The Anatomy of Melancholy

They make a sport of this, and will inflict it on friends and allies too, violating oaths, vows, and promises, by treachery or otherwise: “Deceit or courage—who asks which, against an enemy?” Treaties and the laws of war are broken for their advantage—“laws fall silent amid arms”—and “all laws, divine and human, are generally trampled underfoot.” The laws of God and humankind are trodden down. The sword alone settles everything. To satisfy their lust and spite, they care nothing what they attempt, say, or do: Loyalty and honesty are rare among men who follow the camp.

Nothing is more common than father fighting son, brother fighting brother, relation fighting relation, kingdom fighting kingdom, province fighting province, Christians fighting Christians, “by whom they have never been harmed even in thought”—people who have never offended them in thought, word, or deed. Limitless wealth is spent, towns burned, flourishing cities sacked and ruined; and, “what the mind shudders to recall,” fine countries are emptied of people and left desolate, their old inhabitants driven out, trade and commerce ruined, young women raped: maidens not yet joined in marriage, and youths whose locks have not yet been cut.

Chaste wives cry out with Andromache, “Soon I shall be forced to submit to the embraces of the man who killed Hector”: perhaps they will be forced to sleep with those who killed their husbands. To see rich and poor, sick and healthy, masters and servants, “all stricken by the same calamity,” destroyed or maimed, and so on; “and whatever a spirit delighting in crime and a perverted mind dare,” as Cyprian says; and every torment, misery, and outrage that hell itself, the devil, fury, and rage can devise for their own ruin and destruction! War is so abominable, as Gerbelius concludes: “War is so foul and detestable a thing, bringing human slaughter, devastation,” and so on. It is God’s scourge, the cause, effect, fruit, and punishment of sin; not “a pruning of humankind,” as Tertullian calls it, but “its ruin.”

Suppose Democritus had witnessed the recent civil wars in France, those abominable wars, wars hated by mothers, in which, Coligny says, a million people perished in less than ten years and twenty thousand churches were destroyed—indeed, the whole kingdom overturned, as Richard Dinoth adds. So many tens of thousands of ordinary people were butchered by the sword, famine, and war, “with such hatred on both sides that even barbarians were stunned by the dreadful slaughter”: such savage hatred that the world stood amazed.