Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  The doctrinal divisions created by the Reformation became especially important in states aspiring to strong, centralized rule. Hitherto the traditional agrarian state had neither the means nor, usually, the inclination to supervise the religious lives of the lower classes. Yet those monarchs striving for absolute rule had developed a state machinery that enabled them to supervise their subjects’ lives more closely, and increasingly confessional allegiance would become the criterion of political loyalty. Henry VIII (r. 1509–47) and Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) of England both persecuted Catholics not as religious apostates but as traitors to the state. When he was Henry VIII’s chancellor, Thomas More had passed harsh sentences on politically dangerous heretics, only to be himself executed for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy that made Henry head of the church in England.47 In France the Edict of Paris (1543) described Protestant “heretics” as “the seditious disturbers of the peace and tranquillity of our subjects and secret conspirators against the prosperity of our state, which depends chiefly on the preservation of the Catholic faith in our kingdom.”48

  Although the Reformation produced fruitful forms of Christianity, it was in many ways a tragedy. It has been estimated that as many as eight thousand men and women were judicially executed as heretics in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.49 Policies differed from region to region. In France judicial proceedings had given way to open warfare, massacre, and popular violence by the 1550s. The German Catholic inquisitors were never overly zealous in pursuing Protestants, but Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II of Spain (r. 1555–98) regarded Protestantism in the Netherlands as a political as well as a religious threat, so they were unwavering in their attempts to suppress it. In England policy changed with the faith allegiance of the monarch. Henry VIII, who upheld his Catholicism, was unswervingly hostile to Lutherans, but regarded fidelity to the pope as a capital offense because it threatened his political supremacy. Under his son Edward VI (r. 1547–53), the pendulum swung in favor of Calvinism, then veered back under the Catholic Mary Tudor (r. 1553–58), who burned some three hundred Protestants. Under Elizabeth I, England became officially Protestant again, and the main victims were Catholic missionary-priests, trained in seminaries abroad and living in England clandestinely, saying Mass and administering the sacraments to recusant Catholics.

  We cannot expect these early modern states to have shared the outlook of the Enlightenment. Civilization had always depended upon coercion, so state violence was regarded as essential to public order. Petty theft, murder, forgery, arson, and the abduction of women were all capital offenses, so the death penalty for heresy was neither unusual nor extreme.50 Executions were usually carried out in public as a ritualized deterrent that expressed and enforced state and local authority.51 Without a professional police force and modern methods of surveillance, public order was dependent on such spectacles. Utterly repugnant as it is to us today, killing dissenters was seen as essential to the exercise of power, especially when the state was still fragile.52

  But the suppression of heterodoxy was not wholly pragmatic; an ideology that was central to an individual’s integrity also played a role. Thomas More, once a ruthless persecutor, would have taken the oath had he been motivated solely by political concerns; and Mary Tudor could have strengthened her regime had she been less zealous against Protestants. Yet heresy was different from other capital crimes, because if the accused recanted, she was pardoned and her life spared. Modern scholars have shown that officials often genuinely wanted to bring the wayward back into the fold and that the death of an unrepentant heretic was seen as a defeat.53 During the 1550s, the zealous inquisitor Pieter Titlemaus presided over at least 1,120 heresy trials in Flanders, but only 127 ended in execution. Twelve attempts were made by inquisitors, civic authorities, and priests to save the Anabaptist Soetken van den Houte and her three women companions in 1560. Under Mary Tudor, Edmund Bonner, Catholic bishop of London, tried fifteen times to rescue the Protestant John Philpot, six times to save Richard Woodman, and nine times to redeem Elizabeth Young.54

  Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists could all find biblical texts to justify the execution of heretics.55 Some quoted scriptural teachings that preached mercy and tolerance, but these kinder counsels were rejected by the majority. Yet even though thousands were indeed beheaded, burned, or hanged, drawn and quartered, there was no headlong rush to martyrdom. The vast majority were content to keep their convictions to themselves and conform outwardly to state decrees. Calvin inveighed against such cowardice, comparing closet Calvinists to Nicodemus, the Pharisee who kept his faith in Jesus secret. But “Nicodemites” in France and Italy retorted that it was easy for Calvin to take this heroic line while living safely in Geneva.56 Under Elizabeth I, there was a strong cult of martyrdom only among the Jesuits and seminarians training for the English mission who believed that their sacrifice would save their country.57 But recruits were also warned against excessive enthusiasm. A manual of the English College in Rome during the 1580s pointed out that not everybody was called to martyrdom and that no one should put himself at risk unnecessarily.58

  The one thing on which Catholics and Protestants could agree was their hatred of the Spanish Inquisition. But despite its gruesome reputation, the crimes of the Inquisition were exaggerated. Even the auto-da-fé (“declaration of faith”), with its solemn processions, sinister costumes, and burning of heretics, which to foreigners seemed the epitome of Spanish fanaticism, was not all it was cracked up to be. The auto-da-fé had no deep roots in Spanish culture. Originally a simple service of reconciliation, it took on this spectacular form only in the mid-sixteenth century and after its brief heyday (1559–70) was held very rarely. Moreover, the burning of the recalcitrant was not the centerpiece of the ritual: the accused were usually put to death unceremoniously outside the city, and scores of autos were held without a single execution. After the Inquisition’s first twenty years, less than 2 percent of those who were accused were convicted, and of these most were burned in effigy in absentia. Between 1559 and 1566, when the auto was at the peak of its popularity, about a hundred people died, whereas three hundred Protestants were put to death under Mary Tudor; twice that number were executed under Henry II of France (r. 1547–59), and ten times as many were killed in the Netherlands.59

  Very few Protestants were killed by the Spanish Inquisition; most of its victims were the “New Christians.” By the 1580s, when Spain was at war with other European states, the crown once again turned on the “enemy within,” this time the Moriscos, who, like the Jews before them, were resented less for their beliefs than for their cultural difference and financial success. “They marry among themselves and do not mix with Old Christians,” a Toledo tribunal complained to Philip II in 1589; “none of them enters religion, nor joins the army, none enters domestic service … they take part in trade and are rich.”60 Yet again, persecution proved counterproductive because it transformed the beleaguered Moriscos from imaginary to real enemies, courted by the Huguenots and Henry IV of France or turning to the sultan of Morocco for help. As a result, in 1609, the Moriscos were expelled from Spain, eliminating the last substantial Muslim community from Europe.

  Spain was heavily involved in the Wars of Religion that culminated in the horror of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). These conflicts gave rise to what has been called the “creation myth” of the modern West, because it explains how our distinctively secular mode of governance came into being.61 The theological quarrels of the Reformation, it is said, so inflamed Catholics and Protestants that they slaughtered one another in senseless wars, until the violence was finally contained by the creation of the liberal state that separated religion from politics. Europe had learned the hard way that once a conflict becomes “holy,” violence will know no bounds and compromise becomes impossible because all combatants are convinced that God is on their side. Consequently, religion should never again be allowed to influence political life.

  But not
hing is ever quite that simple. After the Reformation, northeastern Germany and Scandinavia were, roughly speaking, Lutheran; England, Scotland, the northern Netherlands, the Rhineland, and southern France were predominantly Calvinist; and the rest of the continent remained mostly Catholic. This naturally affected international relations, but European rulers had other concerns. Many, especially those trying to create absolutist states, were alarmed by the extraordinary success of the Habsburgs, who now ruled the German territories, Spain, and the southern Netherlands. Charles V’s aspiration to achieve trans-European hegemony on the Ottoman model was opposed by the more pluralistic dynamics in Europe that inclined toward the sovereign nation-state.62 The German princes naturally struggled to resist Charles’s ambitions and retain their local power and traditional privileges.

  In the minds of the participants, however, these wars were certainly experienced as a life-and-death struggle between Protestants and Catholics. Religious sentiments helped soldiers and generals to distance themselves from the enemy, blot out all sense of a shared humanity, and infuse the cruel struggle with a moral fervor that made it not only palatable but noble: they gave participants an uplifting sense of righteousness. But secular ideologies can do all this too. These wars were not simply and quintessentially “religious” in the modern sense. If they had been, we would not expect to find Protestants and Catholics fighting on the same side, for example. In fact, they often did so and consequently fought their co-religionists.63 Just two years after Charles became Holy Roman emperor, the Catholic Church had condemned Luther at the Diet of Worms (1521). For the first ten years of his reign, Charles, a Catholic, paid little attention to the Lutherans in Germany and instead concentrated on fighting the pope and the Catholic kings of France in Italy. Catholic rulers were particularly hostile to decrees of the Council of Trent that sought to limit their powers; this was yet another episode in the long struggle of European monarchs to control the church in their own realms.64 As late as 1556, Pope Paul IV went to war against Charles’s son Philip II, the devout Catholic ruler of Spain.65 The Catholic kings of France were so alarmed by the Habsburgs that they were even prepared to make alliances with the Ottoman Turks against them.66 For over thirty years (1521–52) they engaged in five military campaigns against the Catholic emperor, who was supported in these conflicts by many of the Protestant German princes; Charles rewarded them by granting them extensive powers over the churches in their domains.67

  The German princes, Catholic and Lutheran alike, were also alarmed by Charles’s centralizing ambitions. In 1531 some Protestant princes and townsfolk united to form the Schmalkaldic League against him. But during the First Schmalkaldic War, other prominent Lutheran princes fought on Charles’s side, while the Catholic king Henry II of France joined the Lutheran League in an attack on the emperor’s forces, and the Catholic German princes remained neutral.68 Moreover, many of Charles’s soldiers in the imperial army were mercenaries fighting for money rather than faith, and some were Protestants.69 Clearly these wars were not simply driven by sectarian fervor. Eventually, Charles had to admit defeat and signed the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. The Protestant princes were allowed to keep the Catholic ecclesiastical properties they had seized, and henceforth in Europe the religious allegiance of the local ruler determined the faith of his subjects—a principle later enshrined in the maxim cuius regio, eius religio. 70 Charles abdicated and retired to a monastery, and the empire was divided between his brother Ferdinand, who ruled the German territories, and his son Philip II, who governed Spain and the Netherlands.

  This was a political victory of one set of state builders over another.71 The Catholic and Lutheran princes of Germany had ganged up on Charles, realizing quite correctly that his aim had not been simply to crush heresy but also to increase his own power at their expense. The peasantry and the lower classes showed little theological conviction but switched from Catholicism to Lutheranism and back again as their lords and masters required.72 At the end of the struggle, the Peace of Augsburg greatly enhanced the political power of the princes, Catholic and Protestant alike. They could now use the Reformation to their own advantage, taxing their clergy, appropriating church estates, controlling education, and potentially extending their authority, through the parishes, to every one of their subjects.73

  A similar complexity can be observed in the French Wars of Religion (1562–98). These too were not simply a fight between the Calvinist Huguenots and the Catholic majority but were also a political contest among competing aristocratic factions.74 The Guises were Catholic and the southern Bourbons Huguenot; the Montmorencies were split, the older generation inclining to Catholicism, the younger to the Huguenots. These aristocrats were defending their traditional rights against the kings’ ambition to create a centralized state with un roi, une foi, une loi (“one king, one faith, one law”). The social and political elements of these struggles were so evident that until the 1970s, most scholars believed that faith was merely a front for the purely secular ambitions of kings and nobles.75 But in a landmark 1973 article, Natalie Zemon Davis examined the popular rituals in which both Catholics and Protestants drew on the Bible, the liturgy, and folk traditions to dehumanize their enemies and concluded that the French civil wars were “essentially religious.”76 Since then, scholars have reemphasized the role of religion, pointing out, however, that it is still anachronistic to separate the “political” from the “religious” at this date.77

  On October 25, 1534, Calvinists had pasted vitriolic and satirical posters attacking the Catholic Mass on public landmarks all over Paris, Blois, Orléans, and Tours. One even appeared on the door of Francis I’s bedchamber. As Catholics made their way to morning Mass, they were confronted by a headline printed in capital letters: “TRUE ARTICLES ON THE HORRIBLE, GROSS AND INSUFFERABLE ABUSE OF THE PAPAL MASS.” The French pamphleteer Antoine Marcourt listed four arguments against the Eucharist, “by which the whole world … will be completely ruined, cast down, lost and desolated”: it was blasphemous for the Mass to claim that it repeated Christ’s perfect sacrifice on Calvary; Jesus’s body was with God in Heaven so could not be present in the bread and wine; transubstantiation had no scriptural warrant; and communion was simply an act of remembrance. The diatribe concluded with a vicious attack on the clergy:

  By this [Mass] they have seized, destroyed and swallowed up everything imaginable, dead or alive. Because of it they live without any duties or responsibility to anyone or anything even to the need to study.… They kill, burn, destroy and murder as brigands all those who contradict them, for now all they have left is force.78

  The polemic was so extreme that even Theodore Beza, Calvin’s future deputy in Geneva, condemned it in his history of the French Protestant Church. Yet it was this disreputable attack that sparked the French Wars of Religion.

  As soon as the king saw the placards, he initiated a nationwide persecution of the Huguenots that forced many, including Calvin himself, to flee the country. King Francis was not a theological bigot; he was open to new ideas and had entertained Erasmus and other humanists at his court. But he rightly saw the placards not simply as a theological denunciation but also as an assault on the entire political system. The Eucharist was the supreme expression of social bonding, experienced not principally as a private communion with Christ but as a rite that bound the community together,79 a ritual of “greeting, sharing, giving, receiving, and making peace.”80 Before receiving the sacrament, Catholics had to beg their neighbors’ pardon for outstanding grievances; king, priests, aristocrats, and the common folk all ate the same consecrated bread and in so doing were integrated as one in the Body of Christ. The placards were also understood by both Catholics and Protestants as an implicit critique of the monarchy. The kings of France had always been revered as semidivine; the Calvinists’ denial of the real presence of Christ now tacitly denied the fusion of the physical and the sacred that had been crucial to medieval Christianity and that the king embodied in his person.81 Pasting the scurrilous
placard on Francis’s door was both a religious and a political act; and for Francis, the two were inseparable.

  Yet during the ensuing wars, it was impossible to divide the French population into neat communities of Protestants and Catholics.82 Here too people crossed the confessional lines and even changed their religious allegiance.83 In 1574 Henry of Montmorency, Catholic governor of Languedoc, joined his Huguenot neighbors in supporting a constitution attacking the monarchy.84 In 1579 a significant number of Huguenots were prepared to fight the king under the banner of the ultra-Catholic Duke of Guise, a pretender to the throne.85 Even the Catholic kings made alliances with Protestants in their struggle against the Habsburgs, whom the Peace of Augsburg had set back but hardly neutralized. Charles IX (r. 1560–74) fought with the Huguenots against the Spanish Habsburgs in the Netherlands, and in 1580 Henry III (r. 1575–89) was prepared to support Dutch Calvinists against Catholic Spain.

  In their struggle against the aristocracy, the lower classes also transcended sectarian allegiance. In 1562 hundreds of Catholic peasants joined a revolt against a Catholic nobleman who had forbidden his Huguenot peasants to hold Protestant services.86 Catholic and Protestant peasants joined forces again to oppose Henry III’s excessive tax levy in 1578, rampaging through the countryside for almost a year until they were slaughtered by the royal troops. In another tax protest during the 1590s, twenty-four Protestant and Catholic villages in the Haut-Biterrois set up an alternative system of self-government,87 and in the southwest Protestants and Catholics engaged in dozens of joint uprisings against the nobility, some of which involved as many as forty thousand people. In Croquants, the most famous of these associations, ignoring religious difference was a condition of membership.88