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The World Of The Siege In New Perspective 21

Chapter 2 The World of the Siege in New Perspective: the Populace during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648)

Sigrun Haude

Early modern military history has seen stimulating changes in the last few de- cades. After the traditional focus on battles and military leaders, and a lively debate about the so-called ‘Military Revolution’ – if and when it occurred, and what its principle features were – military scholars are increasingly turning their attention to sieges. Frank Tallett provides a useful summary of this histo- riography, which contends that early modern warfare “was not primarily char- acterized by pitched battles at all, but rather by sieges and what would now be called ‘low intensity operations’: skirmishes, ambushes, raids, forays against civilians and prisoner-taking expeditions.”1 Our love affair with big battles, such as at Breitenfeld (1631) and Lützen (1632), Tallett suggests, has blinded us to the fact that “[b]attles remained relatively infrequent events, and it was the siege that predominated.”2 Tallett points to new-style fortifications – espe- cially the trace italienne – that changed warfare forever, demanding ever larger armies and tying up a commander’s energy and resources for months. His ex- amples from throughout Europe describe sieges that lasted from ten months to over three years, but even blockades as ‘brief’ as forty to sixty days were thor- oughly taxing.3 In our heightened attention to sieges, the focus is generally on the logistics of the operation, its strategists, and the complex conditions (political, geo- graphical, etc.) under which it unfolds. The following analysis reflects on these military maneuvers from a point of view that is rarely considered in siege war- fare studies: the perspective of the populace. This investigation explores how people experienced these sieges, and whether their testimonies can expand our understanding of siege warfare. Our exploration will start by listening to several contemporary narratives about advancing troops and what this meant for the authors and the people around them. In a second step, we will examine

1 Frank Tallett, War and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1495–1715 (London, 1992), p. 3. 2 Ibid., p. 66. 3 Ibid., p. 51.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004395695_003 22 Haude how these experiences reflect on our perspective of sieges. Insights on how society suffered through the various military campaigns are less readily avail- able than testimonies about the war’s predominant tacticians and command- ers, but in recent years ever more scholars, including myself, have turned toward the war up close to comprehend people’s experiences of and agency during the conflict.4 This initiative has centered on ‘autobiographical’ ac- counts.5 Notably, in the first half of the seventeenth century the lines between the lit- erary forms of autobiographies, diaries, and other chronological accounts were fluid.6 Scholars have underlined that such narratives, unlike their post-Enlight- enment counterparts, focused little on self-reflection or the construction of an individual personality. Rather than confidently arranging one’s personal his- tory from hindsight, these texts frequently listed events or experiences chrono-

4 See especially the work of Hans Medick, particularly the volume co-edited with Benigna von Krusenstjern, Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe: Der Dreißigjährige Krieg aus der Nähe (Ver­ öffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte), vol. 148 (Göttingen, 1999). See also Sigrun Haude, “The Experience of War,” in Research Companion to the Thirty Years War, ed. Olaf Asbach, Peter Schroeder (Farnham, 2014), pp. 257–268. 5 For literature foregrounding these autobiographical texts, see, for example, Benigna von Krusenstjern, “Buchhalter ihres Lebens: Über Selbstzeugnisse aus dem 17. Jahrhundert,” in Das dargestellte Ich: Studien zu Selbstzeugnissen des späteren Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Arnold et al. (Selbstzeugnisse des Mittelalters und der beginnenden Neuzeit), vol. 1 (Bochum, 1999), pp. 139–146; eadem, Selbstzeugnisse der Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges: Beschreibendes Verzeichnis (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit), vol. 6 (Berlin, 1997); eadem, “Was sind Selbstzeugnisse? Begriffskritische und quellenkundliche Überlegungen anhand von Beispielen aus dem 17. Jahrhundert,” Historische Anthropologie 2 (1994), 462–471; and Geoff Mortimer, Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War, 1618–1648 (New York, 2002). There has also been ample discussion over the terminology of these texts. James S. Amelang describes autobiographical texts as “any literary form that expresses lived experience from a first person point of view.” Idem, “Vox Populi: Popular Autobiographies as Sources for Early Modern Urban History,” Urban History 20 (1993), 30–42, here p. 33. See also Kaspar von Greyerz’s assessment of autobiographical sources (in this case autobiographies and diaries) in “Religion in the Life of German and Swiss Autobiographers (Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries),” in Religion and Society in Early-Modern Europe 1500–1800, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz (Winchester, 1984), pp. 223–241, and Benigna von Krusenstjern, “Was sind Selbstzeugnisse?,” pp. 462–471. Winfried Schulze, following the Dutch scholars Jacob Presser and Rudolf Decker, prefers the term ‘Ego-Dokumente’ to ‘Selbstzeugnisse.’ The argument is that ‘Ego-Dokumente’ include both free and forced testimonies. Thus, tax records, interrogations, visitations, and court re- cords can also be utilized as documents pointing toward the self. See his “Vorbemerkung” and his Ego-Dokumente: Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte (Berlin, 1996), pp. 9–30. For more recent discussions, see the special issue of German History 28, no. 3 (2010) that is dedicated to ego-documents. 6 Kaspar von Greyerz, Vorsehungsglaube und Kosmologie: Studien zu englischen Selbstzeugnissen des 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1990), p. 16.