Sonic Strategy and Sensory Experience in the Eighty Years’ War

Abstract

Early modern war was a complex phenomenon that marked not only the lives of soldiers and civilians directly involved in conflicts, but also the technology, the economy and the culture of the epoch. Current intellectual approaches to war nevertheless tend to ignore that war was also experienced as a particular series of sounds, from drums to cannons and cries. In fact, aural perception constituted in many circumstances the primary source of information about the progress of military events. This article explores the sonic nature of the Eighty Year's War through a renewed analysis of the many accounts left by Spanish soldiers and officers and other international chroniclers. More specifically, it shows that sound was a defining characteristic of armies and that the disciplining of sound constituted a fundamental development in early modern wars. Sound control was associated with a crucial rise in discipline and logistics that was developed at the time and that played a key role in the nocturnal and diurnal strategies of one of the most important conflicts of the early modern epoch. Drawing on abundant, if often overlooked, information about sound and sensory perceptions found in military treatises and war chronicles, this article analyses the whole range of sonic interaction between townsmen and soldiers, and stresses the uses of sound to produce fear, force negotiation, and express joy over victories. It also reveals how war sounds affected the pattern of communications in the Low Countries and the responses of local inhabitants to the conflicts. The increasing intensity of war sounds was not merely a by-product of firearms. War sounds were integrated in early modern culture and affected the lives of numerous people, they modified the perception of civic life and helped redefine the boundaries of religious and communal identities.