Of Christian Princes and Losing Your Head

by Brad Isbell

Online Christian Nationalists were not happy with certain inconvenient truths I posted about the 30 Years War. In that mostly religious, mostly protestant vs. papist struggle a staggering number of civilians and combatants died. It was, in some ways, the first modern total war. In some regions of what we now call Germany as much as 50% of the population were killed or displaced.¹ And it was fought by Christian princes.

Population loss in the 30 Years’ War

How many online activists and pro-Christendom conference speakers have considered the costs of real religious war and revolution? It’s as if their thought experiments and aspirational cosplay exercises are not too imaginative but that they are not imaginative enough. “What could go wrong?” is not on the menu. History tells us that even protestant-on-protestant violence occurred during the Reformation era (besides that directed at radicals, like Anabaptists). This might give pause to those Christian Nationalists longing for a pan-protestant Christian-Prince-as-the-answer, many of whom now seem to trust their own “science” and believe in a sort of religious climate change where winds will no longer shift:

“A case in point is that of Niklaus Krell, chief adviser to Elector Christian I of Saxony (1560-1591), who had introduced Calvinism to the land of Luther, and, among other reforms, had introduced German Bibles with Calvinist footnotes and abolished exorcism that had traditionally accompanied the rite of baptism. After his prince and patron died and the political and religious winds shifted, Krell was stripped of his chancellorship and imprisoned in 1591. The new elector, the resolutely Lutheran Frederick Willam I, set about ridding Saxony of Calvinists and making an example of their leader. On 9 October 1601, after enduring a decade of inhumane imprisonment at the fortress of  Königstein, a very frail Krell was brought into the New Market in Dresden for execution. His trial had dragged on far too long, as had his appeals, but after innumerable delays, his fate had been sealed. Three Lutheran clergy had been assigned the task of converting Krell to orthodoxy, and had spent the previous few days fruitlessly badgering him. It mattered little that (Christian princes and princess) Queen Elizabeth I of England, Henry IV of France, and William of Hesse protested Krell's death sentence. A single blow from the executioner's sword was all it took to deny those pleas. Holding high his victim's head for all to see, the executioner mocked it, asking a question that loosely translates as, ‘How did you like that Calvinist sword stroke, Krell?’ The sword itself had been engraved for the occasion with Krell's initials and the Latin inscription ‘Cave Calviane,’ or ‘Beware, Calvinist!’” ²

Krell’s Crypto-Calvinist head, severed by a Lutheran Christian Prince

Pray and work for good magistrates, but remember that mixing religion (even if only varieties of Protestantism) and politics is complicated.

1. Carlos Eire, Reformations, chapter 20

2. Carlos Eire, Reformations, chapter 22