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>> Bump to the medal the Pope issued in commemoration of the "victory" of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. <<
Of course, the reason for the Pope being glad was that the French were now free to support the war against the Muslims. The Pope had strongly urged the French Queen to solve the Hugenot problem quickly, because the Hugenots were both diverting the French attention from repelling the Muslim horde, and funding pirate raids against the Spanish fleets, who had just won the plainly miraculous battle of Lepante. Had that war battle been lost, Europe would have fallen to the Muslims.

The anti-Spanish alliances, based in Netherlands and funded by British, Protestant nobility were terrified that the Spanish victory over the Muslims at Leponte would help solidify Spanish political authority. The French and many English even believed that a marriage between England and France, re-establishing Catholicism in England was imminent.

France, however, had no interest in establishing Catholicism, and sought a secularist alliance with the Hugenots, instead of a Catholic alliance between England, Spain and France, hatching a marriage between French royalty and a Hugenot prince. A Catholic dissident faction, named the Guises, assassinated the Hugenot prince. Hugenot leaders angrily demanded reprisals, insisting on destroying the French state. Thus, the French throne called for a pre-emptive strike at a gathering of Hugenot leaders.

Once fighting openly erupted, the Guises began attacking Hugenots independently. Some Catholic leaders expressed horrors that the fighting had descended from military strikes into general rioting. Others viewed it the way the US has viewed Iraqi attacks against terrorists: it violates the policies we need to uphold for political legitimacy, but God bless the commoners for desiring to put an end to the persistently destabilizing elements.

Edicts were issued by the Queen to try to stop the bloodshed. It is hard to know if she was genuinely appalled at the violence, or feared political domination was being thrown towards the Guises.

By the end of the fighting, 1100 dead were buried, but hundreds more were thrown into rivers and streams. A Protestant book, published in the 1580s, claimed more than 15,000, but could only account for fewer than 1000. Over the centuries, the figures grew by leaps and bounds. Some now say 100,000, but many sources say as few as 2000 died.

Papal expectations that the battle would yield a stronger French Catholicism were soon to be dashed. The French monarchy settled the fourth religious war by establishing a Supreme Monarchy which was nominally Catholic, but thoroughly secular in nature, making heretical claims about the meaning of "divine right" and creating an absolutist state. For two and a half centuries following the massacre, the French nobility was nominally Catholic but functionally agnostic or even atheist, and remained a bitter rivalry with more truly Catholic regimes in Austro-Hungary, Poland, and Spain. The throngs eventually would cheer the atheistic Reign of Terror for wiping away the false pretenses of Catholicism, and the Roman Catholic Church would recognize evil fruits of the massacre.

I would even hazard a bet that the lessons of St. Bartholomew's Massacre constitute a huge portion of the reason French cardinals blanche so fearfully at President Bush's talk of "pre-emptive strikes," "imminent war," and cheering of the Iraqi people's taking the battle against terrorism into their own hands. Four and a half centuries ago, they were split by similar talk, and with the very same enemy in mind. (in this case, I differ from the French cardinals because I believe war with Islam is inevitable, so "failure" to create a peaceful detente between Islam and the West is not necessarily horrible.)