Fields of Blood (47 page)

We cannot expect these early modern states to have shared the outlook of the
Enlightenment. Civilization had always depended upon coercion, so state violence was regarded as essential to public order. Petty theft, murder, forgery, arson, and the abduction of women were all capital offenses, so the death penalty for heresy was neither unusual nor extreme.
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Executions were usually carried out in public as a ritualized deterrent that expressed and enforced state and local authority.
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Without a professional police force and modern methods of surveillance, public order was dependent on such spectacles. Utterly repugnant as it is to us today, killing dissenters was seen as essential to the exercise of power, especially when the state was still fragile.
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But the suppression of heterodoxy was not wholly pragmatic; an ideology that was central to an individual’s integrity also played a role.
Thomas More, once a ruthless persecutor, would have taken the oath had he been motivated solely by political concerns; and Mary Tudor could have strengthened her regime had she been less zealous against Protestants. Yet heresy was different from other capital crimes, because if the accused recanted, she was pardoned and her life spared. Modern scholars have shown that officials often genuinely wanted to bring the wayward back into the fold and that the death of an unrepentant heretic was seen as a defeat.
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During the 1550s, the zealous inquisitor
Pieter Titlemaus presided over at least 1,120 heresy trials in
Flanders, but only 127 ended in execution. Twelve attempts were made by inquisitors, civic authorities, and priests to save the
Anabaptist
Soetken van den Houte and her three women companions in 1560. Under Mary Tudor,
Edmund Bonner, Catholic bishop of
London, tried fifteen times to rescue the Protestant
John Philpot, six times to save
Richard Woodman, and nine times to redeem
Elizabeth Young.
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Catholics,
Lutherans, and Calvinists could all find biblical texts to justify the execution of heretics.
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Some quoted scriptural teachings that preached mercy and tolerance, but these kinder counsels were rejected by the majority. Yet even though thousands were indeed beheaded, burned,
or hanged, drawn and quartered, there was no headlong rush to
martyrdom. The vast majority were content to keep their convictions to themselves and conform outwardly to state decrees.
Calvin inveighed against such cowardice, comparing closet Calvinists to
Nicodemus, the
Pharisee who kept his faith in Jesus secret. But “Nicodemites” in
France and
Italy retorted that it was easy for Calvin to take this heroic line while living safely in Geneva.
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Under Elizabeth I, there was a strong cult of martyrdom only among the
Jesuits and seminarians training for the English mission who believed that their sacrifice would save their country.
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But recruits were also warned against excessive enthusiasm. A manual of the English College in Rome during the 1580s pointed out that not everybody was called to martyrdom and that no one should put himself at risk unnecessarily.
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The one thing on which Catholics and Protestants could agree was their hatred of the Spanish
Inquisition. But despite its gruesome reputation, the crimes of the Inquisition were exaggerated. Even the
auto-da-fé
(“declaration of faith”), with its solemn processions, sinister costumes, and burning of heretics, which to foreigners seemed the epitome of Spanish fanaticism, was not all it was cracked up to be. The auto-da-fé had no deep roots in Spanish culture. Originally a simple service of reconciliation, it took on this spectacular form only in the mid-sixteenth century and after its brief heyday (1559–70) was held very rarely. Moreover, the burning of the recalcitrant was not the centerpiece of the ritual: the accused were usually put to death unceremoniously outside the city, and scores of autos were held without a single execution. After the Inquisition’s first twenty years, less than 2 percent of those who were accused were convicted, and of these most were burned in effigy in absentia. Between 1559 and 1566, when the auto was at the peak of its popularity, about a hundred people died, whereas three hundred Protestants were put to death under
Mary Tudor; twice that number were executed under
Henry II of France (r. 1547–59), and ten times as many were killed in the
Netherlands.
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Very few Protestants were killed by the Spanish Inquisition; most of its victims were the “New Christians.” By the 1580s, when
Spain was at war with other European states, the crown once again turned on the “enemy within,” this time the
Moriscos, who, like the
Jews before them, were resented less for their beliefs than for their cultural difference and financial success. “They marry among themselves and do not mix
with Old Christians,” a
Toledo tribunal complained to
Philip II in 1589; “none of them enters religion, nor joins the army, none enters domestic service … they take part in
trade and are rich.”
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Yet again, persecution proved counterproductive because it transformed the beleaguered Moriscos from imaginary to real enemies, courted by the Huguenots and Henry IV of
France or turning to the sultan of Morocco for help. As a result, in 1609, the Moriscos were expelled from Spain, eliminating the last substantial Muslim community from Europe.

Spain was heavily involved in the
Wars of Religion that culminated in the horror of the
Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). These conflicts gave rise to what has been called the “creation myth” of the modern West, because it explains how our distinctively secular mode of governance came into being.
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The theological quarrels of the
Reformation, it is said, so inflamed Catholics and Protestants that they slaughtered one another in senseless wars, until the violence was finally contained by the creation of the liberal state that separated religion from politics. Europe had learned the hard way that once a conflict becomes “
holy,” violence will know no bounds and compromise becomes impossible because all combatants are convinced that God is on their side. Consequently, religion should never again be allowed to influence political life.

But nothing is ever quite that simple. After the Reformation, northeastern
Germany and
Scandinavia were, roughly speaking,
Lutheran;
England,
Scotland, the northern
Netherlands, the Rhineland, and southern France were predominantly Calvinist; and the rest of the continent remained mostly Catholic. This naturally affected international relations, but European rulers had other concerns. Many, especially those trying to create absolutist states, were alarmed by the extraordinary success of the
Habsburgs, who now ruled the German territories, Spain, and the southern Netherlands.
Charles V’s aspiration to achieve trans-European hegemony on the
Ottoman model was opposed by the more
pluralistic dynamics in Europe that inclined toward the sovereign nation-state.
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The German princes naturally struggled to resist Charles’s ambitions and retain their local power and traditional privileges.

In the minds of the participants, however, these wars were certainly experienced as a life-and-death struggle between Protestants and Catholics. Religious sentiments helped soldiers and generals to distance themselves
from the enemy, blot out all sense of a shared humanity, and infuse the cruel struggle with a moral fervor that made it not only palatable but noble: they gave participants an uplifting sense of righteousness. But secular ideologies can do all this too. These wars were not simply and quintessentially “religious” in the modern sense. If they had been, we would not expect to find Protestants and Catholics fighting on the same side, for example. In fact, they often did so and consequently fought their co-religionists.
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Just two years after Charles became
Holy Roman emperor, the Catholic Church had condemned
Luther at the
Diet of Worms (1521). For the first ten years of his reign, Charles, a Catholic, paid little attention to the Lutherans in
Germany and instead concentrated on fighting the pope and the Catholic kings of
France in
Italy. Catholic rulers were particularly hostile to decrees of the
Council of Trent that sought to limit their powers; this was yet another episode in the long struggle of European monarchs to control the church in their own realms.
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As late as 1556,
Pope Paul IV went to war against Charles’s son Philip II, the devout Catholic ruler of Spain.
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The Catholic kings of France were so alarmed by the
Habsburgs that they were even prepared to make alliances with the
Ottoman Turks against them.
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For over thirty years (1521–52) they engaged in five military campaigns against the Catholic emperor, who was supported in these conflicts by many of the Protestant German princes; Charles rewarded them by granting them extensive powers over the churches in their domains.
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The German princes, Catholic and Lutheran alike, were also alarmed by Charles’s centralizing ambitions. In 1531 some Protestant princes and townsfolk united to form the
Schmalkaldic League against him. But during the
First Schmalkaldic War, other prominent Lutheran princes fought on Charles’s side, while the Catholic king
Henry II of France joined the
Lutheran League in an attack on the emperor’s forces, and the Catholic German princes remained neutral.
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Moreover, many of Charles’s soldiers in the imperial army were
mercenaries fighting for money rather than faith, and some were Protestants.
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Clearly these wars were not simply driven by sectarian fervor. Eventually, Charles had to admit defeat and signed the
Peace of Augsburg in 1555. The Protestant princes were allowed to keep the Catholic ecclesiastical properties they had seized, and henceforth in Europe the religious allegiance of the local ruler determined the faith of his subjects—a principle later enshrined in the maxim
cuius regio, eius religio.
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Charles abdicated and retired to a monastery,
and the empire was divided between his brother Ferdinand, who ruled the German territories, and his son Philip II, who governed Spain and the
Netherlands.

This was a political victory of one set of state builders over another.
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The Catholic and Lutheran princes of Germany had ganged up on Charles, realizing quite correctly that his aim had not been simply to crush heresy but also to increase his own power at their expense. The peasantry and the lower classes showed little theological conviction but switched from Catholicism to Lutheranism and back again as their lords and masters required.
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At the end of the struggle, the
Peace of Augsburg greatly enhanced the political power of the princes, Catholic and Protestant alike. They could now use the
Reformation to their own advantage, taxing their clergy, appropriating church estates, controlling education, and potentially extending their authority, through the
parishes, to every one of their subjects.
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A similar complexity can be observed in the French
Wars of Religion (1562–98). These too were not simply a fight between the
Calvinist
Huguenots and the Catholic majority but were also a political contest among competing aristocratic factions.
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The
Guises were Catholic and the southern
Bourbons Huguenot; the
Montmorencies were split, the older generation inclining to Catholicism, the younger to the Huguenots. These aristocrats were defending their traditional rights against the kings’ ambition to create a centralized state with
un roi, une foi, une loi
(“one king, one faith, one law”). The social and political elements of these struggles were so evident that until the 1970s, most scholars believed that faith was merely a front for the purely secular ambitions of kings and nobles.
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But in a landmark 1973 article,
Natalie Zemon Davis examined the popular rituals in which both Catholics and Protestants drew on the
Bible, the liturgy, and folk traditions to dehumanize their enemies and concluded that the French civil wars were “essentially religious.”
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Since then, scholars have reemphasized the role of religion, pointing out, however, that it is still anachronistic to separate the “political” from the “religious” at this date.
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