Butcher’s War

The Butcher's War, or First Francescian War, was a military conflict between Poveglia's Francescian colony, and various Picunche nations and their Huilliche allies, during Caluchia's early colonial period. During and after the war, Etrurian settlers conquered most of Caluchia's coastal plain and killed, enslaved, and expelled its indigenous Picunche inhabitants. The conflict was primarily caused by tensions between expansionist Etrurian settlers and the Carileuche and Auquincoche towns near San Matteo, but Francescia's policy of total war and failure to discriminate between neutral and hostile Picunche ultimately drew most of the region's indigenous population into the conflict.

The story of the Butcher's War begins with the war’s most ruthless commander, Paolo D’Onofrio. Mercenary, planter-entrepeneur, and prominent colonist, Paolo D’Onofrio was born the son of a cobbler in Piavenna, but ran away from home and enlisted in a mercenary company at the age of 16. D’Onofrio would fight in the internecine wars of the Etruriani city states for another 10 years, retiring a successful mercenary captain after losing his left hand at the Battle of San Sebastian. D’Onofrio was one of the first settlers of the Poveglian colony in Caluchia, having agreed to muster a mercenary force and provide hired muscle for the Poveglian Northeast Trading Company (NTC). Abramo Costantini, Commander-General of the NTC Expedition, described D’Onofrio as a “grizzled manne of early middle years, dark of hair and eye. The condottiero is stoutly builte and loutish of feature, but of a cunning and vicious sort. He rules his men with an astonishyng heavy hand.” Never quite respected by the merchant leaders of the colonizing venture, D’Onofrio quickly garnered loyalty among the poorer settlers, his intensity and hunger for a share of the gold the merchants believed themselves sure to find appealing to their ambitions for social advancement. After the Sack of Aztocheletynal in 1523, Di Mariran’s men had carried an astonishing quantity of gold, silver, and other treasures back to Poveglia, and the flow of Etruriani colonists to newly established San Matteo came in search of another such windfall. Like D’Onofrio, the settlers of what would soon be dubbed Francescia were upwardly mobile, ambitious men, willing to take the risk of a long and dangerous sea voyage to an unknown land in search of profit.

As Etrurian settlement on the coasts expanded, relations between the indigenous Picunche communities and the settlers grew increasingly tense. The Great Dying had drastically reduced the native population, with somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of the Picunche perishing to smallpox, cholera, and scarlet fever introduced by Poveglian explorers as well as epidemics spread on the indigenous trade routes from newly-colonized Satucin. The new Francescians found depopulated villages and abandoned farmland and fish traps, which they took for themselves, often digging up Picunche graves and looting the corpses for grave goods, especially those of the Auquincoche, who lived in and around modern-day San Matteo. The discovery of silverwork in Picunche grave goods inflamed the spirits of the colonists, leading to scattered skirmishes between settlers and Picunche in the years leading up to the Butcher’s War. Nevertheless, the colony’s merchant backers were initially more interested in trade with the native population than conflict, and it would be seven years after the founding of San Matteo and three after the official chartering of the Francescian colony before the tensions would spill over into outright warfare. When the war finally came, D’Onofrio would be instrumental in both its beginning, and the bloody way it would be conducted.

On a hot summer day in 1559, a fight broke out between one of D’Onofrio’s men and a Carileuche trapper, who had entered a Francescian settlement to sell his wares. The mercenary, known to history only as Alfredo, was stabbed in the shoulder, after which three mercenaries beat the Picunche man in retribution, before seizing him and his two sons and dragging them back to San Matteo. D’Onofrio ordered an impromptu tribunal, declared them guilty, and the trapper and his sons were executed by firing squad. The actual cause of the fight is unknown, but the general consensus of the Francescian tribunal was that the trapper was a “violent savage,” who “unforgivablie disrespected his goode Sotirian betters.” A few days later, seven Carileuche ambushed Alfredo, along with two other mercenaries who were traveling with them, in retribution for the killing of their compatriots. Violence between settlers and Picunche groups subsequently intensified. On July 21st 1559, 50 mercenaries under D’Onofrio, on a punitive mission against a Carileuche village, met 80 Carileuche in battle at Fonte Piccolo. 8 mercenaries were killed and 11 wounded, while Picunche fatalities are not recorded. The remaining Francescians retreated back to the fortifications at San Matteo. This is considered the first pitched battle of the war Auquincoche.

After the Battle of Fonte Piccolo, Francescian troops turned to scorched earth tactics. While violence against civilians had long been a feature of skirmishes between settlers and the native population, these were now institutionalized as government policy. D’Onofrio men burned Picunche fields, leading to mass starvation among the nearby native population, and Picunche civilians encountered in these raids were killed indiscriminately. Allied Carileuche and Auquincoche forces destroyed the small, outlying settlement of San Giacomo in retaliation for these tactics, killing twelve settlers, wounding ten, and taking eight prisoners. The remaining settlers fled to San Matteo. Mass panic spread throughout the colonies after the destruction of San Giacomo, leading, D’Onofrio and Governor Costantini to set a bounty on Picunche scalps, including those from previously neutral native communities. The Francescian authorities also organized settlers into irregular militia companies led by mercenary officers to expand the colony’s fighting force. After one of D’Onofrio’s lieutenants, Berardo Capello, was ambushed and killed along with several of his men by Picunche soldiers, D’Onofrio, led a force of 75 mercenaries and 250 settler militia into a neutral Coyancoche town. Nine Picunche were killed trying to resist the invasion. While the ton’s women and children were enslaved and sent back to San Matteo, the mercenaries massacred the town’s men and older boys and buried them in a mass grave. 93 Picunche men were killed, and 90 women and 32 children were force-marched back to San Matteo. Half died en-route. A similar campaign of scorched earth and extermination wiped the the Coyanoche nation off the map by the end of 1559. Between the rise of indiscriminate scalp hunting and attacks on neutral Picunche, the colony’s actions during the first year of the war expanded the conflict beyond its initial Carileuche and Auquincoche combatants.

In 1560, Aucaman, the leader of the Limayche people, organized a confederation of the various Picunche subgroups to resist violent Francescian incursions into their lands. On September 2nd, 1561, a force of 1200 Picunche besieged San Matteo, but failed to storm the fortifications, and were forced to retreat in the face of heavy casualties when Francescian cannon emplacements began to bombard the army. Ultimately, after three years of brutal, grinding warfare between the settlers, in which many Etrurian colonists perished, and most of the Picunche population were either slain, enslaved, or died of war-related starvation and disease, the colony’s steel weapons and cavalry began to tell against a Picunche populace already severely weakened by the Great Dying. Some Picunche were taken as slaves and concubines, but most of the war’s survivors refused to submit to the Euclean conquerers even in defeat, and thus were either massacred by Vespasian troops, or forced into the interior. Those who escaped inland were absorbed into the nascent Huilliche Confederacy in the hill country to the south.