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15. One is punished for stubbornly defending a fort without a good reason
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[A brief consideration of the limits placed on stubborn bravery by the rules of contemporary warfare. Exceptionally, all Montaigne’s examples are modern ones, with no reference to antiquity.]
[A] Like all other virtues valour has its limits: overstep them, and you tread the path of vice; consequently a man may go right through the dwelling-place of valour into rashness, stubbornness and madness if he does not know where those boundaries lie: yet at their margins they are not easy to pick out. From this consideration was born the custom observed in warfare of punishing even by death those who stubbornly persist in the defence of a fort when, by the very rules of war, it cannot be sustained. Otherwise if there were hope of escaping punishment whole armies would be held up by chicken-coops. At the siege of Pavia, My Lord the Constable de Montmorency was required to cross the Ticino and to take up position in the suburbs of San Antonio: he was delayed by a tower at the foot of a bridge which stubbornly held out until battered down: he hanged every man inside. Another time he accompanied My Lord the Dauphin on his Transalpine expedition. The castle at Villano was taken by force and all the defenders hacked to pieces by the soldiers in their frenzy, excepting only the Captain and his ensign; for the same reason he ordered both of them to be strangled to death by hanging. Captain Martin Du Bellay, when Governor of Turin in the same territory, similarly hanged Captain Saint-Bony after all his men had been massacred at the taking of his fort.1 Yet judgements about the strength or weakness of a fort depend upon estimates of the relative strength of the attacking forces. A man could justly be obstinate when faced with a couple of culverins who would be out of his mind if he resisted thirty cannons. And where you have to take into account the greatness of the conquering prince, the reputation he has and the respect due to him, there is a risk of the balance being weighted in his favour; that is why some have so great an opinion of themselves and of their resources that they deem it unreasonable that anyone whatsoever be thought worthy of resisting them: when any are found doing so they put them all to the sword… while their fortune lasts. That can be seen in the form of defiance and the summonses to surrender used by Eastern potentates2 and their successors today: they are proud, arrogant and full of barbaric assertiveness. [C] And in the regions where the Portuguese first penetrated into the Indies they discovered lands where it is universally held to be an inviolable law that an enemy defeated in the presence of the King or his Viceroy is excluded from any consideration of ransom or mercy.3
[B] Above all, then, you must avoid (if you can!) falling into the hands of a judge who is your enemy, victorious and armed.