War and famine in Europe between 1450-1700 CE, the Renaissance

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"... In the Early Modern Era, “an army of twenty thousand men . . . 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.” Armed runaway conscripts also ate their way through villages. “Desertion was rife, and in the early eighteenth century gangs of disciplined deserters occasionally terrorized rural communities.” ...

Fearing pillaging soldiers, peasants and rural folk often fled to the nearest walled city—but these offered little protection from starvation if they were sieged. In the siege of the port city of La Rochelle in 1628, “some fifteen thousand Rochelais perished, mostly from starvation, out of a population of eighteen to twenty thousand inhabitants.” ...

Many ate horse excrement “with great avidity,” according to Léry, combing the streets for “every kind of ordure,” whose “stink alone was enough to poison those who handled it, let alone the ones who ate it.” “I can affirm that human excrement was collected to be eaten,” ...

Finally, some people turned to cannibalism. Léry wrote of how a grape-grower named Simon Potard, his wife, and an old woman in their household, had together eaten the brains, liver, and innards of Simon’s daughter, who was about three years old. Léry personally saw “the cooked tongue, finger” and other bodily remains of the toddler in a cooking pot, “mixed with vinegar, salt, and spices, and about to be put on the fire and cooked.” ..."

"We think of the Renaissance as a shining era of human achievement, 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 Renaissance history captures the dark reality of the period in a gripping narrative mosaic. ..."

Grim Old Days: Lauro Martines’ Furies "Early modern war was waged not just with weapons, but also hunger and social collapse."

Published in 2013 Source