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Missionaries and Military in Spanish Europe: Cultural and Religious Issues from the Jesuit Mission in the Army of Flanders (1587–1659)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2026

Silvia Mostaccio Open the ORCID record for Silvia Mostaccio [Opens in a new window]
Silvia Mostaccio*
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Histoire, Université catholique de Louvain , Belgium.
*
E-mail: silvia.mostaccio@uclouvain.be.
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Abstract

This article focuses on the Jesuits of the Missio castrensis (1587–1659), the military mission to the army of Flanders, the Spanish Catholic army that criss-crossed Europe between Flanders and Italy during the Eighty Years’ War and the Thirty Years’ War. A comparative analysis of unpublished sources allows us to trace the radical change in attitude of these men. These sources testify to a fundamental modification in the Jesuits’ pastoral and human priorities. If, at the beginning, the discourses and practices referred to the ‘holy war’ against the heretics, as the war continued, new attention was drawn to all bodies suffering from the war. This profound shift echoed a new attention to the poor, the sick and their needs. In the first part of the article, this alteration in the Jesuits’ priorities is contextualized by comparing it with the case of the Ministers of the Sick, founded in Rome in 1586 by Camillo de Lellis.

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Research Article
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Studies in Church History , Volume 62: THE CHURCH AND THE MILITARY , June 2026 , pp. 145 - 165
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Ecclesiastical History Society

Introduction

This article focuses on a specific group of European missionaries in the early modern period: the Jesuits of the Missio castrensis (military mission) and their ministry to the army of Flanders and, in particular, their interactions with the men and women of this army. This was the Spanish Catholic army that criss-crossed Europe between Flanders and Italy during the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) and the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). More specifically, the context here will be that of the French phase of this war, fought in Flanders in the 1630s, when the French engaged in direct conflict on the side of the Protestants to counter the Habsburgs. The comparative analysis of a number of unpublished sources makes it possible to trace a radical change in the attitude of these missionaries towards the men and women who were the object of their mission. While the war seemed never-ending, the sources testify to a fundamental modification in the Jesuits’ pastoral and human priorities. If, at the beginning, the discourses and practices referred to the context as a holy war against the heretics, with a clear separation between the attention given to Roman Catholics and an intense disinterest in others, as the war continued, attention began to be paid to all those suffering, whether from the war or from the plague. The war changed everyone, including the Jesuits. Their priority became that of saving human bodies and their dignity, before the cure of the souls of those who approached them seeking care. This was a profound shift, which in the mid-seventeenth century reflected a new attentiveness to the poor, the sick and their needs.

This article argues that, in order to understand these changes historically, it is necessary to open up the history of the Society of Jesus by proposing a broader analysis that attempts to reconstruct a wider religious and social atmosphere. To do this, it will be useful to look also at other male religious congregations of the same period, particularly the congregation of Camillo de Lellis. This small new congregation will not be considered in terms of the influence of one religious order on another. The aim will rather be to show shared theological and pastoral urgencies and changes. The idea is to shed light on the historical and religious context, using examples other than the Society of Jesus. While there is no denying the importance of the order founded by Ignatius of Loyola, not everything can be explained within its boundaries. The Society of Jesus was a product of its time and of the different contexts in which its members found themselves working.

As in many other areas of historical research, the last twenty years have witnessed a double process of opening up, or désenclavement. Firstly, the historiography of Catholicism has started to study Roman Catholics as actors amongst others, in an approach going beyond ecclesiastical or religious history; and secondly, military history has gradually become the history of war, with its diverse protagonists and its many social, cultural, economic and religious dimensions. The result has been both the birth of a religious history of societies at war, and the analysis of societies at war through the prism of religion and its protagonists.Footnote 1 If we widen our gaze and consider war as a system of life in which a person also lives his or her own religious faith, we can free our minds from purely military or ecclesiastical logics and grasp the changes in attitudes towards warrior violence and confessional conflicts.Footnote 2 Recently, Nikolas Funke proposed a very convincing example of these changes from the Germanic lands during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). Thanks to a rigorous study based on a particularly rich collection of sources, Funke has been able to demonstrate progressive changes both at the level of war discourses, and also at the level of practices of piety in the context of confessional warfare. His focus on the Germanic lands confirms the results of other investigations that have complexified the view of confessional wars, showing how, in many European regions, Roman Catholics and Protestants developed strategies of coexistence that went beyond the proclamations of the ecclesiastical authorities.Footnote 3

With the same aim of challenging overly monolithic interpretations that necessarily associate Catholic culture with the glorification of war, this article also seeks to understand the more general cultural and social attitudes that challenge war.

A Counterculture of War in Spanish Europe? Early Modern Discourses on Military Misery

The challenge for every missionary is to maintain his inner garden, while immersing himself in the world of the other, who is the object of his mission. Recent historiography on early modern religious missions – and especially Jesuit missions – has clearly shown that this immersion in multiple and contradictory realities had major consequences, both for the identity of the missionaries and for the practical modalities of their action. This action is now understood to be the result of interactions between missionaries and those to whom their mission was addressed – the missionized people – men and women with a shared agency, albeit with unequal access to power.Footnote 4 These assertions are particularly relevant to harsher and more remote mission areas, where missionaries were more likely than elsewhere to experience loneliness and a sense of foreignness. This was the case, for example, with missions to the armies in Habsburg Europe at the end of the sixteenth century and in the first half of the seventeenth century. As already mentioned, this article examines the profound changes in the pastoral priorities of the missionaries and, in particular, the gradual shift to paying attention to soldiers’ material needs, a fundamental change from a more spiritual attitude, focused on the salvation of souls, to a growing concern for suffering bodies. Before analysing this major change in the specific case of the Jesuit missio castrensis, and in order truly to understand it, it is important to sketch the social, cultural and religious context. It is in this broader perspective that the changes that took place in the Society of Jesus found their raison d’être.

To date, there has been no comprehensive study of the ambivalent relationship between war and its consequences for individuals which characterized the Habsburg spaces in both Europe and the Americas during the long seventeenth century.Footnote 5 While Miguel de Cervantes, a former soldier who had fought in the terrible Battle of Lepanto (1571), would turn his El Quijote (1605–15) into a masterpiece that demystified and challenged the chivalric tradition and one of the founding images of Iberian identity, that of the Christian knight, this was just one example of a counterculture which developed in the Spanish dominions and other regions that suffered under the wars conducted by the king of Spain’s soldiers. Picaresque literature is an important example of this counterculture. Its protagonists, whose incredible adventures were a great success in publishing, developed an art of survival amid violence and hardship of all kinds. Here, the concept of honour, so fundamental to aristocratic and military culture, disappeared in favour of immediate pleasure, which became the only way to ward off, albeit temporarily, the threat of death that hung over all.Footnote 6 In this literature, the figure of the soldier, who dreams of glory and riches but dies alone, poor and crippled, often far from his family and his homeland, is omnipresent. The same figure appears in other successful literary genres, such as theatre and tales. A good example is found in Lo Cunto de li Cunti (The Tale of Tales; 1634–6) by Giambattista Basile, who was a man of letters, administrator and courtier in Spanish Naples in the first half of the seventeenth century:Footnote 7

Here’s a man who praises war … . If a friend asks him ‘Where are we going?’ he cheerfully answers, walking on air ‘To war, to war!’ … Poor fellow! All that happiness, those airs, and that strutting are transformed into tribulation and torment. Cold numbs him, heat puts an end to him, hunger gnaws at him, fatigue massacres him, danger is always at his side, and the rewards are far away. Wounds come in cash, pay comes on credit, suffering is long and sweetness short, life uncertain and death sure.Footnote 8

Such thoughts were commonplace in the viceroyalty of Naples, which, at the end of the sixteenth century and in the first half of the seventeenth century, was constantly contributing – financially and with its soldiers – to the king of Spain’s military efforts in Flanders during both the Eighty Years’ War, the conflict between the Netherlands and Spain, and the terrible Thirty Years’ War which affected most of central Europe. Against a backdrop of increased taxation and unremitting conscription, the viceroyalty became a veritable battleground for challenging the powers-that-be and their values. Authors and artists responded to Spanish writings on political economy, which suggested that to send the poor to war was to kill two birds with one stone, with fierce criticisms of the social order.Footnote 9 Examples include the work of the painter Jusepe de Ribera, a Spaniard living in Naples, and of many other artists, including the etchings in Proverbi figurati (Figurative Proverbs; 1678) by Giuseppe Mitelli, who represented a former soldier, mutilated and with torn clothes, wandering around with no destination.Footnote 10 The same kind of visual denunciation can be found in northern Europe, where the Thirty Years’ War generated criticism of the ‘miseries’ and ‘misfortunes’ that accompanied it, in the words of one of the most famous chroniclers of the period, the engraver Jacques Callot (1633).Footnote 11 Hunger, cold, lack of money and the consequences of the army’s endemic corruption on the lives of the soldiers were also the daily bread of the military, according to the Peregrinaciones, viajes y varias aventuras (Pilgrimages, Journeys and Various Adventures; 1674–1711) by the Jesuit Felipe Frutos, who had been a soldier for many years in the Old and New Worlds before joining the Society of Jesus.Footnote 12 In the viceroyalty of Naples, and more generally in the Italian peninsula under Spanish influence, this rethinking of war propaganda was also accompanied by new forms of religious life that placed the poor at the centre of their activities.

It is important to remember that, in the collective consciousness, soldiers fell within this category of poverty. One of these new forms of religious life was a congregation of regular priests, established in Rome in the 1580s and 1590s, but soon active on the battlefields and in caring for the soldiers of the king of Spain: the Congregation of the Ministers of the Sick, founded by Camillo de Lellis (d. 1614).Footnote 13 This congregation profoundly changed the medical practices of its time, by turning hospitals, and with them also the itinerant care provided in wartime in field hospitals, into spaces shared between carer and patient, for a salvation that began with the body. This new model developed in the context of Roman Catholic renewal of regular congregations, often where priests or religious were working in close contact with devout laypeople. Thus the contacts between Camillo, his confrères, the Oratorians of the Vallicella – who included the doctor Giovenale Ancina – and the Jesuits were manifold, and concerned in particular the status of medicine in the Roman Catholic soteriology of the time.Footnote 14 Against neostoic positions, which preached acceptance of illness, a new theology made the act of caring the concrete manifestation of charity. A few decades later, similar discussions would take place at the University of Leuven, in Flanders, and in France.Footnote 15 Camillo de Lellis contributed through his practice to a questioning of the notion of salvation. He was a restless and rebellious spirit, belonging to the small provincial aristocracy of Abruzzo, who had spent six years as a soldier, before becoming first a patient and then – as a brilliant autodidact – one of those responsible for the hospital of San Giacomo degli Incurabili in Rome. He was ordained a priest in 1582 and, for many years, practised nursing in the enormous hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia in Rome.

In 1584, Camillo wrote his Regole della Compagnia delli Servi degli infermi (Rules of the Society of the Ministers of the Sick), according to which his companions were to care for the sick poor ‘con quella carità e amorevolezza che sogliono far le madri verso i propri figliuoli infermi’ (‘with the love and tenderness that mothers show towards their sick children’). For a long time, the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars would be very critical of this maternal love, from which stemmed the priority of saving the suffering body of the poor. The Congregation accused de Lellis of confusing priorities and subordinating spiritual care to that of the body. Had he not written in his Regole: ‘se il Servo degli infermi, fatta che avrà la carità corporale, conoscerà che l’infermo ha bisogno di confessarsi, avvertirà il padre confessore quanto prima con consenso, però, dell’infermo’ (‘if the Servant of the sick, having provided for the sick person’s physical needs, learns that the sick person needs to go to confession, he shall inform the confessor as soon as possible, but with the consent of the sick person’)?Footnote 16 This order went against the usual practice in hospitals at the time, including the military hospital in Mechelen, near Brussels, where many of the missionaries working with the Spanish army were trained.Footnote 17 Usually, no treatment was given before confession. This practice allowed Protestants to be detected and reaffirmed the superiority of salvation of the soul over that of the body. Camillo was aware of this, and instructed the opposite. This redefinition of priorities, which would also be seen a few decades later among the Jesuits of the missio castrensis, found its meaning in the ongoing reflection on the therapeutic vocation of the hospital and the medical act: charity was becoming more concrete and being expressed through action.Footnote 18 From this perspective, ‘Serving even in corporeal matters’ became the priority.Footnote 19 Camillo’s congregation was first approved in 1586 and recognized by Gregory XIV in 1591, under the title of Clerics Regular, Ministers to the Sick.

As early as 1594, and again in 1597 and 1601, Camillo sent his companions on a military campaign with the pope’s army in Hungary, giving them precise instructions as to how to administer first aid to soldiers wounded by firearms, how to set up field hospitals, and how to transport the wounded to the rear. The red cross became the polysemous symbol of this congregation. In fact, the battle cross of the miles Christi took on another meaning here, clearly summarized around 1630 by Giuseppe Belcastro da Palermo, head of the Ministers to the Sick in Milan, in his Avvisi (News), addressed to the confrères during the terrible plague that ravaged the city: ‘non poteva acquistarsi dai soldati di Christo gloria maggiore che morire con le armi alle mani’ (‘Christ’s soldiers could not have gained greater glory than by dying with weapons in their hands’).Footnote 20 These weapons, though, were those of care and love of neighbour, mobilized by ‘tutti questi veterani & esercitati soldati della pietà, che da molti anni avanti, sempre havevano avuto quartiero ne gli Hospedali, e non havevano conosciuto altro corpo di guardia, che riposando sotto la felice insegna della carità christiana’ (‘all these veteran and trained soldiers of piety, who for many years have been establishing their military quarters in hospitals and have known no other garrison than that of rest under the happy banner of Christian charity’).Footnote 21

From the perspective of Camillo and his first companions, the soldiers were a very specific group within the mass of the poor to whom they had decided to dedicate themselves. The Vita of the founder, written by Father Sanzio Ciccatelli a few years after Camillo’s death, often refers to the soldiers’ solitude and misery.Footnote 22 Moreover, it instructs, ‘dar speranza ai peccatori, ai soldati, ai giuocatori, et a ogni sorte di huomini sommersi’ (‘give hope to sinners, soldiers, gamblers, and all kinds of drowned people’). This was the explicit aim of Ciccatelli’s Vita, but also of the Camillians more generally.Footnote 23 They were specifically targeting these ‘drowned men’. For this reason, during the Thirty Years’ War when the plague was ravaging the population of Mantua, the Ministers to the Sick decided to care for Lutheran soldiers, without requiring their conversion.Footnote 24 By this time, as we shall see, the Jesuits too had adapted their pastoral priorities.

Jesuit Discourses about the Flanders military mission: Engagement for Catholic Souls

This article now turns to a specific group of European missionaries in the early modern period: the four hundred Jesuits of the Missio castrensis to the army of Flanders. This was the Spanish Catholic army that criss-crossed Europe between Flanders and Italy during the Eighty Years’ War and the Thirty Years’ War, that is, between 1568 and 1648.Footnote 25 The mission was created in 1587, at the behest of Alexander Farnese, governor-general of the Spanish Netherlands and general of the army, with the support of his confessor, the Jesuit Thomas Sailly (1558–1623), who was its first superior.Footnote 26 The mission was active until the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, although it was suspended at the beginning of the Twelve Years’ Truce in 1609, but restored in 1614 following the instructions of Archduke Albert and his general, Ambrogio Spinola.

From the beginning of the missio, the identity of this group of missionaries, often affiliated to the Flandro-Belgica province of the Society of Jesus, was based on two elements: their status as part of an elite group of Christ’s soldiers (milites Christi), and their ability to maintain an emotional and physical separation from the soldiers whose spiritual wellbeing, and ultimately salvation, they were to ensure by accompanying them on their military campaigns. Indeed, the topos of the Jesuit as miles Christi was one of the most emphasized elements of the representations of Ignatius at the time of the confessional conflicts. Ever since the Pilgrim’s Testament, dictated by Ignatius himself at the end of his life, the founder of the Society of Jesus had been understood to have remained a soldier, even if he had changed army and battle.Footnote 27 While his conversion narrative, which began at the siege of Pamplona (1521) and ended at the Marian shrine of Montserrat, changed his idea of honour and his definition of the battles worth fighting, the military and militant dimension remained very strong.Footnote 28 This spiritual and material narrative is also clearly summarized in the first hagiographies of Ignatius, including one by emblems, published on the occasion of Ignatius’s beatification in 1609. Commissioned by General Claudio Acquaviva, this Life in text and images drew on the best human resources of the Society of Jesus and its associates: the Acta of Ignatius, the Vita of Pedro de Ribadeneira and the iconographic reinterpretations by Peter Paul Rubens and Jean-Baptiste Barbé, culminating in the production of eighty-one engravings, accompanied by short Latin commentaries.Footnote 29 After emphasizing the Virgin’s role in Ignatius’s change of attitude during his convalescence in the family home, the 1609 Vita makes the relationship between the Virgin and Ignatius the connecting element between the different episodes of Ignatius’s conversion pilgrimage. Along the way to the Marian shrine of Montserrat, Ignatius had to question his reaction to a Moor chevalier who queried Mary’s virginity.Footnote 30 Helped by his horse, which resisted him when he wanted to go after the man who had doubted the Virgin’s honour, Ignatius discovered a new way of reacting, which involved distancing himself from the performative automatisms of the warrior masculinity that had previously been his. Instead, he learned to control his impulses towards vengeance and violence. In the next engraving, Ignatius is shown kneeling and pronouncing his vow of chastity: In eodem itinere B. Virginis amore atque imitatione succensus voto se illi castitatis obstringit (‘On the same pilgrimage, inflamed by love and imitation of the Blessed Virgin, he bound himself to her with a vow of chastity’).Footnote 31 During this pilgrimage of body and spirit to Montserrat, the Virgin was evoked as an object of love and a model of life. Once in Montserrat, Ignatius offered the Virgin his sword, a gesture that underlined his definitive conversion as a novus Christi eques (‘new soldier of Christ’).Footnote 32

In 1590, in his Guidon et pratique spirituelle du soldat catholique, Thomas Sailly opened the section of his book devoted to models of military saints with an account of Ignatius.Footnote 33 This book was one of the first to be produced specifically for the army of Flanders. It contained moral admonitions against the vices and sins most widespread in the army, as well as prayers and a calendar of military saints so that every soldier could feel part of the history of salvation.

Furthermore, during celebrations for the canonization of Ignatius in the summer of 1622, reference to the Spanish military victories against heretics was particularly insisted upon in both Madrid and Antwerp. In Madrid, the decorated allegorical floats that paraded on the day dedicated to St Ignatius celebrated Spanish military conquests in Europe and elsewhere, recalling ‘the courageous soldiers Ignatius gave to the Church for the salvation of souls’.Footnote 34 In Antwerp, when the war resumed after a long truce, the city’s guilds staged a re-enactment of the siege of Pamplona at the Great Market, with highly realistic battles.Footnote 35

A few years later, the Roman Jesuit Famiano Strada published his De bello belgico (The Belgian War), subsequently translated into Italian, French and English. In his discussion of the events of 1586, he devoted a few pages to the missio castrensis, stressing its importance for warfare. Indeed, in that year, the general Alessandro Farnese had established the Jesuit military mission, entrusting it to his confessor Thomas Sailly. Thanks to the spiritual support of the Jesuits, soldiers with ‘light souls’ would be better able to fight for the faith. The missionaries were the sacra militia (sacred army) at war against the heresy of the rebels.Footnote 36

This vision of conquest is also central to the narrative of the missio proposed in 1640 in the Imago primi saeculi Societatis Iesu and printed in Antwerp. Here, the first five books, which dealt with the Society’s general history, were followed by a sixth book devoted to the Flandro-Belgic province and its missionary activities. Different spatial contexts – the missio hollandica (Dutch mission), the missio castrensis, and the missio navalis (naval mission) – reveal to different publics the same concerns about participating in the reconquest of peoples and lands threatened by Calvinist reform, as well as about supporting the Roman Catholic armies.Footnote 37 In the missio castrensis emblem, conquest of the enemies of the faith is the central element, even though the motto accompanying the image, da mihi animas, coetera tolle tibi (‘Give me the souls and keep the rest for yourself’), makes it clear that the Jesuit conquest was aimed at souls, leaving the bodies and the spoils of war to the military.Footnote 38 This last statement makes it possible to clarify the second element of the collective identity of the Jesuits in the missio: the otherness of the missionary in relation to those at whom their mission was aimed and the context in which they lived. I have analysed the various elements of this otherness elsewhere, pointing to the interplay between warrior masculinity and the masculinity of the clerics acting in a military context.Footnote 39 Suffice to say, the question of separation was fundamental in such a difficult, and in various ways promiscuous, mission. In fact, this very separation is at the heart of the Instructiones written by the provincial François Coster and approved by General Claudio Acquaviva in 1588.Footnote 40 Coster insisted that the Jesuits share common prayer and partake in common meals, and that each missionary should be obliged to return to his own tent at nightfall. In this way, the provincial underlined the importance of elements that are also found in the Imago primi saeculi, concerning the casta conversation (chaste conversation) that should characterize every Jesuit in his mission. He must be like a swan: ‘moving water touches me, but it does not bathe me or change my colour’.Footnote 41 In his De bello belgico, Famiano Strada also pointed out that missionaries had their own means of transport and separate accommodation.Footnote 42 A similar discourse was developed by Thomas Sailly in his Mémorial Testamentaire, published in 1622, shortly before his death. Here, the first superior of the missio castrensis summed up his vision of the priest involved with armies. Reviewing his long experience, Sailly proposed a gendered model. He sketched a portrait of the military chaplain as a profoundly masculine being, who was able to maintain his freedom in the face of power (this is the ‘holy freedom’ of the confessor in the face of army officers) and his control in the face of lust.Footnote 43 In fact, continence and chastity, the fruit of the missionary’s self-control, enabled him both to maintain his virility and to function as a model of vis militaris (military strength/virility) for the soldiers.Footnote 44 To explain the chaplain’s otherness, Sailly referred to Deuteronomy 18, which sets out the rights and duties of the Levite priests in Israel. Their separation from the rest of the chosen people is clearly shown by the rules of inheritance: ‘Levi shall have no heritage among his brothers; the Lord himself is his heritage, as he has told him.’Footnote 45

However, all these theories and rules about the missionary’s otherness, while enabling him to lead others in the struggle for faith, are only one aspect of this reality. It is important to look at how practices were adapted and how the attitudes of those to whom this mission was directed changed as a result of the situation in the field.

The Challenges of War and the Renegotiation of Missionary Practices

Missionaries and soldiers shared the same reality of violence, hunger, disease and fear. They shared the same muddy camps, the dampness of the trenches, the boredom of the long days of waiting, the adrenaline of the attack and the nauseating smell of blood at the end of the battle. How did all this transform the missionaries, who were no longer protected by the rhythm and space of religious life? How did they adapt to the reality of their existence the discourses and rules that their superiors had formulated for them?

Beyond the discourses presented above, there are other sources that allow us to observe what happened in missionary practice. This is the case, for example, with the mission journals that were passed down among the Jesuits of the missio castrensis in the early seventeenth century, some of which are now preserved in the state archives in Brussels. They are heterogeneous manuscripts composed of different parts: the mission diaries of a number of individual missionaries, particularly the priest and spiritual coadjutor Henri Jamblenne, who died in 1640 after many years of service to the missio; the rules written by superiors for Jesuits engaged in the mission; and summaries of particularly challenging issues, such as the application of Tridentine marriage law to soldiers. In the same manuscript, one can also find suggestions on how best to fulfil the responsibilities of serving as an executor for deceased soldiers, recipes for food for sick people and, above all, formulas for pharmaceutical remedies created by doctors from the University of Leuven to be used in military camps.Footnote 46 This variety of writings testifies to the versatility which was required to be a missionary in this context. The first Jesuit in charge of the missio, Thomas Sailly, insisted on the necessity of being able to speak many languages in order to hear the confessions of people of many different nationalities that made up the (mercenary) European armies of the time. Famiano Strada confirms that ‘steadfastness of mind, robustness of strength, expertise in languages’ were all indispensable.Footnote 47 A search in the catalogues of Jesuits assigned to the mission makes it possible to form a fairly accurate portrait of this group. Relatively young men were chosen, with a good education – although excellence was not required – who were polyglot. They must be good at interpersonal relations and capable of initiative; not ‘scrupulous’ or ‘melancholic’ types (according to the medical terminology of the time), but rather ‘choleric’ and ‘sanguine’. All, or almost all, must be ordained priests: in wartime, death is always lurking and a missionary must be able to hear confessions and ‘at that moment on which eternity depends, give them absolution to free the soul from eternal death.’Footnote 48

Taken together, the study of the Litterae annuae (Annual letters) and of the correspondence between the missionaries and their local or Roman superiors, makes it possible to follow the adaptations imposed by the missionary context. Soon, the Jesuits began to write to their superiors saying that, as a community, they had decided to change certain rules, for example regarding the use of night hours. It was found that it was in the trenches, at night, that soldiers were most willing to talk, even about spiritual things. The missionaries therefore communicated that they would often not return to sleep in their own tents, and that they would not always be working in pairs when around the camp.Footnote 49 The reality of military mission during a campaign continually pushed them to adapt, and they experienced situations that would not be easy to share with those Jesuits who remained in the colleges or religious houses. In particular, controlling the impulse to join in the fray was not easy: their superiors felt it necessary to write minatory letters when some Jesuit missionaries died in battle, condemning them for having thrown themselves into the attack with their horses, urging the soldiers to follow them.Footnote 50 The missionaries’ relationship with women was likewise not easy: wives, concubines, prostitutes and sutlers (camp followers) were omnipresent in the camps, as well as in besieged or conquered towns. Although in some cases the problem was to manage sexual impulses in a promiscuous context – calls for ‘modesty’ were frequent – in others the point was rather that women must be treated with respect and without disdain: the verba acerba (‘hard words’) used by missionaries were often evoked.Footnote 51

Over the course of eighty years of war, however, and alongside specific changes in some missionary practices, we also find important and profound transformations in missionary priorities and, particularly, their attitudes towards enemies. No missionary is an island: missionary action is constituted by interactions between missionaries and missionized and was undertaken from several different positions of power: civil, military and spiritual. The results of these interactions are striking. For example, there are profound changes amongst the Jesuit missionaries in the face of soldiers’ physical suffering. This is an important element, because it was bound up with changes in the concept of just war. These changes are evident in both the internal correspondence of the Society of Jesus, and the correspondence between the missionaries and the military authorities. The summer of 1605 offers an example. At that time, the Spanish army in Flanders felt itself to be strong. The military victories of the previous year – in particular that of Ostend in 1604 – were understood by the Spanish high command to offer a good augury for the future. In this context, there are many letters addressed to the general of the army in Flanders, Ambrogio Spinola, asking him to invest money in the care of the wounded. A few years earlier, the first Spanish military hospital had been established in Mechelen, but there were not enough places. Moreover, the hospital’s regulations specified that only Roman Catholics were allowed to be treated and that, before the body could be cared for, patients had to have attended confession and received absolution.Footnote 52 In 1605, the military missionary Pedro de Léon wrote to Spinola explaining that he needed money to create field hospitals, ‘where the wounded and sick who come to die for the defence of the Catholic faith and are treated for the honour of God and Your Excellency.’Footnote 53 Both beds and a means of bringing the injured from the battlefield to the hospital were indispensable. There was no system for caring for the wounded at the end of the battle: the women ran to find their men to take them to the camp and treat them, and those who had no one to do this were more vulnerable. In November 1605, the person responsible for the military hospital in the town of Roermond explained to Spinola that twenty-two wagons of wounded English Catholics had been dumped in the mud at the gates of the town in the middle of the night: ‘the wagoners unloaded them outside the village and drove off.’Footnote 54

After years of military campaigns, sieges, plague and famine, even the missionaries were tired. Perhaps that was one reason why their distinction between the body and the spirit, between Roman Catholics and ‘heretics’ began to change. Letters sent to Rome show that while initially help had been offered only to wounded Catholics on the battlefield, from the 1630s onwards this was changing. In 1635, during the siege of Leuven by the French, the missionaries argued with the governor-general, Cardinal Ferdinand of Austria, that the wounded French, whether Roman Catholic or Huguenot, could not be left to die.Footnote 55 The same went for those civilians who had taken refuge in the countryside of the neighbouring Protestant lands: hunger was everyone’s obsession and many people were falling ill with the plague. In this situation, the duty of charity took precedence over all other considerations. A few years later, in 1638, when the Spanish were fighting simultaneously in Artois against the French, and in Brabant against the Dutch, the terrible battle of Kalloo, near Antwerp, was won by Spain. Some 2,500 Dutch troops were killed in the battle or drowned while trying to escape, and around 3,500 Protestants were taken prisoner. In the prisons, conditions were desperate, and epidemics of diarrhoea broke out. After begging food from the local inhabitants, Jesuits and other religious visited the prisoners ‘tamquam si fratres amicissimos, non hostes nacti essemus. Curavimus corpora’ (‘as if we were the most loving of brothers, not enemies, we took care of the bodies’). Indeed, the missionaries explained that, for some years now, ‘iussi Nostri sunt Castrenses non animorum tantum sed et corporum gerere curam’ (‘our military missionaries have been ordered to take care not only of souls, but also of bodies’).Footnote 56

The previous year, after a battle near Maubeuge, south of Mons, the Jesuit fathers had also decided to bury the corpses of Protestants abandoned by their companions. In a beautiful letter sent to Rome, they reflected on how this gesture – reminiscent of the pietas of Tobit against the tyrant, as narrated in the biblical book of that name – was the best way to fight against the tyranny of war and plague that oppressed all people.Footnote 57 The burials became humanity’s retaliation against the violence of war and death. The author of the littera annua of 1637 recalled that, faced with the horror of corpses abandoned along the river, the charity of his companions who decided to also bury the bodies of their Protestant enemies similarly unlocked the common humanity of the soldiers who began to help them: ‘plane in his castris Tobiae memoriam Nostri resuscitarunt’ (‘It is clear that in the army our missionaries were resuscitating the memory of Tobit’).Footnote 58 As with Tobit, prayer became action.

Conclusion

As shown at the beginning of this article, there are several explanations for this gradual shifting of the boundaries between the licit and the illicit: these new frontiers of charity are more or less directly linked to the different phases of the war and, more generally, to profound changes in mentality. By focussing on the Jesuit confessors active in the most important courts whose sovereigns were involved in the Thirty Years’ War – Spain, France, Austria and Bavaria – Robert Bireley has clearly identified two distinct phases in the attitude of these confessors towards the war: after an initial long phase of unreserved support, the Jesuits would later adopt a different position.Footnote 59 They were looking for a balance between support for Habsburg supremacy in Europe, opposition to Protestants, and the need for peace. Bireley identified 1635, the year of the Peace of Prague, as ‘the end of the aggressive Counter Reformation in the Empire’.Footnote 60 From a geopolitical point of view, France’s entry into the war in 1635 had blurred the lines of the confessional conflict and it was now a question of achieving peace, implying a degree of tolerance towards Protestants. Lucien Bély has shown how a number of players at the time adopted the need for peace as their own, and built around it the art of diplomacy as a founding element of European identity, leading to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.Footnote 61

However, political realism does not explain everything. The shift in the mid-1630s was also clearly visible on the ground, in the everyday lives of missionaries, soldiers and civilians. In addition to the violence inflicted and endured, there were the horrors wreaked by waves of plague and other diseases on bodies weakened by hunger. Several of the Jesuits mentioned in this article alternated periods of service with the army with ministering to plague victims, and the death toll was considerable. It was normal for them to count among their companions several who had succumbed to infectious diseases. It is therefore no coincidence that, both within and outside the Society of Jesus, this period was characterized by renewed theological reflection on illness and death. In his De martyrio per pestem (On Martyrdom by the Plague) published in 1630, the Jesuit Théophile Raynaud theorized the theological equivalence between a martyrdom in odium fidei (‘in hatred of the faith’) and a martyrdom of charity.Footnote 62 In this text, Raynaud developed a theology of the apostolate, which translated into the codes of theological discourse the overcoming of the phase of doctrinal and confessional confrontation at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries. In so doing, he emphasized service to the suffering body as a place of divine revelation and witness to the faith, even to the point of sacrificing one’s life.Footnote 63 The discovery of the theological role of the poor and the sick in reaching Christ through their, and his, humanity was one of the fundamental developments of Reformed Catholicism in the seventeenth century. From this point of view, the case of the Camillo de Lellis Ministers of the Sick, discussed above, is not an isolated one: Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac with the Congregation of the Daughters of Charity offer a further example.Footnote 64

From the middle of the 1630s, the correspondence of the Jesuit missionaries emphasized their communitarian decision to take care of the bodies of Roman Catholics and Protestants, both on the battlefield and in the prisons which held hundreds of prisoners of war. They considered it impossible to care for souls without first caring for bodies. Their credibility was at stake: some Protestants converted, struck by this general charity. Their decision provoked indignant reactions from some of the Spanish high command, but the Jesuits won the approval of important commanders, such as Prince Tommaso di Savoia.Footnote 65

In the correspondence, letter after letter, a fundamental shift in priorities can be seen. This group of missionaries was creating a new focus on suffering humanity. They had formed themselves around a double discourse of the otherness of the Jesuits in relation to the military and on the missio castrensis as the activity of a militia Christi in the unrelenting war against heretics. However, they also discovered the urgency of not losing their humanity. This urgency was shared by many in Spanish Europe in those years. Probably no one showed this better than Caravaggio in his The Seven Works of Mercy (1606–7). In this revolutionary painting, the divine presence becomes flesh and action through the tourbillon of characters telling of a suffering humanity, but also of the simple gestures necessary to remain human. This is ‘l’uomo, che aiuta l’uomo’ (‘man, who helps man’) and, in doing so, allows God to exist.Footnote 66

References

1 Silvia Mostaccio and Alessandro Serra, ‘Histoire globale des catholicismes et fait guerrier, XVIe–XIXe siècle. Un bilan’, in Benjamin Deruelle and Jonas Campion, eds, Etudier la guerre. Perspectives historiographiques et épistémologiques de l’histoire de la guerre des années 1950 à nos jours (Lille, forthcoming).

2 Laurence Croq and David Garrich, eds, La religion vécue. Les laïcs dans l’Europe modern (Rennes, 2013); Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, Lived Religion and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Abingdon, 2021).

3 Nikolas Funke, Faith in War: Religion and the Military in Germany, 1500–1650 (New York, 2024); Johannes Burkhardt, ‘The Thirty Years’ War’, in Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, ed., A Companion to the Reformation World (Oxford, 2004), 272–90; Judith Pollmann, ‘Religious Identity in the Low Countries 1520–1650’, in Andreea Badea, Bruno Boute and Birgit Emich, eds, Pathways through Early Modern Christianities (Böhlau, 2023), 281–304, at 293–6.

4 There is a huge bibliography on these issues. On the identity drama of the missionary, see the still very important Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552–1610 (Oxford, 2010); on the theory of a multifactorial approach to Catholic missions, see Simon Ditchfield, ‘Decentering the Catholic Reformation: Papacy and Peoples in the Early Modern World’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 101 (2010), 186–207, at 195–6 and 201–7.

5 Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT, 2014).

6 José Antonio Maravall, La literatura picaresca desde la historia social (siglos XVI y XVII) (Madrid, 1986).

7 Giambattista Basile, Il racconto dei racconti, ed. Alessandra Burani and Ruggero Guarini (Milan, 1994); Nancy Canepa, ‘Introduction’, in Giambattista Basile, The Tale of Tales, ed. Nancy Canepa (New York, 2016), xxxiii–lxvi.

8 Basile, The Crucible, in The Tale of Tales, 107–8.

9 Rosario Villari, Un sogno di libertà. Napoli nel declino di un impero 1585–1648 (Milan, 2012), 165–78.

10 For Ribera, see Carlo Avilio, ‘Naturalism and the Picaresque in Jusepe de Rivera’s Work’ (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2016); Annick Lemoine et Maïté Metz, eds, Ribera. Ténèbres et lumière (Paris, 2024); Francesco Sorce, ‘Mitelli, Giuseppe Maria’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 75 (2011), online at: <https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giuseppe-maria-mitelli_(Dizionario-Biografico)/>, accessed 20 October 2025.

11 Katie Hornstein, ‘Just Violence: Jacques Callot’s Grandes Misères et Malheurs de la Guerre’, University of Michigan Museums of Art and Archaeology Bulletin 16 (2005–6), 29–48, at 42; Gregory Hanlon, Italy 1636: The Cemetery of Armies (Oxford, 2016), 153–68; Marika Takanishi Knowles, Realism and Role-Play: The Human Figure in French Art from Callot to the Brothers Le Nain (Newark, DE, 2020).

12 Thomas Calvo, Peregrinaciones y viajes de un soldado, después jesuita De Cataluña a Nueva España, Cortes de Madrid y Roma (1674–1711) (Madrid, 2023).

13 Giorgio Cosmacini, Camillo de Lellis. Il santo dei malati (Rome, 2013); Piero Sannazzaro, Storia dell’ordine Camilliano (1550–1699) (Roma, 1986); Sabina Andreoni, Carlo Fiorentino and Massimo Giannini, Storia dell’Ordine di San Camillo. La provincia Romana (Soveria Mannelli, 2012); Sabina Andreoni, Massimo Giannini and Giovanni Pizzorusso, Storia dell’Ordine di San Camillo. La provincia Siculo-Napoletana (Soveria Mannelli, 2015).

14 Stefano Tomassetti, ‘Surviving and Caring: The Oratorians and the Oratory during the Plague of Rome, 1656–1657’, in Matthieu Brejon De Lavergnee and Emanuele Colombo, eds, Religious Orders, Public Health and Epidemics: From the Black Death to Covid-19 (Münster, 2024), 83–106.

15 Anon., Quelli che servono gli infermi. Assistenza e medicina a Roma nei secoli XVI e XVII (Rome, 1987); see also Cosmacini, Camillo de Lellis, 68–86.

16 Camillo de Lellis, Scritti di san Camillo de Lellis. Raccolti e presentati da p. Mario Vanti (Roma, 1965); for the Regole, see ibid. 52–80; for tensions with Roman Congregations, see ibid. 58–9.

17 Constituciones del hospital Real del Exercito de los Países Baxos, Ordenadas por el Serenissimo Señor Archiduque Alberto año 1599 (Brussels, 1685), 45, §58; Fanny Verslype, ‘L’hôpital royal de Malines (1585–1701), une machine à guérir? Contribution à l’histoire du service sanitaire de l’armée des Flandres dans les Pays-Bas espagnols’ (MA thesis, UCLouvain, 2018), 66–9. On the place of confession within the therapeutic process, see Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Turin, 1996), 667–79.

18 Cosmacini, Camillo de Lellis, 64–8.

19 Ibid.

20 Domenico Regi, Memorie historiche del venerabile Camillo de Lellis e de’ suoi chierici regolari Ministri degl’Infermi libri qundici, di Domenico Regi della medesimo religione (Naples, 1676), 280.

21 Ibid.

22 Sanzio Cicatelli, Vita del P. Camillo de Lellis, fondatore della Religione dei Chierici Regolari Ministri degli Infermi, ed. Piero Sannazzaro (Rome, 1980); see also Santio Cicatelli, Vita P. Camilli de Lellis fundatoris Religionis Clericorum Regularium infirmis ministrantium; scripta italice a P. Santio Cicatello latinitate donata a P. Petro Halloix (Antwerp, 1632), 94–6.

23 Cicatelli, ‘Proemio’, in idem, Vita del P. Camillo de Lellis, 2. See Primo Levi, I sommersi e i salvati (Turin, 1986); ET: The Drowned and the Saved, transl. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1988).

24 Regi, Memorie historiche, 272.

25 For various issues arising in the course of that mission, see Vincenzo Lavenia, Dio in uniforme. Cappellani, catechesi cattolica e soldati in età moderna (Bologna, 2017), 129–54; idem, ‘Missiones Castrenses: Jesuits and Soldiers between Pastoral Care and Violence. Introduction’, Journal of Jesuit Studies 4 (2017), 545–58; idem, ‘In God’s Fields: Military Chaplains and Soldiers in Flanders during the Eighty Years’ War’, in Marco Mondini and Massimo Rospocher, eds, Narrating War: Early Modern and Contemporary Perspectives (Bologna, 2013), 99–112; Silvia Mostaccio, ‘La mission militaire jésuite auprès de l’armée des Flandres pendant la guerre de Trente ans. Conversions et sacrements’, in Bernard Forclaz and Philippe Martin, eds, Religion et piété au défi de la guerre de Trente ans (Rennes, 2015), 183–202; eadem, ‘Dieu à la guerre. Les émotions de Dieu et la guerre des Quatre-vingt ans aux Pays-Bas espagnols’, in Chrystel Bernat and Frédéric Gabriel, eds, Émotions de Dieu. Attributions et appropriations chrétiennes (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Turnhout, 2019), 205–29, at 207–18; eadem, ‘Spiritual Exercises: Obedience, Conscience, Conquest’, in Ines Županov, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Jesuits (New York, 2019), 75–104. Also still important are Alfred Poncelet, ‘L’activité apostolique. Les aumôniers militaires’, in idem, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus dans les anciens Pays-Bas, 6 vols (Brussels, 1927), 2: 405–22; Xavier Rousseaux, ‘Sur tous les fronts. Les missions des jésuites aux Pays-Bas et outre-mer’, in Alain Deneef, ed., Les jésuites belges 1542–1992. 450 ans de Compagnie de Jésus dans les provinces belgiques (Brussels, 1992), 45–8.

26 In addition to the bibliography given in the previous note, see also L. Browers, ʻSailly, Thomasʼ, Diccionario Histórico de la Compañia de Jesús: biográfico-temático, 4 vols (Rome and Madrid, 2001), 4: 3463–4; Walter Melion, ‘Allegory and Affective in Thomas Sailly, S.J.’s Thesaurus precum’, in Heather Graham and Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank, eds, Emotions, Art, and Christianity in the Transatlantic World, 1450–1800 (Leiden, 2021), 71–125. For the books by Father Sailly addressed to military men, see Thomas Sailly, Guidon et pratique spirituelle du soldat chrestien. Reveu & augmenté pour l’armé de S.M. Catholique au Pays-Bas par le R.P. Thomas Sailly Prestre de la Compagnie de Jesus (Anvers, 1590); idem, Memorial testamentaire composé en faveur des soldats combattans sous l’Estandart de la crainte de Dieu. Par le R.P. Thomas Sailly de la Compaignie de Iesus. Partie premiere dediée à monseigneur Ambroise Spinola Marquis des Balbases, Chevalier de l’ordre de la Toison d’or, du conseil de Sa Maiesté Catholique, Capitaine General de son armée au Palatinat Inferieur, &c. (Louvain, 1622); idem, Thesaurus litaniarum ac orationum sacer, cum suis adversus Sectarios Apologis Opera (Brussels, 1598).

27 Ignatius of Loyola, ‘Reminiscences (Autobiography)’, in Personal Writings, ed. Joseph Munitiz and Philip Endean (London, 2004), 3–64; idem, A Pilgrim’s Testament: The Memoirs of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, ed. Barton T. Geger (Boston, MA, 2020); idem, Journal des motions intérieures, ed. Pierre-Antoine Fabre (Brussels, 2007).

28 Pierre-Antoine Fabre and Silvia Mostaccio, Ritorno all’agiografia ignaziana. “Maschile” e “femminile” nelle Vite di Ignazio di Loyola’, paper given at the conference of the Associazione italiana per lo studio della santità, dei culti e dell’agiografia, Cantieri dell’agiografia, Rome, 21-23 January 2025, article forthcoming in the online review Giornale di Storia. See also Mateo Rogelio García. ‘Honour for Ignatius of Loyola’, Revue d’éthique et de théologie morale 321 (2024), 89–96.

29 John O’Malley, ‘The Many Lives of Ignatius of Loyola: Future Saint’, in Constructing a Saint Through Images: The 1609 illustrated Biography of Ignatius of Loyola, with introduction by idem and transl. James P. M. Walsh (Philadelphia, PA, 2008), 1–34: this introduction is followed by the anastatic reproductions of the Vita beati P. Ignatii Loiolae, Societatis Iesu fundatoris (Rome, 1609), with engravings, and the Latin text and English translation.

30 Ibid. 8. On the changes in the performativity of Ignatius’s masculinity in this account, see also Ulrike Strasser, ‘The First Form of Grace: Ignatius of Loyola and the Reformation of Masculinity’, in Scott H. Hendrix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn, eds, Masculinity in the Reformation Era (Kirksville, MO, 2008), 54–70, at 52, 59–61.

31 Vita beati P. Ignatii Loiolae, 9.

32 Ibid. 11.

33 Sailly, Guidon et pratique spirituelle du soldat chrestien, 301–8.

34 Relacion de Fernando Monforte, noble de la cour de Madrid, analyzed in Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, ‘War Saints: The Canonisation of 1622’, Journal of Early Modern Christianity 9 (2002), 201–26, at 220.

35 Ibid. 224.

36 Famiano Strada, Della guerra di Fiandra. Deca seconda (Rome, 1648), 511–6.

37 Imago primi saeculi Societatis Iesu a prouincia Flandro-Belgica eiusdem Societatis repraesentata (Antwerp, 1640). On missio castrensis, see ibid. 804–7. ET: ‘The Emblems’, transl. Michael C. J. Putnam [Latin], Alexander Sens [Greek], and James P. M. Walsh, S.J. [Hebrew], in John O’Malley, ed., Art, Controversy, and the Jesuits: The Imago Primi Saeculi (1640) (Philadelphia, PA, 2015).

38 Imago primi saeculi, 941.

39 Silvia Mostaccio, ‘Sacerdotal Masculinity at War: Jesuit Military Chaplains at the Eighty Years’ War’, in Jean-Pascal Gay, Silvia Mostaccio and Josselin Tricout, eds, Masculinités sacerdotales. Approches historiques (Xème–XXIème siècles) (Turnhout, 2022), 291–301.

40 I refer here to the copy of the Ordinationes preserved in a small handwritten book belonging to the Castrensis’ Jesuit missionaries: ʻOrdinationes pro Missione Castrensiʼ, in Brussels, Archives Générales du Royaume de Bruxelles [hereafter: AGR], Jésuites, Collège de Bruxelles, item no. 1969, Liber ordinationum et aliorum quae in Missione Societatis Jesu in Castris Regys observantur, fols 7–9. For François Coster, see also Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus, 2: 405–16.

41 ‘Casta conversation’, in Imago primi saeculi, 479.

42 Strada, Della guerra di Fiandra, 513.

43 Sailly, ‘Religieux et Prestres qui suivent l’armée’, in idem, Memorial testamentaire, 168–80.

44 Ibid. 201–5.

45 Ibid. 169; see Deut. 18: 1–2.

46 ‘Medicinalia pro Patribus qui in Castris versantur’, in Liber ordinationum et aliorum quae in Missione Societatis Jesu in Castris Regys observantur, fols 193r–201r. The Jemblenne missionary journal can be found at AGR, Jésuites, Collège Bruxelles, 1971, Instructio historica pro sacellano Artilleriae.

47 Strada, Della guerra di Fiandra, 513.

48 Rome, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu [hereafter: ARSI], Flandr. Belg., Catalogi Triennales, 12 (1633–6); quotation taken from Strada, Della guerra di Fiandra, 514.

49 ARSI, Flandr. Belg., 57, Hist., ‘Missio castrensis’, in Littera annua Collegii Bruxellensis anno 1642, fols 319–22.

50 Letter from Bernard Olivier to Father Superior mission castrensis, 14 July 1600, in AGR, Jésuites, Collège de Bruxelles, 1969, Liber Ordinationum, fol. 16. For this letter, see also Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus, 2: 415–16.

51 Instructio PP. Castrentibus a RP Manareo, 26 August 1598, in AGR, Jésuites, Collège de Bruxelles, 1969, Liber ordinationum et aliorum quae in Missione Societatis Jesu in Castris Regys observantur, fols 12–13.

52 Verslype, ‘L’hôpital royal de Malines’, 66–9.

53 ‘Donde se remedien los heridos y enfermos que vienen a morir por la defensa de la fe’ católica y por la honra de Dios y de V’: AGR, Secrétairie d’Etat et de Guerre, letter no. 128, Pedro de Leon to Ambrogio Spinola, 6 June 1605, fol. 158. On Ambrogio Spinola and the military campaigns in Flanders, see Silvia Mostaccio, Bernardo García García and Luca Lo Basso, eds, Ambrogio Spinola between Genoa, Flanders, and Spain, Avisos de Flandes 20 (Leuven, 2022).

54 ‘Los carros los descargaron fuera del villaje y se fueron’: AGR, Secrétairie d’Etat et de Guerre, letter no. 128, Antonio Gonzales to Ambrogio Spinola, 7 November 1605, fol. 316.

55 ARSI, Flandr. Belg. 53, ‘Anno 1635 Excerpta ex litteris annuis provinciae flandro-Belgicae’, fols 128r–135v, Labores in exercitibus Nostrorum, fols 130v–131v.

56 ARSI, Flandr. Belg. 53, ‘Anno 1638 Excerpta ex litteris annuis provinciae Flandro-Belgicae’, fols 149v–155v, at fol. 152r.

57 ARSI, Flandr. Belg. 53, ‘Anno 1637 Excerpta ex litteris annuis provinciae Flandro-Belgicae’, fols 144r–149r, at fols 145r–v.

58 Ibid.

59 Robert Bireley, ‘Conclusions’, in idem, The Jesuits, and the Thirty Years’ War: Kings, Courts, and Confessors (Cambridge, 2003), 267–75.

60 Ibid. 268.

61 Lucien Bély, L’art de la paix en Europe. Naissance de la diplomatie moderne, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2007).

62 Theophilus Raynaudus, De martyrio per pestem ad martyrium improprium & proprium vulgare comparator. Disquisitio theologica Theophili Raynaudi Societatis Iesu Theologi (Lyon, 1630); see also Jean-Pascal Gay, Le dernier théologien? Théophile Raynaud (v. 1583–1663), histoire d’une obsolescence (Paris, 2018).

63 Jean-Pascal Gay, ‘Finding Martyrs at Home? Jesuit Attempts at Redefining Martyrdom in the Seventeenth Century and Their Censure’, Journal of Jesuit Studies 9 (2022), 15–35; Brejon de Lavergnee and Colombo, eds, Religious Orders, Public Health and Epidemics.

64 Matthieu Brejon de Lavergnée, Histoire des Filles de la Charité (Paris, 2011).

65 ARSI, Flandr. Belg. 53, ‘Anno 1638 Excerpta ex litteris annuis provinciae flandro-Belgicae’, fol. 153r.

66 Maurizio Calvesi, Le realtà del Caravaggio (Turin, 1990).