I am not a historian but I am looking for some historically accurate depictions of what I am referring to as "scorched earth" activities by mundane armies.
By "scorched earth" I am referring to large armies fighting across large regions and one of the (or perhaps both) armies scavenges all available food - crops, farm animals, stores, etc of the local peasants before driving off/conscripting/killing said peasants and torching the fields and village to deny resources to the other army.
What would such fields and farms look like after a year or two? Especially to travellers unaware of the local history. Fields full of untrimmed grass?
How long would the fields remain fallow before new peasants arrived and settled?
I am assuming this happens often enough during Crusades and Civil wars
Your "scorched earth" happened very rarely - and to my knowledge not in 13th century Europe or the Holy Land. Even noble crusaders were typically not only motivated by remissal of their sins, but also by a share in conquered lands - with the serfs still on them. So not even the Massacre at Bèziers (1209) comes close to your ideas.
Medieval cities in Italy like Milan, Rome or Viterbo utterly destroyed and razed competitor towns: Castelseprio in 1162 and 1287, Tusculum in 1167 and 1191, Ferento in 1172 - but not the surrounding countrysides.
In brief: medieval large armies were hard to assemble and keep together, and very hard to order around. A commander requesting highly questionable deeds not immediately benefiting knights and lords risked losing control of them.
This is why I needed the more historically trained to comment.
I was aware that the Russians used scorched earth tactics when retreating before Napoleon and the Nazis, so I was kind of assuming the tactic had been around for awhile.
The reason why they were not used more often in feudal Europe was not moral, but practical.
If you "just" grab all resources from the peasantry you are already effectively denying their use to the enemy for months at least, possibly years. Active destruction not just of those resources, but of the relevant productive infrastructure (including the peasants) does not help you if by the end of that time the enemy is the victor; and it actively hurts you a lot if you are. So, it's generally useful only if you are planning for a long, long war - which was generally considered foolish and very hard to carry out in feudal times, when one's vassals became restless and expected to return home after a few months.
Your other examples for me were not close enough to 13th century to list them.
The Mongols had their own ways of war very different from European ones - and brought those to 13th century Europe indeed.
Yes, plus weeds and shrubs and the beginning of trees (several trees can grow taller than a man within a year). A lot depends on where you are located: the Scottish highlands and Sicily will look very different from each other. There would probably be visible remnants of stone walls and buildings too.
It depends. It could be just a year if the lord who lost the area quickly defeated his opponents, and actively encouraged resettlement. It could be a century or more, if the area remained contested.
Note that many peasants could not move by their own choice - they'd need permission from their feudal lord. And almost no peasant would move to settle a place without having a good idea of who ruled there, and without having come to an agreement with such ruler. Moving into a militarily contested zone would be considered folly (though a generous grant of land would entice many to move into a newly conquered, but still "troubled" area).
Henry Raspe destroyed a town entirely to the ground leaving nothing behind. And this would be ca 1230 +/5 years. I do not ave my big document with all my notes, but he also razed the castle of BĂĽdingen in 1241.
Another example would be Burg Isemburg near essen being totally destroyed as punishement for the murder of Engelbert of Cologne around 1225. Though this was more vengeance than a calculated scorched earth.
A victor forcing the destruction of walls has been a standard since the empires of Mesopotamia.
And peasantry that hid survived, kept some grain to replant, and the next year everything was as if the ary had never come through. In Contrast the original "scorched Earth" approach was when the Romans salted the fields of Cartage to prevent the civilization from recovering. That was exceptionally rare.
Fundamentally medieval and earlier wars had a much smaller impact on their environment than modern wars after the development of high explosives, but conversely tended to be much more cruel in terms of intentional treatment of non-combatants.
I have no idea what you speak of. You mean Henry IV Raspe, landgraf of Thuringia, anti-king and king of Germany, right? This man was certainly more of an administrator, diplomat and plotter than a warrior or commander of men able to raze a town to the ground.
Really? Best check here.
As for the Isenburg near Essen: it was built only around 1240. However the castles of Friedrich von Isenberg, found guilty of murdering Engelbert and executed for that, were indeed razed. But razing castles is defortification and has very little to do with "scorched earth".
The most famous ancient account of sowing a city with salt was the destruction of the rebellious city of Shechem in the the Bible (Judges 9:45).
So, in 1299, when Pope Boniface VIII's forces destroyed Palestrina, the account is that he ordered it plowed under like Carthage, and that it be sowed with salt. It is not clear from the phrasing of the account whether it was thought that Carthage had been both plowed under and sowed with salt, or whether this was a case of stacking symbolisms from the destructions of both Carthage and Shechem on Palestrina.
Aside from that bit, there's apparently no documented statement that Carthage was sown with salt prior to the 19th Century, and the approximate current academic consensus, ever since the issue was raised in the Journal of Classical Philology in 1986, is that Carthage probably was not sown with salt (either practically or as a matter of a few symbolic handfuls).
This is a tricky topic. Clever Boniface VIII needed many allies among the Italian cities to finally in 1299 conquer Palestrina, the main stronghold of his enemies, the Colonna. It was close to the main stronghold of his own family, the Caetani - so apparently he did his utmost to make Palestrina disappear. That included fierce rhetoric, an attempt to destroy its ancient walls and more modern buildings and the resettlement of the temporarily subjected people of Palestrina to a newly built Civitas Papalis (Town of the Pope) in the plain. But Civitas Papalis was destroyed by a conflagration of unknown origin already in 1300, and around 1307 - some four years after the death of Boniface - the Colonna retook the area of Palestrina, moved its people back and rebuilt it as they could.
On the topic of an army marches on its stomach, are there any accounts of a medieval army that normally feeds itself from local produce, that strips everything edible from a farming community? And when they can't get enough they burn the place down in frustration?
Say weather or the enemy traps them in one locale for too long. Or perhaps they are hungry advancing, then shortly afterwards come back the same way, still hungry?
Could be bandits or mercenaries not paid as other possibilities
Or would there be other reasons that a healthy farming village is suddenly abandoned and left fallow for years at a time?
Then again, this being Mythic Europe a dragon might have moved in and eaten all the available meat, four or two-legged. I am wondering if this might become a saga scenario...
Since the word "salary" comes from Roman Army paying its soldiers with salt (at least in part), I doubt the troops would be happy seeing their wages being tossed out like that.
An army marching through usually caused destruction by its presence more than intent. They usually didn’t intend to kill all the peasants, but left disease in their wake, as any large group of people moving through semi isolated peasants would. (Most people never going more than 10 miles from their homes is comparative isolation.) The army also didn’t have effective logistics, so small groups of armed men trying to feed themselves have a tendency to eat anything that isn’t well hidden.
Then the social structures that keep people behaving break down. Young men far from home, armed, among an unarmed victim population doesn’t result in good “Christian” behavior most of the time. So, the peasants they find are subject to disease, famine, robbery, and casual cruelty.
Anyone who gives them protection during this: covenant, walled town, or local lord with a castle, is going to be a hero.
Take a look at the routiers or brabançons of the 13th century. These had few means than plunder to make themselves fed or paid during a campaign, and at its end more often than not turned into robbers. They also were not respected by anybody, including their employers - so could also be sacrificed if that was favorable. Local militias went after these whenever they could. There never was a ransom for them and at the end of a battle like Bouvines they could be slaughtered standing on the battlefield.
See Georges Duby, LE DIMANCHE DE BOUVINES cp.6 : Amazon.fr
Employing routiers was considered a necessity by many lords - but not a conscious decision of a "scorched earth" strategy.
EDIT: Below is a translation to English of a tricky and hard to enforce part of Canon 27 of the 3rd Lateran Council from 1179, lumping together with Cathars and excommunicating those lords who employ routiers:
With regard to the Brabanters, Aragonese, Navarrese, Basques, Coterelli and Triaverdini {17}, who practise such cruelty upon Christians that they respect neither churches nor monasteries, and spare neither widows, orphans, old or young nor any age or sex, but like pagans destroy and lay everything waste, we likewise decree that those who hire, keep or support them, in the districts where they rage around, should be denounced publicly on Sundays and other solemn days in the churches, that they should be subject in every way to the same sentence and penalty as the above-mentioned heretics and that they should not be received into the communion of the church, unless they abjure their pernicious society and heresy. As long as such people persist in their wickedness, let all who are bound to them by any pact know that they are free from all obligations of loyalty, homage or any obedience. On these {18} and on all the faithful we enjoin, for the remission of sins, that they oppose this scourge with all their might and by arms protect the Christian people against them. Their goods are to be confiscated and princes free to subject them to slavery. (Under Pope Alexander)
"Scorched Earth" seems to be the wrong title for this thread, but I can't think of a better term for stripping all edible resources from a rural location, and possibly wrecking everything else.