Immediate Causes of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre
St B | What were the Immediate Causes of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre? | Document Sources 15,16,17,18 | | Travis Bontorin | 10/24/2012 |
The immediate causes of the Saint Bartholomew’s day massacre, 1572 using the sources from Barbara Diefendorf’s “The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, A Brief History with Documents. |
Since the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre there has been a great deal of controversy over the causes and blame of the historic crisis. Any religious dispute is a very contentious debate due to the fact that there were generally very few impartial bystanders to record what took place. Given that the clash between the Protestants and Catholics had been an ongoing problem since Protestantism had spread to France in the early 16th century, documents that can be studied are often very biased, and historians must gather information from a third party perspective in order to form opinions about historic events such as the Saint Bartholomew’s day massacre. Attempting to figure out why such a horrific event happened is incredibly difficult. It is impossible to know why an individual acted the way they did unless they recorded their thoughts at the time. However, by encompassing various documents written by different individuals we are able to establish an understanding of the circumstances leading up to the massacre and hereby construct a recipe for the event. The formula for any sort of civil crisis is simple; it requires two groups of people who passionately disagree on an issue enough to fight over it, a situation that puts high levels of tension between the two parties, an established fear of the unpredictability of the opposing group, and finally a trigger. In the days leading up to Saint Bartholomew’s Day 1572, the recipe for a disastrous event unfolds and ultimately evolves into the slaughtering of thousands of Protestants in Paris and surrounding regions of France.
As with any conflict, there are two sides to every
The immediate causes of the Saint Bartholomew’s day massacre, 1572 using the sources from Barbara Diefendorf’s “The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, A Brief History with Documents. |
Since the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre there has been a great deal of controversy over the causes and blame of the historic crisis. Any religious dispute is a very contentious debate due to the fact that there were generally very few impartial bystanders to record what took place. Given that the clash between the Protestants and Catholics had been an ongoing problem since Protestantism had spread to France in the early 16th century, documents that can be studied are often very biased, and historians must gather information from a third party perspective in order to form opinions about historic events such as the Saint Bartholomew’s day massacre. Attempting to figure out why such a horrific event happened is incredibly difficult. It is impossible to know why an individual acted the way they did unless they recorded their thoughts at the time. However, by encompassing various documents written by different individuals we are able to establish an understanding of the circumstances leading up to the massacre and hereby construct a recipe for the event. The formula for any sort of civil crisis is simple; it requires two groups of people who passionately disagree on an issue enough to fight over it, a situation that puts high levels of tension between the two parties, an established fear of the unpredictability of the opposing group, and finally a trigger. In the days leading up to Saint Bartholomew’s Day 1572, the recipe for a disastrous event unfolds and ultimately evolves into the slaughtering of thousands of Protestants in Paris and surrounding regions of France.
As with any conflict, there are two sides to every