pillage

Old French pillage derives from pille, 'a rag' or 'torn cloth,' which may trace to Latin pilare, 'to strip of hair' or 'to plunder.' The connection between rags and plunder is physical: medieval soldiers stripped the dead and defeated of everything usable, starting with their clothing. The scraps of fabric torn from corpses were pilles. The act of collecting them was pillage.

By the 1300s, pillage in French and English had broadened from stripping cloth to stripping everything — goods, livestock, valuables, food. It became the standard term for the systematic looting that followed military victory. Armies expected pillage as compensation. Soldiers were often unpaid or underpaid, and the right to loot a conquered city was an implicit part of the contract.

The sack of Rome in 1527 by the troops of Charles V was one of history's most notorious pillages. Imperial soldiers — German Landsknechte, Spanish troops, Italian mercenaries — looted the city for eight days. Churches, palaces, private homes, and convents were ransacked. The word pillage barely captures the scale. Contemporaries described it as the end of the Renaissance.

International humanitarian law now prohibits pillage. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) states: 'Pillage is formally prohibited.' The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) lists it as a war crime. A word that described normal military practice for most of human history is now the name of a crime. The shift took less than a century.