Chapter 3 - From Religious Zealot to Convert

Summary

During his short career as a Reformed pastor, George Jenatsch acted as a zealous and intolerant advocate for the Calvinist cause. Rejecting the caution of his older peers among the pastors in the Three Leagues, he let religious passion shape his actions, including playing a role at the notorious Thusis trials of 1618. There, as one of the spiritual overseers intended to guarantee that the assembled militia “protected the fatherland and punished the guilty” (as they saw it), his role was close to that of an Old Testament prophet. Judge and shepherd simultaneously, he embodied the intertwined duality of religion and politics that had long characterized European society. That duality faced a severe challenge after the great schism of the Protestant Reformation that began in 1517, though the old ideas persisted for generations. By the early 1600s, Europeans' ideas about religion and politics had become critically unstable, and would continue to fracture during the political and cultural crisis brought on by the Thirty Years' War.

During the course of that war, after what he described as five years of resisting his own inner voice, Jenatsch publicly announced his conversion to the Catholic faith.1 Since he converted in the midst of high-level diplomatic maneuvering over the future of the Three Leagues, many of his contemporaries wondered about his motivations. After all, moving from one religion to another was one of the most visible changes in identity that a person living at this time could undertake.