Furies: War in Europe, 1450-1700
Unlucky were civilians of early modern Europe in the path of an army on the march or in a city under siege. No safer were soldiers, more apt to die from disease and starvation than battle. Vignettes of horror from the era’s maelstroms, grandly titled the Thirty Years’ War or the Dutch Revolt, abound in Martines’ treatment, which tries to raise ethical questions about panoramas of war. Discounting princes’ justifications for war, which come across as aristocratic brigandage in his text, Martines sets aside conventional military history of campaigns and leaders to show the hand of Mars on the peasants and villagers it touched. It coerced them into armies, but Mars’ royal sponsors failed to render promised pay and supplies. To square accounts, their generals instead let soldiers pillage the countryside and sack cities, examples Martines draws from eyewitnesses to plunder, arson, and killing. Ending by asking historians—he is a specialist on Renaissance Florence—to consider morality in their political and military works about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Martines poises an agenda atop graphic historical envisioning of what he decries. --Gilbert Taylor