People are tortured, raped and murdered or are killed by malnutrition and epidemics. Cities are besieged, starved and destroyed after being taken. Refugees seek refuge elsewhere. It is happening now, and it happened on a large scale in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
June 1635 French and Dutch soldiers jointly besieged the Brabant town of Tienen, where a Spanish garrison was stationed. Because the Spanish captain refused to surrender the city, Tienen was violently captured, looted and burned on 9 June. To force the population to give up the repository of their riches, the soldiers used excessive force. According to contemporary news reports and oral tradition, rape was also widespread.
One of the eyewitnesses to the capture and looting was Anna Wielant, the Mother Superior of the Annunciaten Monastery in Tienen. A penetrating account of the siege and violent looting of the city has been handed down from her hand. In the days leading up to the siege, the sisters hear about the advancing army and the city is gripped by fear of what is to come, Anna writes.
Everyone hopes that the surrender of the city will be nonviolent, but when the enemy has entered the gates and ramparts after an hour and a half of cannon fire, the cloister gates are soon knocked by garrison soldiers in agony:"Oh, oh! Protects us; because we are being beaten to death in the streets.' Soon after, hundreds of civilians appear to have fled into the monastery church, followed by Dutch soldiers, 'Beggars', who enter the monastery with 'bare swords'.
In search of loot, the soldiers turn all the cupboards and storage spaces inside out, the sisters even pull the rings from their fingers and smash the altar in the chapel and trample the hosts. In the evening new groups of soldiers keep coming and they are more and more violent. The nuns and the women and children who are with them are beaten and mistreated by the beggars.
Especially Anna herself, who as Mother Superior is supposed to know all the secret hiding places of the monastery, has a hard time. All night the women are harassed, beaten and harassed. Anna has wounds all over her body, her habit is soaked with blood. In between they try to bandage each other's wounds. The father who is with the women is so badly mistreated that he succumbs to it. The next morning he is found dead in the sacristy.
When new groups of soldiers arrive in the morning and the misery seems to start all over again, a French soldier takes pity on the sisters and leads them out of the city. All citizens flee, those who cannot walk must stay behind.
Tienen is on fire. The streets are hot with fire and strewn with rubble and ashes. Some sisters have lost their slippers or are limping on one shoe. They are smeared and bloodied. Dead bodies are everywhere. '[…] where we said that one lay without head, there again one who was about to die, there again a child, there after another dying woman, such that it seemed a general [total] devastation, and a motherry [slaughter ] been too late.'
After ten hours of 'struggling', now they have not eaten for two days, the sisters arrive in Sint Truiden where they are given a place to sleep and something to eat. Later they are housed in Tongeren, and only on Sint-Nicolaas evening do they return to their 'miserable cloisters' in Tienen. Everything of value, all the furniture had been taken, the sisters had to sleep on straw. Mother Superior Anna Wielant probably wrote down her story shortly after her return, because she asks the reader to understand her sloppy handwriting, which she attributes to her emotional state.
Death and destruction
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as now, hundreds of thousands of people fled war and violence. The hundreds of chronicles, diaries and autobiographical texts that have survived from that time contain numerous stories such as that of Anna Wielant. During the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), for example, large parts of Germany and Central Europe, as well as the Southern Netherlands, were ravaged by armies of mercenaries. They fought now on one side and then on the other and gathered their own wages – often with little discipline.
Everywhere they sowed death and destruction. The population suffered equally from all parties. The war was like a natural disaster befalling them. Some blamed this or that party, Protestants, Catholics, others blame the sin of the people in general. Was this the beginning of the end times? As now, religion was sometimes a motive for struggle, but the many temporary alliances between Protestant and Catholic monarchs prove that it was really about power in Europe.
Demographically, the French Wars of Religion, the Eighty Years' War and the Thirty Years' War, were a disaster. Some German regions lost two-thirds of their population. This was due to mortality – people died from violence, hunger and epidemics – but also because hundreds of thousands left. This also applied to Flanders, Brabant, Gelderland and Limburg in the years after 1585.
For example, the region around Oudenaarde, Aalst and Namur lost 40 to 45 percent of the population. Antwerp, the largest city in the Netherlands with 90,000 inhabitants, fell back to 40,000 inhabitants between 1585 and 1600. A third of the houses in Ghent and Bruges also became vacant. Around Ypres the depopulation seems to have amounted to two thirds. In the Flemish and Brabant countryside, much agricultural land lay fallow due to a lack of farm workers.
'Come here too'
Where did all these people go? To places where it was safer, of course. Where they hoped to earn a living and build a new life. This is central to the letters that Protestant refugees in England wrote to their relatives in Flanders. Come here too, they write, we are safe here, we can go to our own church, we are treated kindly and there is work.
Social networks determined the destination. So many people from Ypres ended up in Norwich. Flemish refugees in England mainly went to work in the wool industry and textile trade. The women could spin.
Dutch Calvinists and Mennonites had similar motives for going to the German Rhineland, to Ostfriesland and from the 1580s to the Dutch cities, which then began to grow and become more prosperous.
Many people from the latter group managed to build a new life and some even prospered in the Republic. But of course they also had to live with loss. They had left behind family and friends, their familiar surroundings and their possessions. Those who were actually persecuted often had their property confiscated. They were dependent on aid and charity upon arrival.
Refugee suspect
Refugees had to justify and reclaim the loss of status, honor and respect for themselves, but also the society in which they ended up. Banishment was a common punishment at this time, so undocumented aliens were therefore suspect. The refugee had to prove that he did not belong to the punished criminals, but to the innocent group of persecuted Christians.
Refugees were heavily dependent on their own social networks. The group provided initial shelter, helped to find work and offered recognition and solidarity. Refugees invariably created a collective identity that could be valued positively. Especially the Bible book of Exodus, which describes the flight of the Israelites from Egypt, became the source of inspiration for everyone who had to leave home and hearth. The Israelites were tested but were finally chosen by God.
Almost all flight stories end with formulas expressing gratitude. Anna Wielant also ends her story:'we have already comforted ourselves in our poverty, with the schickinge, and the will of Godts, trusting that he would foresee it again, who is all-powerful, and never and forsake him, who sincerely seek him. , serve and love.'