The Four Horsemen: Scholars Look Back at the Reformation, a Gruesomely Chaotic Time

I think you'd be forgiven a little historical jingoism if you wanted to argue that the 20th century was the most apocalyptic one in the history of the West, if not the world. Consider the many tens of millions of people slaughtered or brutalized in wars large and small; the Great Depression; the very real threat of total nuclear annihilation; the many bouts of famine; the plagues, from influenza to AIDS; the widespread fears that an ecological End Time was approaching. Small wonder the century ended on a note of doomsday hysteria.

To find a period nearly as end-of-the-world, you have to go back 500 years or so. In The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe (Cambridge University Press, 360 pages, $64.95 hardcover/$22.95 soft), historians Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell suggest the 150-year period from 1498, when Albrecht Durer's famous Four Horsemen woodcut was published, to 1648, the end of the Thirty Years' War. Like our recent past, it was a gruesomely chaotic time, visited by every calamity the Four Horsemen represent: enormous religious upheaval (Luther nailed up his 95 theses in 1517, sparking the massive dislocations of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation), nearly constant and widespread warfare (including the Thirty Years' War, the English Civil War, the Eighty Years' War between Spain and the rebellious United Provinces, the Peasants' Wars, war with the invading Turks, and more), frequent famines and plagues. Moreover, the authors argue, it was a time when everyone from peasants to great minds like Martin Luther and Tycho Brahe were of an apocalyptic mind-set, absolutely convinced that they were living in the End Times and the Last Judgment was soon to come.

I have a feeling the authors may be exaggerating this last part to build a neat thesis, but that doesn't detract much from the book's appeal. Despite being an academic text it's a highly readable overview of a fascinating, terrifying period.

The authors handily break it down by Horseman?or by horse, really. They start with the White Horse, which represented religious contention, arguing that Luther and many other Protestant leaders and followers really were convinced that the end of the world was near, that the Antichrist was in the Vatican, and that they themselves were akin to the prophets of the Old Testament. Some evangelical Protestants took up arms and led peasant revolts against their earthly princes to hasten the coming of the end. In Saxony, self-styled prophet Thomas Müntzer (c. 1490-1525) led a ragtag army against the forces of the Landgrave of Hesse?who captured and beheaded him. A satirical cartoon of c. 1590 shows the Devil devouring priests and shitting Catholic soldiers to fight the Protestants. The city of Strassburg produced a whole generation of seers and prophetesses predicting imminent doom. The Catholics had their own doomsayers, like one of my favorite figures of the era, Savonarola, the Giuliani of Florence.

Throughout the 16th century, and all over Europe, people reported apocalyptic signs and portents in the natural world. They saw apparitions of great armies clashing in the sky, complete with sound effects; or three suns would appear in the sky, or there would be freak rains of "blood" or sulphur. Stories of monstrous births, both animal and human, became routine. "Wonder-fish" were caught that bore arms or had miraculous writing on their flesh. Groundbreaking astronomers like Brahe were also avid astrologers, eager to interpret celestial events like the prodigious comets of 1577 and 1618 in eschatological terms.

Several philosophers had the notion that Nature itself was running down, becoming decayed and "lame with age. Despite the fact that the sun, according to [the astrologer] Forsius, by then had come much closer to the earth than it had been in classical times, it was unable to warm it properly, because its rays were losing their force. Likewise, the four Elements were weakened and had become impure, and together with the sun they were unable to nourish and maintain the number of plants, animals and fish as had hitherto been the case. Also the age of Man had much diminished, where our forefathers lived for hundreds of years, Forsius refers to the case of Methuselah who is supposed to have lived for 969 years, by 1609 you could exceptionally expect to reach only 70 or 80 years. Nothing lasted any longer, bricks, which had previously withstood time for 100 or 200 years, now lasted little more than three or four years, while old wood was much stronger than the new. This was to Forsius definite proof that the world was suffering from the infirmity of old age and it was rapidly coming to its End."

The Red Horse of War bestrode the period with devastating impact. Wars grew larger, longer and more destructive all way around during the epoch. Huge armies roamed Europe. Chronically unpaid and underfed, soldiers were as likely to mutiny as to fight. Looting, raping and foraging, they wrought unspeakable depredations on the civilians of whatever land they happened to be passing through. In his great, grotesque novel of 1668 Simplicissimus (which the authors surprisingly don't mention, unless it's in a footnote and I missed it) Hans Jacob Christopher van Grimmelshausen, a German who'd fought in the Thirty Years' War, describes the devastating impact of soldiers descending upon a family farm:

When these horsemen took over my father's smoky house, the first thing they did was to bring in their horses; then each one started to destroy everything and tear everything to pieces. Some were killing the cattle, and broiling or roasting the carcasses; others were going through the house, determined not to miss anything good there might be for them to find; even the privy was not safe from their investigations, as if we had hidden there Jason's Golden Fleece. Others were making great bundles of linen and clothes and all sorts of stuff, as if they were going to open a flea market someplace, and what they weren't going to carry away with them they pulled to pieces. Some shoved their swords through the piles of straw or hay as if they hadn't had enough pigs to kill; others shook the feathers out of the mattresses and filled them with bacon and salt meat and other things as if they expected to sleep on them better that way... They burnt beds, and the tables, and the chairs, and the benches, when they could have found plenty of dry firewood in the yard. Of pots and of pans they shattered the lot... Our maid underwent such treatment in the stables that she could hardly walk coming out...

Firearms became common weaponry during this period, changing the face of war forever. The authors discuss the flintlock arquebus, as dangerous to the shooter as to his target. "The gunpowder in the priming pan might explode," they explain, "causing 'a flash in the pan', and when doing so might permanently blind the soldier and inflict horrendous burns on his face in particular." French surgeon Ambrose Pare wrote of three soldiers who

were leaning against the wall, their faces wholly disfigured, and neither saw nor heard, nor spoke; and their clothes did yet flame with the gunpowder which had burnt them. Beholding them with pitty, there happened to come an old soldier, who asked me if there were any possible meanes to cure them, I told him no: he presently approached to them, and gently cut their throates without choler. Seeing this great cruelty, I told him he was a wicked man, he answered me that he prayed to God that whensoever he should be in such a case, that he might find someone that would doe as much to him, to the end he might not miserably languish.

This era also saw the birth of great siege cannons, with names like Fierce Buck and Brutal Butcher, of whom it was said that "he will dance across moats, through ring walls, inner walls and bastions, through churches, houses, cellars, kitchens."

The Black Horse is famine. In this epoch, bread?made of wheat, barley or oats, or even of nuts in lean times?really was the staff of life, to a degree we can hardly imagine today. Any failure in the fields?which were common?could mean instant hunger. Famine spread with the constant warring as well. During the Catholic siege of the Protestant town Sancerre in 1573, once all the usual foodstuffs were gone, the horses, dogs and cats were all butchered. Next, as an eye-witness named Lery reported, "There was no tail, paw or skin of rat which was not seized upon to serve as nourishment for a great multitude of suffering poor folk..." People next boiled and ate their belts and shoes. "When the leather was all consumed," the authors write, "people turned to trying parchment 'not only white blank parchment, but also letters, title deeds, books printed and hand written, having no difficulty in eating even those a hundred or a hundred and twenty years old'. They were soaked, chopped, boiled for a day and a half, and then they were fricasseed like tripe, or cooked with herbs and spices. After paper, people turned to eating the hooves of horses and cattle and the horns of cattle." They tried making bread out of straw, and "of the shells of nuts, roasted and ground." Lery also reported, "I can affirm that dung and human excrement were piled up and collected to eat. And I saw some who, having filled their pots with horse shit, ate it with such avidity that they claimed to find it as good as if it had been made with bran-bread."

Finally, some people were reduced to eating their own children. "Lery himself saw the evidence: the bone, the head of the poor girl cured and gnawed, the ears chewed, the tongue cooked, all the limbs put in a pot ready to boil with vinegar, spices and salt. He was so shocked that 'all my entrails were disturbed': in other words, he vomited."

The last chapter is devoted to the Pale Horse: plagues, disease and death. In the 1490s syphilis, thought then to have been brought back from the Americas, began to spread viciously throughout Europe. It was, not surprisingly, considered God's punishment for lust. There were other strange new epidemics, like one called "the English sweat." The bubonic plague itself, although it reached nothing like the levels it did during the Black Death years of 1348-'49 (when it killed as many as a third of the population of Europe), was present in some part of Europe every year during the 16th century, and Europe-wide flare-ups came on an average of about once every nine years. "In a world where life expectancy was about 35 years," the authors grimly note, "this meant that a Europe-wide outbreak occurred in the lifetime of most people."

Small wonder the image of the Danse Macabre, which seems to have first appeared on a cemetery wall in Paris in 1424-'25, became a nearly ubiquitous motif in the 16th century. Then, as at the end of the 20th century, people could be forgiven for harboring gloomy or chiliastic thoughts.