If it became clear that a town would not fall easily to assault, the host would finish settling in for a long siege. Camp defenses and shelters might be improved, logistic arrangements regularized, and so on. Efforts might be made to interfere with the defenders’ water supplies, for example by locating and breaking underground conduits.109 If not already done, and provided manpower was sufficient, steps would now likely be taken to encircle the full perimeter of the town with a ditch or rampart. In some cases, such as Ville-neuve-le-Hardi (“Bold New Town”) outside Calais, Vittoria outside Palma, or Santa Fe outside Granada, the siege camp would itself become almost indistinguishable from a town, with gates and towers, a plaza and marketplace, wooden houses, bakeries, butchers’ stalls, bordellos, and even apothecaries’ shops:
In the host which King Ferdinand [III of Castile-Leon] had at Seville [in 1248], there was a strong similarity to a great, noble, and very rich city. The camp was full of all the fine attributes which could pertain to such a complete and well-provided city. There were streets and squares allotted there to every craft, each one keeping to itself: there was one street of tailors and money-changers; another for the spice-merchants, and for the druggests who stocked the medicaments that the wounded and sick needed; another for the armourers, another for the harness-makers, another for the butchers and the fish-merchants; and so on for each craft, for all those that there might be in the world, for each one of them there was a street set aside, all duly measured up and elegant and well-ordered.110
Some of the besiegers might be accompanied by their families, as illustrated in the will of Bazela Merxadrus, a citizen of Bologna, drawn up during the siege of Damietta: “He left his share in the tent, and the furnishings that belonged to him, to his wife Giulietta, for ‘as long as she is in the army.’ To one comrade he left two sacks of biscuit, two measures of flour, plus wine and wheat together with a pair of trousers, a shirt, and money for his part of the bread and wine which the group shared.”111 The concentration of such large bodies of people and horses—far more horses than would normally be found even in a great city—over such long periods of time posed tremendous challenges of supply. Despite the best efforts of princes, commanders, and merchants eager for profit, severe shortages could arise, especially because the enemy would do everything possible to prevent food from reaching the besiegers. Only rarely did this result in rationing. Things were usually left to the market, and though the leaders of the host might draw on their own resources to distribute some alms of supplies or money to their followers or to the poor soldiers of the host in general (the latter is usually heard of only during Crusades), prices could go so high that even lords might go hungry and their men starve. Such extreme cases generally occurred only in sieges conducted deep in enemy territory, particularly overseas, since otherwise men would first desert.
That option was, of course, much more difficult for those inside the town. Even when the poor began to starve to death, the wealthy and the soldiers of the garrison were likely to have enough to eat, having had the resources to lay in large stocks at the start or enough gold to buy a loaf of bread for the normal cost of a sheep.112 On the other hand, since rich merchants had a great deal to lose if the town walls were not defended, and the garrison needed the help of the townsfolk to watch and man the ramparts, at least some food was often distributed in the form of rations once that became necessary. Otherwise, those who could not simply desert would be tempted to betray the town and let in the besiegers (likely receiving in return a rich personal reward and perhaps a promise to respect the goods and lives of community members), rather than watch their families starve; many towns were ultimately taken in just such a way. To reduce the risk of that turn of events, the leaders of the defense often took whatever steps they could to forbid and prevent any form of communication between the besieging army and the townsfolk. The besiegers would often aim to split the latter away from the soldiers of the garrison, who had more to gain and less to lose by prolongation of the defense, partly because they were less likely to go hungry, partly because they were more concerned to maintain military honor, partly because they did not usually have to worry about the fate of their wives and children if the place were captured by storm, and partly because even if the town fell, they usually had a castle or citadel to fall back to.
Occasionally, when hunger grew too great, the garrison would force the expulsion of so-called useless mouths—poor women, children, and the elderly, who could not fully participate in the defense or feed themselves—to stretch food supplies longer. This was done, for example, at Calais in 1347 and at Rouen in 1418.113 A merciful commander might let the refugees escape, but more likely, they would be forced to stay and starve in the No Man’s Land between the walls and the siege lines so that the defenders would have to feed them or watch them die. It is hard to imagine a more pitiful situation, and to witness it was hard on even the besiegers—as John Page, who was in the English army at Rouen, attests—and absolutely agonizing for those who had expelled them. Still, at Rouen the refugees were left in the ditches through the winter, permitted neither to escape nor to reenter their home city.
If a siege was sustained over harvest time, besieging soldiers would bring in the crops themselves, if necessary using swords to reap the grain. Ale was relatively quick and easy to brew, even in camp conditions, and the grain to make it would be available if any supplies were, but wine could easily run short. Wine’s antibiotic properties were of great importance in warding off waterborne illnesses, which were particularly likely to arise and spread in the conditions of a siege camp anyway, so it took luck to conduct a long siege without serious outbreaks of disease. A hard-hitting epidemic could easily kill more men than a lost battle.114
World History
