Abstract

This article focuses on the relationship between ecclesiastics and their use of weapons in the early modern age, by the analysis of cultural and political elements and contexts, which justified or legitimized this phenomenon at various levels. The analysis will refer both to historiography and to some sixteenth and seventeenth-century examples relating to the Spanish Monarchy. Despite the increasing bans of the bishop, synodal and canonical legislation, especially in the dramatic context of the Thirty Years War, of ideological and political polarization and of the revolts that took place in various parts of Europe and America, the clergy - that, at least in the case of some of its members, had never lost the medieval custom of the use of weapons - armed himself and fought both against and in defense of the sovereign, especially when the local community was at stake. Especially the sieges of the cities were, in many cases, the real moment of truth to establish the boundaries and limits of political fidelity, in which the jurisdictional conflicts and social divisions were attenuated, without however disappearing, if not only in propaganda. In all these circumstances the involvement of clerics in hand-arm fights was perceived by contemporaries without particular embarrassment, as an expression of their right to direct and tangible participation in personal salvation and the community.