Early Modern History Winter 2024

Religious Conflict and Violence

Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries many different religious movements grew and attempted to coexist across Europe, which produced many instances of conflicts and violence. New ideas like Protestantism arose due to preexisting social and political tensions between religous groups. These new religious traditions created solutions for particular groups of Europeans, but would often also exacerbate conflicts with other groups or monarchs. While Protestantism would often emerge in a concentrated geographic area - a couple of towns, or sometimes larger regions - those burgeoning Protestant communities were still generally within Catholic countries and were surrounded by Catholics who were displeased with their presence. Throughout the latter half of the sixteenth century, there were numerous conflicts between Protestants and Catholics (a notable example of this was the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris, France). Monarchs often tried to create peace both through early forms of religious tolerance and by enforcing their own religious traditions on the people within their territory, like with the Peace of Westphalia and Edict of Nantes proving how intertwined social and political issues were with religion.

 The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre took place in Paris in August 1572, as depicted in this painting by François Dubois. This massacre was one of the events in the French religious wars that occurred in the 1560s and 70s between Catholics and Protestants, or Huguenots, due to the Protestant Reformation. A wedding between Catholic King Charles IX’s sister Marguerite of Valois to Henry of Bourbon, who was a Protestant, was the catalyst for this massacre. The wedding greatly displeased Catholics in Paris, and when Huguenots arrived in the city for the wedding, fighting broke out.  Wiesner-Hanks writes that in response to the massacre, “Protestant writers began to argue that the power of a monarch should be limited,” among other newer political ideas about rebellion (Wiesner-Hanks, 146). Although the focus of the Protestant Reformation was of course religion, and there were very intense, very specific theological debates, the problems extended outside of the church and affected politics and society too, which Dubois’ painting shows.

Gerard Terborch's 1648 painting The Swearing of the Oath of Ratification of the Treaty of Münster  depicts the signing of one of the treaties that made up the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which helped end the Thirty Years’ War. This new treaty was built on the ones that preceded it while acknowledging the current political and religious realities of Europe, yet it did not result in lasting peace. The Peace of Westphalia recognized the “United Provinces of the Netherlands and Switzerland as fully independent,” and allowed the Habsburgs to retain their “family holdings and claims on the imperial title” (Wiesner-Hanks, 344). The agreement also allowed “territorial rulers to choose the religion of their territories, with Calvinism joining Catholicism and Lutheranism as an acceptable choice,” which both recognized some level of religious tolerance, with the acceptance of Calvinism, but also displays the continuity of state control over religion in these territories (Wiesner-Hanks, 344). The Peace of Westphalia symbolizes a temporary conclusion to long-standing religious disputes while transitioning toward the new wave of European territorial conflicts to come, in which religion would certainly remain important.

Credit to Zach Hill

The 1598 Edict of Nantes was Henry IV's attempt to end the brutal French Wars of Religion which had been raging since the 1560s (Wiesner-Hanks, 204). The Edict made room for a certain level of religious toleration in France for Huguenots (French Protestants), allowing them to “live and worship freely” in specific areas and maintain certain towns, while also affirming that Catholicism would remain the official religion in France (Wiesner-Hanks, 204). This was accepted by both Huguenots and Catholics, who sought an end to the devastating fighting going on at the time, and led to almost a century of religious peace in France. However, the Edict was never a permanent solution to the problem, and its protections were slowly eroded by successive French monarchs until Louis XIV revoked it outright in 1685 (Wiesner-Hanks ,204). In spite of its eventual failure, the Edict stands as an important document in the history of the Reformation because of the temporary peace that it created. Although it would be succeeded by the devastating Thirty Years War, it serves as an early example of religious tolerance in France and the role that monarchs had in controlling and maintaining the role of religion in the lives of Europeans in the early modern period.  

Credit to Ben Stever-Zeitlin

Bibliography:

Work on this page credited to Julia Tassava, Chris O'Mara, Kiera Block, Tabitha Jones, Zach Hill, and Ben Stever-Zeitlin. See complete Bibliography for all sources used in the Religion exhibit.