27 - Intercommunal Violence in Europe

Summary

Communal violence took many forms in early modern Europe, but much of it was shaped by an unprecedented level of inter-confessional conflict. The Reformation resulted in the rapid spread of minorities which, in the sixteenth century in particular, caused clashes with the majority confession and the authorities seeking to curb civil strife. Violence was often localised and small scale but could also be significant and widespread. As regimes sought to incorporate the new reality of confessional coexistence, so resentment and tensions grew within communities, often resulting in outbursts of both popular and official violence. Attacks on individuals and groups as well as objects, through acts of iconoclasm, were commonplace; massacres and other atrocities less so. This chapter explores these issues with respect to communities across both eastern and western Europe and argues that the similarities are more striking than the differences. It considers in what circumstances outbreaks of intercommunal violence were more likely, how successfully such tensions were accommodated, and to what extent there was a decline in their incidence as the period progressed. By 1800, it appears that political violence had displaced confessional violence within communities as the predominant form of repression and exclusion.