ABSTRACT
In early modern Christianity, the use of force as a means to push through religious aims appears to have been a contradictio in adjecto. Aer all, the commandment to love one’s enemies and neighbours is central to Christian theological ethics. At the same time, however, historians are familiar with the perception that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are a period of erce wars of religion or confession. Indeed, the justication for war as regards Europe’s confessional divide became an enduring political and theological theme. Furthermore, in almost every European region, the question of religion became tied to the intensely controversial issue – even prior to the Reformation – of dening the participation of the estates vis-à-vis political rule. By the middle of the sixteenth century, religion and politics became inseparably entangled, and the legitimacy of force thus became a theological and political problem that for several centuries appeared detached from the Christian commandment to uphold the common peace. At about the same time, contemporaries began to recognize a legitimacy decit, which spawned an abundance of publications: statements, rationalizations, systemic texts, and polemics. ese all sought to justify the claim that force needed to be used against confessional or religious believers of other faiths, in spite of the commandment to uphold the common peace. Participating in these debates were learned jurists and theologians (of each of the three confessions), political advisors from the nobility, and high nobility sovereigns themselves. Some of these arguments appeared across Europe simultaneously if independently of one another. In other cases there is evidence of a reciprocal reception. Yet there was no general argumentative structure, which was acknowledged by all those concerned.1
