Massacre and Atrocity
Just as iconoclasm was a way for Protestants of purifying sacred space so, too, for Catholics, the polluting element of heresy could be excised by the shedding of Protestant blood.
The culmination of this pattern of intercom- munal violence across France was the archetypal religious atrocity, the killing of thousands of Protestants by Catholics in August and September 1572, known as the St Bartholomew's Day massacres. It can be safely asserted that the extent of the brutality of the French religious wars had no match on the European continent, but that should not allow us to overlook comparable outbreaks elsewhere, notably in the so-called Spanish Fury in Antwerp, and other military atrocities in the Netherlands in 1570s and 80s, or the treatment of Protestant settlers in Ireland in 1640s. The difference here, perhaps, is that most of the violence in the Netherlands was perpetrated by foreigners rather than fellow citizens and neighbours, that peculiarly nasty aspect of civil wars in any period. Since the sixteenth century, English troops had been responsible for major atrocities against the Irish, forming the bedrock of resentment for the devastating violence of the seventeenth century.The militia of Paris has been identified as largely responsible for the massacre of 1572, and this official participation is found to be the case in other French cities, too. Although still targeted at neighbours and fellow Frenchmen, such large-scale violence seems, therefore, to have necessitated an element of military or official collusion. Equally, the graphic descriptions of the sort of barbaric violence meted out by the Spanish soldiers in 1576, or in Ireland in 1641, or indeed in the empire during the Thirty Years War, are reminiscent of that in France. These included, for example, instances of cannibalism and of gratuitous mutilation and torture, and the unnatural killing of innocents in cold blood, especially children and pregnant women.
Of course, here we are dealing with the biased reporting produced by the ideologically driven rhetoric of a confessional conflict, designed to demonise the other side. Historians need to be sensitive to this when cataloguing and analysing this sort of violence. People certainly died in their thousands, and we have corroborative testimony from more moderate Catholic observers for the generic rituals of dragging bodies through the streets and the deliberate and calculated drowning of victims in rivers. Although individual stories are harder to verify, their symbolism is as important as their veracity for our understanding of contemporary attitudes to violence.This pattern of brutality, however, was not experienced to the same extent in all communities. When it came to intercommunal confessional violence, Judith Pollmann argues, Dutch Catholics were more restrained than their French counterparts because of general opposition to the Spanish-imposed stringent heresy laws and a less vitriolic tendency among the clergy who, in France, actively stirred up a violent response.[816] When considering the contrast between Catholic violence during the French religious wars and the Dutch Revolt, it is worth reflecting further on the role of Spanish involvement. In the northern Netherlands, the brutality of Spanish troops did much to undermine the Catholic cause, and allowed Protestants to present their movement as a resistance to foreign tyranny. In France, Catholic preachers were able to stir up the antipathy of crowds toward the Protestant minority, whereas its alliance with Spain was one of the contributory factors to the discrediting of the Catholic League in 1590s. A powerful sense of confronting the ‘other', whether in the form of foreigners or confessional opponents and the threat they posed to the wider community, undoubtedly played a key role in instigating and regulating large-scale violence.
As the examples of France and the Netherlands demonstrate, much of the ‘frequently violent aftermath' of the Reformation was concentrated in the sixteenth century, with fainter echoes in many countries, with some notable exceptions, into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[817] According to David Luebke, in the Holy Roman Empire the practice of simultaneum (the sharing of sites of worship) and other communal arrangements were able ‘to smother religious violence', with only limited outbursts after 1648.[818] Keith Luria points to continuing confrontations in seventeenth-century France, with violence in some regions ‘a constant factor...
[which] easily surfaced in particularly difficult times', but argues that there was also widespread accommodation of the other faith.[819] Nevertheless, even in the relatively peaceful Dutch Republic, there were incidents of sporadic violence between the confessions in the lands of Overmaas well into the eighteenth century. The violent consequences of civil war were also powerfully felt in mid seventeenth-century England and Ireland. One of the bloodiest conflicts of the seventeenth century was the Thirty Years War, which resulted in the death, destruction and displacement of many people in the Holy Roman Empire and had ramifications far beyond. The role of religion as a driving force in these wars has, however, been disputed.Peter Wilson, in particular, has downplayed the confessional nature of the Thirty Years War and argues that explicit propaganda exaggerated the stories of brutality and cruelty carried out principally by foreign soldiers which was manipulated to justify violent retaliation. Furthermore, the infamous destruction or ‘rape' of Magdeburg in 1631, which resulted in the death of four-fifths of the city's population, was a horrific but exceptional event given undue prominence by historians. So, too, the massacre or ‘bloodbath' of 600 Protestants in Valtellina in 1620 was blamed on Catholic clergy. Despite incidents of iconoclasm and confessionally motivated mob violence, Wilson asserts, ‘it remains questionable how far violence was directly motivated by religion', especially that exacted by the military against civilians, often involving torture.[820] In this way, he downplays the role of religion in the wars in contrast to other conflicts, but, again, we are dealing here with the difference between troop and popular violence. For the soldiery, other considerations were more significant, including the opportunity for plunder and humiliation of foes, and Wilson suggests that a breakdown of communication with the local population was the cause of much of the brutality.
The violence was not all one way, however; resistance and reprisal by the populace was also characteristic of the conflict, introducing a communal element. It is argued that there is little evidence for violent death during the war, and that most of the civilian population succumbed to disease, but this neglects the strong relationship between the spread of epidemics and the weakening of the population as a result of civil war. France, for instance, also witnessed a significant demographic decline during its religious wars. Wilson admits that increased confessional animosity contributed to the outbreak of the war, stating that during the first decades of the seventeenth century the polarisation of Protestants and Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire into opposing armed parties increased tension and ‘led directly to violence'.[821] The interplay of religion and violence in these and other similar circumstances, and the role of the former as a contributory factor to the latter, therefore, continues to be a contested issue dependent on the weight given to confessional difference.The atrocities perpetrated in Ireland in 1640s, ‘where ethnic and confessional hatred converged with truly ghastly results', would seem to provide an uncontested conclusion to this conundrum.[822] They have only recently drawn serious scholarly attention, however, so politicised do many of their aspects remain. Here the worst acts of violence were directed by Irish Catholics against the Protestant settlers in Ulster, most especially with the deliberate drowning of settlers at Portadown and the burning of refugees in (the aptly named) Kilmore. This in turn was, of course, a response to a bloody campaign of conquest and colonisation conducted by English troops. In seventeenth-century Ireland we see many of the patterns of violence and its portrayal experienced in communities across Europe, but certainly producing a ‘level of violence... more intense and vicious than elsewhere in the Tudor and Stuart kingdoms'.25 There was the symbolic use of ritual beheadings,
Intercommunal Violence in Europe accusations of barbarity including (once again) cannibalism on both sides, and the dehumanisation of victims.
The violence, which escalated over time, was legitimised with reference to divine sanction and justified as a response to provocation. As in the Holy Roman Empire and the Netherlands, the blaming of foreigners for the worst acts was commonplace. Thus, violence was used to intimidate and to seek revenge for previous atrocities. Indeed, it is evident that the cold-blooded killing of Irish civilians by English soldiers during the sixteenth-century campaigns far outweighed in bloodshed the impact of the oft-cited endemic clan violence of the native lords. Ritual brutality was evident here, too. At Maynooth Castle, in 1535, the Irish ‘rebels' were deliberately and symbolically decapitated on the feast of the Annunciation, so as to send out a stark message of royal retribution. Confessional divisions would only become significant in later years, merging into other hatreds with catastrophic results for intercommunal relations.While Wilson points to a pervasive climate of uncertainty in the empire which he describes as violating what was familiar, Alex Walsham, by contrast, sees episodic violence in England as occasional ‘ruptures of normal neighbourly relations'. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that ‘episodes of verbal and physical aggression' between faith groups increased at times of political crisis, and at these times ‘waves of religious persecution cut vertically rather than horizontally across communities and neighbourhoods'.[823] However, civil conflict did see a breakdown in social relations in some areas, accompanied by incidents of iconoclasm and popular violence, including anti-Catholic riots which targeted wealthy Catholic lords in particular. Furthermore, insolent and provocative behaviour and self-segregation by minority groups increased hostility and, therefore, the likelihood of violence against them. Challenging the positive depiction of early modern England as relatively restrained in its confessional relations, Ethan Shagan has identified the ‘subtle violence' of the English Crown in controlling and coercing the populace through a policy which advocated moderation and restraint.[824] An emphasis on obedience and conformity was aggressively and violently pursued in the interests of the monarchical state and the official church, and even the language of liberty during the English Revolution, he argues, was exclusive and intolerant. Violence, or at least the use of force, could therefore be a factor in both exacerbating and calming intercommunal tensions. Pacification of civil unrest involved constraint and the exercise of control by the authorities.