By looking at Theodore De Bry’s engraving ‘The Cruelties of De Soto’ and Francois Dubois

‘The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre’, we receive a unique and detailed insight into early

modern violence. Religious and colonial violence were the two largest areas of early modern

violence, greatly shaping the world and often intertwining. Both sources give us a look into

both these areas, from early Protestant-Catholic relations before the Thirty-Years war to

Spanish colonial exploits in the New World and the various justification behind violence in

both cases.

Theodore De Bry was a Protestant engraver who after fleeing to Frankfurt to avoid

persecution, constructed the ‘Grands Voyage’, a catalogue of engravings concerning the

new world, indigenous peoples and importantly violence both committed by the Spaniards

and by the indigenous. In ‘the cruelties of De Soto’, De Bry has made a multi-layered

portrayal of Spanish colonial violence featuring various elements combining both a

condemnation and a justification for the depicted violence. De Bry certainly knew his

audience well, consistently shifting the language and text used to appeal to specified groups

such as volumes in German being ‘geared towards protestants’ and Latin for Catholics, as

well as omissions like excluding passages that criticised Catholic beliefs and Psalms

offending Calvinists.1 The audience is the general European populace of any Christian sect,

to display the religiously immoral violence committed by both sides and to gain the appeal

of all.

The engraving is striking in detail utilising an effective variety of elements to complete the

multi-layered depiction. The towering walls are apart of the ‘imposing European

architecture’ that acts as symbols of dominance, order, and power. Coupled by the tools

and methods of torture, De Bry cuts out an image of civilised versus the uncivilised, with the
1
‘Inventing “America”, The Engravings of Theodore de Bry”, Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank
Spaniards implemented use of science and technology in their torture like suspending the

target ‘in mid-air by a pulley and stretched downward with a weight’. 2 The portrayal of the

natives continues this, the dismembered natives are defeated, lost and confused as they

wander back into the empty valleys without their hands, the most important tools of

production and overall capability. The other natives are ordered to line up, forming a queue

and observing their inevitable fate, yet even this furthers the violence as justified and

civilised. It is planned and structured, in comparison to De Bry’s engravings of native

violence which is outright chaos and senseless bloodthirst.3 The story behind the event

continues this sense of justice; De Soto, a Spanish governor, ordered the natives to be

torture and abandoned after they failed to bring him to the gold reserves after 12 days of

travel, despite De Soto forcing the agreement onto the natives to take him to the Gold in 8

days, the natives are declared the criminals for breaching the contract and so the

punishment is justified. De Bry implements elements of this view such as the raised hands of

the native in the centre ‘as a sign of his acceptance and repentance of the wrongdoing’. 3

The impact of the source is the reduction of empathy towards the native victims of colonial

violence and the strong assumption that whenever violence is committed by the Europeans

towards the natives, it surely must be justified by a wrongdoing by the native for they are

uncivilised and savage. This was common for its time as De Bry’s contrasting depiction of

native violence show. The violence and its depiction were long-term, being situated in an

extensive period of colonialization, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and slavery. Overall, the

source is very useful in telling us about the violence in its period and in the New World, that

2
Molly Tun, ‘Colonial Cruelty: The Expression and Perpetuation of Violence in Theodor de Bry's America’,
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 95.2 (2018), pp. 145-162.
3
De Bry, ‘The Indians Pour Molten Gold into the Mouths of the Christians’ (Courtesy of the James Ford Bell
Library, University of Minnesota)
a strong bias was applied to justifying the colonial violence by attaching elements of

civilisation, science, technology, reason, and religion, which all intertwine.

‘The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre’ (1572) is Francois Dubois most well-known work

and not much is known about the painter himself, being born in Amiens and fleeing to

Lausanne to escape the persecution that enfolded after the massacre. Whilst not being

present there himself, a close relative died and he was commissioned to paint the event

from a fellow refugee and banker from Lyon. We can therefore assume the paintings

targeted audience is both Catholics and Protestants, to outright condemn the violence for

its cruelty and lack of justification whilst letting Protestants visualise and remember the

event and the lives lost. The violence demonstrated was common and long-term as religious

tensions heightened and the Thirty-Years war followed.

The painting makes no attempt to filter the violence with examples of decapitation,

defenestration and castration all being highlighted. The Protestants are shown to be

confused, defenceless and unprepared, instantly placing the Catholics to be cruel attacking

those helpless and oblivious. An infant is shown to be dragged by a rope, mountains of

corpses are formed, houses are pillaged and a pregnant woman is disembowelled. During

the chaos stands Catherine de Medicis, the supposed instigator, and Catholic dukes

including the duke of Guise all proudly observe the bloodthirst. Despite all of this, this shows

us that religious violence in the early modern period was not senseless, that the

perpetrators genuinely believed that what they were doing was morally and religiously

correct, that their victims not only deserved death but had led themselves to that fate by a

series of religious violations. This is how acts of extensive cruelty and inhumanity could be

committed with no significant mental or emotional impact regarding guilt or remorse, their
reasoning and justification was simply too solidified within their mentality. The reasons

behind the built-up hatred can be linked to previous attempts of conciliation as well as the

Catholic reaction to Protestant change. For the Catholic, the very being and concept of the

Huguenots was a violation of their beliefs. The Huguenots believed we must rely solely on

‘the gift of grace and salvation of God’, it is the only religious duty and we alone can not

save ourselves. Naturally, this means the church’s structures of papacy, popes, churches,

divinely appointed figures, mandatory religious events, and commitments were nothing but

‘cheats and wicked’, abuses of the true nature of Christianity inspired by greed and desire. 4

The Catholic way of life was attacked with its suppression of what they held most dear and

significant, and so despite early attempts to reconcile even by Catherine like ‘the marriage

of the king’s sister, Marguerite of Valois to the young protestant leader Henry of Navarre’

and the 1561 gathering between Catholic and Huguenot figures, the massacre still

occurred.5 Furthermore, France had always been a nation held together by its absolutist

monarchy being a land of various languages and peoples, therefore the 1559 ‘Great

Rapture’ was a significant turning point in Catholic-Protestant relations when Henry II died a

bizarre death at a tournament and who followed was his adolescent brother. With reliance

on the monarchy being fragile and the royal government relying on the Catholic dukes for

power and support, they permitted the massacre.4

Both sources deliver an excellent insight into early modern violence. De Bry sets the scene

for the ‘New World’ creating engravings both of violence originating from the natives and

the Spanish colonialists, whilst ostensibly appearing to display a universal condemnation of

violence from both sides, a deeper look reveals a heavy bias and how it helped shape

European views and justifications towards colonial violence. The engraving chosen shows all
4
BBC Radio 4 Podcast: ‘St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre’, 2003
5
Smither, James R. “The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and Images of Kingship in France: 1572-1574.”
of this through depicting the torture assembly line formed to deliver a ‘civilised’

punishment. On the other hand, is the massacre of the Protestant leadership in France,

stemming from a long-rooted rivalry between the Huguenots and the great Catholic house

Guise and riddled with mystery with the true perpetrators and full story being hidden from

history (record of parliament were destroyed and memoirs give conflicting accounts). 6 The

painting reveals the side of religious violence in the early modern period, being a key event

and an early stage of Protestant-Catholic violence, occurring 46 years before the dreaded

Thirty-Years war. Furthermore, the story behind the painting is significant in what it can tell

us of early European Protestant-Catholic relations and how reunion was the initial goal.

Religious and colonial violence are perhaps the most significant areas of violence in this

period of extensive exploration and religious reformation, countless links can be made to

how the period and its violence helped to shape the contemporary world.

In conclusion, the early modern period was defined by violent change. Despite its important

events, from discovering the Americas to religious reformation, they were riddled with

violence with no filter on its cruelty. These sources are effective in helping us as historians

understand the intent, scale, and justification of such violence as it hardly ever is senseless.

De Bry played a role in shaping how Europeans understood and reasoned with their violence

against the natives abroad despite his attempts to portray their cruelty too whilst Francois

Dubois created a visualisation of an event so little documented about, helping the world

both then and now understand what took place that day and how it looked.

Bibliography:

6
Kelley, Donald R. “Martyrs, Myths, and the Massacre: The Background of St. Bartholomew.”
1. Online Article: ‘Inventing “America”, The Engravings of Theodore de
Bry” by Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank on smarthistory.org.
https://smarthistory.org/engravings-theodore-de-bry/

2. Molly Tun, ‘Colonial Cruelty: The Expression and Perpetuation of

Violence in Theodor de Bry's America’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies
95.2 (2018), pp. 145-162.

3. De Bry, ‘The Indians Pour Molten Gold into the Mouths of the
Christians’ (Courtesy of the James Ford Bell Library, University of
Minnesota)

4. BBC Radio 4 Podcast: ‘St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre’, 2003.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p005493t

5. Smither, James R. “The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and Images of

Kingship in France: 1572-1574.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 22, no. 1
(1991): 27–46.

6. Kelley, Donald R. “Martyrs, Myths, and the Massacre: The Background

of St. Bartholomew.” The American Historical Review 77, no. 5 (1972):
1323–42.