THREATS

While the soldiers of the army were busy at the labor of fortifying their camp, filling the enemy’s ditches, helping to erect or construct various engines, carrying stones, pulling traction trebuchets, making ladders and mantlets, and carrying out the tasks of daily camp life, their leaders would be working to persuade the defenders to surrender. From the perspective of the army commander, this was usually far and away the best option. It could be fast and would give him possession of an intact town, a very valuable asset, whereas a place taken by storm was likely to have suffered severe damage to its defenses (which its new possessor would have to pay to repair) and was almost certain to suffer a brutal sack, which would greatly reduce its value for the future. As in any political negotiation, two principal tools were threats and promises. The defenders would normally be promised (and receive) good treatment if they surrendered promptly, but they were threatened with harsh punishment if they did not. The preparations described in the last section were actually more likely to contribute to a successful siege by helping to frighten the defenders into negotiating than by paving the way for a successful assault. Even if most of the defenders were determined to hold out, these means might persuade a faction or an individual traitor within the town to help the attackers in.74

The mass of the army, however, often hoped that negotiations would not bring a surrender, because a surrender was likely to deprive them of the opportunity for looting the town, which could be tremendously profitable. This fact was, indeed, often used by the besiegers’ negotiators, analogously to the nuclear deterrence concept of a “threat that leaves something to chance”: The townsfolk might know that the besieging prince did not really want to see their town sacked, but they also knew that he might not be able to prevent it if things were allowed to progress too far, thus making the threat of a sack credible. Although efforts to intimidate the besieged into surrender were mainly the business of the army’s leaders, the common soldiers sometimes had a part to play as well. A detailed diary of the siege of Tournai in 1340, for example, records how “the enemies came each day to yell at the gates that [the townspeople] should surrender, and that they were being betrayed by [the garrison], and often said ‘Eat well tonight, for you will not eat at all tomorrow!’” Or “Surrender, knaves, lest you die of hunger, and we take your women!”75 On the other side, at the siege of Lisbon in 1147, the defenders “taunted [the attackers] with numerous children about to be born at home in our absence, and said that on this account our wives would not be concerned about our deaths, since they would have bastard progeny enough. And they undertook that if any of us should survive, we would return to our home lands in poverty and misery; and they mocked us and gnashed their teeth against us.”76