Free Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe by Stuart Carroll

the peasant bands seized Saverne, residence of the Bishop of Strasbourg, and set up their headquarters in the nearby abbey of Maursmünster.
    It is significant that the convent of Sainte-Claire was a Franciscan establishment, for the friars would later be the order most associated, more so than the Jesuits, with the fight back against Calvinism in France, becoming celebrated and loathed in equal measure for their street rhetoric and rabble-rousing. Philippa had a particular devotion to an early Franciscan, Saint Anthony of Padua, ‘hammer of the heretics’, whose apparition visited the convent at her death. It was in this fiercely orthodox environment that Claude and his brother Antoine, on their way to confront the peasant hordes, visited their mother to receive her benediction: ‘Do not recoil now that the occasion presents itself to die gloriously for Him, who with the infamy and opprobrium of the world upon him, died on the cross for you...
    Hurry yourselves...and against all who oppose you with arms strike, chop and cut...Do not fear to be cruel...heresy is of the nature of gangrene, it will spread over the whole country, if one does not confront it with fire and steel.’17
    These chilling words were prescient. The violence and swiftness of the campaign was terrifying. Saverne was invested by the Catholics on 15 May 1525; the following day peasant relief force was defeated at Lupstein and a second band marching over from the Palatinate met the same fate at Neuwiller. The besieged peasants surrendered on 16 May and marched out unarmed under a white flag of surrender, but in consequence of a dispute between nearby mercenaries and the peasants a fight broke out, leading to a mass slaughter of the peasants. In this action alone 18,000 were slain. On his triumphal return to Nancy, the duke defeated another peasant band at Scherwiller on 20 May. During the battle, Catholic hearts were emboldened by a number of miraculous visions. Guise was himself bathed in rays of sunlight, a halo, which, with his shining sword, made him appear, so it was said, as an ‘angel exterminator’. 18
    Following the campaign the brothers published an account which presented their deeds as a crusade undertaken by Christian knights. Since the first crusades God had chosen the House of Lorraine to defend the Catholic Church. Antoine and his brothers were fulfilling their historic mission; the peasants, having revolted against divinely instituted order, were compared to the Philistines. 19 Propaganda was required to justify the scale of the blood-letting, for tales of the slaughter of women and children were soon current in Germany and the duke compared to Herod by the Protestants. And there was suspicion that the ‘crusade’ had more to do with extension of political control over the fractured lordships of Alsace. Among those who agreed that the House of Lorraine was divinely inspired, however, were the Alsatian Jews, who feared lynching at the hands of the peasants.
    Much later during the Wars of Religion the events of 1525 were seen as the link between the great crusading past of the House of Lorraine and the new crusade against heresy that began with the massacre of Wassy. This view is one that modern historians have reinforced. There are reasons for being cautious about this interpretation. There is no doubt that Claude, Duke of Guise—like his elder brother and his mother—was fiercely, one might even say violently, Catholic. In a letter of 1538, he informed the constable, Montmorency, that whenever he heard rumours about ‘this evil sect of heretics’ in his governorship he was quick to act. Claude considered life to be like a pilgrimage, in which one was at any moment in danger of ambush. He was proud of his role at Saverne. It is the only one of his battles named on the epitaph of his magnificent tomb executed by Primataccio, the leading Italian artist in France. The figure of Justice on the tomb displays no sign of clemency and