The effect on communications goes without saying. Even worse than that was the danger from those whom the horrible cruelty of sixteenth-century warfare drove half-mad with grief and loss, who shook off civilisation and robbed and murdered recklessly. According to Aubigné, who witnessed the horrors which he dwells on at length in his "Les Tragiques," war demoralised even the dogs in a way that endangered every passer-by. Speaking of those around Moncontour, where was fought one of the battles which left most bodies on the field,
Vous en voyez l'espreuve au champ de Moncontour;
Héréditairement ils ont, depuis ce jour,
La rage naturelle, et leur race enyvrée
Du sang des vrais François, se sent de la curée.
But it may be objected that the evidence of a sectarian historian is not admissible on any question of fact. Take, then, what a sober correspondent writes from the scene of the Thirty Years' War in 1639, not of dogs, but of men: "It is an ordinary thing in Brandenburg country to eat man's flesh,"[144] and he goes on to tell how a judge has just met his death that way.
Again, De Thou, approaching Mérindol, finds not a soul to be seen; all had retired to caves at the sight of armed men. Elsewhere he saw all the peasants at work armed, and of one town nothing remained intact but a fountain and one street; the work of a commander, in the king's name, for the gratification of his private revenge. The state produced is well described by Sir Thomas Overbury in 1609 as one in which there was "no man but had an enemy within three miles, and so the country became frontier all over." What "frontier" meant is well defined by an Italian of this time as country to which a few could do no harm and in which many could not live. The prosperity of the Empire while this was the state of France has been already outlined; what it became, as a result of the civil war, while France was becoming the best organised and most civilised country in Europe, may be guessed from Reresby's description of the district which in 1600 had been the most comfortable in Christendom, that between Augsburg and Frankfurt; villages and towns uninhabited, much ground untilled, no meat to be had, no sheets, sometimes no beds; for drink, milk and water, little wine and that sour and very dear; people so boorish as to resemble beasts. Significant, too, is it that while Sir Philip Sidney, defining the qualities of the dominions of Europe for his brother, writes, "Germany doth excel in good laws and well administering of justice," and while all subsequent travellers for forty years confirm this, a German, Zeiler, compiled his guide to Spain shortly before the date when the correspondent just quoted wrote his letter, and in this guide, in maintaining the claims of Spain on the attention of the student, puts among the characteristics in which Spain excels the rest of Europe, the inflexibility of justice there.
Yet civil war was less detrimental to touring than international war, inasmuch as no nation was barred the country for the time being. Besides, fewer mercenaries were employed. Now, however bad the native soldier may have been—and how bad that was may be judged from Shakespeare's picture of him in "Henry V" (Act III, sc. 2),—mercenaries were far worse, seeing that they behaved in the country they were defending as the others did only in that which they attacked. Sastrow followed in the wake of the mercenaries whom Charles V imported; wherever they had passed the way was strewn with corpses. In one house he found the body of a man who had been suspended by the genitals, a usual custom, while they tortured him to make him reveal his valuables, and released by a sword-stroke, not on the cord he hung by, but "flush with the abdomen." From Bamberg they carried off four hundred women as far as Nuremberg, while Hungarians cut off the feet and hands of children and stuck them in their hats instead of feathers. And it is perhaps worth while quoting the effect on Sastrow himself. On his horse being stolen, he "chose the best nag at hand"; and finding a gentleman's house temporarily abandoned, he and his companions stole wholesale, not only to satisfy present wants, but also in order to realise money later.
The effect of all this so far as it concerned tourists may be exemplified by the state of the highroad between Danzig and Hamburg, along which, in 1600, the only corpses in evidence were those of criminals. By 1652, in one day's journey, a traveller[145] could count thirty-four piles of faggots, each pile marking the spot where a wayfarer had been murdered. Each passer-by was expected to add a faggot. Another result was that soldiers continued to exercise during peace the habits they had contracted in war. When Lady Fanshawe passed through Abbeville in 1659, the governor warned her against local robbers, advising an escort of garrison soldiers at a pistole [£3, 6s. 8d.] each. She engaged ten, and met a band of fifty 'robbers.' The ten parleyed with the fifty, and the fifty retired; they, too, were soldiers of the garrison.