Wars Fought Over Faith in Europe

Eighteen expeditions between 772 and 804 brought the Saxons under Frankish rule and compelled their conversion, opening with the destruction of the Irminsul. Widukind submitted and was baptized in 785, and new bishoprics followed.

Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade at Clermont in 1095 and offered a plenary indulgence to those who took the vow. The campaigns ran to the fall of Acre in 1291 and left a vocabulary of holy war that was later turned on other targets.

From 1419 to 1434 followers of the executed reformer Jan Hus defeated five crusades, using war wagon tactics, before the moderate Utraquists crushed the Taborites at Lipany. The Compacts of Basel then permitted communion in both kinds in Bohemia.

Zurich, reformed under Zwingli, fought the Catholic cantons in 1529 and 1531. The first war ended with the milk soup legend at Kappel, and the second ended at the Battle of Kappel on 11 October 1531, where Zwingli served as army chaplain.

Anabaptists seized the Westphalian city in February 1534 and declared it the New Jerusalem under Jan Matthys and then Jan van Leiden. Catholic and Lutheran princes together besieged it until June 1535, and the cages that held the executed leaders still hang from St Lambert's tower.

Eight civil wars between Catholics and Huguenots ran from 1562 to 1598 and included the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572. They ended when Henry IV issued the Edict of Nantes, granting limited freedom of worship and fortified towns.

Beginning in a confessional revolt in Bohemia in 1618, the war spread across the Holy Roman Empire. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 recognised Calvinism alongside Lutheranism and Catholicism and is often read as the end of Europe's wars of religion, a view scholars still debate.

Fought from 1642 to 1651 over how the church should be governed, the war ended with a king executed and episcopacy abolished. The collapse of censorship let Baptists, Quakers, Ranters, Diggers and Fifth Monarchists argue openly until the Restoration of 1660.

Huguenot peasants of the Cevennes rose from 1702 to 1704 against persecution that followed Louis XIV's 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Prophesying spread among them, and Jean Cavalier accepted a royal settlement in 1704.

Beginning in March 1793, the Catholic and Royal Army rose in western France against conscription and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which required priests to swear an oath to the state. The Republic answered with scorched earth columns, and peace agreements came in 1795.

In November 1847 seven Catholic cantons that had formed a defensive league lost to the liberal federal army under General Dufour within four weeks. The dispute began over closed monasteries and the Jesuit order, and the restrained conduct of both sides kept the fighting brief.