Peace and Religion

After the fracture of Christendom, religious diversity was no longer limited to the familiar face of the Jew, the Muslim or the Orthodox Christian. It no longer concerned a minority, which could be controlled. Religious diversity now had the aggressive features of a rival confession that threatened to become the majority and to invade the vital spaces, of a disease that could spread through the whole of society and the body politic. To prevent religious violence from destroying that body, some parts of sixteenth-century Europe set up processes of pacification between different faiths. The peace that was constructed in everyday practice in specific places, not in the rarefied air of the world of ideas, did not develop straightforwardly. There were retreats and sudden advances, and a mixture of minor and major compromises, provisional rules and solutions, which, as time passed and contexts changed, might alter their meaning, set off new aggressive dynamics, or prove obsolete. Thus, for some Europeans, preserving religious peace became the result of compromises and negotiations.