Subject: clérigo priest, cleric

Culture: Spanish

Setting: Habsburg empire 16-17thc

Context (Event Photos, Primary Sources, Secondary Sources, Field Notes)

* Ruff 2001 p124-125

"Among others who engaged in the physical violence we have found so common in this [early modern] period were even Catholic clerics, at least before the late seventeenth century when Tridentine reforms of clerical behavior began to take effect at the grassroots level in much of Europe. Until that time, priests in many areas, such as the Spanish Netherlands and Spain itself, routinely bore arms. Indeed, in Spain a third of the caseload of the Tribunal of Bref, a special sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ecclesiastical court charged with enforcing priestly discipline, consisted of clerics charged with bearing arms, and another 26 percent of its cases involved murder by priests bearing guns. Priestly violence featured other weapons too, and even originated on the high altar. Such violence erupted at the cathedral of Elne in northern Spain at the Christmas Eve vigil of 1590. When Canon Hieronim Advart placed a small likeness of Christ on the tabernacle just before the service his colleague Miguel Tamarro told him to remove it. Advart refused and the two traded insults even as mass began; when Advart left the altar at the end of the service he lay in wait for Tamarro, seized his robes as he passed by, and wounded him with several knife blows."