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T H R E E The Historical Context: The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the Dutch Revolt against Spain, and the Rise of the Absolutist State THE LIFE OF JOHANNES ALTHUSIUS (1557-1638) fell into a period of tremendous transition: The epoch of medieval Christian universalismwas ever more rapidly coming to an end, giving way, albeit not without considerable resistance, to the rise of the European territorial state system. Ten years before Althusius was born, the last emperor of that universal Christian world, Charles V, had fought his final military battle against the forces of Reformation. The Augsburg Treaty of Religious Peace (1555) then confirmed for the first time that each European ruler had a right to determine the official religion in his territory (cuius regio, eius religio). When Charles abdicated a year later, his son Philip was no longer crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation because the German electors would only regard him as a "Spaniard, and nothing but a Spaniard."1 For a century, Europe would be tormented by a combination of dynastic, religious, and increasingly territorial conflicts, culminating in the Thirty Years War (1618-48) which had begun as a religious war once again, but ended up as the first all-European battle for territorial supremacy. Althusius still lived through the first twenty years of that war. But the two most important events during his long life span, and particularly so for a devout defender of the Reformed faith, were the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, and the Dutch Revolt against Catholic Spain. During the sixteenth century, France, deeply divided between about seventeen million Catholics and a minority of one million so-called Huguenots, became centre stage for the religious conflicts raging through 1 H.G. Koenigsberger and G.L. Mosse, Europe in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans & Green, 1969), 186ff. 29 30 EARLY MODERN CONCEPTS FOR A LATE MODERN WORLD post-Reformation Europe. In 1535, a state edict ordering the extermination of heretics led to a first wave of emigration that included John Calvin, who settled in Geneva. Nearly forty years of intermittent civil war erupted after a number of Huguenots were massacred during worship in 1562. The Catholics received financial support from Spain, the Huguenots from England. The 1598 Edict of Nantes finally led to a religious settlement under the reign of Henry IV, a Calvinist who had been forced to abjure the Reformed faith in 1593: "The Catholicism of France was ensured, as was the crown's supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs." The Huguenots were recognized as a minority and granted limited rights of self-government and worship. "The conflict between the Catholic majority and the Huguenot minority was settled through a grant of circumscribed rights to the minority."2 But it was the infamous St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572 that shook the Protestant world more than any other event at the time. Its occasion was the gathering of hundreds of Huguenots in Paris for a wedding between Henry of Navarre, their titular leader, and the Catholic Marguerite de Valois, youngest daughter of Catherine de' Medici, queen mother of King Charles IX, which may have been arranged as an attempt of reconciliation between the warring factions. For reasons which will never be entirely known, and probably at least with the consent of Catherine and Charles, a decision was made, during the early morning hours of August 24, to have the entire Protestant leadership killed. Unleashing fanatical popular passions, the act triggered a blood bath which had been neither foreseen nor premeditated. Within a few days or weeks, as many as 20,000 Protestants were savagely murdered all across France. The reasons triggering this massacre were at least as much rooted in French foreign policy as in religious divisiveness. The most prominent Huguenot victim was Coligny, the admiral of France, who not only may have intended to persuade the indecisive Charles to adopt the Reformed faith but moreover had plans to draw France into a war with Catholic Spain by intervening in the Dutch Revolt. Both prospects may have brought together in anticipatory and preventive action Catherine, who wanted to avoid open conflict with Spain, and the ultra-Catholic Guise family, which had been engaged in a personal vendetta with Coligny for years.3 2 On this and the following, see Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 323-26. 3 SeeJ.H.M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (New...

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