From Michael A. Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 193-195.
Chapter 5: The Contradictions of Pre-Modernity
On a spring day in May of 1631, Count von Tilly celebrated a mass to thank God for his conquest of Magdegurg, the chief city of the Protestant Reformation, boasting that no such victory had occurred since the destruction of Jerusalem. He was only slightly exaggerating—the cathedral in which the mass was held was one of three buildings that had not been burned to the ground. His Catholic League troops had besieged the city since November, living in muddy trenches through the winter snows, enduring the daily jeers and abuse of the Protestant inhabitants of the city. Once they stormed through the gates their zeal, rapacity, and greed knew no bounds. The slaughter was unstoppable. Fires were set throughout the city, children were thrown into the flames, and woman were raped before being butchered. Fifty-three women were beheaded in a church where they sought refuge. No one was spared—twenty-five thousand Protestants were massacred or incinerated, and of the five thousand survivors some few were noblemen held for ransom, but all the rest were women who had been carried off to the imperial camp to be raped and sold from soldier to soldier. News of this atrocity quickly spread throughout Europe, hardening the sectarian lines of a conflict that had begun thirteen years before and that would rage on for another seventeen.
The modern world, as we think of it today, was born in this time of religious conflict and destruction. Beginning in the early sixteenth century and lasting until the middle of the seventeenth, the Wars of Religion were conducted with a fervor and brutality that were not seen again until our own times. Indeed, the ferocity of the combatants may even have exceeded our own, for almost all the killing took place at close quarters, often in hand-to-hand combat, and thus without the emotionally insulating distance that modern technologies make possible. The slaughter at Magdeburg, for all its horror, was not the first nor the last such event. During the Peasants’ Rebellion in the 1520s, over one hundred thousand German peasants and impoverished townspeople were slaughtered, many of them when they rushed headlong into battle against heavily armed troops, convinced by their leader Thomson Müntzer that true believers were immune to musket balls. In 1572, seventy thousand French Huguenots were slaughtered in the St.Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The Franciscan monks who had preached that killing heretics was the surest way to salvation were pleased, but apparently not as pleased as Pope Gregory XIII who was so delighted to receive the head of the slain Huguenot leader Coligny in a box that he had a special medal struck commemorating the event. And finally, lest anyone imagine that the barbarity was one-sided, Cromwell’s model army sacked the Irish town of Drogheda in 1649 killing virtually everyone. They buried alive all those who had taken refuge in the St. Mary’s Cathedral, butchered the women hiding in the vaults beneath it, used Irish children as human shields, hunted down and killed every priest, and sold the thirty surviving defenders into slavery. Crowell, without the least sense of irony, thanked God for giving him the opportunity to destroy such barbarous heretics.
While these accounts are shocking, they only give us an inkling of the horror of these wars that raged over Europe for more than five generations. By conservative estimates, the wars claimed the lives of ten percent of the populations in England, fifteen percent in France, and thirty percent in Germany, and more than fifty percent in Bohemia. By comparison, European dead in World War II exceeded ten percent of the population only in Germany and the USSR. Within our experience only the Holocaust and the killing field of Cambodia can begin to rival the levels of destruction that characterized the Wars of Religion.