THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 75 ALFRED SOMAN THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW REAPPRAISALS AND DOCUMENTS Directors: P. Dibon (Paris) and R. Popkin (Washington Univ., St. Louis) Editorial Board: J. Aubin (Paris); J. Collins (St. Louis Univ.); P. Costabel (Paris); A. Crombie (Oxford); I. Dambska (Cracow); H. de la Fontaine-Verwey (Amsterdam); H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (Paris); T. Gregory (Rome); T. E. Jessop (Hull); P. O. Kristeller (Columbia Univ.); Elisabeth Labrousse (Paris); A. Lossky (Los Angeles); S. Lindroth (Upsala); J. Orcibal (Paris); I. S. Revaht (Paris); J. Roger (Paris); H. Rowen (Rutgers Univ., N.J.); C. B. Schmitt (Warburg Institute, London); G. Sebba (EmoryUniv., Atlanta); R. Shackleton (Oxford) ;J. Tans (Groningen); G. Tonelli (Binghamton, N.Y.). THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW REAPPRAISALS AND DOCUMENTS edited by ALFRED SOMAN D MARTINUS NUHOFF I THE HAGUE I 1974 © I974 by Martinus NijhojJ, The Hague, Netherlands Softcover reprint oft he hardcover 1s f edition 1974 All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to reproduce this book or parts thereof in a'!)' form ISBN-13: 978-94-010-1603-2 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-1601-8 DOl: 10.10071978-94-010-1601-8 TABLE OF CONTENTS Editor's Preface VII Introduction by H. G. KOENIGSBERGER I PART I: ST. BARTHOLOMEW AND EUROPE I. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew and the Problem of Spain by N. M. SUTHERLAND 15 2. Reactions to the St. Bartholomew Massacres in Geneva and Rome by ROBERT M. KINGDON 25 Comment by PIERRE HURTUBISE 50 3. The Elizabethans and St. Bartholomew by A. G. DICKENS 52 4. ImpGrialism, Particularism and Toleration in the Holy Roman Empire by LEWIS W. SPITZ 71 PART II: TWO UNPUBLISHED DOCUMENTS 5. Tomasso Sassetti's Account of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre by JOHN TEDESCHI 99 Brieve raccontamento del gran macello fatto nella citta di Parigi il viggesimo quarto giorno d'agosto d'ordine di Carlo N ono re di Francia, & della crudel morte di Guasparro Sciattiglione signore di Coligni & grande ammiraglio di Francia, MDLXXII I 12 Parer di N sopra il Raccontamento del grande et crudele et biasimevol macello di Parigi et di tutta la misera Francia 153 6. The Discourse Dedicated to Count Guido San Giorgio Aldobrandini by ALAIN DUFOUR 155 VI TABLE OF CONTENTS Two Extracts from the "Discorso": The Account of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew Conclusion of the "Discorso" PART III: MARTYRS, RIOTERS AND POLEMICISTS 7. Martyrs~ Myths, and the Massacre: The Background of St. Bartholomew by DONALD R. KELLEY 181 8. The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France by NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS 203 g. The Wars of Religion in Seventeenth-Century Huguenot Thought by ELISABETH LABROUSSE 243 Conclusion: St. Bartholomew and Historical Perspective by THEODORE K. RABB Notes on the Contributors Index PREFACE On 18 August 1572, Marguerite de Valois, sister of King Charles IX, was married in Paris to Henri de Navarre, "first prince of the blood" and a Protestant. This union, which was to cement the provisions of the Peace of St. Germain (1570) ending the third of the French wars of religion, was the occasion of an extraordinary influx of French Calvin ists into the notoriously Catholic capital. Hundreds of Huguenots had journeyed to Paris to honor their titular leader and participate in the wedding celebrations. Tensions were already running high when the court made the fatal decision to take advantage of the situation and assassinate the admiral of France, Gaspard de Coligny, the recognized leader of the Huguenot armies which had helped plunge the country into ten years of intermittent civil war, and who now threatened to embroil the kingdom in a full-scale foreign war with Spain. On Friday the twenty-second, as he returned from the Louvre to his lodgings, Coligny paused in the street - some say to receive a letter, others to doff his hat to an acquaintance or to adjust his hose - and was fired on by a hired assassin hidden in a house known to belong to one of the ultra-Catholic Guise faction. The arquebus shot missed its mark and succeeded only in wounding the admiral in his hand and arm, where upon he was carried by his followers to his bed. In the face of the outcry raised by the Huguenots who protested against this flagrant violation of solemn guarantees of personal safety, the king, the queen mother Catherine de Medici and their council disclaimed all responsibility for the deed, as if they were continuing their long-pursued policy of steering a middle course, playing Catholics and Protestants off against each other. Exactly when and how the crown had decided to abandon this policy, and what precisely happened in the frantic discussions in the royal council during the next thirty-six hours, are questions to which it seems we shall never have satisfactory answers. But sometime between VIII EDITOR'S PREFACE Friday noon and late Saturday evening, the court determined to rid itself once and for all of the menace of the admiral and a handful of obstreperous Huguenot aristocrats of his party. In the small hours of Sunday morning 24 August - a day dedicated to St. Bartholomew, the patron saint of the butchers, traditionally depicted holding his own flayed skin in his hand - armed bands broke into the houses of Coligny and other leading Protestant noblemen and murdered them. Before these assassinations had ended, the fanatically Catholic populace of Paris began to run riot. To what extent was this planned? Again, we shall probably never know for certain. The spark may have been struck by the municipal militia hastily assembled to give support to the assassins. In any case, given the dry tinder of religious hatred, the violence was soon out of control, as mobs sacked the houses of Huguenot merchants, artisans, lawyers and teachers, killing all suspected heretics on sight, mutilating and degrading the corpses, and looting their property. Estimates vary, but the number of victims of this massacre may well have been in the neighborhood of two thousand. It was several days before the royal government could restore order to the city, and as the news spread to the rest of France, the carnage was repeated in many of the provincial capitals: Lyons, Rouen, Orleans, Bourges and, after a lapse of some weeks, in Bordeaux and elsewhere. This sequence of events - the abortive first attempt on Coligny's life, his assassination together with the murder of his principal ad herents, and the mob violence (the "massacre" properly speaking) - have come collectively to be known as the Massacre of St. Bartholo mew, a phrase which even to this day is capable of producing a thrill of horror and compassion among historians and the general public alike. The degree to which the Massacre has remained one of the most memo rable events of European history is attested not only by its tenacious hold on the popular imagination but also by the steady accumulation of scholarly activity devoted to the circumstances of the Massacre, its causes and effects, and its persistence as one of the major historical "myths" throughout the course of subsequent centuries. There is little to be added to the huge quantity of information which histo rians have by now succeeded in accumulating on the Massacre of St. Barthol omew; and the conclusions at which the best of them have arrived (if we discard the bias and religious prejudice which in past generations tended to dominate their works) have finally resulted in an agreement nearly unani mous among specialists on the subject. Whatever it is possible to discover about the event itself, about its antecedents, the circumstances which sur rounded it, and its repercussions - these are already well known, and it is EDITOR'S PREFACE IX unlikely that additional documents will substantially modify what has now become the classic interpretation of the facts.1 There is much truth in these words of one distinguished historian, whose recent edition of the correspondence of the papal nuncio Salviati makes accessible an important heretofore unpublished body of docu ments bearing on the question. Still, scholan, widening the horizons of their research find much to say about St. Bartholomew. In 1972, on the occasion of its fourth centennial, a five-day collo quium was held in Paris, sponsored by the Societe de l'histoire du protestantisme franc;ais; the proceedings have now appeared in a separate volume published by the Society.2 In the United States, there were two conferences commemorating the event. On 22 April, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., was host to a program organized by Dr. Philip Knachel, including a dramatization of excerpts from Christopher Marlowe's "The Massacre at Paris," and papers by Robert M. Kingdon, A. G. Dickens and Lewis W. Spitz. Professor Harry McSorley was chairman and general commentator. Two weeks later, on 5-6 May, the present editor presided over a series of meetings at The Newberry Library in Chicago, at which papers were offered by N. M. Sutherland, Natalie Z. Davis, Alain Dufour, John A. Tedeschi, Robert M. Kingdon, Donald R. Kelley and Elisa beth Labrousse. An informal panel of critics - H. G. Koenigsberger, Ralph E. Giesey, De Lamar Jensen, Theodore K. Rabb, Orest Ranum and Nancy L. Roelker - led the discussions which followed each of these contributions with their incisive remarks, some prepared and some impromptu.3 The volume now in hand brings together the principal papers read at the Folger and Newberry conferences, plus the texts of the two Italian documents described respectively by Dufour and Tedeschi. 1 Pierre Hurtubise, O.M.L, "Comment Rome apprit la nouvelle du massacre de la Saint-Barthelemy: contribution a une histoire de l'information au XVle siecle," Archivum Historiae Pontijiciae, X (1972), 187-88. 2 Actes du colloque L'amiral de Coligny et son temps (Paris, 24-28octobre I972) (Paris, 1974). See also in the Revue d'histoire litteraire de la France, LXXIII, the issue of Sept.-Oct. 1973, devoted to "La Saint-Barthelemy dans la litterature franc;aise," and containing the papers read at a symposium held at the College de France on 20 April 1972. 3 In addition, Professor Philipp Fehl contributed to the Newberry meetings a stimulating, illustrated lecture on the Vasari frescoes in the Sala Regia of the Vatican, indicating some of the moral and technical problems confronted by an artist commissioned by an interested party to do a history painting of so controversial and bloodcurdling an event as the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. In his fresco of the Battle of Lepanto, Vasari had depicted the Turks dying with human dignity, but his Huguenots are portrayed with contempt, almost as devils. The text of this interesting paper unfortunately could not be included here. It will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Gazette des Beaux Arts. x EDITOR'S PREFACE Kingdon has welded his two separate offerings into a single unified essay. Since the authors in preparing their papers for publication took into account many of the points raised at the conferences, it would have been superfluous to include verbatim transcripts of the discussions themselves, especially as the substance of a number of other remarks is touched upon in the Introduction and Conclusion graciously con tributed by Messrs. Koenigsberger and Rabb, each expanding upon his comments made in the course of the Newberry conference. In one case, however, portions of a letter by Pierre Hurtubise (who regretfully was unable to attend the Newberry meetings) seemed appropriate for inclusion as a final note to that part of Kingdon's essay which is concerned with the ramifications of St. Bartholomew in Rome. The contributions by Dufour, Labrousse and Hurtubise have been trans lated from the French by the editor. As the reader will see, by a coincidence in itself reflective of trends of interest within the historical profession today, almost all the authors have chosen to concern themselves with reactions to the Massacre in France and abroad (Kingdon, Dickens, Spitz, Labrousse), with its implications for the development of political philosophy and politico religious ideologies (Kingdon, Dufour), and with the problem of popular mentalities which underlay the actual unfolding of the event itself (Kelley, Davis). In his introduction to the text of Tomasso Sas setti's "Brieve Raccontamento," Tedeschi sheds additional light on the career of that curious literary figure, Giacomo Castelvetro. And the "Brieve Raccontamento," apart from its interest as one of the major unpublished contemporary accounts, reveals once again how many of the legends surrounding the Massacre reflect initial rumor, presup position and misinformation - for example, the supposed poisoning of Jeanne d' Albret, the traditionally assumed ascendancy of Coligny over the impressionable young king Charles IX (convincingly refuted by Sutherland), and the early premeditation of the assassination of the admira1.4 To cite but one of the many intriguing questions raised by these papers, the juxtaposition of the essays by Kelley and Labrousse provides a study in itself of the use and non-use of historical myths for 4 It is noteworthy that Gregory XIII, now generally remembered as one of the villains of the piece for his jubilant reception of the news of the Massacre, was described by the moderate and tolerant Montaigne eight years after the event in these terms: "d'une nature douce, peu se passionnant des affaires du monde, grand bastisseur; et en cela iliairra a Rome et ailleurs un singulier honneur a sa memoi re ; ... et a la verite, a une vie et des moeurs auxquels il n'y a rien de fort extraordinere ny en l'une ny en l'autre part, toutefois inclinant beau coup plus sur Ie bon" (Journal de voyage en Italie, 29 Dec. 1580 [cd. Pleiade], p. 1208).