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Furies: War in Europe 1450-1700

Lauro Martines

3.62 · Rating details · 267 ratings · 35 reviews

We think of the Renaissance as a shining era of human achievementa pinnacle of artistic genius and humanist brilliance, the time of Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Montaigne. Yet it was also an age of constant, harrowing warfare. Armies, not philosophers, shaped the face of Europe as modern nation-states emerged from feudal society.

In Furies, one of the leading scholars of ...more

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Hardcover, 320 pages

Published January 15th 2013 by Bloomsbury Press (first published January 1st 2013)

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May 04, 2013 Donald Luther rated it really liked it

In my very first class in my very first college course in History (Western Civ at the University of Hartford), Professor Brayfield said this: 'History is the imaginative re-creation of the past.' I have never forgotten that definition, and it's always been behind what I tried to do in any class I taught.

Lauro Martines has written a study that allows one to add significant elements to that re-creation: when treating wars in the early modern period, his book gives striking and memorable details ab In my very first class in my very first college course in History (Western Civ at the University of Hartford), Professor Brayfield said this: 'History is the imaginative re-creation of the past.' I have never forgotten that definition, and it's always been behind what I tried to do in any class I taught.

Lauro Martines has written a study that allows one to add significant elements to that re-creation: when treating wars in the early modern period, his book gives striking and memorable details about what war did to ordinary people--the soldiers, the villagers, the city-dwellers.

Too often classroom treatment of war focuses on the '3 C's': Causes, Course and Consequences. This leaves out those who were most directly affected by the events of combat. People in cities besieged; farmers and villagers who were in the way of meandering armies; women who were raped; soldiers and their train of camp followers. The people who actually fought the battles planned by generals who carried out the wishes of political leaders. The people who died and were wounded. The people whose livelihood was disrupted or destroyed by rampaging armies.

It is not an easy read. Martines' organisation does not allow for a chronological understanding what happened in the Thirty Years' War, as opposed to the French Wars of Religion or the Dutch War for Independence. But his point is that in this early modern period, war was of a piece, and the behaviour of soldiers and their officers and their treatment of civilians varied little during these 350 years. The book marks off the period from the beginnings of modern state machinery to its full development. What we are watching is the growth of one key aspect of state power: its ability to wage war, whose purpose is the aggrandisement of the state (or the state's personification in the prince). I should add here that a very large element of 'Furies' treats the ability of the state to pay for these wars--where did the money to hire and equip armies come from? For economic historians, there is a remarkable revelation about the extent of deficit spending in the early modern period.

It can be confusing at times. Very often those who served in one war will also turn up in another (French officers who served in the Italian Wars will soon be killing Frenchmen over religion). Like I said, this is occasionally a little disorienting. But his point is not about the individuals who were involved, but rather about the effects of war on those who are swept up in war's events. And how the need to understand what happened to the victims of war allows courses in early modern Europe to present all the colours of the period. Not just the garish colours of war's glory, but also the dull earth tones of the impact of war on those who would just want it to go away. ...more

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Jul 06, 2015 Myke Cole rated it liked it

Martines is to be commended for deliberately breaking with the tradition of focusing on everything but the hardships and horrible impact of war and military machines. This is the first book I have ever read that focuses exclusively on the ills of armed conflict, both on the civilizations they ravage, and on the military members themselves.

But the book ultimately failed for me on two counts: Reader expectations and lack of a cohesive narrative. This book could have been more accurately titled: th ...more

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Sep 29, 2014 Krishna rated it really liked it

A clear-eyed look at the way early modern states in Europe waged war in the late medieval period. Driven by the overweening ambitions of kings and princes and under the cover of deepening religious schisms, war was a hugely disorganized, wasteful, cruel and destructive affair. Weak tax bases, creaky logistics, rampant disease, and the "total war" mentality engendered by religious bigotry created a chaotic environment in which the outcome of any battlefield encounter was as much a result of chanc A clear-eyed look at the way early modern states in Europe waged war in the late medieval period. Driven by the overweening ambitions of kings and princes and under the cover of deepening religious schisms, war was a hugely disorganized, wasteful, cruel and destructive affair. Weak tax bases, creaky logistics, rampant disease, and the "total war" mentality engendered by religious bigotry created a chaotic environment in which the outcome of any battlefield encounter was as much a result of chance, as it was of tactics.

But Martines demonstrates that the entire "complex of war" was not without its logic; all the individual parts depended on each other to create the horror of war. States did not maintain standing armies, and kings and princes relied on feudal vassals to provide the soldiery -- and these in turn were impressed into service from the lowest classes: peasants, ex-convicts, mercenaries, cutthroats and criminals. Their leaders did not give these soldiers any respect or consideration, regarding them as nothing more than cannon fodder. These soldiers went often unpaid and underfed, forcing them to live off the land. Armies ate their way through the land like locusts, preying on peasants just like them. The limitations on the food supply also imposed a limitation on the size of armies -- forty to fifty thousand was the maximum size that any army could sustain. With no pay coming in, soldiers were motivated by war booty, obtained from the sack of cities. So both soldiers and generals were keen on the sieges of cities -- if the cities refused to surrender, starvation ensued for both the besieged and the besiegers as the food supplies in the surrounding countryside soon ran out. To feed themselves, armies had to be mobile. The besieged resorted to eating household pets, vermin, grass and leaves, leather parts, and even cannibalism as defending cliques, often led by apocalyptic religious visions, refused to surrender and sieges dragged on. Massacres were common, and whole populations could be put to the sword and the women raped, for defying an invading army. Low nutrition and unsanitary conditions often led to epidemics, further weakening armies on the march. War-making was also expensive, and often put kings in thrall to bankers and moneylenders -- they in turn, knew that their loans may not be repaid reliably, and charged higher interest rates. Late medieval war-making laid the groundwork for the emergence of modern banking.

One image from Martines sticks in the mind. This is of an army on the march. A large army of 40,000 or 50,000 soldiers was often bigger than most urban centers in medieval Europe. For isolated villages, an army of this size would appear interminable as it streamed through their streets, first the outriders and scouts, then the mass of the army itself, soldiers silent and hollow-cheeked with hunger, diseased and harboring horrific festering wounds, starving pack animals and camp followers, the clank of weapons, the dust of marching feet.

Princes were nothing more than glorified warlords, and floating an army often required no more than an act of will -- once in the field, armies were expected to feed themselves and earn their pay from war booty. This explains how some countries like Sweden, hitherto impoverished and on the fringes of Europe, suddenly came to prominence. Gustavus Adolphus, the king of Sweden was a leading champion in the Protestant cause during the Thirty Years War, and led a lifetime of almost incessant warfare and briefly made his country one of the leading powers of Europe.

While reading the Furies, one cannot but think of books like Victor Hansen's Carnage and Culture, that argue that there is a superior Western way of war, that has allowed Europe to beat all its non-European adversaries over thousands of years. But Hanson's examples jump from early ones drawn from the Greco-Persian wars (Thermopylae, Salamis), Alexanders's campaigns (Gaugamela), and the Roman Republic (Cannae) to one isolated example in the middle ages (Poitiers, 732 AD), and then fast forwards eight centuries to the colonial and modern periods of European ascendancy (Tenochtitlan, Lepanto, Rorke's Drift, Midway, and Tet). We are asked to believe that (A) there is something identifiably "European" about the protagonists of these battles, (B) that this "Europeanness" remained invariant over 2500 years; and (C) that this "Western Way of War" succeeds because Western armies "often fight with and for a sense of legal freedom" (Hanson, 2001, p. 21), their armies are "products of civic militarism or constitutional governments" (p. 21), their soldiers are "citizens," "Western militaries put a high premium on individualism" (p. 22), and "soldiers ... commanders ... and generals all voiced their ideas with a freedom unknown" (p. 22) among their enemies. Hanson sees European warriors as rugged, freedom-loving, property-owning individualists, coming from law-abiding, constitutional societies, going to war against despotic, tyrannical, slavish non-European powers.

Martines's account of medieval European war shows how off the mark Hanson is. Even if the ideal of the free, propertied Athenian citizen-soldier (the hoplite) was true to begin with (and there is reason to suppose it was not since Greek city states were rigidly hierarchical slave-owning societies), there was no continuity in this tradition. The vision that Martines paints of the medieval European soldier -- unpaid, famished, diseased, brutalized -- evokes pity and bears no resemblance to the all-conquering European colonialist of a few centuries later. What led to this transformation? One can only presume that the incessant, horrific, all-consuming warfare of the late medieval centuries coarsened and brutalized societies, loosened moral restrictions on "total warfare" against civilian populations, competitively improved weapons, logistics and tactics, bred immunity to diseases, and created the industrial and financial apparatus of warfare that came in good stead when European armies encountered non-Western societies in the early modern period.

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Jan 09, 2013 Daniel rated it it was amazing

This is a social history of war in Early Modern Europe, a time in which the continent was ravaged in succession by the Italian Wars, the French Wars of religion, the Eighty Years' War, the Thirty Years War, the Franco-Dutch War and the Nine Years' War, among others. However, the organization of the book is not chronological but thematic.

The focus is not in high-minded diplomacy or in battle tactics. In fact, the author maintains that too much emphasis has been traditionally given to these aspect This is a social history of war in Early Modern Europe, a time in which the continent was ravaged in succession by the Italian Wars, the French Wars of religion, the Eighty Years' War, the Thirty Years War, the Franco-Dutch War and the Nine Years' War, among others. However, the organization of the book is not chronological but thematic.

The focus is not in high-minded diplomacy or in battle tactics. In fact, the author maintains that too much emphasis has been traditionally given to these aspects of war. He notes that diplomacy is often just a flimsy facade over stark aggression and, interestingly, that none of the battles of the Thirty Years War was politically decisive.

Instead, the book centers on the plight of the common people. First the soldiers, which despite inflicting horrific suffering on civilians by way of plunder, requisitions and sackings, and acting as a vector for the spread of infection and plague, often were victims as well, pressed in service against their will and going hungry, ragged and unpaid. The book also touches on the often neglected camp followers which accompanied the soldiers.

Armies tended to "live off the land" by extorting food and resources from the inhabitants of those villages unlucky enough to be located in their path. Due to their massive size and the limited agricultural productivity of the time, armies ended up emptying the countryside of anything edible, causing widespread starvation. This focus on the high-level logistical challenges of maintaining an army, combined with the untold suffering on the ground (vividly rendered thanks to quotes from diaries and primary sources) makes for an interesting, if harrowing, read.

Attention is also paid to the role of finance in war. Going into war invariably meant going into debt. Rulers managed to gather enough money get a campaign going, but not enough to pay the soldiers all the way through. Which meant angry and unruly soldiers, which meant sackings like that of Antwerp in 1576 (the "Spanish Fury") or the one that afflicted Rome in 1527.

All in all, I found this to be a fascinating book. ...more

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Oct 08, 2018 loafingcactus rated it liked it

Shelves: history, read-2018

Books on war often focus on grand political themes and grand political persons. The point of this book was to show how war affected everyday people and their everyday towns. The greatest army possible could take 8 days to march past one town, a merely very large one 4 days. Starving soldiers spread out into the country side taking everything the could as a replacement for missing pay and food. Armies simply couldn't march through very sparely populated areas because of this need to plunder to su ...more

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Jan 14, 2013 Loren rated it it was amazing

I really enjoyed this book, It gives alot of insight to the world and things in history that have been skipped over or not examined very closely. I do not even have a passion for history and this book sucked me in and kept me from my family for three days haha! it was just so good! I never thought I would enjoy history so much!

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Feb 05, 2018 Steffan Jones rated it liked it

Shelves: false-plunder

Much like the opening chapter, this non fiction historical book of the stark and brutal consequences to cities, countries, nations and civilians in Early Modern Europe meanders back and forth over around the 250 year period.

It is clearly meticulously researched and brought together but can get a bit repetitive as in different chapters just describe some of the same times and events just with a different focus. Often the information comes from diary observations of a range of sources; e.g. pries Much like the opening chapter, this non fiction historical book of the stark and brutal consequences to cities, countries, nations and civilians in Early Modern Europe meanders back and forth over around the 250 year period.

It is clearly meticulously researched and brought together but can get a bit repetitive as in different chapters just describe some of the same times and events just with a different focus. Often the information comes from diary observations of a range of sources; e.g. priests, nobles, generals, judges and/or soldiers or peddlers themselves.

Highlights include subtler things historian may not always think to include or describe like how much food standard 20,000-80,000 strong armies had to forage, plunder and consume just to survive as they fan out over the dozens of miles of countryside in every direction. Or the details of how soldiers were paid or press gang conscripted.

Another gruesome highlight is the the day by day account of certain sieges where you find out exactly retrogressed how they genuinely progressed from meats, to breads, to rats, cats and dogs, to leather boots and belts to slate, grass and waste then eventually resorting to cannibalism. Tonnages of foodstuffs and how they were transported e.g. the logistics.

The accuracy of the illnesses kill count % and exact costs of things e.g. financing or these armies were also excellent information and how different currencies worked.

There were some problems with the book though mainly around how repetitive it could get in the way things were described or explained. I also wasn't too keen on how often the author returned to the 30 years war which was initially mostly a German/holy roman empire affair. This bothered me a little as there were so many other interesting conflicts in this time period, particularly later on (Great Turkish War, the politics driven War of Spanish Succession etc).

Basically I would say either give every conflict an equal amount of attention or just admit it's mostly focused on the thirty years war. The back and forth madness of the chapters chronologically annoyed me quite a bit too. Other than that this was an interesting book that provides great source material increasing the authenticity of my Historical fiction set between 1679 and 1770. ...more

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Aug 26, 2015 Christopher rated it liked it · review of another edition

An oddly moralistic and incoherent book. It's more or less a broad-stoke denunciation of how brutal warfare in the early modern period could be (FWIW, there's no indication of why the dates 1450-1700 were chosen or what exactly those temporal boundaries signify.) The emphasis is on how savage armies could be to the civilian population in general and the peasantry in particular, and it also talks about how military service was likewise an imposition on the lower classes of the ruling elite. The b An oddly moralistic and incoherent book. It's more or less a broad-stoke denunciation of how brutal warfare in the early modern period could be (FWIW, there's no indication of why the dates 1450-1700 were chosen or what exactly those temporal boundaries signify.) The emphasis is on how savage armies could be to the civilian population in general and the peasantry in particular, and it also talks about how military service was likewise an imposition on the lower classes of the ruling elite. The book is pretty much a work of "advocacy" rather than analysis, and it works by picking out divergent examples of "bad behavior" from quite varied temporal and geographical areas. That is, it's a pastiche that cherry picks evidence and then makes broad generalizations. Now, I'm certainly not denying that war is an unpleasant experience for those caught up in it (who could deny that?), but I got the sense that the material discussed was chosen specifically for how it fits in with the accusatory tone of the book rather than for its representative nature. A large amount of the examples come from the Thirty Years War and the French Wars of Religion of the later 16th century. Surely, those religiously-inspired conflicts were particularly nasty, and it's striking how they dominate the discussion. If the entire period was as bad as the author makes out, why is there so little evidence from other conflicts?

The book has no real thesis. On p. xiv of the "prelude" (whatever that means), the author asks rhetorically: "What, then, to say about what is new or different in this book?" A page of text follows, and as far as I can tell, the question isn't answered and the words that follow don't give a particularly clear indication of what's in the book. So, if the author himself doesn't know the answer to that question (or at least can't express it), that doesn't bode well for the discussion that comes.

The following chapters are all devoted to a particular aspect of war. Most deal with how unpleasant war was to the non-ruling classes (e.g., "Sacking Cities", "Sieges"), but the final chapter ("The State: Emerging Leviathan") talks about the effects of having to finance armies on the expansion of the state in the early modern period. This chapter is entirely out of place given what the author says in his "Afterward." In an emotional denunciation of the activities of rulers in that period, the author indicates that the specious rationalizations used to justify warfare then are so much cant given the realities of war for the general populace:

In the middle of all this woe [i.e., the unpleasantries discussed in the book], for the historian as for the villager, the skills of generals lose all meaning. The knowledge of "weapons systems" fades into irrelevance. Dynastic rights turn into legal abstractions. The "honor" of princes becomes palaver. "Reason of state"… is drawn out and isolated, now fit to be put on trial. In short, from the moment we cut the social history of war away from the bonds of politics and diplomacy, down come all barriers against the raising of moral questions.

That is the substance of the work in a nut shell. The author rejects traditional military history, which (he claims) is either a technical discussion of weapons and tactics or a (literally) bloodless subdiscipline within diplomatic history, which takes for granted the specious reasons used by the princes.

First, even if we grant that military history of the past was mostly interested in guns and generals, does that ipso facto make the study of such things illegitimate, as the author seems to suggest? Are the aims of the states that set those armies so emotionally denounced by the author in fact "meaningless"? By that standard, because the First and Second World Wars were far more horrific in terms of deaths and sufferings inflicted on the general populace, is it wrong to discuss, say, the development of tanks or the military strategy of Tsarist Russia? That's an absurd conclusion. It no doubt is important that the practical consequences of warfare on everyone involved should be always at the forefront of the historian's mind, but the idea that that suffering is the only thing that matters is ridiculous. Neither in the seventeenth nor in the twentieth century were armies mobilized and set in motion and the soldiers who fought in them motivated to act as they did for no reason at all. Furthermore, if one is interested in understanding why those armed conflicts arose, then the role played in that by the development of military hardware and its application is of crucial interest.

Note that in his attack on previous scholarship, the author speaks of the primacy of "moral questions" and putting military strategy used in furtherance of "reason of state" "on trial". That actually is what the author is up to. He wants to denounce the ruling classes of early modern Europe for being hypocrites who (ab)used the lower orders for their own benefit. Who would have imagined such a thing? Me, for one. I found the moralizing tone of this book tiresome, and the overall case "unproven". Does he think that war was, as Sherman supposedly said, "hell"? Yes. Does he show that that's all there was to it? No.

The author mainly works on Renaissance Italy, and I sometimes got the impression that he actually isn't all that comfortable with the broader European setting. For instance, he talks blandly of "Spain" and "Austria" (clearly distinguished from Germany) as actual states, which makes one think he thinking of the modern period instead. Indeed, in connection with the practice of tax farming (that is, the state takes money up front from private individuals or groups, who then collect public taxes): "Yet it [the state] farmed taxes out to financiers, thus putting one of the chief functions of the modern state, the collection of taxes, into private hands. Here a crucial aspect of administration was alienated…" (p. 237, emphasis added). First off, note that the early modern state is being criticized for not fulfilling one of the supposed functions of the "modern" state. So, we're now condemning the past for not living up to our modern conceptions of how the world is supposed to work? That's silly enough in its own right, and is a judgemental stance that is completely unhistorical. Somebody who actually thinks that for a state to be a state in any historical period, it has to collect its own taxes has no business talking about the distant past. It was a perfectly common practice throughout antiquity and the middle ages into the early modern world (look at, for instance, the publicans of the Roman Republic). Now, this example is perhaps of no great consequence in its own right, but it does reflect how the author doesn't really have much sympathy for how the past actually worked in its own right. He just wants to point his modern finger at the people of the past and shout "You're bad!" Well, and he's tiresome in being representative of the modern strain of thinking that assumes that the way we do things today is self-evidently right, and everybody in the past was wicked or stupid for thinking differently. ...more

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Nov 11, 2017 Jacob Zolotenko rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A thorough study of war in the early modern period, Martines strays away from the usual "great man" tales of great kings, princes and generals seeking glory across the land and instead gets right down to ground level - the level of the lowly soldier, peasant and camp follower of the huge armies that marched up and down Europe's countrysides between 1450-1700, devouring any resources, farms, and people in their way. Wars we normally see through the lens of Hollywood as noble battles between armou ...more

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Aug 08, 2020 J. Johnson rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history

'Furies' is one of the more enlightening histories I have read about this period in European history. While it documents the internecine warfare among dynasties and describes battles and tactics, it also provides remarkable insights to the effects these wars had on the cities, towns, and people of that age. What makes this a great book is the perspective. Rather than focus primarily on the big battles and big wars of the age, it also lets us peer into the challenges, victories, defeats and miser ...more

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Sep 11, 2019 Cameron Climie rated it liked it

Shelves: history

A conceptually admirable rethink of the focus of military history that dives deep into what Renaissance warfare looked like for those on the ground living through it (namely, unrelentingly brutal, miserable, and violent). Not sure all its constituent parts work as well as they could, but more military history should do what this book does - step away from high politics and maneuvers and focus on those who suffered for it.

3.5

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Jun 04, 2019 Adam Meek rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history, non-fiction

Martines shows us the horrifying reality of early modern warfare from the perspective of the common soldiers and peasants who lived it, rather than the focusing on statesmen and nobility who ordered it. The learned phrase "Bellum se ipsum alet" cloaked murder, rape, robbery, starvation and pestilence on a scale that boggles the mind, and from this morass was birthed the modern nation state. ...more

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May 18, 2017 cee rated it liked it

Shelves: own, keep

really more like 3.5 stars. contains valuable and interesting information but feels scattershot and doesn't spend a lot of time on any one encounter, which is a shame because it's obviously well-researched. ...more

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Apr 27, 2013 Christopher rated it did not like it

In the broad context of early modern Europe, the most transformative sequence of events behind the renaissance was the 30 Years War. While the early wars of religion in Luther’s own time plagued cities and towns with religious discord and violence, it paled in comparison to the pure destructive brutality that awaited society in the middle of the seventeenth century.
Into this particularly destructive locus of time in history enters Lauro Martines, a scholar of renaissance Italy and Europe. Martin In the broad context of early modern Europe, the most transformative sequence of events behind the renaissance was the 30 Years War. While the early wars of religion in Luther’s own time plagued cities and towns with religious discord and violence, it paled in comparison to the pure destructive brutality that awaited society in the middle of the seventeenth century.
Into this particularly destructive locus of time in history enters Lauro Martines, a scholar of renaissance Italy and Europe. Martines’ approach to unpacking the history of early modern Europe is to explore the violence and destruction thematically rather than chronologically. Whereas past narratives have been in depth studies of one or more countries or state actors, Martines cuts a broad swath with his analysis of society from Rome to the Lapland. In his effort to create a compelling narrative of human suffering he is undoubtedly successful, however as a serious work of social history it fails rather spectacularly.
Early on, Martines betrays his own personal interest in the following examples he lists. Martines writes:
“In the study of war, historians should also be positioned where questions of right and wrong move into view”.
The rest of the book then becomes a sort of pulpit for Martines to rage against the actions of historical actors who have upset his sensibilities in one way or another. The author spends a great deal of time criticizing Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus for his campaigns and also upon the inter-ethnic makeup of armies at the time. Weirdly, Martines seems to spend an inordinate amount of time on Adolphus despite the fact that the Lion of the North dies in 1632 and Sweden plays a less important role in the coming peace that would eventually follow.
Returning to the author’s claim that it is important for historians to be judges, it goes without saying that events such as the sacking of Augsburg leave a decidedly bitter taste in the mouth to present day readers; but that it is also important to understand the actions and their intent before placing summary judgment. An action can of course be morally and ethically wrong by society’s estimation, but without trying to understand the actions and goals of the actors and what that means in a larger sense, any study is bound for eventual irrelevance.
I wanted to like Furies. I find the idea of thematic examination in social history an interesting proposition; however it would be best to view this work as an attempt at exploring themes of early Europe rather than the rule to follow.
For students of early to modern Europe, this work presents no real new evidence or changes in the generally established facts. While containing some compelling translations of witnesses and their testimony, the author fails to create a cohesive structure around these quotes.
Instead, I would recommend reading the late CV Wedgewood’s opus on the Thirty Years War, which provides a more nuanced and fluid understanding of the times and the characters despite not having the rhetorical flourish that Martines tries so hard to stock in every page.
Recommended for experience readers of early to modern Europe.

Full review at www.lovepovertyandwar.wordpress.com ...more

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Mar 06, 2013 Tom rated it really liked it

I really didn't think I would get through it since it was not assigned by my History 437 professor, but I decided to give it a go after reading about it in the Wall Street Journal which gave it a good review. It's an amazing perspective on how war affected not the territories or coffers of warlords, but on how it affected the common farmer or villager, on what it was like to be a soldier or city dweller during a siege. It's pretty grim and a great reminder of how horrible war is for everyone. So ...more

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Sep 09, 2013 Kate rated it it was ok

I didn't finish this history of medieval warfare. It's not that I'm not interested in the subject; indeed, some of the anecdotes included were fascinating. The author is respected and has written other work. But I just couldn't get into the author's writing style or the way he jumped from century to century, decade to decade, country to country, overlapping times and places in a way that seemed jumbled. I understood that he was giving us an overview of the average soldier's experience. But way t ...more

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Jul 18, 2013 Sandra Strange rated it really liked it

Shelves: history-and-nonfiction

You have to be a hard core history buff to read this book, but if you are, you will really like it. It covers war in Europe between 1450 and 1700, but not as a review of wars and battles (though specific battles in real wars are used as specific examples of what the book does cover). This history presents what war was like from the social and economic point of view: how much did it cost? Who paid and how? How did war impact peasants? Who made up the armies, and how were they recruited or impress ...more

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Jul 26, 2013 Carl Johnson rated it really liked it

Shelves: war

This is not an account of motives, strategies, and tactics in the Middle Ages, but rather a history of the logistics of war during that period:
- How are tens of thousands of troops and horses provisioned?
- What impact does the passage of a large army have on any countryside?
- What logistical disadvantages handicap the besiegers of a walled city?
- How many tons of excrement does a modestly fed army produce every day?
- How do mostly unpaid soldiers convert war booty into money?
- What functions do ...more

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Jan 28, 2014 Margaret Skea rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: history buffs

5.0 out of 5 stars
Real stories behind the history,

This review is from: Furies: War in Europe, 1450-1700 (Hardcover)

Having been looking for a while for particular information on France in the 16th century, not dates and political records, but rather the human angle on historical events, I was delighted to find this book. Here are the stories behind the 'headlines', what it was like for ordinary people to be caught up in the wars that raged across Europe at this period. It isn't the most comfort ...more

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Jan 09, 2013 Lisa rated it liked it

I found this book to be informative. It is easy to appreciate the amount of research Lauro Martines put into this book on the history of Wars from 1450-1700. The descriptions of the horrors experienced by both those forced into military service and civilians of the times; What life was really like is detailed in this book more so than any other book I have read on War and Wartime about the lives of those who lived during these horrific and tyrannical times. A good read for in depth description o ...more

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Jul 14, 2013 Aloysius rated it liked it

The era of the Renaissance was not all Michelangelo and Shakespeare, unfortunately. As Lauro Martines makes clear in this book, the convergence of new technologies, religious division, and the growth of centralized authority and power in what would become the modern European nations contributed to the incessant, destructive wars of these two and a half centuries. Above all, "Furies" showcases conflict from the view of the grunt and the civilian, and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that in all ...more

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Jan 18, 2016 Ron Nurmi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

How "total war" affected the life of everyone during the Renaissance. From the author "to write a history from the standpoint of the common soldier, or villagers, and of the inhabitants of cities under the battering of merciless sieges. I was also driven to fix attention on the sight of starving armies, on famine, cannibalism, the massive plundering of food and livestock, and on churches pillaged, children and women violated, farms laid waste, houses torn apart for firewood, and men butchered. T ...more

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May 14, 2013 Clark Maddux rated it really liked it

An exceptional, and exceptionally lucid, study of the cost--financial, cultural, and human--of war in the 16th and 17th centuries. Through carefully selected representative stories of the conduct of war in this brutal period of European history, Martines makes the case that the civil governments that followed were not so much an outcome of the Renaissance or the early Enlightenment, but of the necessity of sovereigns to feed and maintain large standing armies.

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Jun 04, 2013 Eliz rated it liked it

If you are interested in the early modern period you'll want to read this book, but I really think the format, and the slant of the author make this book a disappointment. I thought he contradicted himself several times, and I have some serious issues with a historian who will say a source exaggerates but then goes on to say but what the source says can't all be wrong. There is a term for that - cherry picking. ...more

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Apr 16, 2014 Britton Grier rated it liked it

A thorough retort to every textbook and movie that romanticizes Absolutism and the wars led my princes and kings during the Early Modern period in Europe. The name of the book is quite apropos in that the "moving cities" which waged war during this time period were starved, unpaid, and relentless. This invariably led to the destruction of whole communities and explains why civilians, not soldiers, were those most likely to die in war. ...more

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Jun 03, 2015 David rated it liked it

Shelves: 21st-century, european-history, history, military-history, medieval-history, renaissance, medieval

This is a history of a crucial period in European history and the emergence of the modern state. The author however is more interested in finding a new angle on an old story and has elected to focus on the violence rather than on the broader sweep of history. Nothing wrong with this, but for those new to the history this may not be the book for you. Furies is a work for the jaded and the informed.

In the end, though, the book wasn't all that enlightening or informative.

3 out of 5 stars. ...more

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Sep 11, 2013 Mary Paulin rated it it was amazing

I found it a very challenging read because I am not a "history buff" and am not familiar with the wars covered in the book--had to do a lot of Googling to bring myself up to "start", let alone speed, on the issues. But well worth it to highlight the savagery of war, politics, religion, and the financial system and the fiendish disregard of the powerful for the weak, undiminished 350 years later. ...more

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May 19, 2014 Frank Kelly rated it liked it

Shelves: military, germany, europe, medieval-history, vatican, france, 2014, italy

Good God. The horror and inhumanity of this period is almost unspeakable. Martines offers it in snapshots, almost easy enough for us to read and try and understand. But it was as if a madness of war, pillage, rape and murder descended on Europe during this time. And we must read it and understand it in order to understand modern day Europr as well as ourselves.

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Apr 12, 2013 Darren rated it really liked it

Very interesting format. It's arranged in small chapters dealing with aspects of the 30 Years war from the point-of-view of the average soldier and peasant. It was amazing the suffering inflicted on these poor people. It makes me very thankful for the time and place I live. ...more

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Jun 07, 2014 Bill Lenoir rated it really liked it

A good look at warfare during this period. The author is not a fan of conventional military history. I agree that it sometimes too narrowly focuses a work, but this guy gets all up in arms over this. Still, a good read.

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About Lauro Martines

Lauro Martines

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Lauro Martines , former Professor of European History at the University of California, Los Angeles, is renowned for his books on the Italian Renaissance. The author of Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy, and most recently of Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance, he reviews for The Times Literary Supplement and lives in London with his wife, noveli ...more

Books by Lauro Martines

April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici

Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence

Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy

An Italian Renaissance Sextet: Six Tales in Historical Context

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“An army of twenty thousand men, even without camp followers, 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. Such an army could not stay put; it had to move; it had to go on seeking new pastures and more stocks of food.” — 0 likes

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