European wars of religion

Book 4, Chapter 17.

The Wars of Religion in France and the Reign of Henry IV, Part 1.

A.

The Reformation and the Formation of Parties The beginning of the Reformation in France was especially closely connected with the Renaissance.

Disturbances broke out in different parts of the country, and civil war became imminent.

B.

The Wars of Religion, 1562-89 On Sunday, March 1st, 1562, the Duke of Guise was traveling from Joinville to Paris with his wife and children, his brother the Cardinal of Guise, and about two hundred armed gentlemen.

As he rode through Vassy, he found an Huguenot service going on in a barn there.

The age of feudalism was fast passing.

The last great feudatories had worn out their strength in the wars of religion.

The monarchy had gained what they had lost, and now set to work in the splendor and pageantry of Versailles to reduce the once semi-independent feudal soldier into a mincing courtier.

The Bourbons succeeded in large part.

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Its chief results were the establishment of the Anglican Church and of those more markedly Protestant sects from among which came the sturdy settlers of New England.

The Founding of the British Empire It was during the Wars of Religion that England came into a struggle with the new Habsburg Spanish power.

It had its tremendously dramatic episodes in the cruise of the Great Armada and its fascinatingly romantic ones in the voyages of discovery and semi-piratical exploits of the British seamen who burst the paper walls that Spain had attempted to raise around the southern seas.

The world outside the tower was consumed by violence.

France was tearing itself apart in the Wars of Religion, a long and brutal series of conflicts between Catholics and Protestants that lasted with intermissions for more than three decades.

Massacres, assassinations, sieges, and betrayals were the constant background noise of Montaigne’s adult life.

The St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of fifteen seventy-two, in which thousands of Protestants were killed across France in a coordinated frenzy of religious violence, occurred just a year after his retirement.

And what begins as internal persecution of religious minorities, such as Protestants, will soon metastasize into open warfare as some states become fully Protestant and begin to see themselves as at odds with other states that are completely Catholic.

The Wars of Religion, as they are collectively called, are going to get started by 1560, so as Francis Drake is a young man, and they're going to last for the next 80 years or so, as Europe tears itself apart over religious identity.

And these wars don't finally come to an end until 1648.

So it's going to be a period of intense upheaval, of warfare, there's going to be sacking of cities, rape, starvation, displacement, and economic ruination.

That is a Spanish colony, and that silver is going directly into Spanish coffers.

So this kind of wealth is allowing Spain to dramatically increase its power and influence in Europe.

And it also allows them to fund armies for military projects in Western Europe, which are going to be pretty important because of the wars of religion that I've already mentioned.

So now that we have a sense of the politics and the economics of the world in the 1500s, let's zoom in and look a little bit more closely at the main character of our story today, Francis Drake.

These conflicting intellectual pressures induce me to spend many years contemplating the philosophical aspects of the war.

The deepest conviction produced by this long thinking is that the closest historical analogy to the American culture war is the European wars of religion that laid waste to much of that continent in the 16th and early 17th centuries.

Here's a quick overview of the similarities, see my essay The Hatred of the Believers for a more extensive discussion.

Society in both eras is held together by a unifying ideology, Christianity to liberal democracy, which both sides affirm, and which is used as a justification for the conquest of foreign nations.

but it is simply a category error to draw far-reaching ethical conclusions on the basis of these modest correlations.

The second implication of the historical analogy is that the culture war is going to continue for many years.

The European Wars of Religion lasted for roughly 120 years, the 95 Theses appeared in 1517 and the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648.

In the wake of the 2024 election, many observers argued that wokeness had been defeated.

But, you know, they are articulated anew in distinctive ways.

So in the same way that Christendom, the meaning of Christendom, changed over time from something which described medieval Catholic Europe in the aftermath of the Wars of Religion, it comes to describe, in the 19th century, when they talk about Christendom, they're talking about a clutch of rivalrous states engaged in a kind of global project of commercial and political expansion.

So similarly, the meaning-- and again, you know, I mean, I'm taking existing scholars' work.

This isn't kind of my view, but I'm simply using the work of existing scholars, primarily Debschi, but some others as well, to make the case that these categories are re-articulated.

I mean, it's an incredible technology.

It uses lots of medieval and later technologies to, to try to make clocks more reliable and more regular, and there's a lot of expertise coming in from, from continental Europe, so and the Wars of Religion, England is, is blessed with enormous numbers of, of migrant Protestants coming in from the Continent, and they bring these advanced skills, and lots of the clocks that we have that were made in London in this period are made by expertise from, uh, from the Low Countries.

So that's a really important part as well of this story.

And then there's, there's main drivers.

Book 4, Chapter 17.

The Wars of Religion in France and the Reign of Henry IV, Part 1.

A.

The Reformation and the Formation of Parties The beginning of the Reformation in France was especially closely connected with the Renaissance.

Disturbances broke out in different parts of the country, and civil war became imminent.

B.

The Wars of Religion, 1562-89 On Sunday, March 1st, 1562, the Duke of Guise was travelling from Joinville to Paris with his wife and children, his brother the Cardinal of Guise, and about two hundred armed gentlemen.

As he rode through Vassy he found an Huguenot service going on in a barn there.

And that is the number one reason why it's a difficult topic and it is a turning point in European history.

So, the Thirty Years' War is sort of the culminating war of religion.

In podcast number 116, episode 116, we looked at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, and we went back and we studied the Schmachaldic War, and how Charles V is going to allow the princes of the Holy Roman Empire to pick their religion in their region.

That was the Peace of Augsburg of 1555.

In podcast 117, we looked at the French Wars of Religion, and that is actually involved a little bit in here too.

So let's start there.

Let's go back and review that French War of Religion that brought the French king, the French Bourbon King, Henry IV to power.

You might remember that he was a Protestant.