‘Through Naval Practice and the Association with Foreigners’ French Nobles’ Participation in Mediterranean Religious Struggles, 1598–1635

This article examines a group of ‘military migrants’, French nobles who engaged in Mediterranean maritime warfare, in an attempt to reconsider religious violence in the early modern period. The great religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have often been completely divorced from one another in early modern historiography— the Ottoman-Christian wars in the Mediterranean treated separately from the Protestant-Catholic conflicts within Europe. French nobles engaged in religious conflict within France throughout the long French Religious Wars of 1562–1629, but they also were very active in other religious struggles throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. Analyzing French nobles’ maritime activities exposes their social networks and their religious activism.