Europe In The Age Of The Wars Of Religion, 1559–1618

Abstract

Abstract The war of 1562–3 in France was probably the first to be given openly the description of a ‘war of religion’, though (as has already been seen) the war of 1546–7 in Germany was a war of religion in fact, if not in name. Thereafter, there were to be many European wars which might be described by this label. Yet, it may be doubted whether there has ever been an age in which religious issues alone, without additional political, social or economic forces, caused wars or even crusades. Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century exemplifies this. Historians have professed to see the beginnings of radical religious parties in France and the Low Countries during this period, and ‘the ideological upsurge of the international Protestant community’ in the 1570s or thereabouts. The age generated its own powerful legends. Protestants imagined a great Catholic conspiracy, beginning with the meetings of the Council of Trent and extending to the ‘interview’ at Bayonne in 1565 between the French queen mother, Catherine de Medici, and the duke of Alba, representing Philip II of Spain. There, it was claimed, a plot had been formed to massacre the Protestants which came to its barbarous fruition in the St Bartholomew’s Day massacres in France in 1572. In fact, there was no Catholic con spiracy and the Bayonne meeting decided nothing of importance. The massacres of 1572 were chiefly a product of the volatile French domestic situation, not part of an international intrigue. Protestant states found it difficult to sink their political, economic and religious rivalries in a common ideological cause. There was much propaganda, but little practical co-operation: the separate political and religious rebellions of the later sixteenth century never became a single, generalized war of religion.