From the 1500s through the middle of the 1600s, near constant warfare beleagured Europe, taking on new horrifying expressions. This picture shows one moment where the fighting got so bad that people put aside their differences to ally themselves with one another in order to have a break from the violence — a brief episode known as “the Pacification of Ghent”.
But first, about the tenor of war in these times: for one, army sizes grew ten times compared to the 15th century. One estimate gives the number of troops in a large army in the 1490s as 20,000, but close to 150,000 by the mid 1600s. Unlike earlier times, these militaries operated year-round instead of seasonally. Furthermore, who raised these forces and paid them changed — this was the age of vast mercenary troops. Men who signed on to fight often did so out of desperate poverty. Many were conscripted criminals – between 1585 and 1602, between 5,000 and 6,000 English troops a year were made up of former prisoners.
The disruption to the civilian population cannot be overstated. 30,000 soldiers on the move needed 20 tons of bread, 20,000 gallons of beer, and 30,000 pounds of meat every day. The violence caused by the fighting was an added and bloody cost to the demands of provisioning.
Furthermore, these were centuries when religion drove war. Key examples were the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598) and the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), when Catholic and Protestant sides strove futilely to eliminate each other.
Which brings us to this image of the Pacification of Ghent, when, in 1576, the seventeen Provinces that made up the Hapsburg Netherlands decided to unify across the religious divide — Protestants and Catholics siding with one another — in order to keep out the Spanish mercenary forces invading them. The Provinces here are represented by seventeen maidens, with women often used in art as a sign of innocent civilians despoiled by war. Alas, the peace was not lasting, nor did it spread. The religious wars didn’t stop in Europe until the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, when a tolerance born more out of exhaustion than rational enlightenment brought this age to a conclusion.
Some estimates of casualties caused by the Thirty Years War put the death number at 8 million — this includes sickness, starvation, and other war-related fatalities. This war was Europe’s deadliest up through the First World War.
Sources: The Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War. Source: _The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse _, by Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, Cambridge UP 2000, pp 95-104. Image and description from Wikipedia, Adriaen van de Venne, 1626.
