Duccio Balestracci

Stato d’Assedio: Assedianti e Assediati dal Medioevo all’età Moderna

(Il Mulino, 2021), 372 pp. €25.00

It is a truism among scholars of medieval and early modern warfare that anyone who pursued a career of arms could expect to spend far more time sitting in sieges either as attacker or defender than in combat on the field of battle.  This was well recognised by contemporary soldiers both at elite and humble levels.   Old fighters might define their military careers in terms of the sieges they had seen. A member of the King of France’s Scottish Guard unit cried out “I was at Lagny, we ate our horses there” as a quarrel with a fellow guardsman approached its fatal climax in 1461-referring back to a siege some thirty years earlier.   That was the action which lived in his memory in a moment of high emotion.

The siege of Lagny-sur-Marne, despite having its epic aspects, is not one of the best known episodes of the Hundred Years War and is not name-checked by Duccio Balestraccio in his study of what one might call the siege experience in European military culture, though the above anecdote fits well into his account. It is important to stress that this is not a history of siege warfare in the way that is often written by military historians. The changing techniques of poliorcetics and defensive responses to them are certainly covered in an opening chapter but the focus of the book lies elsewhere. The temporal span is impressive- the title suggests the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods but the coverage runs from the Roman Empire to the French Revolutionary Wars with glances back to the Trojan War and forward to Sarajevo in the 1990’s. To make this massive time span manageable, Balestracci focuses much of his attention on a core group of around fifteen well documented sieges.  In addition he draws references to sieges from a number of writers (e.g. Procopius, Paul the Deacon, the anonymous fifteenth century Parisian diarist known, probably inaccurately, as the Bourgeois de Paris and the Ottoman Tursun Bey). Many of them (perhaps a disproportionate share) are part of inter-religious conflicts-the Crusades in their widest geographical definition, wars involving the Ottoman Empire or the French Wars of Religion- which in turn tends to paint the aftermath of storms and surrenders in a particularly bleak light (Balestracci spends a relatively large number of pages on the atrocities following Ottoman successes in siege warfare). There is perhaps a slight source bias towards defenders over attackers. If the work has a centre of gravity, it lies around five well-documented sixteenth century sieges; Florence in 1529-30, Siena in 1554-5, Malta in 1565, Famagusta in 1571 and the less well known siege of Sancerre during the French Wars of Religion in 1573. This means, for instance, that the engaging but egocentric and unreliable memoirs of Blaise de Monluc make a regular appearance.

It is also worth noting that there is an implicit bias towards sieges of more or less substantial places with significant civilian populations since the experience of these populations forms an important part of Balestraccio’s coverage. He gives a graphic account of the experience of life under siege (recognising that some of the same issues affected the besieging armies as well). He identifies a world of ongoing psychological stress, not helped by sleep deprivation and sharpened by fears of spying and betrayal. Rumours might sustain morale or, more often, undermine it. Religious solidarity could help to sustain resistance in the face of overwhelming odds even in situations when both sides shared a common faith (as in Florence where Savonarolan apocalypticism played a major role).   Social tensions could become acute, especially in places which went into a siege with deep political or religious divisions. Divisions might open up between the civil population and the military, or between town dwellers and the country populations which had taken refuge behind the walls (Balestracci emphasises that sieges were disastrous for the rural population whether they fled or tried to stay put). There were tensions over requisitioning or even demolishing properties for defensive ends.

Above all, supplies were a steadily growing worry. The defenders might run out of ammunition. Water could be a problem. If it ran short then sanitation-always precarious in medieval and early modern urban settings- might collapse. This was also a major issue for besieging armies, condemned to stay in one place for weeks on end as mounds of human and animal ordure piled up (Balestracci does not discuss the claim made by some historians that Ottoman armies were better at handling these issues due to the religious importance of ritual ablutions in Islam). Above all, food shortages and fears of food shortages haunted both sides of the siege lines. Having to eat horses, as at Lagny, was indeed the proof of a hard siege but was far from the final expedient to stave off hunger; eating the leather harness would have followed. Food shortages sharpened all the other tensions. Moves to expel “useless mouths” (children, the elderly, most women, possibly the urban poor or peasant refugees) were commonplace, often leading to tragic situations which shocked even hardened warriors. In the absence of relief or some other factor forcing the raising of the siege, when resistance was at an end, the fate of the civilian population was often grim whether matters ended by surrender or a storming; that of the garrison could be rather more complex.

Balestracci’s very wide chronological coverage has advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, it underlines the long term constants of waging siege warfare which yielded only very slowly to changing technology (and indeed remain true to this day). It also underlines long term constants in the writing of sieges, with similar stories ultimately drawn from Biblical or Classical literature (e.g. on stratagems to disguise food shortages or on cannibalism in siege situations) recurring over the centuries.  Siege writing, as Balestracci admits, was a genre with its own rules and expectation. The downside is that it tends to collapse the individuality of specific sieges and even local variants of siege culture into one overarching atemporal model. Such local variations emerge occasionally in the text; for instance, it looks very much as if the practices of striking coins in contempt of the city under siege and running palio type races around it were confined to north and central Italy in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. On the other hand, the culture of honourable surrender which developed in the seventeenth century in northwest Europe, the meanings and implications of which have given rise to much debate in Anglophone historiography in recent years gets very little coverage.

Balestracci ends his work on a slightly tangential note, citing three or four sieges related to the Ottoman empire (Constantinople 1453, Malta 1565, Vienna 1683 and possibly the otherwise undiscussed siege of Venetian-held Corfu in 1716) as part of a process of “making Europe”. This is intriguing (Europe as besieged fortress?) but a bit under-developed and seems to be part of a slightly different book. He also notes in the introduction that the book was written under what amounted to siege conditions subject to the very hard Italian version of Covid lockdown, which perhaps adds a level of empathy for those who suffered sieges in the past. It is certainly a valuable contribution to the study of what was in many ways the defining military experience of medieval and early modern Europe.

Brian Ditcham
Independent Scholar