Between Eschatology and Enlightenment | The Early Modern Dutch Press in an Age of Religious Persecution: The Making of Humanitarianism (2024)

David de Boer

Two weeks before Christmas 1724, burgomaster Johann Gottfried Rösner of the Polish city of Toruń, was executed together with nine of his fellow Lutheran citizens. The men were punished in the wake of a riot, the escalation of a conflict between the city’s Jesuit students and Lutheran citizens, which had disrupted Toruń in the preceding summer. During the tumult, a Lutheran crowd had vandalized the Jesuit school. After the riot, the Jesuits took proceedings against the city to the royal Assessorial Court, which thereupon sent an all-Catholic research commission to the confessionally mixed city to investigate the matter.1 The civic authorities were found guilty, a verdict confirmed by the Sejm. Toruń was occupied by royal troops to make sure that the sentences were carried out. Rösner was convicted for having forsaken his duties to keep the public peace in failing to prevent or quell the riot. The other convicts were executed as participants in the tumult. Extra harsh punishments were designed for those who had engaged in iconoclasm. The city’s Lutherans were also punished collectively; they had to hand over their main church to the Benedictines, pay a large sum of money to the Jesuits, and the city government, hitherto fully Lutheran, was to become 50 percent Catholic.2

That a local riot turned into a matter of national concern was the result of clever lobbying. Looking for justice, the Jesuits had drawn up an account of events in Latin, accusing the magistrates of being responsible for the iconoclasm. This document was disseminated among the Polish nobility shortly after the riot. Through their mediation, the case was taken higher up, to predominantly Catholic authorities. The Toruń authorities subsequently turned it into a matter of international concern by publishing an account of their own, which was picked up by the Prussian court. Like Gdansk and Elbląg, Toruń was a Royal Prussian city. An old and complex constitutional settlement within the Commonwealth granted Royal Prussia a significant degree of autonomy from the rest of the realm. At the time of the tumult the cities had been engaged in a long struggle to protect their privileges against the centralizing policies of the monarchy.3 Neighboring Brandenburg-Prussia had long served as a protector to the Royal Prussian cities, for whom they had interceded with the Polish Crown on numerous occasions.4

In the early months of 1725, the so-called “Bloodbath of Toruń” became a European scandal. By the end of the year, over one hundred pamphlets had flowed from the presses in the Holy Roman Empire, the United Provinces, and Britain.5 As a cause célèbre, the Tumult of Toruń became a milestone in the changing perception of Poland among Western Europeans.6 Once famed for their religious forbearance, the Poles slowly came to be seen as a backward and bigoted nation, a negative example in Enlightenment debates on toleration. Voltaire, for one, referred to the executions in Toruń in his praise for the First Partition of Poland by Prussia, Austria, and Russia in 1772, which he regarded as a decisive victory for religious tolerance.7 The enduring negative imprint Toruń made on the image of Poland and the Poles explains why the episode remained the subject of a historiographical trench war between German and Polish scholars for more than two centuries.8 The nadir of this politicized historiography came in 1939, when Gotthold Rhode—who would become a renowned professor of Eastern European history after World War II—equated the Prussian intercessions with the “protection” of German minorities, so as to legitimize the Nazi struggle against “Polendom.”9 In 1982, Rhode revisited the Tumult of Toruń to conclude that the event had such a profound echo in the 1720s because “the European ‘Zeitgeist’ had turned away from the world of fanatical religious wars and steered toward the Enlightenment.”10

Reflecting broader historiographical developments, recent research has criticized the Enlightenment narrative and instead singled out reactions to the crackdown as proof that Europeans still perceived international politics through a confessional lens.11 Stressing the difference between motivation and legitimation, some scholars have insisted that interventionist policies were dictated by reason of state but propagated with recourse to confession.12 They sketch a media landscape reminiscent of Habermas’ ideal type of a representative public sphere, where print media were closely interwoven with the respective political centers.13

As we have seen throughout this study, printed opinion surrounding persecutions did indeed often originate close to political centers. But it has become clear that regarding the printing press as mainly a tool of governments fails to do justice to the complex relation between politics and pamphlets. This chapter advances the argument that pamphleteers seized upon state-authorized public outrage over religious persecution to communicate and justify contested political norms. This also raises the question whether the execution of ten Lutherans in Poland-Lithuania caused such a commotion because Protestants throughout Europe read a similar story, or because they all saw something different in Toruń. The chapter argues that printed expressions of transnational solidarity with victims of persecution became ever more present precisely because it was a major theme in both confessional and Enlightenment perceptions of European politics. To evaluate the relative importance of these perceptions, the chapter concludes by comparing international responses to the Tumult of Toruń with those to the expulsion of the Jews from Prague in 1744.

The Tumult

The Tumult of Toruń has mostly been studied as an isolated case, but it should be understood as an instance of broader developments in Poland-Lithuania’s Counter-Reformation and the decreasing religious toleration that was its consequence. While some Protestant states in Western Europe increasingly adopted legislation for religious pluriformity by the turn of the eighteenth century, Poland-Lithuania made somewhat of a reverse move. The realm had once been renowned in Europe for its religious coexistence.14 In the course of the seventeenth century, however, new narratives emerged, which firmly linked being part of the szlachta, the large noble class that dominated Polish politics, with Catholicism.15 Catholic Poles started to reclaim churches that had been ceded to Lutherans, while the Sejm forbade Catholics to convert and decided that Protestants could no longer be ennobled.16 By the end of the seventeenth century, most of the szlachta had returned to the Catholic fold.

The decrease in religious tolerance was closely connected with international politics. The destructive Swedish invasions of Poland-Lithuania in the 1650s were remembered as attacks not only on Poland but also on Catholicism.17 Prussian and Russian appeals to solidarity with religious dissidents—Lutheran and Orthodox—in an effort to steer the Commonwealth’s domestic politics added fuel to the flames; the first legal restrictions passed by the Sejm in 1717 against Protestants holding national public office were underpinned by the wish to safeguard sovereignty against foreign interference through a fifth column.18

Whereas Lutherans throughout the Commonwealth found themselves increasingly discriminated against, they remained socially and politically dominant in the merchant cities of Royal Prussia. Toruń was religiously and socially divided between a German merchant class of Lutherans, who held a firm grip on the city’s administration, and a significantly poorer Catholic Polish community, with both groups making up about 50 percent of the city’s population.19 Since the Swedish occupation of the city during the Great Northern War (1700–1721) especially, religious tensions within the city had been running high.20 In short, (perceived) foreign confessional allegiances lay at the heart of civic unrest in Toruń well before it created international outrage.

Royal Public Diplomacy

From the very beginning, foreign intervention for the sake of Toruń’s Lutherans included a public strategy. In December 1724 the kings of Great Britain, Sweden, and Denmark received a letter from Frederick William I. The Prussian king urged his fellow monarchs to get involved in the matter of Toruń, insisting that the Protestant religion in all of Poland-Lithuania was under threat.21 Since the executions had not yet been carried out, the Protestant kings thereupon sent letters of intercession to Augustus II of Poland, insisting that the death sentences be reversed. After this had proved unsuccessful, they pleaded for the maintenance of Toruń’s old political privileges. While sent through diplomatic channels, the royal letters were not treated as “classified.” They were all published, thus serving not only as diplomatic pressure, but also as a public stance on the issue by the respective courts.22

Finding their way to European newspapers shortly after the executions had taken place, the royal letters of intercession were among the first foreign works of public opinion on Toruń. In most newspapers—with their otherwise brief reports on a wide variety of subjects—the letters of intercession were published in full, so granting a disproportionate amount of space to the Toruń episode.23 The letters became some of the most important sources for other printed news media about Toruń, included in nearly every publication that provided a reconstruction of events.

The royal letters of intercession intentionally exposed royal communication to the scrutiny of the international public eye, thus invoking a third actor to be reckoned with. In doing so, the monarchs reframed the Toruń affair as not only unjust in and of itself. They also identified the failure to respond to their pleas as an insult to themselves. Frederick William I’s letter to Peter I of Russia from January 9, 1725 illustrates this well.24 In this letter, the Prussian king deplored that the “Polish side” hastened the execution, thereby showing “a public contempt for [our] intercessions in front of the entire world.”25 George I of Great Britain actively tried to manage the public effect of his letter, only allowing it to be published after he had received a response from Augustus II of Poland.26 Augustus II, in turn, asked George I to recall his envoy Edward Finch, after the ambassador’s plea with the Evangelical Corps in Regensburg concerning Toruń had been published. Polish notables regarded the plea as a public insult to their nation and demanded the ambassador’s resignation.27

Joint royal engagement in public diplomacy against a fellow king with whom they were not at war was not a common practice. In Chapter 2 we have seen the unwillingness of the Dutch authorities to protest against Louis XIV’s religious policy. Even James II of England, who had actively promoted his image as a protector of the Huguenots, refused to issue a public condemnation when requested.28 The intercession letters therefore must have made a considerable impression upon Europe’s news-reading public. Moreover, the letters encouraged “bystanders” to speak out against Toruń; in Frederick William I’s first letter, he offered a “brotherly” warning to Augustus II of Poland-Lithuania that “all reasonable men” will understand that the accused had been executed “not for the love of justice, but because of the deceits and tricks of the Jesuits and an implacable hatred for [the Protestant] Religion.”29 In a second letter, sent shortly after the executions, Frederick William I admonished Augustus II to take into consideration the international public perception of events:30

Taking a similar stance, Frederick IV of Denmark warned Augustus II in a letter of intercession not to let his reputation be clouded by allowing such executions within his realm.32 George I of Great Britain, in turn, stressed to the Polish king that not only he, but the entire English nation, was moved by the executions.33 Indeed, the interceding monarchs not only ensured, but also emphasized, that the whole world was watching and judging.

The monarchs justified their intercessions with reference to two strands of international law. On the one hand, they referred to positive international law by reminding the Polish king that they were guarantors of the Peace of Oliva, the 1660 treaty between Sweden, Poland-Lithuania, Brandenburg-Prussia, and the emperor, which ended the Second Northern War.34 The second article of the treaty protected the autonomy of the Royal Prussian cities, stipulating that they would retain all the rights and privileges they had had before the war. The interceding powers regarded this article to have been breached when Toruń was forced to appoint Catholic magistrates. As such, this became the main legal justification for foreign intervention in the affair. Ambassador Finch added humanity as a justification for George I of Great Britain to act, declaring that

But the royal intercessions were not entirely devoid of confessional argumentation. Frederick William I also claimed that “it would conform to divine law and the natural right of peoples” if the Protestant powers made their “Catholic subjects feel some of what…the poor Evangelicals…had to suffer.”36 As we have seen in Chapter 3, a Dutch pamphleteer made a similar argument in the wake of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Prussian king’s letter thus offers an interesting negotiation of the norms of sovereignty, rule of law, and confessional solidarity. In his view, Augustus II’s sovereignty did not take precedence over Frederick William I’s right to pursue a policy of confessional solidarity, which he regarded as supported by natural law. Following this argument, the Prussian king was not permitted to breach the sovereignty of Poland-Lithuania, but he did have the right to punish the co-religionists of Augustus II within the bounds of his own territorial sovereignty. Indeed, while emphasizing confessional neutrality by arguing that the injustice of Toruń would be self-evident to all “reasonable” people, regardless of religion, religious solidarity nevertheless gave him the natural right to pick sides.

A Cause Célèbre

Compared to the scope of the other instances of religious persecution investigated in this study, Toruń was a strikingly minor episode. Royal public diplomacy and the somewhat ambiguous religious interpretation of events provided by the Protestant monarchs were two factors that help explain why the Tumult of Toruń nevertheless received such unprecedented international public attention. Another factor was the nature of the alleged persecution. The letters of intercession were directed at Augustus II with a request to intervene in his domestic politics, but few opinion makers identified him as the instigator of the persecutions. Toruń was first and foremost regarded as a Jesuit issue. A shared repertoire of anti-Jesuit literature therefore premediated the news. The breach of the city’s autonomy nourished the widely shared narrative in Europe that the Jesuits were a severe threat to sovereignty.37

Part of what made anti-Jesuit conspiracies so tenacious was that they did not depend on an anti-Catholic mindset. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, they had become prevalent among non-Protestant parties as well. The Jansenists developed a lively anti-Jesuit literature and several European governments—including Catholic ones—began to regard the Jesuits as a fifth column.38 Different types of Enlightenment thinkers, in turn, singled out the Jesuits as prototypes of irrational religious fanaticism and readily adopted accusations that they had an insatiable lust for power. In the words of Richard van Dülmen, “as different as the respective Enlightenment currents were, they were united in their opposition against the Society of Jesus.”39 By the eighteenth century this diffusion of anti-Jesuit thought increasingly pushed adherents into a corner. Ultimately, the Jesuit Order was suppressed by several governments—including the papacy—in the second half of the eighteenth century.40

By the early eighteenth century, people of very different religious and political outlooks associated the Jesuits with a set of common evils, ranging from theological error, bigotry, and intolerance to greed for power and foreign disruption of civic order. Toruń could serve as a smoking gun for all such conspiracy theories. Moreover, that a Protestant civic government had been toppled by a fifth column, reinforced the idea of the Jesuits as an internal threat. As such, Toruń blurred the lines between foreign politics and domestic social order to a greater extent than the other cases of religious persecution discussed in the preceding chapters had done. Concerted monarchical intervention in a minor incident was seized upon as evidence to feed a particularly widespread and flexible conspiracy theory that suggested that the social order was vulnerable.

This allowed the Tumult of Toruń to receive so much attention that print media soon began to discuss that public attention in its own right. On January 4, 1725, the Amsterdamse Courant reported that news about Toruń made all Protestants in England shudder and that the people in Leipzig were devastated by what had happened.41 Five days later it reported that

On January 12, the ’s Gravenhaegse Courant included a similar report from Frankfurt, saying that people talked almost exclusively about Toruń. A day later the Oprechte Haerlemsche Courant added that this had already led to brawls between Catholics and Protestants in the free imperial city.43 On January 24, the Leydse Courant reported that English Catholics, “as immoderate as they are, appear to feel ashamed and avoid hearing about it as much as possible.”44 On January 27, the Oprechte Haerlemsche Courant reported that

On January 30, the Amsterdamse Courant reported that there was no lack of writers who make it their business

Four days later, the Amsterdamse Courant reported that several Protestant powers had begun to carry out reprisals because of Toruń, while on February 6, the Oprechte Haerlemsche Courant claimed that in Hanover Roman Catholics had been told to leave the city before the 25th.47

Newspapers also mentioned the publication of pamphlets in different countries. The ’s Gravenhaegse Courant, for instance, wrote on February 28 that a pamphlet had been published in London, written in a style both “emphatic and moving.”48 On March 16, the Leydse Courant recounted from Warsaw that one Polish prince

One series of pamphlets, presenting a fictional conversation between the deceased Rösner and Luther, narrated that even the people in the realm of the dead—both Protestant and Catholic—were anxiously awaiting news about Toruń.50 The 1726 edition of the Europische Mercurius devoted its frontispiece to the executions. In the print, a Jesuit pulls away a curtain, revealing the dismemberment of a headless body, with several other decapitated corpses in front of the scaffold.51 The issue also introduced yet another report about the matter in almost apologetic terms, stating that “as soon as the reader sees the name Poland, he will realize that we will again speak of the poor Thorners.”52

In short, royal attention may have made the story big, but it set something in motion that, at least in the Dutch Republic, cannot adequately be described as a public sphere of “princes and diplomats.” Indeed, one of the principal works on Toruń originating in Prussia’s government circles, court preacher Daniel Ernst Jablonski’s The distressed city of Thorn, appears not to have been translated into Dutch at all.53 The only edition published in the United Provinces that could be traced was in French.54 Whether or not they were encouraged to do so by their governments, Europeans were all looking at Toruń, which they found wildly interesting in and of itself. But did they see the same thing?

Visions of Religious War

As usual, several Dutch opinion makers expressed their views on Toruń in the language of confessional truth. The allegorical print The bloodthirst of the Jesuits revealed in the suppression of the Polish Church is a case in point (Figure 8). It presents pope, cardinal, and bishop—allegorized as the three-headed beast Cerberus—holding the banner of the Inquisition, alongside a Jesuit perpetrator, who is struck down by God. Next to the Jesuits are the clergy, presented as bats, “devils incarnate,” taunting the truth throughout the world. Reference is also made to the international legal aspect of the conflict, as the Jesuit tramples upon the Treaty of Oliva, but the focus is clearly on the absolute evil of the Catholic Church. Appropriating this Catholic threat, the image also makes reference to Dutch history. A portrait of William of Orange, assassinated by a Catholic in 1584, not far from the severed heads of the convicts of Toruń, underlines a continuum, suggesting that they were killed by the same malefactor.55

In Amsterdam, publisher Johannes van Leeuwen had some success with the production of warmongering pamphlets, written by an anonymous author who was simply referred to as a “lover of the Protestant religion.” The pamphlet series strikingly lacked nuance, presenting its readership with a salvo of exaggerated historical examples of Catholic cruelty. The author wondered whether the “Roman Beast has not plunged around in Christian martyrs’ blood for long enough.”56 He revisited the cruel treatment of indigenous Americans, described in detail how children were roasted and human flesh was eaten during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, how the “choir harpies” had been responsible for the Thirty Years War, and how the Inquisition under Alba in the Low Countries had been responsible for 150,000 deaths—a wild overestimation.57

The “lover of the Protestant religion” also sneered at the Catholic image cult, accused the Jesuits of being rapists, and made the claim that they had tried to raise an army of 60,000 Tartars, who were commonly associated with Satan, irreligion, and invasion, against the Protestant powers.58 This anti-Catholicism came with a political agenda. In the Address to the Protestant powers for the protection of their oppressed coreligionists in Poland, the author praised the “heroes who guard the Dutch garden,” but simultaneously admonished them to action:

The pamphleteer directly urged Dutch regents to join in the common cause directed by Europe’s Protestant kings. Such admonishments to the authorities were not common, but the author must have felt strengthened by the activism of other Protestant powers, which was so widely discussed in the news.

In the Excellent remarks about the bloodbath of Thorn, a conversation pamphlet in the same series, the prospect of an apocalyptic war was further elaborated upon. The discussants, going by the names of Theophilus and Philometor, marvel at how a small spark, in comparison to other executions, could ignite such a great fire that even Protestant princes paid attention to it.60 They felt that a “war between the Antichrist and God’s people [which] will shake and stir all of Europe” was nigh, as providence clearly steered in this direction. After all, the Treaty of Oliva was signed by more powers than any other treaty in history. And since the war was prophesied in the Book of Revelation, there was no chance that the parties would manage to settle the dispute. Yet the Excellent remarks was more than a prediction or a work on prophecy; it also admonished the reader. Theophilus and Philometor express their uncertainty about a victory, because the Protestant world is in bad shape.61 Hence, they argue that the best way for a prince to fight the Antichrist in the impending war is to purge his own lands and territories from cruelties and injustices, and be guided by God in all his deeds. “Princes and potentates” should therefore commit themselves to “a personal and a popular Reformation” within their realms.62 The conversation ends with a firm rejection of the “openly profane and…the feigned adherents of Christ.”63

Using Toruń for a call to religious purification, the author drew on a Dutch theological tradition often referred to as the “Further Reformation” (Nadere Reformatie), a pietistic movement aimed at disciplining and moralizing believers into living more godly lifestyles. Whereas the “first Reformation” had concentrated on purifying religious dogma, this “second Reformation” aimed at purifying the inner religion of the adherents of the true religion.64 To improve the spirituality and morality of the people, the “Further Reformation” also called for a struggle against pretended religiosity and pseudo-piety—an important exponent of which was Roman Catholicism.65 “Further Reformation” polemic often interpreted contemporary Dutch history in providential terms. The author expanded upon this theme by interpreting Toruń as the herald of what would befall the Dutch Republic if the country persisted in its sinfulness.66 These pamphlets still presented foreign news in a framework of confessional antagonism and impending holy war.

Yet at the same time, the author of the series also spoke a different language; he combined this militant sectarian defense of Protestantism—“the pure faith”—and anti-Catholicism with an ode to the religious toleration and the magistrates of Amsterdam.67 He praised the city’s four burgomasters for keeping Amsterdam safe from tyrants and allowing the people to “sleep under the shade of…[their] wisdom.”68 In response to the accusation in the Jesuit indictment that Catholics were repressed in the Dutch Republic, the author gave the following answer:

We have seen throughout the preceding chapters that confessional perspectives on events were common among Dutch pamphleteers. Still, we should be careful not to stick national labels on these different outlooks. The author’s colorful interweaving of providence, warmongering, patriotism, and celebrations of tolerance was not found in any other work on the Tumult of Toruń. The individual parts, however, were far from unique. Other Dutch authors were similarly eager to integrate the fate of Poland’s Protestants into a patriotic narrative, albeit without the militant confessional argumentation. The poet Willem van Swaanenburg (1679–1728), founder of one of the earliest Dutch periodicals, devoted an issue of his satirical weekly, the Arlequin distelateur, to Toruń.70 Breaking with his habit of poking fun at the news, the author regarded the situation as too grave to be taken lightly:

Drawing on Dutch history, the poet invoked the death of the Catholic Lamoral, Count of Egmont, one of the political martyrs of the Dutch Revolt, to remind readers of the consequences of discord and tyranny. The matter of Toruń thus offered a mirror, a topical reminder of the state of the Dutch Republic and its national past:

Van Swaanenburg pointed to the difference between the Jesuits and the “Evangelicals of the Reformed religion and the governors of the United Provinces,” who had created a paradise within the walls of Amsterdam for the glory of God and the Commonwealth. However, he concluded by insisting that people of all religions contributed to the welfare of their fatherland.73 Toruń should remind the reader of the value of religious tolerance. This emphasis is noteworthy as many Dutch pamphlets examined in this study used foreign persecutions to plea for curtailing Catholic rights in the United Provinces.

Another well-known pioneer of the Dutch periodical, Jacob Campo Weyerman (1677–1747), provided a narrative that was neither patriotic nor confessional. In his weekly Dissector of disasters he gave an allegorical representation of the Jesuit as the Beast, a monster which looks like a man, but feels like a snake. In another issue of the Dissector of disasters, Weyerman followed English conspiracy theories, arguing that the Jesuits had devised Toruń to “drill into the grassy meadows of Albion.”74 The author began his perspective on events with a proverb by Lucretius, tantum religio potuit suadere malorum (“so much evil could religion induce”), from his Epicurean didactical poem De rerum natura, written in defense of materialism and against superstition.75

He thus suggested that what happened in Toruń was a human tragedy, caused by too much religious drive rather than by an anti-religion devised by the Antichrist. Accordingly, he did not use confessional arguments. Weyerman also predicted that Europe might lapse into religious war once again, but the problem and solution lay in international relations, not the heavens. He ended his piece by asking Bellona, the Goddess of War, to forever close the temple of Janus—its gates were open at times of war—bringing the states in a stable balance of power, so that “the power of a greater [state] will never be a thorn in the eye of a lesser, nor enable the more powerful to violently engage with the states of a weaker prince.”76

Irenicism

The two strands of thought expressed by Swaanenburg and Weyerman, respectively understanding Toruń within the frameworks of religious tolerance and international politics, merged in another religio-political discussion, which increasingly preoccupied Protestant Europe in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It revolved around irenicism, an ideology concerned with the (re)unification of Protestantism or Western Christendom in general.77

By the second half of the seventeenth century, an increasing number of political and religious thinkers began to realize that both war and theological dogmatism had done little to reestablish unity within the Church.78 Throughout Europe, both influential figures such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the popular press made an effort to emphasize a basic common Protestant ground;79 from a theological viewpoint, advocates of Reformed irenicism argued that all Protestants agreed in the fundamental articles of the faith. Moreover, they had a common enemy: international Catholicism.80 The threat of the ultimate confessional other made a religious ideal into a political necessity for survival. The Tumult of Toruń provided an excellent example of the pressing need for religious reconciliation. It clearly showed that Europe had not moved beyond the horrors of Catholic persecution. Moreover, as we have seen, the Jesuit enemy was not considered to be a faraway evil, but a fifth column that had infiltrated all of Europe.

Despite their projects of rapprochement, irenicists were not a hom*ogeneous group. Their thoughts were shaped by their own confessional backgrounds and the political situations of their home countries. But since publishers, ever hungry for new material on Toruń, were eager to translate works of public opinion, readers all over Europe were now repeatedly confronted with different irenicist ideas from different regions. An important transnational irenicist voice with regard to Toruń was that of Jean-François Bion, whom we met in the Introduction of this book. In 1725 London printer J. Roberts published Bion’s Faithful and exact narrative of the horrid tragedy lately acted at Thorn, which was soon translated into French and Dutch by Amsterdam printer Johannes de Ruyter. In the pamphlet, Bion argued that the British king should put himself at the head of the Protestant powers in Europe, “following, with some changes, the wise measures of Oliver Cromwell, for the sake of peace in the North.”81 According to Bion, Toruń should be a wakeup call:

In another pamphlet, the Exact and impartial account, Bion went a step further, and called the Protestant world to arms:

Bion’s approach shows that irenicism should not be conflated with religious moderation. But not all irenicists adopted this militant view of the Tumult of Toruń. In fact, in the Exact and impartial account, Bion, or his anonymous publisher, also integrally incorporated two articles from the London Journal—a government newspaper that was published between 1720 and 1731. In these two articles, the Whig pamphleteer and famous latitudinarian Benjamin Hoadly, bishop of Hereford, presented the Tumult of Toruń as a lesson for Britain after the 1715 Jacobite Rising—which was widely perceived as a Catholic invasion and had fueled anti-Catholic sentiments.84 Hoadly had long earned his credentials as an anti-Jacobite polemicist, but held the extremely controversial belief that the Church was a spiritual community rather than a worldly institution, and that the state therefore had no right to privilege the Church of England and act against Catholics or any other religious dissenters. Instead, he consistently urged people to be passionate against Jacobitism out of patriotism, not religion.85

In these two articles, Hoadly—writing under the pseudonym of Britannicus—used the Tumult of Toruń to defend this position. He warned that nothing was more observable in human nature, “than the forgetfulness and insensibility of the greatest evils” that are committed against men, as soon as some distance of time and place has intervened. He argued that providence kept Protestants vigilant against danger:

Hoadly argued that the matter of Toruń should awaken English Protestants to the danger of Jacobitism, which would bring popish cruelty back home. He stated that “every advance of the power of bigottry abroad, threatens us with a popish pretender at home; and together with him, all the train of his attendants, superstition and cruelty.”87 It should thus make Britons think twice about the issues they had with their government, a sneer against the Tories who had lost political power with the Hanoverian succession.

While Hoadly referred to providence, he did not perceive it as operating within a bilateral world divided between a true and a false religion. He asserted that not all Catholics were bigots, as some of them held on to their “natural or religious humanity” and “the bias of their good nature.”88 Still, as a body, Catholics formed a great threat to “all who value any rights, whether religious or civil.”89 Therefore, “every soul that has a feeling of what the freedom of social creatures, and the happiness of rational creatures…mean,” should be worried when the Jesuits gain ground:90

At first glance, Hoadly appears to have sketched a confessional perception of events, combining references to providence with a clear stance against Catholic rule. However, Catholicism was identified as a political threat rather than a religious error. More importantly, bigotry was rooted in social life rather than in the essential evil of a specific religion. The bishop therefore admonished his readers to not only pity the people of Toruń, but contemplate what laid at the foundation of such cruelty. He urged them to “abhor and fly from the first motions, the least beginnings, of that temper in [oneself].”92 The mutual condemnation on account of religious differences, hard judgments of private men against one another, “the violence of words,” the refusal of friendship, and calling upon the secular authorities to hurt one another were all “motions of the same spirit [as] the outrage of persecution.”93 Step by step, society could lapse into forms of violence that could “not have been borne by any humane mind”:94

Religious hatred led to gradual shifts in human sociability, that could ultimately lead to a society that ran counter to human nature. Protestants had a stronger sense of the duties of “love and forbearance,” but they should remain charitable and not give bigots an excuse for their behavior, which runs counter to God, nature, reason, and revelation.96 As such, Toruń became a reminder of the necessity of forbearance and human sociability.

Foreign Narratives

Above, we have seen that if a Dutch person wished to form an opinion about Toruń, he or she could choose from a variety of interpretations, many of which spoke about an imminent war of religion: The person in question could buy printed works that told him or her that providence had led Europe’s Protestant princes to act in unison against the executions, and that it was only a matter of time before a holy war would break out; they could read a pamphlet which argued that Protestants should lay aside their petty differences and raise their banners against the Catholic Church; in the same work he or she could learn that providence did not call for war, but for tolerance, emphasizing that Protestants should remain vigilant toward the bigotry of their government as well as their own potential intolerance against religious dissidents; finally, they could buy newspapers that expressed concern about an impending war of religion, which, however, would not be caused by providence but by human fanaticism.

There were also many printed works about Toruń that the Dutch would not have been able to read in their native language. Dutch printing presses produced some foreign adaptations to cover Toruń, but the question remains to what extent they were reflective of a larger European debate. To answer this question, this section will explore the main printed works in Europe that appear not to have made it to the presses of the Republic.97

Let us first return to Jablonski, the central figure in Prussia’s “propaganda machine,” whose work could, in fact, be found in Dutch bookshops, albeit in French. The Prussian court preacher too was a devoted irenicist and a prominent figure in the early eighteenth-century Enlightenment.98 Apart from being a man of science, Jablonski had long been a fervent supporter of the Protestant cause.99 The court preacher published The distressed city of Thorn in the early months of 1725. There is no evidence that the work was published on the king’s initiative, but Jablonski’s proximity to the court makes it likely that he received some sort of royal fiat. Some historians regard The distressed city of Thorn as a “programmatic and engaged pamphlet against Catholicism in general, and the Jesuits in particular.”100 By contrast, I would argue that the court preacher consciously refrained from writing an anti-Catholic pamphlet. Instead, Jablonski presented a non-confessional perspective on Toruń, taking an argumentative strategy focused on humanity and reason. Accordingly, he identified the Jesuit Order as the root of all problems rather than the Catholic Church in general.

Not only did the Jesuits initiate a period of renewed religious tension, they also damaged the city’s autonomy. Because the Order attained protection from the Sejm, they made the city accountable to the Commonwealth’s tribunal, and therewith to the Catholic nobility and clergy.101 Jablonski used secular arguments against the Jesuits, stressing that they had a history of clashing with authorities, both Catholic and Protestant, both worldly and religious. He concluded that “wherever the Jesuits arrive, stench and confusion inseparably accompany them, whereas peace and rest are exiled.”102

To be sure, in Jablonski’s understanding of events, confessional animosity played a significant role. The court preacher deemed it likely that “embitterment against the religion” was the real motive behind the executions and that the “destruction of the Evangelical religion in Poland” had been the main goal.103 The Jesuits could be so militant only because they found a willing ear among the common people. The latter were easy to mislead, as they were drowned in superstition and biased against so-called heretics.104 Yet the preacher reminded his readers that the executions were criticized by Catholics who understood that they “do harm to all worldly and Godly laws”:105

Indeed, human nature sufficed for Catholics to pity the persecuted in Toruń. For Jablonski, the antonym of religious bias was not the truth of the Protestant religion; it was a civilized society based on reason, legal justice, and benevolent human nature. Interestingly, despite its largely non-confessional message, The distressed city of Thorn did praise the convicts as martyrs, as they could have saved themselves by converting. Most early modern Europeans agreed that people could only become martyrs if they died for the true religion. However, Jablonski refrained from praising the martyrs of Thorn with explicit references to confessional truth.

Writing in the service of the monarch who had initiated concerted humanitarian engagement with Toruń, Jablonski never mentioned the possibility of a war of religion. Instead, he expressed hope that the royal letters of intercession would lead reasonable Poles to understand that the case of Toruń was not an internal matter, and that it was in the best interest of their fatherland to take a milder stance. In that way, all subjects could live together in mutual trust.107 Moreover, it should be noted that although Jablonski was a proactive irenicist, he did not use Toruń to speak out for religious unification, like Bion did.108 The court preacher’s non-confessional approach fits within a larger pattern that we have seen throughout this study; when supporting Protestant minorities, governments were usually careful not to alienate Catholic monarchs and thus preferred to condemn persecution on the basis of confessionally neutral normative principles.

This is not to say that only pamphleteers from government circles tried to deconfessionalize the conflict. Other German pamphleteers actually went a step further. A case in point is the Leipzig-based publisher David Faßmann, who devoted an issue of his immensely popular conversation piece periodical Extraordinary conversations in the realm of the dead to Toruń—not long before becoming an historian at the Prussian court. In the Extraordinaires Gespräche, he had the executed burgomaster Rösner converse with Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus.109 In the preface, Faßmann pointed out that he wanted to give an impartial account. Yet he warned Catholics that if they felt that their thoughts were not adequately represented, they should remind themselves that the author was a Lutheran. To Lutherans who might accuse him of not being “zealous and passionate” enough, he pointed out in advance that their desire to shame and revile was unchristian, and that both parties should be heard.110 In their conversation about Toruń, Loyola aptly counters many of Rösner’s accusations, who represents the outrage of the Protestant world. In another piece, Faßmann argued that the whole world was astonished by Toruń, but that all writers who took up the pen in anger should have set their emotions aside, as to prevent irrational curses, admonishments, and untruths from being spread.111

Faßmann’s conversation pieces debunked many Jesuit conspiracy theories, including the historical accusation of regicide, and reevaluated Toruń’s wider significance. Pleading for tolerance, he saw the limited toleration of Catholics in Protestant lands as one of the causes behind the persecution.112 Faßmann made Loyola convincingly argue that the Jesuits did not seek worldly pleasure or power, but rather gave it up to serve people.113 Rösner finally concludes that whereas he still believes Loyola to be a fantastical melancholic, he no longer regards him as an impostor. Instead, he considers him a devout man who did many good works for Christendom, while nevertheless expressing excessive zeal against presumed heretics.114 In a nutshell, Faßmann presented the Jesuits as erroneous, but not without good intentions.

It is important to keep in mind that despite his call for the emancipation of Catholics, Faßmann was in other respects a poor champion of religious toleration. He took several opportunities in later issues of the Extraordinary conversations to vilify Jews, most notably by celebrating the execution of the court Jew Joseph Süß Oppenheimer in 1738.115 Given the vast audiences he reached, Faßmann’s appeals to cross-confessional understanding should not be underestimated, but neither should the severe limitations to these appeals.

Calls for moderation could also be heard from opinion makers close to the fire. Theophilo Theodor, a pamphleteer from the Polish-Prussian city of Elbląg, some 160 kilometers north of Toruń, called for caution in The mistreated city of Thorn in Polish Prussia. He warned that the rules set out by international law should not be confused with prudent foreign policy, pointing to the complexities of a foreign intervention to restore the Peace of Oliva:

In short, following the rule of law could go against reason of state. Some well-read dialogues published on the matter also aimed to provide a more moderate representation of events. In a series of three conversation pieces from Leipzig, the deceased Luther and Rösner discuss how Catholic processions in biconfessional cities often led to unrest, like it had in Toruń, as Catholics were irritated by the non-participant onlookers and the authorities failed to curtail the curious commoners’ lust for spectacle.117 Luther criticizes the Protestant spectators for indulging in the voyeuristic curiosity, while showing respect for the zeal of the processioners.118

On the other side of the confessional divide, a Catholic publisher pointed out that many Protestant opinion makers, living too far away to be adequately informed, made wild and unfounded claims against respected royal courts and foreign governments.119 Johann Franz Hanck from Stadt am Hoff, near the Imperial Diet in Regensburg, published a number of works by the Jesuit theologian Gottfried Hannenberg, alias Theologus Polonus, who expressed his concerns in several pamphlets:

In another pamphlet, Hannenberg argued that Protestant authorities should chastise the authors of such works for disturbing public harmony and embittering the hearts of Christians against one another.121 The author also provided a legal argument against the public defamations by arguing that they went against article 35 of chapter 2 of the Treaty of Oliva. Protestant magistrates and cities allowed the publication of works that presented Toruń as an offended party to the treaty. However, Toruń was not a party, in contrast to Poland, which was hence insulted.122

One noteworthy Protestant opinion maker who provided the kind of militant account that Hannenberg criticized, was the Presbyterian minister Charles Owen, from Warrington, Cheshire. Owen came up with a rather radical solution to the continent’s incessant religious conflicts: Europe’s states should once and for all exchange their religious minorities. In his Alarm to Protestant princes and people, which saw at least two editions, Owen argued that the current might of the Protestant world was the only reason why a war of religion had not yet broken out.123 Instead, Catholics resorted to persecuting and massacring Protestants in their own dominions, while they were allowed to live undisturbed in Protestant lands. They would, however, turn violent as soon as they had the power to do so, because their “zeal for the church sanctifies all cruelties and solves all doubts and compunctions, that may arise from unextuinguish’d humanity in the conscience.”124

Summarizing, Catholic zeal went against benevolent human nature. The author believed that the Protestant world should no longer look up at the sky, “and summon in the aids of heaven,” as they had not received an answer. The letters of intercession were equally doomed to fail, because “the wolf having got the sheep into his paw is not to be harangu’d out of his prey…by the eloquence of royal mediators.”125 Instead, it was time to take action:

Owen emphasized that one should be wary not to copy the “gloomy original.” Persecuting Catholics within one’s midst would effectively make the foreign cruelties stop, but it would also “lay waste [to] human nature.”127 Protestants should therefore “root out popery from their dominions, and…have but one religion with its various subordinations and subdivisions,” without resorting to violence.128 Catholics should be allowed to take their belongings and leave in peace. In fact, Owen regarded it as feasible that Europe’s Protestant and Catholic states would mutually agree upon an exchange of religious minorities:

Before such an international exchange could be realized, Protestants should start banishing equal numbers of Catholics to retaliate against Protestant expulsions:

Owen thus expanded on a theme already thematized in his monarch’s letter of intercession. But what justified this “eye for an eye” mentality? The Alarm to Protestant princes and people referred to the Lex talionis—the Roman law of retaliation—and tried to make it applicable to international law. The author granted that retaliation should normally be directed at the offending person in question, but “in the want of such opportunity, [one] may substitute equivalents, and such as are generally allowed by confederacies, alliances, and leagues, as well as laws of war.”131 Whereas “private Christians” should not take matters into their own hands, princes “are born to assert and maintain the liberties of mankind”:132

The sovereign right or duty to intervene against tyranny abroad had also been invoked to support the Camisards, some twenty years earlier.135 But Owen’s appeal to confessional solidarity was much starker; if Protestants were persecuted abroad, monarchs should respond to it with the persecution of Catholics at home. On the one hand, this presents a compelling argument against absolute sovereignty. Evidently, rulers cannot do with their subjects as they wish, because the latter are bound to other sovereigns by confessional ties, who can act as their protectors. On the other hand, sovereignty is reified, as rulers have the right to make their own subjects suffer to punish the behavior of foreign sovereigns.

Finally, reason also comes into play as a political norm in the form of prudence. Owen supported his claim that sovereign princes had so much power beyond their territories by a rather restrictive definition of the state. He argued that “the partition of the earth into distinct states, [was] only a human prudential constitution” and that “governments are there for the good of society, not [the] pleasure of princes.”136 The real divisions in Europe were not constituted by states, but by confession:

It should be noted that although Owen approached Europe as defined by confessional strife, he hardly wrote in terms of confessional truth. Of course, the idea that Catholic zeal infringes upon human’s benevolent nature is a clear qualitative distinction. Yet the proposed reshuffling of Europe’s map was not presented as a godly duty, nor was it backed by divine providence or scriptural truth. Instead, Owen argued that the Protestant world was strong because of its naval power. In that same vein, Italy was harmless because it was home to nothing but “painters and eunuchs” and Venice was “more wedded to the Sea than to Rome [and] dreads nothing so much as a Turk and bad Markets.”138 Owen therefore believed that “skirmishes about religion may happen among opposite powers but [that there will be no] universal religious war.”139

If we compare Owen’s Alarm to Protestant princes and people with the Dutch pamphlets by the “Lover of the Protestant religion” an interesting contrast appears. Whereas the “Lover of the Protestant religion” looked at the heavens and saw signs of providence and impending religious war, Owen looked down and used secular argumentation to show that religious war was unlikely. At the same time, the “Lover of the Protestant religion” pointed to the value of religious toleration, Catholics included, whereas Owen made a radical call for confessional hom*ogeneity. This shows that interventionist arguments based on confessional truth were not necessarily more hostile to the confessional other—in this case Catholics—than calls for confessional solidarity without religious truth claims.

The Last Expulsion

So far, this chapter has shown that the prospect of foreign intervention in a small city in Poland-Lithuania gave rise to a remarkably versatile range of printed opinion throughout Protestant Europe. This is a clear indicator that many contemporaries still viewed Europe’s political landscape as starkly divided between confessional lines and remained highly sensitive to instances of religious persecution. Can we also conclude from the intense public attention for Toruń that Protestant Europeans still looked at international politics through a lens of militant religious righteousness? Some certainly did, but it is significant that many authors resolutely refrained from approaching the religious identity of the persecuted as decisive in whether an intervention was justified. Indeed, even those who presented a virulently anti-Catholic perspective did not always frame the event in the language of martyrdom and confessional truth. Pamphleteers knew how to vilify the persecutor without sanctifying the victim.

To gauge the extent to which humanitarian action and public outrage still depended on a sense of confessional brotherhood, the remainder of this chapter shifts focus to the last mass persecution of religious minorities in early modern Europe: the expulsion of the Bohemian Jews.140 Shortly before Christmas 1744 the zealously Catholic Maria Theresia (1717–1780), Queen of Bohemia and later Empress of the Holy Roman Empire, decreed that all Jews were to leave Prague within a month and remove themselves entirely from Bohemia within six months. The expulsion followed accusations that the Jews had collaborated with the Prussians, who had occupied the city in the recent past. Around 13,000 people—Europe’s largest Ashkenazi community—were forced to leave their homes, while the 40,000 Jews who lived outside the city began to prepare their imminent exile.141

Not unlike the Waldensians and the Huguenots, Prague’s Ashkenazi community leaders made sustained efforts to reverse their fate by garnering international attention.142 Shtadlanim (spokesmen) sent letters to Jewish communities abroad with requests to plead with their local Christian authorities to intercede. This created an impressive snowball effect; influential community leaders and court Jews across Europe mobilized their international networks, writing to other communities with requests to aid their distressed brethren in the faith.143 The most prominent among them, the court Jew Wolf Wertheimer (1681–1765), planned a tightly orchestrated campaign, sending letter templates to the Jewish communities of Venice, Warsaw, Amsterdam, and many others.144 The receivers would present these precisely dictated letters of intercession to their governments, who, in turn, were to send them to Maria Theresia in their name. Wertheimer even addressed draft letters to the Holy See, in which he effectively spoke with the pope’s voice, admonishing the empress for unlawfully punishing innocent people.145

Within months, Maria Theresia had received a flood of protests ranging from the kings of Great Britain, Denmark, and Poland, to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul and the merchant guilds of Amsterdam, Hamburg, Leipzig, and London, more than the king of Poland had received surrounding Toruń.146 While unsuccessful—Maria Theresia would only revoke the edict in 1748 to appease the Bohemian Estates—the intercession efforts were so massive in scope that this case has often been considered a landmark in Jewish diplomatic agency.147

There are clear similarities between the intercessions of 1724–1725 and 1745. On both occasions, intercessors reminded the monarchs in question that the world was looking and that the persecution would be a stain on their international reputation. Barthold Douma van Burmania, the Dutch ambassador who interceded for the Jews at the Viennese court, hence argued that

The emphasis on reputation management also guided Jewish efforts to influence press coverage of the persecution. As Catherine Arnold has shown, Jewish community leaders leaked diplomatic dispatches to Dutch newspapers, making sure that the queen was not only rebuked within secret diplomatic channels, but also in front of the world.149 Such interventions were not superfluous, judging from the fact that some Dutch newspapers had initially given Maria Theresia the benefit of the doubt. The Leydse Courant, most notably, reported Maria Theresia’s decision within two weeks stating that whereas “it is not yet clear why [she expels the Jews] she must have a good reason since there is no place in the world where the Jews have so many privileges.”150

By leaking information to newspapers, the persecuted and their allies managed to keep their predicament on international agendas. However, this appears to have been their only press strategy in a campaign that was otherwise characterized by absolute discretion.151 While exhorting foreign governments to reprimand his own queen, Wertheimer repeatedly insisted on the importance of secrecy to his correspondents.152 For other allies of the Bohemian Jews, employing the printing press would not have been a logical move either. The Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague gained direct access to the States General and immediately convinced them to intercede with sound economic argumentation.153 Generating public debate would probably have constituted little more than an unnecessary and potentially dangerous detour. The same went for most foreign courts. Through their networks, Jewish community leaders had impressively managed to mobilize Europe’s political centers without recourse to the blunt blows of public opinion.

The interceding authorities had to be careful too. In the 1720s, they had interceded with a relatively weak monarch whom they accused of idleness in the face of injustice. This time, they asked a powerful ally to reverse her policy in the midst of a war that held most of Europe in its grip. Proudly presenting themselves as guardians of the foreign oppressed through print—as the States General and Protestant monarchs had respectively done in 1655 and 1725—would serve little political purpose. Worse, it could backfire. The strategy of warning the queen that the expulsion would damage her reputation would be hampered by publicly contributing to her defamation. Unlike in 1725, the intercessors probably reckoned with the fact that if one professes to help a monarch save face, one has to do so discreetly, not in front of the world.154

Without the incentive of the persecuted and their immediate allies, the Dutch press remained largely silent about the expulsion of the Bohemian Jews. No pamphlets appear to have been published on the matter in the Dutch Republic. Dutch periodicals too hardly paid attention to the persecution. The Europische Mercurius—which had tirelessly discussed Toruń in the 1720s—offered little more than the factual coverage provided by newspapers.155 While caution on the side of the intercessors goes a long way in explaining this silence, it also appears that publishers failed to see an obvious angle from which to appropriate the news. The story of Toruń was easy to frame as another chapter in Europe’s never-ending confessional trench war. The case of the Bohemian Jews was more difficult to translate into a grand narrative that connected distant violence with local religio-political circ*mstances. The striking disinterest in the Bohemian Jews suggests that confessional identification remained an implicit prerequisite for moral outrage, even among authors who rejected persecution without recourse to religious truth claims.

The Journal Universel, the only Dutch periodical to extensively dwell on the matter, accordingly framed the news in a familiar narrative. Pierre Quesnel (1695?–1774), the journal’s editor, was a militant Jansenist who had fled persecution in France in 1743.156 He appropriated the expulsion to provide a typical story about the never-ending intolerance of Catholic rulers:

The question of Prague’s Jews thus became an occasion to once again discuss the old conflict between Protestant forbearance and Catholic intolerance, albeit by a man who was theologically somewhat stuck in the middle and used this dispute in defense of Jansenism. Indeed, Quesnel concluded that this was the same line of thinking that led to the 1713 promulgation of Unigenitus, a doctrinal constitution devised by Paris and Rome as a final blow against the Jansenists in France.158 For him, the inhumanity of the persecution of Prague’s Jews was a story worth telling, because he was part of that story. The Bohemian Jews and his religious group had become victims of the same malice.

Conclusion

Publicity played a significant role in the interventionist strategies of Europe’s Protestant powers in response to the Tumult of Toruń. The kings who protested against the sentences elevated the “reasonable” public to judges in the conflict. Publicity not only functioned to inform audiences, but also to involve them. The press added gravity to the intercessions by putting royal reputations on the line. By doing so, the intervening governments set the precedent for an international discussion about how to confront the Toruń persecution that quickly went beyond justifying foreign policy. European observers were not only astonished by the executions, they also marveled at the printed backlash itself. Aware of the fact that all over Europe people had their eyes glued to the events in the Polish-Prussian city, press coverage of Toruń quickly began to take on a life of its own. For many pamphleteers, the “Bloodbath of Toruń” hence became a topical example in the greater narrative they wanted to tell, a broader story about the international religio-political landscape that could differ widely from the course of action taken by Europe’s governments.

Their differences aside, almost all pamphleteers believed that Toruń provided a lesson for how Europeans of different confessions ought to relate to one another, and that this should be reflected in international politics. Not all pamphleteers called for a military intervention in the Commonwealth, but there was a pronounced sense that readers played a role in solving Europe’s age-old struggle with religious persecution. Even if Toruń could no longer be saved, pamphlets propagated that (international) society could be changed for the better and that future crises could be averted, be it through confessional warfare, a great exchange of minorities, personal piety, or a humane attitude toward deviant minds.

Still, the European outrage over Toruń exemplifies that the Enlightenment did not alleviate Protestant concerns about the confessional divide. Ten people were executed in a city which many pamphleteers had probably never even heard of before they read the news, and yet cries echoed throughout Europe that religious war was inevitable, that common Catholics should be banished from England, and that Protestants should finally lay aside their squabbles in the face of an existential threat. This is all the more striking if we remind ourselves that one of the consequences of the Tumult was that the city’s government was no longer exclusive to members of one religion. In other words, it partly constituted the emancipation of a marginalized confessional community. Tellingly, there were no pamphlets that acknowledged this increase in religious toleration. The silence over the Bohemian Jews provides further evidence that while many pamphleteers had become accustomed to crying out against instances of persecution in universalist terms, they restricted such outrage to religious kin. People recognized that religious persecution was fundamentally inhumane, but this was not enough to mobilize them against all instances of religious violence.

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