288Chapter 15
de la Barca (1600–81). The Netherlands, which after
the 1590s enjoyed prosperity and internal peace in the
midst of war, surpassed its own earlier achievements in
the visual arts and became the center of a school of
painting that influenced artists throughout northern
Europe.
But if learning and the arts flourished, at least in
some places, the struggles of the age were often highly
destructive of political and economic life. This resulted
primarily from the ways in which war was organized
and fought. Armies had become vastly larger and more
expensive in the course of the sixteenth century, and
the wars were almost interminable. Given their political
objectives, it could not have been otherwise. The
French Wars of Religion were a struggle between two,
and at times three, irreconcilable segments of the coun-
try’s elite. Most of the battles were classic cavalry ac-
tions that resulted in a clear victory for one side or the
other, but which could not end the war. Only the de-
struction of a major segment of the population could
have prevented the losers from trying again.
In the Netherlands, the primary goal of both sides
was to take and hold land or, conversely, to deny it to
the enemy. After 1572 the war became a series of sieges
that, thanks to the defensive value of the bastion trace,
lasted months if not years. Both sides tended to avoid
battles because their troops were, in the short term at
least, irreplaceable. Sixteenth-century tactics demanded
professional soldiers. The recruitment, training, and
movement of replacements to the war zone took
months, and positions under constant enemy pressure
could not be left even partially defenseless.
If the war in the Netherlands was virtually static,
the situation in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War
was too fluid. Central Europe had become a kind of
power vacuum into which unpredictable forces were
drawn. Bloody battles were fought only to see the vic-
tor confronted with yet another set of enemies. It is
hard to imagine what, other than sheer exhaustion,
might have ended the struggle. War, as Michael
Roberts has said, “eternalized itself.”
No early modern state could afford this. Even the
wealthiest European monarchies lacked the ability to
recruit and maintain full-scale standing armies. They re-
lied instead on a core of subject troops (or, as in the
French Wars of Religion, troops personally and ideo-
logically committed to a cause), supplemented by a far
larger number of mercenaries. The latter were usually
recruited by contractors who commanded them in the
field. If the mercenaries were not paid, they left; if they
stayed, they had little incentive to risk their lives un-
necessarily. Their employers had little control over
their actions, and even subject troops were capable of
mutiny if they were left too long unpaid.
War, in other words, was a chaotic business. Rank
in the modern sense meant little because officers some-
times refused to obey the orders of those who might
have been their inferiors in civilian life. There were no
uniforms, and weapons were not for the most part stan-
dardized. Logistics were a nightmare. An army might
number anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 combatants.
The troops were housed either in makeshift field shel-
ters or quartered on the civilian populations of the war
zones, which meant that civilians might be forced to
provide food and housing for months on end. The
close contact between soldiers and civilians bred hostil-
ity and led to chronic breakdowns in military disci-
pline. To complicate matters further, camp followers
numbered at least three and often six for each combat-
ant. These women and children were the support
troops who made shelter, foraged for food, and nursed
the sick and wounded. No army could function without
them, but together with the men they made up a soci-
ety that lived by its own rules with little concern for
civilian norms.
The system reached a peak of absurdity during the
Thirty Years’ War when contractors such as the imper-
ial general Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583–1634) of-
fered recruits a month’s pay—which they had to give
back to pay for their arms and equipment—and then
marched them so far from their homes that they could
not easily return. From that point onward they were ex-
pected to live off the land. Such practices account for
much of the dislocation caused by the German wars. It
was safer to join an army with one’s family than to re-
main at home to be robbed, raped, or killed by maraud-
ing soldiers (see document 15.5). Whole villages were
depopulated only to reconstitute themselves wherever
they found themselves when the war ended.
When a state tried to provide adequately for its
troops, the costs were prohibitive and could lead to so-
cial breakdown. The fate of Spain is an example. In the
1570s Philip II was spending 140 percent of his annual
revenues on warfare. The uncovered balance was pro-
vided by loans, often at high rates, from Italian or
Dutch bankers. Not even American silver could long
sustain this kind of expenditure, and in time the econ-
omy of Castile was badly damaged (see table 15.2).
The other Spanish kingdoms were exempt from most
forms of taxation, but in Castile taxes increased to the
point that peasants were forced from the land and took
refuge in the cities where the church periodically dis-