Massacre of St. Bartholomew

Massacre of Saint Bartholomew. Also known as the “Massacre of San Bartolomé”. It takes this name because it coincided with the date on which this saint is celebrated. It was the mass murder of Huguenots during the French Wars of Religion of the 16th century . Catholic troops, under the command of the Duke of Guise, murdered more than ten thousand people throughout France , and about three thousand in Paris .

Summary

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  • 1 Background
  • 2 Triggering of events
  • 3 consequences
  • 4 Sources

Background

The kings of France imposed terrible persecutions against the Huguenots or Calvinists in the middle of the 16th century. Edicts and courts were created to condemn Protestants to the stake. Under the leadership of leaders like John Calvin, Protestantism gained more adherents. Catholics were losing ground and had a fierce hatred for Protestants. It was a period of violent wars between Protestants and Catholics. This period coincided with the period of the Counter-Reformation .

There were an estimated two million Protestants in France. Violent acts multiplied throughout the country. King Henry II , the great persecutor of the Protestants in France, died and Queen Catherine de Medici ruled in the name of her son King Charles IX . The queen planned a strategy that sought to bring together and reconcile Catholics and Protestants and end conflicts: the wedding between a Protestant prince and his Catholic daughter. Many Huguenots trusted the queen’s good intentions and gathered to witness the weddings.

During the wedding an attempt was made to kill the leader of the Huguenots who was also a friend of King Charles IX. The attempt to kill the Huguenot leader failed and the queen feared that she would be discovered as the author of the plot. The Huguenots were upset and demanded that the king investigate the culprits. In a secret session, the king was convinced to use the occasion to exterminate all the Huguenot leaders. The houses and lodgings of the Protestants were identified and the king gave permission to the people to annihilate the heretics.

To confront the Protestants, they decided to call in the Parisian militias and have the Catholic bourgeois intervene alongside the soldiers. This decision led to the massacre, as Parisian Catholics detest their fellow Huguenots. They agreed that, to distinguish themselves from the Huguenots, Catholics would wear a white sash as well as a white cross on their left arm.

Triggering of events

The events began on 24 August as as 1572 in Paris , extending over the next few months throughout France . Towards midnight the troops took up arms around the Louvre and surrounded the Coligny residence . Besme, one of the duke of Guise’s intimates, went up to the admiral’s room and plunged a dagger into his chest and threw his body out the window. The Bastard of Angouleme and the Duke of Guise who were outside kicked the body and an Italian, a servant of the Duke of Nevers, cut off its head.

Immediately the king’s guards and the nobles who were with Guise murdered all the Protestant nobles that Charles IX had housed a few days before in the surroundings of the admiral’s mansion.

The act was imitated by other French cities raising the sum of massacred. In a two-month period, the number of those executed rose to 70,000.

 

Commemorative medal of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, struck by Gregory XIII

Upon hearing the news of the massacre, Pope Gregory XIII believed that Protestantism had been crushed in France and rejoiced by ordering a hymn of thanksgiving ( Te Deum ) to be sung in celebration of the night of Saint Bartholomew.

He also ordered that the same be done every year to commemorate the glorious event. He went to the church of San Luis to thank God for the victory. He ordered a coin to be struck commemorating the event and sent the king a trophy: the Golden Rose.

King Felipe II of Spain also ordered a hymn and other celebrations. The Queen of England dressed in mourning and refused to receive ambassadors. The kings of other nations received the news with great sadness. The events were recorded in the annals of history without the possibility of exaggerations or inventions.

Consequences

The massacre of St. Bartholomew led to the fourth religious war. Hostilities resumed (although they were interrupted by truces, 1575-1580). The Edict of Nantes , of 1598 , granted freedom of worship (not in Paris), and above all a religious tolerance was already applied.

In the intellectual media, Giovanni Bottero or Tommaso Campanella (the author of The City of the Sun ) despaired of the internal struggles of Europe. The wars of religion strengthened the idea of ​​a particular nation and, for his part, Jean Bodin set out in The Republic ( 1576 ) a theory of the most marked absolute monarchy.

The wounds were only healed with a long time, at the beginning of the seventeenth century by the new royal ordinances; But the boundaries between the countries, after the parallel wars, became real fixed and permanent borders, given the suspicions generated: the division of Europe was definitely accentuated. The north-south rupture implied the division between a federal and freer state and another, in the south, with absolutist tendencies.

 

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