Her family derived from Toledo, center of the Moorish, Jewish, and Christian cultures in medieval Spain. Her grandfather, Juan Sanchez, made a fortune in the cloth trade. A “New Christian” (see pages 330332), he was accused of secretly practicing Judaism. Although he endured the humiliation of a public repentance, he moved his family south to Avila. Beginning again, he recouped his wealth and, aspiring to the prestige of an “Old Christian,” bought noble status. Juan’s son Alzonzo Sanchez de Cepeda married a woman of thoroughly Christian background, giving his family an aura of impeccable orthodoxy. The third of their nine children, Teresa, became a saint and in 1970 was the first woman declared a Doctor of the Church, a title given to a theologian of outstanding merit.
At age twenty, inspired more by the fear of Hell than the love of God, Teresa (1515-1582) entered the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation in Avila. Most of the nuns were daughters of Avila’s leading citizens; they had entered the convent because of a family decision about which daughters would marry and which would become nuns. Their lives were much like those of female family members outside the convent walls, with good food, comfortable surroundings, and frequent visits from family and friends. Teresa was frequently ill, but she lived quietly in the convent for many years. In her late thirties, she began to read devotional literature intensely and had profound mystical experiences — visions and voices in which Christ chastised her for her frivolous life and friends. She described one such experience in 1560:
It pleased the Lord that I should see an angel. . . .
Short, and very beautiful, his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest types of angels. . . . In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of an iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out. . . he left me completely afire with the great love of God. *
Teresa responded with a new sense of purpose: although she encountered stiff opposition, she resolved to found a reformed house. Four basic principles were to guide the new convent. First, poverty was to be fully observed, symbolized by the nuns’ being barefoot, hence discalced. Charity and the nuns’ own work must support the community. Second, the convent must keep strict enclosure; the visits of powerful benefactors with material demands were forbidden. Third, Teresa intended an egalitarian atmosphere in which class distinctions were forbidden. She had always rejected the emphasis on “purity of blood,” a distinctive and racist feature of Spanish society that was especially out of place in the cloister. All sisters, including those of aristocratic background, must share the manual chores. Finally, like Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits, Teresa placed great emphasis on obedience, especially to one’s confessor.
Between 1562 and Teresa’s death in 1582, she founded or reformed fourteen other houses of nuns, traveling widely to do so. Though Teresa did not advocate institutionalized roles for women outside the convent, she did chafe at the restrictions placed on her because of her sex, and she thought of the new religious houses she founded as answers to the Protestant takeover of Catholic churches elsewhere in Europe. From her brother, who had obtained wealth in the Spanish colonies, Teresa learned about conditions in Peru and instructed her nuns “to pray unceasingly for the missionaries working among the heathens.” Through prayer, Teresa wrote, her nuns could share in the exciting tasks of evangelization and missionary work otherwise closed to women. Her books, along with her five hundred extant letters, show her as a practical and down-to-earth woman as well as a mystic and a creative theologian.
Questions for Analysis
1. How did sixteenth-century convent life reflect the values of Spanish society?
2. How is the life of Teresa of Avila typical of developments in the Catholic Reformation? How is her life unusual?
* The Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, trans. and ed. E. A. Peers (New York: Doubleday, 1960, pp. 273-274).
To Catholicism. Jesuit schools adopted the modern humanist curricula and methods, educating the sons of the nobility as well as the poor. As confessors and spiritual directors to kings, Jesuits exerted great political influence.
What were the causes and consequences of religious violence, including riots, wars, and witch hunts?
In 1559 France and Spain signed the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis (cah-toh-kam-BRIE-sees), which ended the long conflict known as the Habsburg-Valois Wars. Spain was the victor. France, exhausted by the struggle, had to acknowledge Spanish dominance in Italy, where much of the fighting had taken place. However, over the next century religious differences led to riots, civil wars, and international conflicts. Especially in France and the Netherlands, Protestants and Catholics used violent actions as well as preaching and teaching against each other, for each side regarded the other as a poison in the community that would provoke the wrath of God. Catholics continued to believe that Calvinists and Lutherans could be reconverted; Protestants persisted in thinking that the Roman church should be destroyed. Catholics and Protestants alike feared people of other faiths, who they often saw as agents of Satan. Even more, they feared those who were explicitly identified with Satan: witches living in their midst. This era was the time of the most virulent witch persecutions in European history, as both Protestants and Catholics tried to make their cities and states more godly.
The costs of the Habsburg-Valois Wars, waged interFrench Religious Wars Mittently through the first half of the sixteenth century, forced the French to increase taxes and borrow heavily. King Francis I (r. 1515-1547) also tried two new devices to raise revenue: the sale of public offices and a treaty with the papacy. The former proved to be only a temporary source of money: once a man bought an office he and his heirs were exempt from taxation. But the latter, known as the Concordat of Bologna (see page 329), gave the French crown the right to appoint all French bishops and abbots, ensuring a rich supplement of money and offices. Because French rulers possessed control over appointments and had a vested financial interest in Catholicism, they had no need to revolt against Rome.
Huguenots Originally a pejorative term for French Calvinists, later the official title for members of this group.
Significant numbers of those ruled, however, were attracted to the "reformed religion,” as Calvinism was called. Initially, Calvinism drew converts from among reform-minded members of the Catholic clergy, the industrious middle classes, and artisan groups. Most French Calvinists (called Huguenots) lived in major cities, such as Paris, Lyons, and Rouen. When Henry II died in 1559, perhaps one-tenth of the population had become Calvinist.
The feebleness of the French monarchy was the seed from which the weeds of civil violence sprang. The three weak sons of Henry II who occupied the throne could not provide the necessary leadership, and they were often dominated by their mother, Catherine de’ Medici. The French nobility took advantage of this monarchical weakness. Just as German princes in the Holy Roman Empire had adopted Lutheranism as a means of opposition to Emperor Charles V, so French nobles frequently adopted the reformed religion as a religious cloak for their independence. Armed clashes between Catholic royalist lords and Calvinist
Iconoclasm Ridicule and destruction of religious images.
Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre
Massacre of thousands of Protestants in Paris and other cities by Catholics, beginning on Saint Bartholomew's Day (August 24) 1572.
Politiques Moderates of both religious faiths who held that only a strong monarchy could save France from total collapse.
Edict of Nantes A document issued by Henry IV of France in 1598, granting liberty of conscience and of public worship to Calvinists in 150 towns; it helped restore peace in France.
The Netherlands Under Charles V
Antimonarchical lords occurred in many parts of France. Both Calvinists and Catholics believed that the others’ books, services, and ministers polluted the community. Preachers incited violence, and religious ceremonies such as baptisms, marriages, and funerals triggered it.
Calvinist teachings called the power of sacred images into question, and mobs in many cities took down and smashed statues, stained-glass windows, and paintings. Though it was often inspired by fiery Protestant sermons, this iconoclasm is an example of men and women carrying out the Reformation themselves, rethinking the church’s system of meaning and the relationship between the unseen and the seen. Catholic mobs responded by defending images, and crowds on both sides killed their opponents, often in gruesome ways.
A savage Catholic attack on Calvinists in Paris on August 24, 1572 (Saint Bartholomew’s Day), followed the usual pattern. The occasion was the marriage ceremony of the king’s sister Margaret of Valois to the Protestant Henry of Navarre, which was intended to help reconcile Catholics and Huguenots. Instead, Huguenot wedding guests in Paris were massacred, and other Protestants were slaughtered by mobs. Religious violence spread to the provinces, where thousands were killed. This Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre led to a civil war that dragged on for fifteen years. Agriculture in many areas was destroyed; commercial life declined severely; and starvation and death haunted the land.
What ultimately saved France was a small group of moderates of both faiths, called politiques, who believed that only the restoration of strong monarchy could reverse the trend toward collapse. The politiques also favored accepting the Huguenots as an officially recognized and organized pressure group. The death of Catherine de’ Medici, followed by the assassination of King Henry III, paved the way for the accession of Henry of Navarre (the unfortunate bridegroom of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre), a politique who became Henry IV (r. 1589-1610).
Henry’s willingness to sacrifice religious principles to political necessity saved France. He converted to Catholicism but also issued the Edict of Nantes, which granted liberty of conscience and liberty of public worship to Huguenots in 150 fortified towns. The reign of Henry IV and the Edict of Nantes prepared the way for French absolutism in the seventeenth century by helping restore internal peace in France.
In the Netherlands, what began as a movement for the reformation of the church developed into a struggle for Dutch independence. Emperor Charles V had inherited the seventeen provinces that compose present-day Belgium and the Netherlands (see page 348). Each was self-governing and enjoyed the right to make its own laws and collect its own taxes. They were united politically only in recognition of a common ruler, the emperor. The cities of the Netherlands made their living by trade and industry.
In the Low Countries as elsewhere, corruption in the Roman church and the critical spirit of the Renaissance provoked pressure for reform, and Lutheran ideas took root. Charles V had grown up in the Netherlands, however, and he was able to limit their impact. But Charles V abdicated in 1556 and transferred power over the Netherlands to his son Philip, who had grown up in Spain. Protestant ideas spread.
By the 1560s Protestants in the Netherlands were primarily Calvinists. Calvinism’s intellectual seriousness, moral gravity, and emphasis on any form of labor well done appealed to middle-class merchants and financiers and working-class
Calvinist men and women break stained-glass windows, remove statues, and carry off devotional altarpieces. Iconoclasm, or the destruction of religious images, is often described as a “riot," but here the participants seem very purposeful. Calvinist Protestants regarded pictures and statues as sacrilegious and saw removing them as a way to purify the church. (The Fotomas Index/The Bridgeman Art Library)
People. Whereas Lutherans taught respect for the powers that be, Calvinism tended to encourage opposition to "illegal” civil authorities.
In the 1560s Spanish authorities attempted to suppress Calvinist worship and raised taxes, which sparked riots. Thirty churches in Antwerp were sacked and the religious images in them destroyed in a wave of iconoclasm. From Antwerp the destruction spread.
Philip II sent twenty thousand Spanish troops under the duke of Alva to pacify the Low Countries. Alva interpreted "pacification” to mean the ruthless extermination of religious and political dissidents. On top of the Inquisition, he opened his own tribunal, soon called the "Council of Blood.” On March 3, 1568, fifteen hundred men were executed.
For ten years, civil war raged in the Netherlands between Catholics and Protestants and between the seventeen provinces and Spain. Eventually the ten southern provinces, the Spanish Netherlands (the future Belgium), came under the control of the Spanish
Habsburg forces. The seven northern provinces, led by Holland, formed the Union of Utrecht and in 1581 declared their independence from Spain. The north was Protestant; the south remained Catholic. Philip did not accept this, and war continued. England was even drawn into the conflict, supplying money and troops to the northern United Provinces. (Spain launched an unsuccessful invasion of Engl and in response; see pages 353-354.) Hostilities ended in 1609 when Spain agreed to a truce that recognized the independence of the United Provinces.
The relationship between the Reformation and the upsurge in trials for witchcraft that occurred at roughly the same time is complex. Increasing persecution for witchcraft actually began before the Reformation in the 1480s, but it became especially common about 1560. Religious reformers’ extreme notions of the Devil’s powers and the insecurity created by the religious wars contributed to this increase. Both Protestants and Catholics tried and executed witches, with church officials and secular authorities acting together.
The heightened sense of God’s power and divine wrath in the Reformation era was an important factor in the witch hunts, but other factors were also significant. One of these was a change in the idea of what a witch was. Nearly all premodern societies believe in witchcraft and make some attempts to control witches, who are
Union of Utrecht The alliance of seven northern provinces (led by Holland) that declared its independence from Spain and formed the United Provinces of the Netherlands.
The Great European Witch Hunt
I misogyny Hatred of women.
Hans Baldung Grien: Witches’ Sabbat (1510)
In this woodcut, Grien combines learned and popular beliefs about witches: they traveled at night, met at sabbats (or assemblies), feasted on infants (in dish held high), concocted strange potions, and had animal “familiars" that were really demons (here, a cat). Grien also highlights the sexual nature of witchcraft by portraying the women naked and showing them with goats, which were common symbols of sexuality. (Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nurnberg) understood to be people who use magical forces. In the later Middle Ages, however, many educated Christian theologians, canon lawyers, and officials added a demonological component to this notion of what a witch was. For them, the essence of witchcraft was making a pact with the Devil that required the witch to do the Devil’s bidding. Witches were no longer simply people who used magical power to get what they wanted, but rather people used by the Devil to do what he wanted. Some demonological theorists also claimed that witches were organized in an international conspiracy to overthrow Christianity. Witchcraft was thus spiritualized, and witches became the ultimate heretics, enemies of God.
Trials involving this new notion of witchcraft as diabolical heresy began in Switzerland and southern Germany in the late fifteenth century, became less numerous in the early decades of the Reformation when Protestants and Catholics were busy fighting each other, and then picked up again in about 1560. Scholars estimate that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people were officially tried for witchcraft and between 40,000 and 60,000 were executed. While the trials were secret, executions were not, and the lists of charges were read out for all to hear.
Though the gender balance varied widely in different parts of Europe, between 75 and 85 percent of those tried and executed were women. Ideas about women, and the roles women actually played in society, were thus important factors shaping the witch hunts. Some demonologists expressed virulent misogyny, or hatred of women, and particularly emphasized women’s powerful sexual desire, which could be satisfied only by a demonic lover. Most people viewed women as weaker and so more likely to give in to any kind of offer by the Devil, including better food or nicer clothing. Women were associated with nature, disorder, and the body, all of which were linked with the demonic.
Most witch trials began with a single accusation in a village or town. Individuals accused someone they knew of using magic to spoil food, make children ill, kill animals, raise a hailstorm, or do other types of harm. Tensions within families, households, and neighborhoods often played a role in these accusations. Women number very prominently among accusers and witnesses as well as among those accused of witchcraft because the actions witches were initially charged with, such as harming children or curdling milk, were generally part of women’s sphere. A woman also gained economic and social security by conforming to the standard of the good wife and mother and by confronting women who deviated from it.
Once a charge was made, judges began to question other neighbors and acquaintances, building up a list of suspicious incidents that might have taken place over decades. Historians have pointed out that one of the reasons those accused of witchcraft were often older was that it took years to build up a reputation as a witch. At this point, the suspect was brought in for questioning by legal authorities. Judges and inquisitors sought the exact details of a witch’s demonic contacts, including sexual ones. Suspects were generally stripped and shaved in a search for a "witch’s mark,” or "pricked” to find a spot insensitive to pain, and then tortured.
Once the initial suspect had been questioned, and particularly if he or she had been tortured, the people who had been implicated were brought in for questioning. This might lead to a small hunt, involving from five to ten victims, and it sometimes grew into a much larger hunt, what historians have called a "witch panic.” Panics were most common in the part of Europe that saw the most witch accusations in general —the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, and parts of France. Most of this area consisted of very small governmental units, which were jealous of each other and after the Reformation were divided by religion. The rulers of these small territories often felt more threatened than did the monarchs of western Europe, and they saw persecuting witches as a way to demonstrate their piety and concern for order.
Sometimes witch panics were the result of legal authorities’ rounding up a group of suspects together. Such panics often occurred after some type of climatic disaster, such as an unusually cold and wet summer, and they came in waves. In large-scale panics a wider variety of suspects were taken in—wealthier people, children, a greater proportion of men. Mass panics tended to end when it became clear to legal authorities, or to the community itself, that the people being questioned or executed were not what they understood witches to be, or that the scope of accusations was beyond belief. Some from their community might be in league with Satan, they thought, but not this type of person and not as many as this.
Similar skepticism led to the gradual end of witch hunts in Europe. Even in the sixteenth century a few individuals questioned whether witches could ever do harm, make a pact with the Devil, or engage in the wild activities attributed to them. Doubts about whether secret denunciations were valid or torture would ever yield a truthful confession gradually spread among the same type of religious and legal authorities who had so vigorously persecuted witches. Prosecutions for witchcraft became less common and were gradually outlawed. The last official execution for witchcraft in England was in 1682, though the last one in the Holy Roman Empire was not until 1775.
What were the central ideas of the reformers, and why were they appealing to different social groups? (page 338)
The Catholic Church in the early sixteenth century had serious problems, and many individuals and groups had long called for reform. This background of discontent helps explain why Martin Luther’s ideas found such a ready audience. Luther and other Protestants developed a new understanding of Christian doctrine that emphasized faith, the power of God’s grace, and the centrality of the Bible. Protestant ideas were attractive to educated people and urban residents, and they spread rapidly through preaching, hymns, and the printing press. By 1530 many parts of the Holy Roman
Section Review
The religious differences between Catholics and Protestants led to conflict and violence, each side viewing the other as wrong.
The French Calvinist Huguenots clashed with the Catholic majority in bloody riots and massacres, ending only when moderates of both faiths aided in securing official recognition
For the minority.
Protestant ideas spread to the Netherlands, where civil war raged for years between the Dutch and Spain, ending when Spain recognized the independence of the United Provinces.
Witch hunts intensified with the belief that witches did the bidding of the Devil, and all were in danger of experiencing God’s wrath as a result of their acts.
Witch hunts began with an accusation (usually of a woman), then an investigation, often under torture, and sometimes grew to a "witch panic” involving more people, until the whole witch hunt movement gradually faded with the growth of scepticism.
World History
