A master historian reveals the dark side of a golden age-the brutal warfare that ravaged Europe and shaped the transition from middle ages to modernity. We think of the Renaissance as a shining era of human achievement-a pinnacle of artistic genius and humanist brilliance, the time of Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Montaigne. Yet it was also an age of constant, harrowing warfare. Armies, not philosophers, shaped the face of Europe as modern nation-states emerged from feudal society. In "Furies," one of the leading scholars of Renaissance history captures the dark reality of the period in a gripping narrative mosaic. As Martines shows us, "total war" was no twentieth-century innovation. These conflicts spared no one, soldier or civilian, in their path. A Renaissance army was a mobile city: indeed, a force of 20,000 or 40,000 men was larger than many cities of the day. And it was a monster, devouring food and supplies for miles around. It menaced towns and the countryside-and itself-with famine and disease, often more lethal than combat. To raise and deploy such armies was a colossal challenge for a nation, and, as "Furies" shows, the early modern state was often in effect a fund-raising appendage to its army. Fighting itself was savage, its violence increased by the use of newly invented weapons, from muskets to mortars, and its savagery often intensified, in the Reformation era, by religious passion. For centuries, notes Martines, the history of this period has favored diplomacy, high politics, and military tactics-matters far removed from the lived experience of warfare. "Furies" puts us on the front lines of battle, and on the streets of cities under siege, to reveal what Europe's wars meant to the men and women who endured them.

Prelude -- A war mosaic -- Soldiers: plebeians and nobles -- Sacking cities -- Weapons and princes -- Siege -- Armies: ambulant cities, dying cities -- Plunder -- Hell in the villages -- Killing for God -- The state: emerging Leviathan -- Afterword -- Appendix: money.