Religious Warfare in Europe 1400-1536
Norman Housley
Abstract
This book describes and analyzes warfare that sprang from and was driven by religious belief, in the period from the Hussite wars to the first generation of the Reformation. The focus is on a number of key theatres. At times warfare between national communities was shaped by convictions of ‘sacred patriotism’, either in defending God-given land or in the pursuit of messianic programmes abroad. Insurrectionary activity, especially when fuelled by apocalyptic expectations, was a second important type of religious war. In the 1420s and early 1430s the Hussites waged war successfully in defence of ... More
This book describes and analyzes warfare that sprang from and was driven by religious belief, in the period from the Hussite wars to the first generation of the Reformation. The focus is on a number of key theatres. At times warfare between national communities was shaped by convictions of ‘sacred patriotism’, either in defending God-given land or in the pursuit of messianic programmes abroad. Insurrectionary activity, especially when fuelled by apocalyptic expectations, was a second important type of religious war. In the 1420s and early 1430s the Hussites waged war successfully in defence of what they believed to be ‘God's Law’. And some frontier communities depicted their struggle against non-believers as religious war by reference to crusading ideas and habits of thought. The book explores what these conflicts had in common in the ways the combatants perceived their own role, their demonization of their opponents, and the ongoing critique of religious war in all its forms. The author assesses the interaction between crusade and religious war in the broader sense, and argues that the religious violence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was organic, to the extent that it sprang from deeply-rooted proclivities within European society.
Keywords:
warfare,
religion,
Hussites,
reformation,
patriotism,
messianism,
insurrection,
apocalypse,
frontier,
crusade
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2008 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199552283 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2010 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199552283.001.0001 |
