Wars of Religion

9 Key excerpts on "Wars of Religion"

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  The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe

  Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change

  • Daniel H. Nexon(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 7

  The French Wars of Religion

  THE FRENCH WARS OF RELIGION (1562–1629) provide more evidence for how the spread of heterodox religious movements exacerbated underlying dynamics of resistance and rule in early modern European states. Historians typically divide the French Wars of Religion into nine different conflicts, beginning in 1562 and ending in 1598 with the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes. But the Edict of Nantes did not end religious warfare within the country; Mack P. Holt, therefore, extends the history of the French Wars of Religion until 1629 and the Peace of Alais (June 1629).1 The political history of overt Protestantism in France continues beyond that, until Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685.2

  These conflicts deserve our attention for a number of reasons. First, they profoundly shaped early modern European politics. They destroyed, for decades, the ability of France to operate as a great power. They also intersected in a number of crucial ways, as we have already seen, with the Dutch Revolt and the practice of Spanish hegemony. Thus, the French Wars of Religion provide a stark reminder of the significant political implications of “transnational” religious movements. Second, the conflicts provide additional evidence for the importance of those mechanisms and processes elaborated in this book. Historians have a long tradition of debating the “political” or “religious” character of the civil wars that dominated France in the second half of the sixteenth century. This distinction, which parallels realist and constructivist debates in international-relations theory, no more helps us to understand the French Wars of Religion than it does the Dutch Revolt or the Schmalkaldic War. As Julien Coudy notes, “politics and religion” in the French Wars of Religion “were inextricably intermingled and matched together.”3

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  Protestant-Catholic Conflict from the Reformation to the 21st Century

  The Dynamics of Religious Difference

  • John Wolffe(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  2 Europe’s ‘Wars of Religion’ and their Legacies

  Mark Greengrass

  The inseparability of Christianity from the exercise of power by secular authorities in the Reformation era does not diminish the continuing ideological utility of singling out ‘religion’ as a supposedly discrete domain of human life particularly prone to violence.1

  A recent subject on the French agrégation programme (the examination for senior teachers in the civil service) was ‘Religious Confrontation in Europe from the beginning of the Sixteenth Century to the Middle of the Seventeenth Century’. As usual, it resulted in a flurry of publications seeking to provide intelligible syntheses to candidates.2 For most of the authors, there was no doubt about the importance of the ‘religious confrontation’ of this period to the history of later-modern Europe, its potential to ‘define the political and cultural landscape of the continent for centuries to come’.3 Europe’s ‘Wars of Religion’ left a profound legacy. When it came to defining the contours of that confrontation for students, however, these authors discovered a baffling polymorphy. On the one hand, there was doctrinal and dogmatic conflict that was exceptionally virulent and took on new and multiple forms. On the other hand, there were armed conflicts generating physical violence that also had a variety of different modalities (formal military conflicts on established lines; civil wars; iconoclastic uprisings; local civil disorders; peasant uprisings, etc). In addition, there was ‘symbolic’ confrontation (iconoclasm; ritualized violence; burning in effigy; the organized destruction of books, etc.), verbal and visual violence, judicial violence (the repression of heresy and dissension by ecclesiastical and secular authorities), extreme physical violence (massacre) and the resistance which was generated in martyrological cults of narration and commemoration. These authors equally had to take into account the significant polyvalence and polysemy in confrontational content

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  The Causes of War

  Volume IV: 1650 - 1800

  • Alexander Gillespie(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  XI Religion 1. I NTRODUCTION I N THE EARLIER volumes of this series of the Causes of War , religion, as a pretext for conflict both between, and within, countries, was dominant. In the period of this volume, from 1650 and 1800, religion lost its dominant position as a reason for killing. This trend, of religion losing power, is most evident at the external level. Religious considerations or context were barely seen in the Nine Years War, the Wars of Spanish Succession, Austrian Succession, and the Seven Years War. The exception was in eastern Europe, where warfare involving religious considerations could flare and burn to such an extent that religious intolerance was used a justification for Russian interven-tion in Poland-Lithuania in the second half of the eighteenth century. In terms of internal conflict, most of the primary European countries progressed to a position in which tolerance of different faiths became the norm, not the excep-tion, by the end of the eighteenth century. This end point was the exact opposite of when this study began, in 1650, when only a few Protestant countries inched their way towards tolerance on questions of religion. By the end of the eighteenth century, the vast majority of European countries, Protestant and Catholic, were on the road to tolerance on questions of religion. The movement towards tolerance was strongest in the revolutions of America and France. The difference between the two, was that although they both agreed on the ideals of equality and tolerance for all faiths, where the Americans built a wall between Church and State, the French, initially, tried to destroy the previously privileged First Estate and introduce a brand new type of social organisation. However, in the final years of the eighteenth century, the revolution had begun to mellow and Catholicism was once more allowed to breathe again in France. Hence-forth it was to be only one faith among many, equal to all and stripped of political power.

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  Religious Peace, Then and Now

  • Wayne P. Te Brake(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cascade Books

    (Publisher)

  2 .)

  While religious controversy and conflict were common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, religious war was not. To be sure, my simple table identifies six major clusters of religious war between 1529 and 1651 , and it suggests that there was religious war going on somewhere in Europe almost continuously from the 1560 s until the end of the British civil wars nine decades later. Still, we need to resist the temptation to totalize these wars in retrospect and to suggest that during this period, Christian Europe was actively at war with itself everywhere and all the time. On the contrary, the broader history of religious war should teach us that in the interstices of these episodes of coordinated destruction there was plenty of room for religious peace. I will have more to say on that later, but in order to solve the mystery of religious war—that is to show how the specific (limited) wars within these larger clusters were made—I had to write a series of “whodunits” and to expand my vision of the historical actors who made them. In addition to the usual suspects—the kings, princes, magistrates, militia leaders, or warlords who prosecuted the wars—it is important to recognize the roles played by competitive claimants to religious authority, contentious communities of faith, and external allies or enemies. (For a graphic specification of the whole cast of characters, see Appendix 3. )

  Let’s go back to the beginning, to the start of the religious pluralization process that underwrote these wars and to the political actors who chose sides in the religious controversies of the early Reformation. As it happened, both rulers (those who claimed political and/or religious authority within a given domain) and their subjects (those who were nominally subject to their authority) made those critical and consequential choices. Typically, it was popular preachers—some of whom had occupied positions within the priestly hierarchy of the established church—who transmitted the “evangel” (good news) of the reformers’ theology to broader audiences, urging a variety of possible actions to support the cause of reform. When their audiences responded positively and demonstrated their support, they laid the groundwork for popular Evangelical religious reform movements. And when these reform movements collaborated with rulers who were open to religious reform, they laid the foundations for Evangelical reformations within the self-regulating communities and territories that made up the Swiss Confederation and the Holy Roman Empire. And it was these Evangelical reformations—in some communities and territories, but not all—that, in turn, laid the foundations for the first phase of Europe’s religious wars in Switzerland and Germany.22

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  Western Civilization

  Beyond Boundaries

  • Thomas F. X. Noble, Barry Strauss, Duane Osheim, Kristen Neuschel(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Royal governments continued to consolidate authority, but resistance to royal power by provinces, nobles, or towns accustomed to independence now might have a religious sanction. Warfare over these issues had consumed the Holy Roman Empire in the first half of the sixteenth century. The conflict now spilled over into France and the Netherlands and threatened to erupt in England. In the early seventeenth century, the Holy Roman Empire once again was Europe in the Age of Religious Wars, 1560–1648 Imperial Spain and the Limits of Royal Power ◆ ◆ What circumstances permitted Spain’s ambitious policies and to what degree were they successful? Religious and Political Conflict in France and England ◆ ◆ What conditions led to civil war in France? How did religious and political conflict develop differently in England? The Holy Roman Empire and the Thirty Years’ War ◆ ◆ Why did war erupt again within the Holy Roman Empire and what was the significance of the conflict? Economic Change and Social Tensions ◆ ◆ What caused the economic stresses of these decades and how did ordinary people cope with them? Writing, Drama, and Art in an Age of Upheaval ◆ ◆ In what ways do the literature and art of this period reflect the political, social, and religious conflicts of the age? Chapter Overview 15 Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 418 Chapter 15 Europe in the Age of Religious Wars, 1560–1648 wracked by a war simultaneously religious and political in origin.

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  The Causes of War

  Volume III: 1400 CE to 1650 CE

  • Alexander Gillespie(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  When 120 The Wars of Religion in France 21 Skinner, Q (1978) The Foundations of Modern Political Thought , Vol II (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) 215–16, 242, 285, 320; Martines, L (2013) Furies: War in Europe: 1450–1700 (London, Bloomsbury) 12–14. 22 See page 192. 23 The 1577 ‘Catholic League’ in Reddaway, F (ed) (1930) Select Documents in European History , Vol II (London, Methuen) 98. 24 The ‘Edict of Beaulieu, 1576’ in Potter, D (ed) (1997) The French Wars of Religion: Selected Documents (London, St Martins) 163–68; Braghi, G (2014) ‘The Death of Charles IX Valois: An Assassin’s or a Martyr’s Blood?’, French History 28 (3), 303–21. 25 See page 28. the siege of the Protestant seaport of La Rochelle was lifted following a five-month blockade, more than 50 per cent of the Huguenot army of 18,000 men lay dead, dying or had deserted. Nevertheless, they held out against the forces of Charles IX and were rewarded with a further peace in the 1573 Edict of Boulogne. This Edict was a retreat from earlier recognitions of the rights of Huguenots. Now, they were only permitted freedom of conscience in terms of private worship, and only in the three areas which remained under Huguenot control. 21 (ii) Henri III and the Catholic League The French king, Charles IX, died in1574. His successor was his brother, Henri, who had for a few months been the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. Upon accession to the French throne, following more conflict in 1575 and the risk of inter-vention by German and/or English Protestants increasing, Henri III attempted to calm relations with England and reaffirmed the 1572 Treaty of Blois . Furthermore, fol-lowing what he had learnt in his short time in Poland and Lithuania, 22 he disavowed the approach adopted by his brother, Charles IX, and undertook an experiment in toleration with the 1576 Edict of Beaulieu.

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  Assassins' Deeds

  A History of Assassination from Ancient Egypt to the Present Day

  • John Withington(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Reaktion Books

    (Publisher)

  4

  THE Wars of Religion

  T radition has it that on 31 October 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door at Wittenberg in Germany and launched the Protestant Reformation. Many modern historians doubt whether the document was ever posted in this way and argue that, in any case, Luther’s criticisms of the Church at this point were questioning rather than condemnatory, but the effect was the same. The Christians of Western Europe split into Catholics and Protestants, and for two and a half centuries the continent would be riven by religious divisions and wars. We have already seen how religious disagreements motivated assassins in Islamic countries. Now that same force would spread through Christendom as Catholics denounced Protestants as heretics, and vice versa.

  New Theories on the Ethics of Assassination and How to Avoid It

  The idea that a ruler had a ‘social contract’ with those he ruled and that this limited his powers had first been put forward by ancient Greek philosophers, but it gained new traction during the Wars of Religion. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana would argue that if a monarch was a heretic, he violated his contract and could therefore be removed, so any subject had the right to kill him. The Protestant bishop of Winchester John Ponet would not have agreed with Mariana on much, but he took a similar line in his book A Short Treatise on Political Power (1556), arguing that a ruler who abused his position should be treated as a common criminal and killed if necessary, though he and Mariana would no doubt have had opposite views on which specific rulers qualified for assassination. Ponet fled England when Queen ‘Bloody’ Mary started burning Protestants. Almost a century later the great poet John Milton, writing shortly after the execution of King Charles I

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  War and Conflict in the Early Modern World

  1500 - 1700

  • Brian Sandberg(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  The complex motivations and conflicting affiliations of the diverse warring parties have produced a debate over the religious nature of the conflict. Peter Wilson argues that the Thirty Years War “was not primarily a religious war.…The war was religious only to the extent that faith guided all early modern public policy and private behaviour.” 47 Other historians refute this interpretation of the conflict as essentially political, however, calling it a “religious war.” 48 Tryntje Helfferich demonstrates that Amalia Elizabeth, Landgravine of Hesse, fought hard and negotiated vigorously to win religious concessions and legal protections for Calvinism in the Holy Roman Empire in the 1630s–40s, offering ample evidence of “the continued importance of religion in the second half of the Thirty Years War.” 49 The Thirty Years War is often characterized as the Golden Age of mercenaries, since almost every state employed military entrepreneurs to recruit and command some of their military forces. Albrecht von Wallenstein, Ernst von Mansfeld, and Bernard of Saxe-Weimar came to define the concept of “military entrepreneurship.” Military officers such as colonels and captains tended to pursue lengthy careers in the service of different states, moving easily from one field army to another between campaigns. Scottish officers such as Sir Robert Monro gained their reputations in Swedish service, and then later returned to the British Isles. Common soldiers of diverse ethnic, national, and religious backgrounds frequently accepted a bounty to enter another field army when they were demobilized or captured. Nonetheless, many of these so-called “mercenaries” were motivated by strong confessional causes and religious politics, as well as by fame and fortune. Soldiers in every army routinely pillaged villages and sacked cities, giving the Thirty Years War a lasting reputation for brutality

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  A Short History of Europe

  From the Greeks and Romans to the Present Day

  • A. Alcock(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  9 Reformation, Counter Reformation and Religious War 1500±1650ad By the middle of the fifteenth century Germany was seething with dissatisfaction with the Church. Because of the weakness of German central political power the Papacy had a much stronger position than in England, France and Spain where the Church was much more `national'. Thus the Papacy was still able to appoint French and Italians to German bishoprics and, since less money was com- ing from the countries with `national' churches, it was demanding increased contributions from Germany. A second source of resentment was the behaviour of the senior clergy, who considered their bishoprics as feudal fiefs and a means of maintaining standards of living commensurate with their social status rather than paying attention to their spiritual functions. These were left to the parish clergy, who were in many cases theologically ignorant or illiterate, and poorly paid. 1 Third, at a time of intensification rather than decline in religious belief, there was resentment at the deterioration of ecclesiastical means of salvation into substitutes such as confessions and the sale of indulgences. Martin Luther, a Saxon (1483±46) had studied law at Leipzig University, joined the Augustinian Order of Hermits in 1505 and was ordained in 1507. His Order sent him to Wittenberg University to teach moral philosophy, where by 1511 he was a Doctor of Theology and Professor of Biblical Studies. And it was in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517 that Luther posted on the door of the castle church his ninety-five theses attacking the sale of indulgences, the Church's preoccupation with material pos- sessions, and contrasting those material possessions with its true wealth, namely, the Gospel. Crucial to an understanding of Lutheranism and its significance are Luther's interpretation of the relations between God and Man, and, linked to it, his views on politics and society, particularly the place of labour. 124

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