Clifford J. Rogers
“To be besieged,” wrote Otto of Freising in the late twelfth century, “is the most pitiful fate of all.”1 Indeed, the long defense of a castle or a fortified town could impose great suffering: sleepless nights on watch, agonizing labor to rebuild battered ramparts, terrible stench, thirst, unceasing bombardment, constant worry, and above all, hunger “sharper than a sword.” In December 1418, the people of Rouen sent ambassadors to their king and his council, “to lay before them the pitiful condition in which they were within the town, and the evils they were suffering and had long suffered. For they said there to the king personally. . . how that many thousands of people inside were already dead from hunger; and that since the beginning of October they had been obliged to eat horses, dogs, cats, rats, and other vile things not lawful for human beings; and that they had already thrust out of the town more than sixteen thousand helpless persons, of whom the greater part had died miserably within the trenches of the town. And good people had drawn over the wall many of the new-born children of women who gave birth to them there, and they were sent up in panniers to have them baptized, and then returned to their mothers; but plenty of them died without being christened; which things were very sad, and pitiable even to hear related.”
An egg at 9 pence, an apple at 10 pence. . .
Then to die they did begin,
All that rich city within.
They died so fast on every day
That men could not all them in the earth lay
Even if a child should otherwise be dead,
The mother would not give it bread. . .
Nor would a child to its mother give;
Everyone tried himself to live
As long as he could last
Love and kindness both were past.2
Hard as the lot of the besieged was, the experience of the besiegers was often not much better and sometimes rather worse. They too had the burdens and worries of guarding against attack, whether by relief forces or in the form of sallies by the garrison; their labors were likely to be even greater than those of the defenders. They too could suffer deeply from hunger, and they were more exposed to the elements:
The harshness of the weather, the shortage of food caused by miserable indigence and the closing in of the enemy all weighed on them. . . . There was no lack of discontented muttering; indeed it was only to be expected that human fragility should start muttering under the weight of so much suffering, Hail, snow and ice, and stormy wind made life extremely unpleasant for those who were not sheltered under any roof; it was hardly surprising that those outside the tents were almost at the end of their
Tether when the tents themselves were awash. . . . An ass-load of wheat was sold for six pounds, an egg for twelve denarii and one single nut for one. . . . The result was that many died of hunger because they had nothing they could eat.3
Improvised shelter and sanitation systems, and their “foreign stomachs,” left the besiegers even more vulnerable to disease than the defenders were:
While the lord prince was at the siege of the town of Esgleyes so great a sickness attacked his host that all the people were ill. So many nobles, knights, and honourable citizens and footsoldiers died there, and in such great numbers that it was difficult to find anyone to bury them or to stand watch, or to think of anything but of how he could go on living. This lasted as long as the siege was maintained. And the lord prince fell so gravely ill that at no time, as long as he remained in Sardinia, was he without fever. The princess was ill too. Only one remained alive of all the ladies who had come with her. . . . And as far as can be reckoned, half of the people at the siege died there, and, of those left, there were very few who were not ill and often near to death through the sickness. This happened because of a very rainy winter; the mud round the host was very great and there was great cold and stench and infection.4
By no means, however, were all sieges so trying. If they had been, they would not have been so common. And common they certainly were, much more common than battle, especially in the High and late Middle Ages—though the disparity was not as great as some recent writers have tended to imply.5 Most sieges ended before any soldiers experienced starvation or epidemic disease, sometimes due to a successful assault, but far more often through a negotiated surrender. A large number of factors contributed to determining the character of a siege. The most important of these were the nature of the place under attack (its size; the quality of its fortifications) and the determination of its defenders and the attackers. There were also, as with all elements of medieval warfare, variations by region and century, but until the advent of really effective gunpowder siege artillery around 1420-30, these were less significant than one might expect. When Christine de Pizan composed a sort of manual for the attack and defense of fortifications for the duke of Burgundy around 1410, she included an important chapter focusing on the use of cannon, but the rest of her text was basically just a translation of the similar handbook Vegetius had written at a distance of a thousand years and a thousand kilometers. This did no harm to the value of the text; rather, it became one of her most popular works and was translated into English and printed by Caxton at the very end of the Middle Ages.6 When it came down to it, whether in the fifth century or the fifteenth, sieges were about efforts to go over, under, or through the defenders’ walls or to use the threat of doing so to frighten them into surrendering.
If we consider the Middle Ages as a whole, the most common type of siege was probably the siege of a town, especially when we take into account that castles were rare before the tenth century. This chapter will therefore focus on operations of that sort at first, to establish a sort of baseline, then briefly cover sieges of castles as a variation on the theme. Likewise, discussion of gunpowder artillery and its effects will be reserved for the end of the chapter.
World History
