The Beeldenstorm, a mania for image smashing, battered Antwerp today in 1566, as mobs of Calvinist Protestants ransacked the cathedral. They toppled statues and hacked off their heads, smashed altars and stained glass, shredded song books and Bibles, and carted off crucifixes, chalices and vestments. The carnival of destruction ripped through the Low Countries that summer, consuming churches and chapels, monasteries, abbeys and cathedrals. In Ghent, the famous altarpiece by the Van Eyck brothers was saved from destruction by being dismantled and hidden under armed guard in the cathedral tower, but other cultural and artistic treasures were lost forever.
‘These new gospellers came into our Lady’s church at Antwerp about five of the clock after dinner. The beginning of their purposed mischief was committed to a boy, who with a wand, coming into the chapel of our Lady, struck her image, saying, “Mary, thou must come down.” At which voice, as it were at a watchword, the false brethren approached near.’ Nicholas Sanders, 1566
Today in 2007, Esquire magazine named Pope Benedict XVI Accessorizer of the Year. The award was given in recognition of Benedict reviving the ancient tradition of Popes wearing red leather shoes, which had been sadly neglected during the reign of his predecessor. The shoes were handmade by the house of Adriano Stefanelli, cobblers to the Pope.
Geert Groote, the founder of a Christian movement known as the Devotio Moderna (‘the Modern Devotion’), died of the plague in Deventer, Netherlands, today in 1384. Groote was a brilliant scholar with a promising church career ahead of him, but he threw his life into reverse in his 30s. He gave up his family home, which became a refuge for destitute women, and began preaching a message of practical, everyday devotion to Jesus for working people. His followers formed local lay gatherings which sought to imitate the life of Christ at home and at work, and the movement quickly spread throughout what is now the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.
‘In writing, speaking and acting, you ought to make it a point not to hurry. You are not able to seek the glory of God in these things when you are carried into them with such force that all your strength is extended. Learn therefore to wait and to hold back from action. Do no good thing in such a way that you hasten into disobedience.’ Geert Groote, Resolutions and Intentions, translated by John Van Engen
The Middle East passed from Christian to Muslim rule today in the year 636, in the first wave of Muslim conquest, four years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Under the brilliant command of Khalid ibn al-Walid, the Muslim army won an unexpected and shattering victory over the large army of the Byzantine emperor at Yarmük, just south of the Sea of Galilee. The battle ended seven centuries of Roman rule, and the victory was so decisive that within two years, Damascus, Jerusalem, Gaza, Antioch and Aleppo came under Muslim rule, followed by the whole of Syria, Armenia and Egypt. The Christian world had some temporary success in reconquering Jerusalem and the Holy Land during the Crusades, but most of the Middle Eastern lands have remained under Islamic rule ever since.
It is the feast day of St Bernard of Clairveaux, a 12th century Benedictine monk who was sent to start a new monastery in the Vallée d’Absinthe, northern France, when he was 25 years old. The monastery flourished, and planted 68 daughter monastries in France, Italy, Germany, England, Spain and Portugal within Bernard’s lifetime. Bernard was also a preacher, mystic, and founder of the Knights Templar. His spiritual writings remain popular today.
‘When you feel weighed down by apathy, lukewarmness and fatigue, do not yield to cowardice or cease to study spiritual truths, but look for the hand of the one who can help you, to be drawn until finally, under the influence of grace, you feel again the vigorous pulse of life.’ Bernard of Clairveaux, Sermon on the Song of Songs
Image: Rijksmuseum