Sorry sir, just trying to make the discussion more friendly. Never mind, Mr. Michael G. it won't happen again, how could I dare writing to you in such terms!
Weren't they 70.000 (by protestant accounts)? Now they have grown up to 100.000?
Come on, you know exactly what I was refering to! Precisely to that, I wasn't saying you saw Hitler as Catherine or viceversa, but no, I don't think your comparison has valid standards. And that's for sure, Catherine was not born in Braunau...By the way, if my father was a merchant should I have to feel offended, like when I said, writing in a historical context, that protestants were heretics?
No fact in there, Mr. Michael G.. Reports are contradictory. Those which are favorable were written by her friends, those which accused her as the absolut perpetrator were written by her enemies... No points for any of us two in that issue I believe...
The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy in French) was a wave of Catholic mob violence against the Huguenots (French Protestants), under the authority of Catherine de Medici, the mother of Charles IX. Starting on August 24, 1572, with the assassination of a prominent Huguenot, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the massacres spread throughout Paris and later to other cities and the countryside, lasting for several months, during which as many as 70,000 may have been killed. The massacres marked a turning-point in the French Wars of Religion by stiffening Huguenot intransigence.
Background
After the third war in 1570, there was a possibility of peace. The House of Guise had fallen from favour at the court and had been replaced by moderates who were more willing to find a peaceful solution to the crisis. The Huguenots were in a strong defensive position as a result of the Edict of Saint-Germain (August 1570). They controlled the fortified towns of La Rochelle, La Charité-sur-Loire, Cognac, and Montauban. Catherine de Medici had hoped that the marriage alliances of her children would support her move for peace, including the proposed marriage of her son, François, Duke of Anjou and Elizabeth I of England.
By 1571, however, hopes of peace were collapsing. Relations between the Huguenots and the Catholics had deteriorated, and in Rouen on a Sunday in March, forty Huguenots were killed because they refused to kneel in front of the host (the eucharist) during a Catholic street procession.
With the Guise faction out at the French court, the Huguenot leader, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, was readmitted into the king's council in September 1571. The Guises hated Coligny for two reasons: he was the leader of the Huguenots, and they thought he was implicated in the assassination of Francis, Duke of Guise, in February 1563.
The Catholic fleet assembled under Don John of Austria defeated the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto. This confirmed to the Huguenots that Catholicism could resurge across Western Europe, led by Philip II of Spain. In April 1572, Sea Beggars took control of Brielle, thus taking control of Holland. This meant that there was pressure within France to intervene on behalf of the rebels in the Netherlands to prevent a Spanish intervention in France. Coligny was the main supporter of this intervention. There was then the possibility of either another civil war or a major war against Spain, which was at that time western Europe's greatest Catholic power.
Ostensibly to quell the rancour between the Protestants and the Catholics (the House of Bourbon and the House of Guise), the Queen-Mother, Catherine de Medici, arranged for Henry of Navarre, Duke of Bourbon, the patron of the Huguenots, to marry her daughter Marguerite. The wedding provided an extraordinary occasion to get all of the powerful Huguenots in one place. Catherine therefore planned the massacre of many of the Huguenots while they were in town for the wedding, but she had a hard time convincing her son, Charles IX of France, to go along, since he had developed a friendly relationship with Admiral de Coligny. Finally, after much argument, Charles became furious and lashed out at his mother, commanding the massacre to be done thoroughly if it were to be done at all — in other words, he didn't want to face any retaliation, so he ordered them all to be killed.
The massacres
In 1572, a series of inter-related incidents occurred after the royal wedding of Marguerite of Valois to Henry of Navarre, an alliance that strengthened his claim to the throne of France. On 22 August, Catherine's agent, a Catholic named Maurevel, attempted to assassinate Admiral de Coligny in Paris, but succeeded only in wounding him and infuriating the Huguenot party. Then in the early hours of the morning of 24 August, St. Bartholomew's Day, Coligny and several dozen other Huguenot leaders were murdered in Paris, a series of coordinated assassinations that could only have been planned at the highest level. That was the signal for a widespread massacre. Beginning on 24 August , and lasting to 17 September, there was a wave of popular killings of Huguenots by the Paris mob, as if spontaneous.
From August to October, similar seemingly spontaneous massacres of Huguenots took place in other towns, such as Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, Bourges, Rouen, and Orléans. Estimates of the number of those murdered range as high as 100,000. a huguenot source gives a figure of 70,000. Other sources estimate 30,000 or fewer. Among the slain was composer Claude Goudimel.
"Catholics say only 30,000 were slain in the Inquisition of France. Protestants put the number at 70,000. We would prefer the latter figure. If there were 70,000 Huguenots in Paris on the night of the massacre, so much more the justification for the slaughter… We have heard ring out many times the very bells that called the Catholics together on that fatal night. They always sounded sweetly in our ears." (Western Watchman, No. 21, 1912)
Contemporary accounts report bodies in the rivers for months afterwards, so that no one would eat fish. Pope Gregory XIII's reaction was jubilant: although Catholic sources indicate that the news he received from France was that of a serious Protestant plot against the King having been thwarted. In any event, all the bells of Rome pealed for a public day of thanksgiving, the guns of the Castel Sant'Angelo sounded a joyous salute, a special commemorative medal was struck, to honour the occasion, and Gregory commissioned Giorgio Vasari to paint a mural celebrating the Massacre, which is in the Vatican. In Paris, the poet Jean-Antoine de Baïf, founder of the Academie de Musique et de Poésie, wrote a sonnet extravagantly praising the killings. The pope sent Cardinal Orsini to convey, in person, his happy blessings and goodwill to the Queen Mother. It was not the first such pogrom of the Wars of Religion, nor would it be the last.
