The
Ranums'
Panat Times
Volume 1, redone Dec. 2014
De Thou Studies
Part II
Jacques-Auguste de Thou on Heresy
Chapter 3 — Religiosity, Conformity, and Non-conformity in the History down to 1560
In book I de Thou brings up religious matters only when they involve challenges to papal authority, or some other authority. Except for the beliefs of the Albigensians, religious issues never come to the fore, to be presented independently of another theme.
Book I has, as its principal theme, the clash between Spanish and French imperial ambitions in Italy, with the former continually gaining at the expense of the latter. At certain times, he says, the French made the mistake of relying too much on the popes whose military and diplomatic machinations robbed the French of victory. De Thou notes the storm over negotiating the Concordat (1516) but concludes that it was for the best, despite what seemed a blow to Gallican liberties.
De Thou's critique of Rome becomes more specific regarding the reign of Leo X, (1) whose reliance on the policy of selling indulgences, particularly in Germany, led to Luther's critique of papal powers. (2) The Pope's intransigence prompted Luther to dig deeper, as it were, than papal power, down to matters of doctrine. Luther's followers complained about religious practices enforced by the Church that did not exist in the first centuries of Christianity. When secular powers, notably Frederick of Saxony, came to Luther's support, disorder resulted. At this point, de Thou does not mention the Peasants' War or Luther's articulation of alternative churches in Germany, separate from Rome.
In England, Wolsey's machinations led to Henry VIII's break with Rome, (3) an action that in its early phase did not involve matters of doctrine. De Thou refers to Calvin's views deploring Henry's declaration that he himself was head of the church. Again, had the Pope been more indulgent, Henry would not have made such a decision.
In taking up events in Germany, de Thou notes, somberly: "Mais Luther ayant prêché ses dogmes, les Princes et les peuples s'étant à ce sujet desunis, et le zele de la religion ayant enfanté des factions et des parties ...." (4) These decisions gave Emperor Charles the occasion to seek to increase and unify his powers throughout Germany, by trying to make the imperial crown hereditary in his family.
Relying on Sleiden, de Thou continues, after Charles's initial success and subsequent failure in the Schmalkaldic Wars, by emphasizing the accords reached at Speyer that became a baseline for understanding rights in the Empire that the Emperor failed to respect. (5)
After narrating Zwingli's fate in the battle against the Swiss Catholics, de Thou records how Zwingli's followers had supported him while alive, and later revered him as a martyr whose heart would not burn along with his body, something thought to be a visible mark of heavenly protection. De Thou also briefly notes the actions of "Thomas Muncer [Müntzer], prédicateur séditieux qui etant égalemment ennemi du Pape et de Luther, portoit les esprits simples et crédules à la revolte." (6) The extreme harshness of the Inquisition in Naples is also noted (7); and as might be expected, so are the jurisdictional confusions in France:
Cependant malgré la rigueur extrême, dont on usoit à l'égard des hérétiques [in France, late in the reign of Francis I] et quoiqu'on eût accordé aux Evêques la permission de juger de ce sortes de crimes dans la vûë de se délivrer de leur importunité; bien des gens semerent faussement le bruit que le conseil du roi en usoit ainsi par un trait de politique, afin de soustraire ces sortes de coupables aux cruels supplices ausquels les Juges royaux les condamnoient tous les jours. On relevoit ainsi en apparence l'autorité du Pape et des Evêques; mais ils ne pouvoient condamner à mort les accusés, qui tout au plus couroient le risque d'une prison perpetuelle. (8)
A Gallican who sought to avoid brutal torture and capital punishment probably found himself in an ambiguous position, because this royal decision resulted in a stronger authority not only for the Church in France but also for the pope. De Thou follows this with a remark about the death of Marguerite de Navarre, who had protected learned Protestants from the "furor of the Sorbonne."
It is probable that de Thou sought to include the names of all individuals who were tried and burned for heresy in France. As if attracted to the genre of martyrology, he takes the time to recount the fates of victims across Europe, especially if there is an account of the execution that he can include, along with the final words of the condemned. The Scottish reformer George Wishart (de Thou refers to him as "Claude") became caught up in the intense factional squabbles in Scotland, when David Beaton, archbishop and cardinal of St. Andrews, launched a campaign against "Lutherans." De Thou includes considerable detail about Wishart's trial, which ended in his condemnation, with the cardinal one of the judges. Tied to the stake, Wishart was given communion in the then non-Catholic manner, that is, both wine and bread. As the flames increased, he said: "Ces flammes sont, à la vérité, bien douleureuses au corps, qu'elles réduisent en cendres; mais elles ne sçauroient donner aucune atteinte à l'ame." (9) Wishart then was strangled. Cardinal Beaton would be murdered shortly afterward, before the very windows of St. Andrews castle from which he had watched Wishart's execution. It would be reported that some believed Beaton's death to be an example of divine justice for the persecutions he had ordered.
De Thou would state explicitly that divine justice had decided the duel between Jarnac and La Châtaigneraie, and would allude to later comments that Henry II's death from a lance in a joust resulted from his having authorized the duel, thereby breaking royal laws. His personal certainty about the duel yields here to mere reports about what was being said about Henry's accident. Perhaps it is the jurist who comes to the fore when de Thou expresses his conviction about the duel as a divine judgment. This particular duel had been authorized by Henry II, after Francis I, his father, had forbidden it. (10)
Here is another example. After noting the death of King Edward VI in 1553, he writes: "Plusieurs ont remarqué, qu'il mourut le même jour que Henry son père fit trancher la tête (en l'année 1535) à Thomas Morus; comme si la mort injuste d'un si grand homme eût dû être expiée par celle du fils même de Henry." (11)
His reports of opinions -- popular opinions in numerous instances -- about Providential and/or direct divine intervention, are parallels in time. Though not our theme, astrological and divine intervention, and claimed divine intervention, came under papal censure under Sixtus V. Denis Crouzet has explored these relations in Les guerriers de Dieu (Paris: Champs Vallon, 1990), especially concerning the belief in correspondences between divine and human actions, particularly as revealed in incidents involving extreme physical violence. (12)
There doubtlessly will be other examples of parallel divine judgments that de Thou heard or read or made up. Historian though he was, de Thou was also a very literary person. Thus it is not impossible for us to speculate that these prodiges and these divine actions were written by a historian with a brilliant literary imagination.
When de Thou reaches 1549, he takes up the complaint made by "those of Mérindol and Cabrières" concerning the cruelty of the royal justice that had been meted out by the Parlement of Aix. Their being accused of having Vaudois (Waldensian) beliefs prompts de Thou to remark: "It is necessary to go back to the origins of the sect," (13) and he mentions Gui de Perpignan as the source to which he turns.
Guido Terreni or Terrena (c. 1260-1342), also known as Gui de Perpignan, was a Carmelite theologian and official at the Avignonese curia. Dr. Thomas Turley (14) has reconstructed his life as an active councilor to popes, an articulator and defender of papal power, and an inquisitor whose Summa de haeresibus is often referred to as a histoire des hérésies. (15) As Turley describes it: "In many ways the Summa de haeresibus is as much a tractatus de ecclesia as it is a compendium of heresies." (16) Much more than a list of heresies with short descriptions of errors, it provides a historical vision of heresy, as phenomena that were to be repressed but that were not, in a sense, unusual and that, in Turley's words, were "a normal part of ecclesiastical life, and had the purpose of inspiring the faithful to define constantly doctrine, and defend it." Turley continues: "His [Guido's] Summa was effectively a history of the church, a history that recounted the constant struggle of watchful doctors and prelates to maintain authentic doctrine. For Guido heresy was not merely a negative force. As St. Paul had said [1 Cor. 11:19] heresy assured the purity of the Church's doctrine." (17)
Perhaps the most influential summa dating from the Early Church was Augustine's, a text that de Thou borrowed from and commented on. In his preface, de Thou had drawn on Augustine's Letters to support his argument that civil authority, and certainly not capital punishment, should not be resorted to for those in error. Did de Thou know about Augustine's very complex and evolving, almost tortuous thought on this question? The search for lines of jurisdiction between ecclesiastical and civil powers and action -- in de Thou's case, royal legal instances -- had already led him to Augustine. We do not know whether de Thou read all the letters and other works by the bishop of Hippo in which this very difficult question was raised. (18) The narratives that Augustine creates from the letters to Proculeainus (the Donatist bishop of Hippo), Priscillianus and Aurelius emphasize for de Thou the "gloire de la parole de Dieu," "conversations modérées," and "conférences pacifiques." (19) Such evils are not stopped by rigor, violence or authority. For de Thou, Saint Ambrose's embassy to Maximus, Sulpicius Severus's Historia Sacra, and St. Martin of Tours, all stress moderation. He either failed to perceive an evolution toward turning to the state in Augustine's thought, or else he interpreted these thoughts within a broader context grounded on the beliefs about the ineffectiveness of coercion in forced conformity.
Guido's research and writing about heresy was done in a climate of violence and extreme coercion. All that de Thou seems to draw from him takes the form of a list of errors purported to be those of the Vaudois. Guido's historical perspective may well have complemented de Thou's reading in Augustine.
It is difficult to characterize Guido's work briefly. After a lengthy list of heretics and their errors, he turns to heresies and errors. For the Vaudois he fills twenty pages of very carefully stated descriptions and statements about belief, beginning with an account of Waldo's activities in Lyon, ca. 1170. There follows, chapter by chapter, a precise definition of twenty-three errors committed by Waldo and his followers. The leitmotif is their refusal to accept the authority of the Roman pontiff or other prelates -- in short, a rejection of the Petrine succession. Throughout the account, Guido supplies precise references from the Bible. Chapter V recounts issues over the sacrament of penance; chapter X, over Purgatory; chapter XV, over miracles in the Church; chapter XVIII, the sins of the flesh, including sins against nature; chapter XXI, apostolic tradition and the purity and virginity of Mary; and so forth. This extremely detailed and thematically constructed text specifies in great detail the beliefs of the Roman Church as a Carmelite official elaborates them. There is much more.
Faced with all this while writing his History, and seeking to characterize the Waldensians (Vaudois) in order to proceed to an account of their repression, de Thou writes:
Les principaux articles de leur doctrine étoient, que puisque l'église Romaine avoit renoncé à la vraye Religion de J.C. et à la véritable foi, elle étoit devenuë la prostituée de Babylone; que c'étoit cet arbre sterile, que J.C. avoit condamné à être arraché et jetté au feu; qu'il ne falloit donc point obéïr au Pape, non plus qu'aux Evêques, qui enseignoient ses erreurs; que les Monasteres étoient les égoûts de l'Eglise, et de vrais cloaques; que les voeux monastiques étoient illusoires, et portoient au goût infame de la péderastie; que les Ordres sacrés étoient les marques de la grande bête, dont il est parlé dans l'Apocalypse; que le Purgatoire, la Messe, le culte des Saints, la consecration des temples, étoient des inventions de Satan. A ces articles principaux et certains de leur doctrine, on en a ajouté plusieurs autres par rapport au mariage, à la résurrection, à l'état de l'ame après la mort, et à l'abstinence. (20)
De Thou then briefly recounts the diaspora of the Vaudois, adding that people in the diaspora are sometimes called Cathars, "which signifies the same thing as the Puritans in England." (21) Pope Innocent had first tried the "glaive spirituel," but he turned to the "glaive de fer." Leopold, duke of Austria, and Simon de Montfort answer the call for repression.
How is it possible to account for the forcefulness of de Thou's arguments? If it is in Augustine, the categorical formula that coercion increases heresy is not part of Augustine's late writings against the Donatists. Thomas Turley does not mention it in his comments on Guido's Summa. We still have many books of de Thou's History to explore, so it is to be hoped that the force of the social-psychological arguments in the Preface will be accounted for. At this point, the only possible key is one word: experience! It is a crucial argument in the Preface.
Before working out de Thou's study of the Mérindol-Cabrières tragedies, let us briefly glance at the origins of the parallel between the Albigensian crusade and religious divisions in France circa 1560.
As early as 1522, Bernard de Luxembourg published at Cologne a catalog of heresies, accusing Luther of awakening heresies that had been asleep, including those of the Albigensians and the Cathars. (22) His revised and augmented work went through several editions and quickly became known in Paris. Noël Beda, syndic of the faculty of theology at the Sorbonne, also made the linkage between the heresies of the fourteenth century and those of Luther, also as early as 1522. M.H. Vicaire finds that, rather than Guido Terreni, Isidore of Seville's catalog of heresies taken from Augustine, and Gratian's Decretals, were the sources for this revived framework for defining errors. (23) Vicaire continues: "C'est la mentalité juridico-théologique qui s'est esquissée dès la fin du XIIe siècle, et n'a cessé de s'accuser à chaque siècle jusqu'à l'orée du XVIe siècle." (24)
Regarding a historical approach, Vicaire has found that Pierre des Vaux de Cernai's "Histoire albigeoise" was being referred to by theologians in Paris, while still in manuscript, though this lengthy and detailed account would not be translated and published (in Toulouse) until the 1560s. While de Thou may well have read Vaux de Cernai, he merely reached back for a list of heresies and did not allude to a lengthier or emotionally engaged historical account of the Albigensian and Cathar repressions. As we shall see, this clarifies his approach to heresies as defined by theologians, and to heresies as found in histories. He briefly mentions Wycliff and Hus as renewing their errors, but he gives a far more detailed account of the tragedies in Provence, beginning in 1540.
Faced with an edict that contained some terms for pacification in January 1562, the Parlement replied with remonstrances. First President Gilles Le Maistre remarked in a deliberation that instead of an accommodement, the government should do what Philip Augustus had done to the Albigensians: kill them. The remonstrances drawn up in early May 1562 contained a historical argument: "when error surfaced in any part of the kingdom, as in the time of the Albigensians, it was resisted in such a way as to be totally exterminated." (25)
In April of that same year, Jean Du Tillet, greffier civil of the Parlement, indicted heretics in his "sommaire de la guerre faicte contre les hérétiques albigeois," which he dedicated to the regent, Catherine de Médicis. As we have already noted in our discussion of de Thou's Préface Elizabeth A.R. Brown and Denis Crouzet have plotted the diffusion of the parallels and their elaboration into a call for a crusade. Thus far, we have found no references to the specific works and authors who created the Albigensian-Huguenot parallel narrated by de Thou, but we are only in 1547. As a historian-robin imbued with Humanist perspectives on history, de Thou, like so many other erudite historians, turned to the origins of whatever he was researching, as the first step to understanding.
With this context in mind, let us turn to de Thou's account of one of the earliest and most horrific atrocities in a century of atrocities: the massacres of the populations of Mérindol and Cabrières, two small towns situated in relatively mountainous northern Provence. The events were quickly written up, notably by the Huguenot Jean Crespin in 1556; they became well-known throughout Europe as an example of a total miscarriage of justice that ended with the deaths of several thousand people. (26)
The history of the tragic events in Mérindol and Cabrières has, as it center, contradictory and overlapping jurisdictions. Local bishops were united in efforts to convert the Vaudois, but divided over whether to use coercion after preaching and debate had failed. De Thou says that Sadoleto of Carpentras simply left the Vaudois alone, while his colleagues, the archbishop of Arles and the bishop of "Aques" (Aix?), pressed First President Barthélémy Chassanée to enforce the court's November 18, 1540, arrêt ordering execution for some of the Vaudois and of their wives and children, and the burning of their houses.
Chassanée was a very prominent judge who had served in various courts, including the Parlement of Dijon prior to his appointment as first president of Aix. De Thou recounts how Chassanée -- not wishing to enforce the arrêt, but being strongly pressured by the court to do so -- was visited privately by a gentilhomme from Provence, a friend of his named d'Allance, who recounted an incident that had transpired years earlier. De Thou narrates the entire incident word for word and within quotation marks, just as it purportedly had been spoken.
D'Allance recounts his recollection of how, when Chassenée was a young avocat, he had defended some rats charged with stealing grain. The first defense was procedural: for example, a delay was requested on the grounds of insufficient time to prepare the defense. D'Allance then accuses his friend Chassanée, now old and dignified, of being careless in procedures where human lives were involved. There is a brief description of the accused: they are persons "qui servent Dieu avec ferveur; ils ne refusent jamais de rendre ce qu'ils doivent à leurs Seigneurs, aux Magistrats, au Prince." (27) Chassanée came up with some procedural delays to avoid carrying out the arrêt, and died. He was succeeded by Maynier d'Oppède, whom de Thou characterized as "un homme violent, et ennemi particulier de ceux de Cabrières." (28) Rumor circulated that Chassanée had been poisoned.
Immediately before his account of their murders, de Thou provides a lengthy description of the Vaudois. They have improved the soil, they help the poor, they pay the taille and seigneurial rights, they fear God though they rarely go to church, they do not kneel before images of God and the saints, nor do they light candles and have masses said for the dead. They do not make the sign of the cross or take holy water when there is thunder; instead they look to Heaven and pray. They do not make pilgrimages or remove their hats when they pass a cross. They say public prayers in the vulgar tongue. They recognize neither pope nor bishop, but they elect some of their own to be ministers and pastors. De Thou adds that the inhabitants of Cabrières had a profession of faith that resembled Luther's. (29) These views take de Thou far from what he had read in Guido's Histoire des Hérésies.
The various authorities and jurisdictions are carefully and chronologically presented. De Thou includes people who were not present, notably the governor of Provence, Louis d'Adhémar de Grignan, whose powers in carrying out a royal order would have superseded those of judge d'Oppède. Had Guillaume du Bellay been in Provence, matters might have turned out differently (the du Bellay brothers were at least aware of, and partly attracted to Marguerite of Navarre's reforming circle). There was no one to stop d'Oppède and the vaguely defined men from attacking:
Mais ayant été avertis sur le soir que le Président approchoit, et étoit prêt d'arriver, ils [the men of Mérindol] résolurent de partir à la hâte, et sans differer, et de laisser là leurs femmes et enfants, persuadés que les ennemis n'auroient pas la cruauté de leur faire mal. Cette triste séparation excita de tous côtés des gémissements et des cris, dont les Echo des montagnes et des bois augmentoient l'horreur. .
..
Bien-tôt après arrivèrent ceux qui avoient été détachés pour les poursuivre. Ils ne respiroient que le carnage, à la vûë des femmes, qui étoient au moins au nombre de cinq cents, ils vouloient assouvir leur infame brutalité; mais leur Commandant les contint par ses menaces; ensorte qu'ils se retirerent, après avoir enlevé tout le betail et tout ce qui peut tomber sous leurs mains. (30)
When d'Oppède arrived, he found a young man, Maurice le Blanc, whom they tied to a tree and shot at with arquebuses.
The tragic events that took place at Mérindol and at Cabrières, like the summaries of the beliefs of the Vaudois, tended to become merged into a single narrative; and in this, de Thou is no exception. The fact that it was so eminent a judge as Maynier d'Oppède, who commanded in both villages, shocked at the time and has ever since. As with numerous other massacres in early-modern Europe, the idea of moving from one town to the other -- thereby giving time for doubt to set in about what had been ordered and carried out -- seems not to have occurred to the first president of the Parlement of Aix. De Thou continues the narrative:
... dès que les soldats furent entrés dans la ville, on les saisit tous, et même ceux qui s'étoient refugiés dans le château ou dans l'Eglise; et tous, sans avoir égard à la foi donnée, sans distinction d'age ni de sexe, furent massacrés dans une prairie près de la ville. Pour les femmes, elles furent conduites par l'ordre du President dans une grange remplie de paille, où l'on mit le feu; elles voulurent se sauver par une fenêtre, mais on les repoussa avec des perches et des piques; elles furent donc toutes souffoquées par la fumée et consumées par les flames. (31)
The seigneur of the village, Baron de la Garde, had given his word of protection.
What did readers think as they read de Thou under the paternalist eye of Henry IV? Very probably narratives of similar massacres, or worse, would have come to mind, and they might wonder whether de Thou's sources were Huguenot (e.g., Crespin) or Catholic, since during the Wars of Religion the accounts of terrible atrocities had become a genre almost of its own.
De Thou does not comment at length on the consequences of cruel judges and overlapping and confusing jurisdictions; but since one of his principal themes is the suffering of humanity and the castigation of those who are cruel in the name of religion, de Thou accomplished several aims in his narrative of the tragic events at Mérindol and Cabrières. It may be anachronistic to propose that the massacres had become so notorious that he had to include them in the name on honestas. The events in Müntzer's Mühlhausen had also become notorious, but de Thou gives them only a sentence. But how did d'Oppède come to wield the glaive de fer? The parlementaires possessed power over life and death, but not without a hearing or an indictment.
Realizing what he had done, d'Oppède sent Président de la Fond to call upon the king and recount how the inhabitants of Mérindol and Cabrières had inhumanely massacred and unjustly tormented others. In short, they merited greater severity for their crimes than they received. That would not be the full story. As we shall later learn, d'Oppède and some of the men acting under his command would be summoned to Paris, before a tribunal intended to make them accountable for their acts. D'Oppède, as we shall see, claimed that he was only carrying out the king's orders.
De Thou did not cast the emotional valences of these massacres in cold, detached legalese. His phrases about screams and lamentations that echoed through the mountains and the woods, and about poles and pikes used to push women away from the window, prompt emotional responses based on hearing and seeing. That sort of literary technique might be characterized as really literary, so long as the sense of that word does not imply severing the genre of historical writing from literature in general.
De Thou was, of course, familiar with the specific doctrinal questions. But with the authority that only learned specialization can provide, Jonathan A. Reid observes that beliefs concerning the nature of the Eucharist remained the central point of controversy. (32) In de Thou's summary of the beliefs held by the Vaudois townsmen along the Durance, we have seen numerous gestures and non-gestures that were certainly deemed disrespectful and scandalous by their "typical" Roman Catholic neighbors. But were they heretical? De Thou's closing lines about the beliefs of the two communities are similar, in that the more contested beliefs come at the end, almost as afterthoughts. For Mérindol, he writes: "... on en a ajouté plusieurs autres, par rapport au mariage, à la resurrection, à l'état de l'ame après la mort, et à l'abstinence." (33) In the list of beliefs at Cabrières, he concludes that they had "a profession of faith that approaches Luther's." Even the not very well-informed reader of 1603 would have quickly inferred that the inhabitants of Mérindol and Cabrières lived in heresy. The 1530 Augsburg Confession, drafted in part by Luther himself and made more accommodating to Catholics by Melanchton (it nonetheless failed to win their approval) may have remained controversial for some Protestants; but for most Catholics it was clearly heretical.
By ordering the most controversial issues at the end of the summaries of beliefs, and by contextualizing these beliefs in a narrative of atrocities, de Thou implicitly condemns persons in positions of authority who resorted to violence and murder, in an attempt to ensure conformity of beliefs. Chassanée versus d'Oppède; both held the same office and had taken the same oath to uphold justice.
The confusion and brutality demonstrated by those endowed with authority by God, the pope and the king, had led to the deaths of hundreds, without so much as a hearing before a court; whereas in the past there had been representation and efforts at reconciliation. The tragic account of the atrocities perpetrated at Mérindol and Cabrières were/are monumental negative moral exempla. (34)
Only at the end of book VIII does de Thou move toward a more general perspective:
Les questions qui regardent la foi, les bonnes oeuvres, la grace, le libre arbitre, la prédestination, la vocation, et la recompense éternelle, étoient pour lors agrées en secret par ceux qui souhaitoient sincerement la réforme de l'Eglise. La plûpart ayant sur ces matières des opinions différentes de celles qu'on enseignoit communément, s'appuyoient de l'autorité de saint Augustin pour les soutenir ... (35)
This is a very bold generalization, so bold that upon reading this, de Thou's contemporary probably immediately began to reflect, and to seek exceptions to it. But as if he wants to footnote his point, de Thou continues:
C'est pour cela qu'Augustin Fregose Sosteneo [Sostegno] fit imprimer à Venise en 1545. quelques opuscules, extraits de ce Père, ausquels il ajoutâ des notes et des commentaires. Flaminio entroit assez dans leurs opinions, quoique sur les autres points il ne goûtat pas la doctrine répanduë depuis peu en Allemagne. On voit encore dans le recueil des Lettres des grands hommes, (36) un temoignage clair et autentique qu'il n'avoit point d'autre sentiment que ceux de l'Eglise Catholique sur le sacrement de l'Eucharistie. (37)
It is tempting to infer that de Thou's general account of Reformist ideas, and where they came from, was not part of the grand narrative, just as they would not have been part of the grand narratives in Livy or Caesar (Tacitus is a different matter!), and that they were merely prompted by his decision to write a brief eulogy of Flaminio! Flaminio, a poet and humanist, had acquired a dubious reputation about his faith. It was said that on his deathbed he was attended by Paul IV, then only a cardinal. (38)
The Sostegno edition of Augustine was published decades after the formation of the first great generation of reformers. Reducing such a complex movement to the re-reading and re-interpretation of a single church father seems terribly oversimplified. Or was de Thou being ironic? Like so many others in the sixteenth century, he was not above something akin to keeping score about who remained faithful to Rome and who did not.
Notes:
1. Histoire universelle, vol. I, bk I, p. 21 (hereafter, "HU.")
2. HU, vol. I, bk I, p. 23.
3. HU, vol. I, bk I, p. 43.
4. HU, vol. I, bk II, p. 87.
5. HU, vol. I, bk II, p. 87.
6. HU, vol. I, bk I, p. 54.
7. HU, vol. I, bk III, p. 171.
8. HU, vol. I, bk VI, pp 387-88. De Thou quotes at length from the Remonstrance of 1555 on the same theme: "...Quoique nos Rois ne soient pas absolument les juges des matieres de la Religion, cependant comme depuis long-tems ils ont fait voir qu'ils en étoient les plus puissans défenseurs, aussi-bien que de la dignité sacerdotale, c'est avec raison qu'ils se sont en cela attribué quelque droit: ensorte que lorsqu'on conteste sur la possession d'un bénéfice, il n'appartient qu'aux juges Royaux d'en décider. Cependant votre Majesté soûmet par cet édit à une autre puissance les personnes même sur qui elle a droit de vie et de mort. Nous ne pouvons voir sans douleur votre autorité ainsi blessée et affoiblie. HU, vol. I, bk XVI, pp. 640-41.
9. HU, vol. I, bk III, p. 202.
10. R. Billacois, Le Duel dans la société française au XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris: EHESS, 1986), p. 93; and M. Houllemare, Politiques de la parole (Geneva: Droz, 2011), p. 87.
11. HU, vol. II, bk XIII, p. 405.
12. See his "Violence and the State in Sixteenth-Century France," in M. Ragnow and W.D. Phillips Jr., eds., Religious Conflict and Accommodation in the Early Modern World (Minneapolis: Center for Early Modern History, 2011), pp. 83-99, for an overview of the issue. See also Marie-Luce Demonet, ed., Le Hasard et la Providence, Actes du Colloque International de Tours, Centre d'Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, 2007, on line at: http://umr6576.cesr.univ-tours.fr/Publications/HasardetProvidence/
13. HU, vol. I, bk VI, p. 409.
14. "Terreni, Heresy, and the Reconstruction of Tradition," in Nancy van Deusen, ed., Tradition and Ecstasy: the Agony of the Fourteenth Century (Ottawa: Institute of Medieval Music, 1997), pp. 61-68.
15. Patrologia Latina (Paris, 1886), vol. 42, pp. 22-50: a list of 88 heresies, beginning with the Simonians [Symoniani] and ending with the Pelagians. Guido was especially devoted to Augustine (Turley, p. 60). Augustine's thought on heresy, as presented by Guido, would seem to have been cast in a more historical framework, a fact that would have appealed to de Thou.
16. Turley, p. 65.
17. Turley, p. 65. I have not consulted R. Cegna, "Opertet et haereses esse: Guido Terrini su Catari e Valdesi," Revista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa, 3 (1967), pp. 28-64, cited by Turley, p. 64.
18. H. Deane, The Political and Social Ideals of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 172-220.
19. See my pages on de Thou's Préface, (Chapter 1 of the online presentation); and D. Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 380-397.
20. HU, vol. I, bk VI, p. 410.
21. HU, vol. I, bk VI, p. 411.
22. M.H. Vicaire, "Les Albigeois ancêtres des Protestants," in Cahiers de Fanjeaux (Toulouse, 1966), pp. 25-27.
23. Vicaire, p. 29.
24. Vicaire, p. 30. See also Alain Boureau, Satan hérétique: Histoire de la démonologie (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004), brief and excellent on the difference between civil (royal) legal procedures and those of the Inquisition. He partly relies on Guido Terreni.
25. Nancy Roelker, One King, One Faith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 254.
26. Truly modern scholarship on the incident begins with P. Gaffarel's "Les massacres de Cabrières et de Mérindol en 1545," Revue historique, 107 (1911), pp. 241-271. He relies on plaidoyers, arrêts, a procès-verbal and other procédures in the manuscript collections of the Bibliothèque Méjanes of Aix-en-Provence. Michel François touches on it briefly in Le cardinal de Tournon (Paris: Boccard, 1951), and concludes that neither Tournon nor the governor of Provence, Louis d'Adhémar de Grignan, were involved. There are several more recent specialized studies, for example, one of Sadolet, who protected the Vaudois as bishop of Carpentras. See also W. Monter's excellent account in Judging the French Reformation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 96-103, where a more chronological account than de Thou's is provided.
27. HU, vol. I, bk VI, p. 416. See the remarkably long article on Chassenée in L. Moréri, Dictionnaire (Paris, 1744), vol. 3, pp. 261-262.
28. HU, vol. I, bk VI, p. 419
29. HU, vol. I, bk VI, p. 418.
30. HU, vol. I, bk VI, p. 421
31. HU, vol. I, bk VI, p. 422.
32. J.A. Reid, King's Sister, Queen of Dissent, Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549) (Leiden: Brill, 2009) contains a remarkable probing of Gérard Roussel's beliefs, vol.2, pp. 521-563.
33. HU, vol. I, bk , p. 410.
34. I have centered my attention on Mérindol and Cabrières, but see Gaffarel, pp. 255-262, for an account of attacks on other villages, and of various attempts to stop d'Oppède.
35. HU, vol. II, bk VIII, p. 145, preceded by an account of Alciato's career and his death in 1550.
36. The 1558 edition of Clarorum virorum epistolae (Zurich: Froschauer) does not contain a letter by Marcantonio Flaminio. De Thou may have found his information in one or another letter in that publication.
37. HU, vol. II, bk VIII, p. 145.
38. See Carol Maddison, Marcantonio Flaminio, Poet, Humanist, and Reformer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965).