Tim O’Neill, the owner of the website History for Atheists, provides a useful summary disproving the claim that the European Wars of Religion were primarily driven by religion, when in fact there were multiple factors that contributed to the conflict. Below are his comments on the subject:
To begin with, if the Reformation was supposed to have unleashed the violent forces inherent in religious differences, it is very strange that it took about three decades to do so. The first war usually cited as one of the Wars of Religion is the Schmalkaldic War of 1546-47, between the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League. Not only did it take Charles many years to decide to attack any Protestants, but he had spent most of those years at war not with any Protestant princes, but with the Pope. As Richard Dunn points out, “Charles V’s soldiers sacked Rome, not Wittenberg, in 1527” (The Age of Religious Wars 1559-1689, Norton, 1970, p. 6). Charles was far more interested in the long struggle with the Papacy for control of Italy and control over the Church in the German principalities than Protestantism. And even the Schmalkaldic War was hardly some neat Catholic versus Protestant “religious war”: several Protestant princes joined the emperor against the League, indicating that it was more about power and control than doctrine.
And this is the pattern we see across the so-called Wars of Religion. Catholic France allied with German Protestant princes against the Catholic Charles V in 1552, while Catholic German princes sat back and watched. France allied with the Muslim Turks against the Holy Roman Empire in 1525: which saw a Catholic ruler fighting another Catholic with Islamic assistance. The Pope withdrew forces from Germany in 1547, fearing that Charles V’s military successes against rebellious Protestants would make him too strong to deal with. In 1556 Pope Paul IV went to war against another Catholic monarch; Philip II of Spain.
The French civil wars of the sixteenth century are traditionally seen as conflicts between the Catholic majority and the Huguenot minority over religious differences. In reality, we see nobles happily switching sides as the fortunes of war shifted and plenty of examples of Catholic and Protestant nobles cooperating to maintain the rights of the nobility over the increasing centralising power of the monarchy. Such alliances were also found among the commoners, with Catholic and Protestant peasants uniting to resist abuses by both the nobility and the crown. In Agen in 1562, Catholic peasants joined their Huguenot compatriots in rebellion against the Catholic baron Francois de Fumel, seized the lord from his chateau and beheaded him. There were similar revolts where Catholic and Protestant commoners made a common cause in Pont-en-Roians (1578), Roissas (1579), the Vivarais (1580) and many other areas.
When we get to the piece de resistance of the Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years War, the image of one denomination battling another over doctrinal differences became even more endlessly muddled. The nominally Catholic Imperial army included several Protestant generals and many Protestant soldiers. The war was increasingly sustained by mercenary companies whose allegiance was to the highest bidder, regardless of confession. Ernst von Mansfield originally worked for the Catholic Spanish and then switched to Lutheran Fredrick V, before switching sides several more times. Sweden’s king Gustavus Adolphus is often depicted as the great champion of the Protestants, but was often seen as an invader by both Protestants and Catholics in Germany – he massacred Lutheran peasants who tried to drive out the Swedes in November 1632. Cardinal Richelieu made a treaty with the Swedes in 1631 and the latter half of the War was effectively a struggle between France and the German Empire – both Catholic. In 1635 Catholic Spanish troops attacked Trier and captured the Catholic archbishop-elector, with France subsequently declaring war on Spain – again, both Catholic. In 1635 the Protestant principalities of Brandenburg and Saxony signed the Peace of Prague with the emperor and their armies joined the Imperial forces to fight the Protestant Swedes. Meanwhile the Pope, far from backing the Imperial champions of Catholic Europe, gave his blessing to the French-Swedish alliance. And this is just a small selection of examples of how this war was clearly not some Catholic versus Protestant struggle over religious belief.
This is not to say that religion was not a factor, that doctrinal disputes were not often the inciting element that began these conflicts or that both sides did not use religious propaganda to inflame and motivate their troops and supporters. But the examples above cannot be dismissed as mere exceptions. The switching of sides, shifting alliances and multiple examples of armies of different confessional backgrounds uniting against a common enemy or kingdoms of the same faith turning on each other shows that, while religion was a factor in these conflicts, it was clearly not the factor. Anything more than the most cursory reading of the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth century shows that they were driven by social, political, territorial and economic factors as much or more than anything religious.
This means the equally simplistic narrative that the rise of the secular, liberal nation state was a response to and therefore solution to the Wars of Religion is clearly a dubious one. These wars were primarily nation states jockeying for supremacy while also consolidating their new forms of authority and economic strength. The English Civil War was sparked, in part, by a Parliamentary party scandalised by a king who seemed overly “Popish”, but at its heart it was a struggle between a newly and increasingly absolutist monarchy seeking to centralise its power and a Parliament fighting for a much older form of distributed authority. This pattern can actually be seen across Europe, and it pre-dates both the Wars of Religion and the Reformation.
More centralised nation states had been rising across Europe since the later Middle Ages, driven by the economic boom of the later medieval period and by the influx of wealth from the New World and other long distance trade and colonisation. Long before the Reformation, these newly rich and powerful nations began a process of the transfer of much of the Church’s power to the state. Looked at this way, Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses are not so much the beginning of the Reformation but rather an incident within this already accelerating process. It is interesting to note that the Reformation took only hold where it was backed by the state and it did not take hold where it was resisted by the state. Closer examination of this shows that the states that backed the Reformers tended to be ones which had not managed to wrest political independence and economic benefit from its local Church (e.g. England, where the Church had remained rich and politically powerful), while the states that resisted the Reformation were ones where the Church had already increasingly been suborned to royal domination and economically weakened (e.g. France and particularly Spain, where the Church had in many respects become an instrument of royal policy).
This means both the Catholic and the Protestant spheres emerged from the seventeenth century with either a Protestant national church firmly in the hands of the king or the supposedly “universal” Catholic Church locally dependant on royal protection, with the reluctant acquiescence of popes not wanting to see more kingdoms turn Protestant. At the same time older, medieval systems of distributed authority and economic power had increasingly been reshaped or simply marginalised and replaced with more centralised state authority. The division of the realm into secular and religious spheres, the consignment of religion to a matter of personal conscience and the increasing removal or dilution of religious institutions’ political authority was all part of this process. It was not wise and noble kings and politicians realising that religion was uniquely dangerous and so had to be neutralised. It was a growing and increasingly powerful state authority reshaping how everything worked and doing so to its advantage.
This means the Wars of Religion were actually these states jostling for individual benefit and supremacy, thanks to an influx of wealth combined with a revolution in military technology and organisation. Their secularisation was a function of religious institutions being neutralised or marginalised. And any liberalism and democracy came much, much later and as a result of economic and social forces that had little to do with religion.
So the “Wars of Religion” were, actually, not wars of religion. They were certainly not the salutary lesson in unchecked religious impulse of common imagining. And the secular, liberal nation state did not arise as a solution to the problem of religious violence. Rather, the rise of the nation state was the primary cause not only of these wars, but also of the Reformation and its aftermath.
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[T]he Encyclopedia of Wars (Alan Axelrod, Charles Phillips eds., 2004) lists 1,763 historical conflicts and only classifies 123 of them (6.98%) with religion as their primary cause.[1]
[1] https://historyforatheists.com/2021/05/the-great-myths-12-religious-wars-and-violence/
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