St. Bartholomew's Massacre

[Zeno]

I was going to post the link to the article in the Catholic encyclopedia but stopped at three web links. Thanks for including, in your response, what I probably should have included in the initial post.


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The political ambitions of rulers, their ability to raise armies and early modern warfighting technology played more decisive roles than religious differences during the "wars of religion."

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If you had to tier the causes would you, in general, put it so:

Political
Religious
Economic
‘Other’

Of course the causes are often all intermixed.

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The more common thread of the period was the low threshhold of justifiable state violence.


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Very interesting comment.


A few side notes:

War is usually an official act of a state, mob violence, however instigated, is of another character and flavor – and in general is more cruel, warfare usually has some semblance of rules that mobs lose all sense of. And loosely organized militias or armed gangs can probably be classified somewhere in the middle of this sliding scale.

On the other hand, organized and bureaucratic cruelty is usually longer lasting, more efficient, and inflicts more pain, torture, and death than the short bursts of mob violence or even warfare.

But I am wandering a bit off topic.

-Zeno

[MMMMMM]

^

[Dominic]

There's an aboslutely wonderful French movie based on the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre called "Queen Margot" that was released in 1994 and stars Isabelle Adjani. It's a great movie and anyone interested in this time in history should see it!



http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&id...fo&intl=us

[Chris Alger]

This thread caught my eye because I just happened to be watching a series of lectures on "Europe and the Wars of Religion" It emphasizes how all various of these factors tend to erupt and spill over into each other in seemingly unpredictable ways, ways that certainly weren't predicted by the major actors.

Each of the conflicts has its own history, but they commonly involved competition over the fantastic new power of centralized states and the power and dislocations caused by new economies. Religious factionalism and fanaticism provided an uncontrollable catalyst that made these fairly common kinds of political disputes more likely to break into war. It then made the wars harder to resolve. There were cross currents: rulers caught off guard by new religious ideologies calling for disobedience to the state, as well as religious minorities surprised by state persecution, learned to counter with great effect with their own pandering and forging of alliances with co-religionists. So it's hard to say that religion "caused" the bloodshed but it seems to me that better religion (or no religion) certainly could have prevented or reduced it.

I wouldn't hold up this period as a good example of the barbarism of mobs combared to armies. French warfare almost certainly killed more civilians than French mobs, if you include starvation and disease during seiges of Huegenot strongholds. 30-40% of the population of Germany perished during the 30 Years War, a higher percentage than died during WWII.

[Zeno]

That was a very enjoyable post with an interesting expansion on some key points and issues. Thanks for your eloquent responses and participation in this thread.

The lecture series you mention sounds very worthwhile. Similar items have caught my eye, usually advertised in certain magazines, but I always pass off on them not knowing the quality of the product.

-Zeno