ABSTRACT
Even to ask the question posed in the title of this essay might seem unnecessary, since no other conict in late medieval or early modern history includes the phrase ‘wars of religion’ in the label conventionally axed to it. In fact, however, historians from the sixteenth century to the present day have debated whether the civil wars that roiled France from c.1560 to 1598 arose primarily from religious dierences or aristocratic ambition. Consider these two quotations from the years 1579-81, the rst from a Catholic historian and the second from a Protestant:
ose who have considered things closely have known that neither religion alone nor the oppression of the Protestants caused the kingdom’s troubles, but also the hatreds that existed among the great nobles because of their ambitions and rivalries.2
