ruined houses” where “they are to be seen there lying like filthy animals, with no distinction of age or sex.” Children fared the worst. Paris, according to the French author Louis-Sébastien Mercier, had “7,000 to 8,000 abandoned children out of some 30,000 births around 1780.” These children were then taken—three at a time—to the poor house, with carriers often finding at least “one of them dead” upon arrival.

People were constantly hungry, and starvation was only ever a few bad harvests away. In 1800, even France, one of the world’s richest countries, had an average food supply of only 1,846 calories per person per day. In other words, the majority of the population was undernourished. (Given that the average person needs about 2,000 calories a day.) That, in the words of the Italian historian Carlo Cipolla, gave rise to “serious forms of avitaminosis,” or medical conditions resulting from vitamin deficiencies. There was also, he noted, a prevalence of intestinal worms, which is “a slow, disgusting, and debilitating disease that caused a vast amount of human misery and ill health.”

Sanitation was a nightmare. As the English historian Lawrence Stone wrote in his book The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, “city ditches, now often filled with stagnant water, were commonly used as latrines; butchers killed animals in their shops and threw the offal of the carcasses into the streets; dead animals were left to decay and fester where they lay.” London had “poor holes” or “large, deep, open pits in which were laid the bodies of the poor, side by side, row by row.” The stench was overwhelming, for “great quantities of human excrement were cast into the streets.”

The French historian Fernand Braudel found that in 15^th-century England, “80 percent of private expenditure was on food, with 20 percent spent on bread alone.” An account of 16^th-century life in rural Lombardy noted that peasants lived on wheat alone: Their “expenses for clothing and other needs are practically non-existent.” Per Cipolla, “One of the main preoccupations of hospital administration was to ensure that the clothes of the deceased should not be usurped but should be given to lawful inheritors. During epidemics of plague, the town authorities had to struggle to confiscate the clothes of the dead and to burn them: people waited for others to die so as to take over their clothes.”

Prior to mechanized agriculture, there were no food surpluses to sustain idle hands, not even those of children. And working conditions were brutal. A 16^th-century ordinance in Lombardy found that supervisors in rice fields “bring together a large number of children and adolescents, against whom they practice barbarous cruelties … [They] do not provide these poor creatures with the necessary food and make them labor as slaves by beating them and treating them more harshly than galley slaves, so that many of the children die miserably in the farms and neighboring fields.”

Such violence pervaded daily life. Medieval homicide rates reached 150 murders per 100,000 people in 14^th-century Florence. In 15^th-century England, it hovered around 24 per 100,000. (In 2020, the Italian homicide rate was 0.48 per 100,000. It was 0.95 per 100,000 in England and Wales in 2024.) People resolved their disputes through physical violence because no effective legal system existed. The serfs—serfdom in Russia was abolished only in 1861—lived as property, bound to land they could never own, subject to masters who viewed them as assets rather than humans. And between 1500 and the first quarter of the 17^th century, Europe’s great powers were at war nearly 100 percent of the time.

Carlson’s nostalgia for feudalism is not unique on the MAGA right. The influential American blogger Curtis Yarvin, for example, attributes to monarchs such as France’s Louis XIV decisive and long-term leadership that modern democracies apparently lack. But less frequently mentioned is how, for example, that same Louis ruined his country during the War of the Spanish Succession. As Winston Churchill wrote in Marlborough: His Life and Times,

After more than sixty years of his reign, more than thirty years of which had been consumed in European war, the Great King saw his people face to face with actual famine. Their sufferings were extreme. In Paris the death-rate doubled. Even before Christmas the market-women had marched to Versailles to proclaim their misery. In the countryside the peasantry subsisted on herbs or roots or flocked in despair into the famishing towns. Brigandage was widespread. Bands of starving men, women, and children roamed about in desperation. Châteaux and convents were attacked; the market-place of Amiens was pillaged; credit failed. From every province and from every class rose the cry for bread and peace.

The Great Enrichment, a phrase coined by my Cato Institute colleague Deirdre McCloskey, of the past 200 years or so lifted billions from the misery that defined human existence for millennia. It was driven by market economies and limits on the rulers’ arbitrary power, not feudal hierarchy.

There are many plausible reasons for Carlson’s (and Yarvin’s) openness to giving pre-modern institutions such as feudalism and absolute monarchy a second look. One is a lack of appreciation for the reality of the daily existence of ordinary people whose lives, in the immortal words of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, were “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Another is their apparent conviction that the United States is, in the words of President Donald Trump, “a failed nation.” Except that we are nothing of the sort. The United States has plenty of problems, but the lives of ordinary Americans in 2025 are incomparably better than those of the kings and queens of the past. Our standard of living is, in fact, the envy of the world, which is the most parsimonious explanation for millions of people trying to get here.

Solving the problems that remain and will arise in the future will depend on careful evaluation of evidence, historical experience, reason, and hard work. Catastrophism does not help, for it rejects human agency by declaring that the future is already decided. Hunkering down under a protective shield of feudal hierarchy or placing our trust in a modern incarnation of Louis XIV is no guarantee of success. We tried it before, and the results were disastrous.

This article originally appeared in The Dispatch on August 26, 2025.

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.”