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cahnMore diaries of our favorite 18th-century Prussian diary-keeper have been unearthed and have been synopsized!
January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!
January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!
Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-08-08 08:33 am (UTC)Now, this isn't a diary comparable to the ones we know from the 18th or 19th century and certainly not from the 20th, with long introspective explorations of one's feelings. The best comparison I can make is to another 30 Years War diary, by Abbot Maurus Friesenegger of the Monastery Andechs (which btw I've visited, it's near Munich). That one starts out as a regular type of chronicle the way they were written in monasteries through the centuries, and then as the war heats up becomes more and more focused. It also starts out with clear heroes and villains (Catholics = good, obviously, since it's an Abbot doing the writing, Protestants are scum), and then when the countryside around Andechs gets ravaged by Catholic warlords as well, this changed to a "war is evil" central perspective, with a focus on the suffering of the civilians (not that the term "civilians" was used back then). Meanwhile, Peter Hagendorf most likely starts out a Protestant who mostly, though not always, fights in Catholic armies. When he does switch to the Swedish side for a while, it's not for ideological reasons, but for practical ones, and when he does return to his old (Catholic) regiment, ditto. He does believe in God and an afterlife (as can be seen from the entries dealing with the deaths of his wives and children), but seems to be utterly uninterested in dogma, and if he has an opinion as to who is right or wrong in this war, he doesn't share it. There's the occasional snark - as when during a brief campaign in French territory, they come across a church where a candle has supposedly burnt for centuries, and Hagendorf notes that this may believe who wants, he doesn't - but, for example, he does not doubt for a moment that there are witches, and the only thing to do with them is to burn them. (Reminder, in the German territories the 30 Years War coincided with the height of the witch persecution, and it was absolutely brutal; in my hometown with a population of ca. 8000, over 1000 were burned within 5 years. And unlike in England or later the colonies where they were mostly hanged, witches in German states really were burned. This became a problem because of the prizes for wood, and the solution was to make the families of the accused pay for it.) An atheist or unusually progressive thinker, he's not. Basically, being a soldier is his job, it's how he survives, and he's indifferent to the reasons why this war is fought.
Something he notes is that in the later stages of the war, the farmers and rural population, sick of being ravaged by both sides, start to fight back; Hagendorf himself at one point gets beaten up and mugged by farmers who have banded together. This is presented in a matter-of-fact way, without cursing the farmers. (Though he does organize some fellow soldiers and goes after them to get his stuff back later.). Basically, it is what it is. It's interesting that while like most soldiers in this war, he lives more and more by plunder the longer the war takes, he pays innkeepers (and notes down particularly good inns) when he stays longer somewhere (usually in the winter). He also pays for what we'd call medical expenses. For example, when his second wife takes months to recover from the latest childbirth. Whom he pays in this case is the local executioner's wife. Now I knew that executioners often earned additional income by providing medical services to the poor part of the population (who couldn't afford a doctor), because, let's face it, they knew better than most of their contemporaries how the human body worked by taking it apart, but I didn't know executioner's wives also provided such services. (This one must have been good at it, too; Mrs. Hagendorf recovered.) Anyway, these kind of expenses are also noted in the diary, as is generally how much or little Hagendorf earns or spends, but it is a diary, not a calendar. At times he's interested in the landscapes around him, though he limits himself to the adjectives "lovely" or "beautiful". Or if there's a particular good wine or bread to be had in the area, he notes it down. (The bread thing applies to the early stages of the war, when a young Hagendorf is impressed by black Pumpernickel bread. In the later stages, if he and his wife wanted to have fresh bread, they had to bake it themselves, if they could.)
He's familiar with the myths surrounding the Nibelungenlied, which I found intriguing, because generally the assumption is that after the Middle Ages, awareness of those stories disappeared until they were rediscovered in the 19th century. But Peter Hagendorf when mentioning coming through Mantua notes down that the grave of Old Hildebrand is there, how it looks, and that Hildebrand and his son who fought here are depicted on their two big stone horses in the middle of the market square. I mean, he's wrong as to whom those sculptures depicted, but clearly he knows the story of Hildebrand and Hadubrand and applies it to what he's seeing. And when he's in Switzerland, he mentions the Wilhelm Tell legend.
Both times he marries he uses the same phrase "ehrtugendsame" - "the honorable and virtuous" for the bride in question before her name, just as every time, one of the children (usually as babies) dies, there's the phrase "God grant her/him a merry resurrection" - "eine fröhliche Auferstehung" - which I take it must have been common at the time, as we use the phrase "rest in peace". Compared to later ages, these entries on personal tragedies seem Spartan, but to me the way he notes the birth and death of every baby by name is touching by itself; they lived only a few months or sometimes days, but apparantly he was determined not to forget them.
One of the most (now) famous entries comes at the siege of Madgeburg, which resulted in one of the most brutal sackings of the war. Hagendorf got wounded early on, in fact this was the most serious wounding he received in three decades of war, which aside from behing lethally dangerous was a serious economic problem because it meant he couldn't participate in the sacking, and as mentioned, plunder was how most of the soldiers supported themselves, since their payment appeared with months of delay, if at all. So his (first) wife went in his stead after the fall of the town. The entry, which is also one of the rare occasions where Hagendorf lets on how he feels about a place getting sacked, possibly because he originally came from near Magdeburg, and I'll quote it at length because it paints a vivid picture and gives a good impression of the diary style:
On May 20th, we started in seriousness and stormed and conquered. I took part in the storming and made it into the town without any damage. But in the town, at the Neustädt gate, I was shot through my body two times, those were my spoils.
This happened on May 20th in the year 1631 early in the morning at 9.
Afterwards I was brought to the camp, and was patched up, for I was shot once though the stomach, with the shot doing through entirely, and secondly through both shoulders so that the bullet was in my shirt. So the surgeon bound my hands on my back so he could use his chisel. So I was brought to my tent, half dead.
I was heartily sorry that the town was so terribly burned, because it was a beautiful town, and because it belonged to my fatherland.
So when I was bound up, my wife went into the town, despite it burning everywhere, and she wanted to find a cushion and material to bind me and where I could lie upon. So our sick child was also lying with me. Then there was screaming in the camp taht the houses were all falling down, so that many soldiers and their wives who went to plunder remained there. So I was worried more about the wife and the sick child than about my own damage. But God has preserved her. After one and a half hours, she came with an old woman from the town. She guided her with herself, it was the wife of a boatsman and she helped her carrying linen and beddings. So she brought me a huge jug full of wine and also found two silver belts and clothing, which I could later sell for twelve Taler at Halberstadt. In the evening, my comrades came and each donated something to me, a taler or half a taler.
On May 24th, Johan Philipp Schütz was presented to us. I and all the other wounded were transfered to Halberstadt. There we were given quarters in the villages. From our Regiment 300 were quartered in a village, and they all were healed.
Here I got a really good host, who didn't gave me beef but veal, young doves, chicken and birds. So after seven weeks I was sound and healthy again.
Furtherly my little daughter died, Elisabeth. God grant her a merry resurrection
Because history is like that, both of Hagendorf's wives are called Anna, so I'll refer to the second one as Anna Maria to differentiate them. When Anna dies in 1733, she does so after another birth and death (of a daughter named Barbara), and Hegendorf notes:
God grant her and the child and all the children a merry resurrection, Amen. For in the eternal blessed life we will see ach other agan. So now my wife and all her children have passed away. ("sind entschlafen", literally "have fallen into sleep forever".) Their names are these:
Anna Stadler from Traunstein in Lower Bavaria
Children
The first one we couldn't baptize
the other three all have enjoyed the blessed Christian baptism
The mother
Anna Stadlerin
The Children
The first NN
Anna Maria
Elisabeth
Barbara
God grant them eternal calm, 1633.
Between wives, it's noticable that Hagendorf drinks more, and gambles. Typical entry:
From Straubing to Regensburg. On my way, I received two beautiful horses, for I had a good boy, Bartelt by name. He organized both of them for me.
From Regensburg to Dinkelsbühl. Here I met a cousin of mine, named Adam Jeligan, a bellmaker. With him, I drank away one of the horses. We were very merry. For three days. Then the boy cried for the horse.
Poor Bartelt. Though I dare say the horse was safer with the bellmaker than with the army? The rest of Hagendorf's possessions don't stay long, either, for:
On our way, my boy remained sick in Aalen. When he got healthy again and wants to go to me, he was robbed of everything. For he had all my linnen which I got in Landshut with him. In the night when we wanted to attack and where we all had to be battle ready, it got stolen along with my passport and all I had. So all my plunder was gone and my passport which was most important to me. But it was gone.
Something as casually mentioned when Hagendorf is between wives are entries like "here I got a young girl" (whom he let go again, trading her for new linnen); this gets less diary attention than cattle ("my boy got a beauitiful cow out of it; it was sold at Wimpfen for 11 Taler"), but is of course one of the dreadful aspects of not only this war - the ever present rape. (At least I assume Hagendorf didn't ask the girl, anymore than his boy asked the cow.)
An example for the entires re: the farmers who had it with the passing armies:
On July 4th, we arrived at the French border and marched past a castle. In it were seven farmers. They fought against the entire army So we laid fire on the castle and burned it down with the farmers in it.
Here a thousand man on foot and a thousand five hundred on horseback were commanded to go to a village. I was there as well. The farmers in the village cemetary fought back so fiercely that we couldn't do anything without canons. So we left again, for there were a thousand farmers in it. So we burned down the vllalge.
Yeah, that. As one of the essays in the volume notes, most of the soldliers probably had come from such a rural background, but you're looking in vain for a sense of "these were my people" or "I was once like them". The army - all armies, including their entourages - on the one hand, and the not-army humanity on the other; the rift is incredible. When I say "entourage", I don't just mean the wives or the army prostitutes; you get the impression entire families of the wives went along as well. (Presumably on the rationale that this got you protection.) For example, in one entry after Hagendorf is married the second time he notices his mother-in-law has died (of the pesitilence) and that he buried her on September30th 1636. Since he's on the move with the army at that time, not in winter quarters, it means his in-laws must have been with the army as well. On the occasion when he's separated form his wife (either one), he's always anxious, and you get entries like this one about reuniting with Anna Maria:
Here the baggage train of the regiment arrived. Thus I was reunited with my dearest - meine Liebste - again, and in good health she was. Bless the good lord for this, may he grant his blessing furtherly. This happened on April 11th in the year 1638.
He seems to have been faithful to both his wives, at least there is no mention of female prisoners when he's married, but there is also no sense of him regarding this as wrong in the in between time. It's another thing that's taken for every day granted: if you're a soldier, and you don't have a woman of your own, you get yourself one one way or the other.
Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-08-09 05:32 am (UTC)I think it's the former, because the phrasing actually isn't one of hindsight. (When people look back with the knowledge of how events would turn out, I think it's almost inevitable that this colors how they report developments.)
This makes a lot of sense -- I see my sister and myself doing this a lot, when we talk about what happened earlier in life (vs. when I find stuff I actually wrote at the time).
because, let's face it, they knew better than most of their contemporaries how the human body worked by taking it apart, but I didn't know executioner's wives also provided such services.
Ah, right, I remember you told us this now -- but that's really interesting about the wife as well!
but to me the way he notes the birth and death of every baby by name is touching by itself; they lived only a few months or sometimes days, but apparantly he was determined not to forget them.
:( That's really touching, especially given all the dead babies :(((((
for I was shot once though the stomach, with the shot doing through entirely, and secondly through both shoulders so that the bullet was in my shirt.
Holy cow, I'm really surprised he lived!
Then there was screaming in the camp taht the houses were all falling down, so that many soldiers and their wives who went to plunder remained there. So I was worried more about the wife and the sick child than about my own damage.
:( This is really a very interesting passage, thank you for sharing it. But war is awful :(
The farmers in the village cemetary fought back so fiercely that we couldn't do anything without canons. So we left again, for there were a thousand farmers in it. So we burned down the vllalge.
:(((((
Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-08-09 01:20 pm (UTC)<3333
It's like Yuletide, but even better!
Which we know because we even know the papermill where Hagendorf got the paper from
Wow, that is amazing. I love how much detective work went into tracing down Hagendorf and family.
the pyhsical diary isn't a book with blank pages into which he wrote, stuff like that wasn't made in the 30 Years War
When did they start making these, do you know? I was assuming when betaing one of Cahn's fics that such a thing would be expensive but available to a crown prince with sugar daddies in the 1730s, but maybe I was wrong!
in my hometown with a population of ca. 8000, over 1000 were burned within 5 years.
?!!!
I knew it was witch burning time (I'm sure the war contributed to the cycle of trauma), but that is a lot! Good lord.
Basically, being a soldier is his job, it's how he survives, and he's indifferent to the reasons why this war is fought.
I mean, without saying I've burned any witches or villages, I can kind of understand how that works: I dislike the amount of marketing emails I get spammed with, and how inconvenient it is to unsubscribe from them, and yet I work for an email marketing company, because hey, they need a database administrator (so their clients can send large volumes of emails of dubious value).
Hagendorf himself at one point gets beaten up and mugged by farmers who have banded together. This is presented in a matter-of-fact way, without cursing the farmers.
That is really interesting!
I didn't know executioner's wives also provided such services.
Neither did I, interesting!
(This one must have been good at it, too; Mrs. Hagendorf recovered.)
Or at least not bad enough to kill her, which is not to be taken for granted in those days!
clearly he knows the story of Hildebrand and Hadubrand and applies it to what he's seeing
Oh, that is interesting! Cahn, do you know this story? It's the oldest surviving poem in Old High German (and only a fragment of it survives), and I remember reading it in my Old High German class.
to me the way he notes the birth and death of every baby by name is touching by itself; they lived only a few months or sometimes days, but apparantly he was determined not to forget them.
Yeah, that is heartbreaking.
I was shot through my body two times, those were my spoils.
Ooh, I like the way he phrases that, surprisingly ironic or even literary.
for I was shot once though the stomach, with the shot doing through entirely, and secondly through both shoulders so that the bullet was in my shirt. So the surgeon bound my hands on my back so he could use his chisel.
Like Cahn, I'm impressed he survived! Mind you, the bullet exiting the body on its own was often the best possible outcome (meaning it didn't stick around to do further damage or the doctors didn't have to do more damage trying to get it out), if it managed to avoid hitting any major organs or arteries on the way through. That said, many people lived many years with bullets in their bodies that the doctors thought it was safer to leave in!
I was heartily sorry that the town was so terribly burned, because it was a beautiful town, and because it belonged to my fatherland.
Huh, that is interesting, especially in the context of him generally being matter of fact about everything. But the Magdeburg sack was big enough that I remember it even from the one book I read on the Thirty Years' War, and I remember telling my wife about it right after I finished that section--mostly the insane death toll.
Because history is like that, both of Hagendorf's wives are called Anna
*lolsob*
(At least I assume Hagendorf didn't ask the girl, anymore than his boy asked the cow.)
Just *sob* here. But yeah, war = rape.
you get the impression entire families of the wives went along as well. (Presumably on the rationale that this got you protection.)
Did not know that, but that makes sense! Perhaps they were also providing goods and services to the soldiers, like laundry? I know that this was a common way to make a living when an army was on the move in those days.
Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-08-09 02:20 pm (UTC)That is indeed awesome, but in the case of the paper, it helped that it was a water signature. Even Jan Peters' first edition background text when he didn't yet know Hagendorf's name has the information that the paper came from the paper mill Ronsberg in southern Bavaria, which used a water sign (the capital letter R with a crown on top) in 1649 (we have other exemples dating from that year) and probably a few years earlier than that. Since according to the diary the diary writer was in Braunau and Altheim in September 1647, and then in Memmingen, he would have been within the distribution range of this paper mill. Hagendorf bought at least twelve sheets, sowed them together himself and wrote on avarage twelve lines per page, with the handwriting fluent, i.e. not that of a man newly taught but experienced in writing.
When did they start making these, do you know?
Alas no, I have no idea. I'll have to check the preface to Lehndorff's first diary volume again so see whether Schmidt-Lötzen mentions what material Lehndorff uses, i.e. sheets or a book with blank pages.
I knew it was witch burning time (I'm sure the war contributed to the cycle of trauma), but that is a lot! Good lord.
Indeed. It was the worst of three persecution waves, from 1626 to 1631, finally stopping when the Swedes entered the city. That's the era the letter of mayor Junius is from (one of the many victims - the victims in Bamberg came from all stages of society, not just as the cliché has it from the poor) to his daughter is from, which is one of the few documents written by not the perpetrators but one of the victims who already had been tortured and had thus confessed but tried to smuggle a letter to his daughter to tell her he was innocent, which was intercepted, which is why we still have it. One of the most moving and shattering documents I've read outside of the 20th century.
But the Magdeburg sack was big enough that I remember it even from the one book I read on the Thirty Years' War, and I remember telling my wife about it right after I finished that section--mostly the insane death toll.
Yes, it even became proverbial for a time, until later atrocities competed. But there were a lot of pamphlets all over Europe describing the horror of it. Magdeburg never really recovered from it; it had been one of the wealthiest German cities, starting from when Otto I. made it a favored place of residence. (He and his first wife are also buried there.)
Perhaps they were also providing goods and services to the soldiers, like laundry? I know that this was a common way to make a living when an army was on the move in those days.
Yes, that makes sense. In Brecht's Mother Courage which itself is based on Grimmelshausen's novel written during the 30 Years War, the (anti)heroine and her entire family work for the army in various capacities.
Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-08-09 02:47 pm (UTC)Alas no, I have no idea.
Well, good, at least you won't thrown out of the story by the egregious lack of realism! ;)
One of the most moving and shattering documents I've read outside of the 20th century.
I have just read it, and yiiiiikes, yes. And I can see why the 20th century is the obvious comparison.
Yes, that makes sense. In Brecht's Mother Courage which itself is based on Grimmelshausen's novel written during the 30 Years War, the (anti)heroine and her entire family work for the army in various capacities.
Without knowing the details, it would make sense to me if the whole family had been following the army providing services of whatever kind, and that was how Hagendorf and Anna Maria met.
Mayor Junius
Date: 2022-08-13 05:13 am (UTC)I have just read it, and yiiiiikes, yes. And I can see why the 20th century is the obvious comparison.
Yiiiikes indeed. Thank you for the link, Mildred. And to think of the letter being written in the handwriting of someone who had been subject to the thumb-screws...
Selena, you said it was intercepted? So she never got it? But then why didn't the people who intercepted it destroy it? And were the jailers beheaded like he said they would be?
Re: Mayor Junius
Date: 2022-08-13 02:59 pm (UTC)English wiki claims the letter reached Veronica, but as far as I recall this isn't the case, which is why we still have it. It was filed with the rest of the trial records. Now the reason why a lot of the Bamberg witch trial material survives is nothing short of miraculous. When Bamberg, which wasn't just the seat of a bishop but a prince bishop, got secularized and became a part of Bavaria courtesy of Napoleon in 1806, a lot of the church archives got dissolved, were sold or what not. Some years later, a man who just bought some new screws and bolts sees they got wrapped in very old looking paper, checks out the paper, sees it consists of trial records, goes to the ironmonger who sold him the bolts who says yes, he just bought a cellar full of wrapping paper cheaply, and lo, it were most of the 1626 - 1631 witch persecution files. Who this history-conscious buyer immediately bought from the iron monger and thus rescued for posterity.
As for why it didn't get destroyed, well, never underestimate the thoroughness of bureaucrats. It wasn't proof of his innocence to them, just additional material of him being unlawful, trying to smuggle out a letter.
Re: Mayor Junius
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From:Witch Trials of Bamberg
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From:Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-09-03 07:20 pm (UTC)When did they start making these, do you know? I was assuming when betaing one of Cahn's fics that such a thing would be expensive but available to a crown prince with sugar daddies in the 1730s, but maybe I was wrong!
Alas no, I have no idea. I'll have to check the preface to Lehndorff's first diary volume again so see whether Schmidt-Lötzen mentions what material Lehndorff uses, i.e. sheets or a book with blank pages.
Our fic decision is VINDICATED! \o/
According to a book I'm reading/dipping into (same series as the Cunegonde book), Joseph Ryder, prosperous English cloth-maker of the 18th century, started his diary in 1733, and he was able to buy his blank books at the local bookstore in Leeds.
We can start with the concrete: what did Ryder's diary look like? Its bound octavo volumes came in two sizes, six and a half by eight inches and seven and a half by nine and a half inches. Virtually the only blank pages, besides those in his final volume that his death left unfinished, resulted from two pages apparently having been stuck together. The numbers also suggest that he grew more affectionate for writing over time. In mostly consistently sized handwriting, his first twenty volumes, which contain 5,578 pages, cover nineteen and a half years, while the second twenty volumes, 6,777, cover fifteen years. The two and a half million words he wrote (after we throw in thirty-five hundred more for the forty-first volume that he he had just begun before he died) amount to twelve times the total words in Moby Dick, more than three times the number in the King James Bible, and just less than three times the word count of Shakespeare's complex works.
Also,
The book plate advertisements in two of his own volumes...reveal that he bought at least some of his blank books from Samuel Howgate, whose store lay in the commercial center of the city. The fact that the bookplate ad for Howgate's Kirkgate bookshop grew more elaborate between the two volumes in which it was affixed indicates some measure of the store's prosperity. But judging by the content of both plates, this already seems to have been a place with varied consumer possibilities, selling "books in all faculties and sciences," maps, prints, parchment, paper, and at least one doctor's "elixir."
I don't promise a write-up of the book, especially as I'm not sure I'm going to read it beginning to end, but I'll try to at least do a paragraph or two to indicate what the book is *about*.
Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-08-10 07:05 am (UTC)I am intending to read the book Women, Armies and Warfare in Early Modern Europe by John A. Lynn (because I am writing a fic where a woman goes along with the 1745 Jacobite army)! I can do a write-up when I've read it, if you want.
Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-08-10 12:32 pm (UTC)Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-08-13 05:14 am (UTC)Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-08-13 05:07 am (UTC)I have not read the Hildebrandslied! (If it's a poem from OE or Medieval Welsh, I'm probably at least in-passing familiar with it... but not necessarily with lit in other languages.) I'm kind of sad about this, as I was much more motivated to read this kind of thing twenty years ago than I am now... but maybe it will happen!
Hildebrandslied
Date: 2022-08-15 12:09 pm (UTC)Since what survives a fragment with many lacunae, it can be confusing, so quick plot summary:
Hildebrand: father
Hadubrand: son
Hildebrand and Hadubrand are about to kill each other in combat. Hildebrand asks for Hadubrand's genealogy. Hadubrand says his father was named Hildebrand and went off to war 30 years ago, [insert more identifying details] and is dead.
Hildebrand goes, "No, that's me! Let's not kill each other!"
Hadubrand thinks it's a trick and insists they kill each other.
Honor requires they fight to the death.
The fragment breaks off while they're fighting, but this is early Germanic poetry so it probably ended in death. :P Comparanda suggest it's usually the father killing the son, and if this whole episode reminds you of Cuchulainn killing his son in single combat after they don't recognize each other...yep!
Also, Wikipedia says "Legendary material about Hildebrand survived in Germany into the 17th century and also spread to Scandinavia." Do you know this story,
Re: Hildebrandslied
Date: 2022-08-15 12:16 pm (UTC)Re: Hildebrandslied
Date: 2022-08-15 12:21 pm (UTC)Where "Bern" is not the better-known Bern of Switzerland, but Verona.
It's also fascinating that he's so sure that Hildebrand and Hadubrand fought in Mantua
Yes!
Re: Hildebrandslied
Date: 2022-08-16 05:13 am (UTC)Re: Hildebrandslied
Date: 2022-08-16 05:12 am (UTC)Yeah... I think I kind of need fix-it for basically ALL EARLY POETRY, omg. Hmm, I should give this some thought before Yuletide. I've gotten great fic for Mabinogion, Der Ring des Nibelungen (which I realize isn't quite the same, but which is related enough that it slots in the same part of my head), and Preiddeu Annwn (all three fics on AO3 were presents for me :D though I wouldn't call any of them fix-it).
Re: Hildebrandslied
From:Re: Hildebrandslied
Date: 2022-08-22 03:32 pm (UTC)Nope, have not heard of it! Which doesn't mean it's not known in Sweden, obviously...
Re: Hildebrandslied
From:Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-08-11 02:31 pm (UTC)Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-08-11 05:28 pm (UTC)Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-08-22 03:29 pm (UTC)Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-08-22 03:45 pm (UTC)There's also the way armies changed - the French army was backwards before the French Revolution because it kept to the "officers only from the nobility" thing for such a long time, and one reason Prussia went from a minor German fiefdom to a European scale power in just three generations was because the soldiers of its army got regular payment and clothing from the state which they really could rely on, which was as important as the endless drills for the Prussian army's successes. And of course, people going to war except for the territory they conquer to benefit them later when the war is over, so it's in their interest not to devastate it completely. And presumably, that's why Peter the Great shocks not just the Swedes but everyone when using scorched earth tactics for his own people and territory in order to cut Charles and the Swedish army off from their supplies, and why Napoleon didn't anticipate the Russians burning Moscow etc.
Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-08-22 04:48 pm (UTC)...the early modern period seems to represent something of a peak in the uncontrolled destructiveness of armies, a combination of the burgeoning size of field forces as compared to the Middle Ages with state finance and logistics systems unprepared to cope with the new larger armies. Medieval armies may not have been any nicer, but they were smaller which reduced their impact, while the armies of the 1700s and 1800s were increasingly better organized and supplied and as a result less logistically destructive.
and
Repeated ‘contributions’ and foraging over the course of the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) in the Low Countries and the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) in the Holy Roman Empire both created depopulated ‘no man’s land’ areas which in turn made further military operations logistically challenging as no army can forage a depopulated countryside; devastation on this scale and over this much area seemed to have been mostly out of reach for the smaller armies of the Middle Ages. In the late 1600s, we see a marked shift towards a greater degree of central state supply and control which begins to reduce the uncontrolled destructiveness of armies (even as the intentional capacity for destruction of armies is rising), though foraging is still a major factor in warfare well into the 1800s.
Quotes from military historian Brett Deveraux.
And the destructiveness of Cumberland in the Highlands had nothing to do with needing to get food/plunder, that was intentional as a political tool.
Hmm, I wonder whether the attitude towards rape of women by soldiers changed as well? I suppose I will just have to actually read that book about women and warfare in the early modern period to find out...I'm waiting for it to come in at the library.
Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-08-26 12:25 pm (UTC)I don't have statistics (other than the usual "Germany lost over half its population in places" and if that had happened again, I think we would know), but to summarize what he says:
* The historical narrative has always been that warfare got less destructive for a while after the Thirty Years' War, partly because more efficient bureaucracies meant less need to rely on forage and plunder, and partly because everyone got civilized and started avoiding big battles.
* But that's oversimplifying.
* Obviously 18th century warfare was not as bad as the Thirty Years' War or the coalition wars, says Füssel.
* But we have to distinguish between theory and practice.
* 18th century warfare was capable both of the civilized treatment of officers and of massacres, and the brutality was just as much a part of the Enlightenment as the rest.
That's what I've got.
Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I
Date: 2022-08-26 01:56 pm (UTC)