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An uneasy peace existed in France between Protestants and Catholics in 1570, but this did not last long. On August 24th 1572 at the feast held on St. Bartholomew's day, the Catholics struck a mortal blow against the Protestants.

Mezarai, a Romish historian, describes the events:

"The daylight, which discovered so many crimes which the darkness of eternal night ought for ever to have concealed did not soften their ardor but exasperated them more. The populace and the most dastardly, being warned of the smell of blood, 60,000 men, transported with their fury and armed in different ways, ran about where ever example, vengeance, rage and the desire of plunder transported them. The air resounded with a horrible tempest of the hisses, blasphemies and oaths of the murderers - of the breaking open of doors and windows - of the firing of pistols and guns - of the pitiable cries of the dying - of the lamentations of the women whom they dragged by the hair - of the noise of carts, some loaded with the booty of the houses they pillaged, others with the dead bodies which they cast into the Seine - so that in the confusion, they could not hear each other speak in the streets or if they distinguished certain words, they were these furious expressions - "kill, stab, throw them out of the window." A dreadful and inevitable death presented itself in every shape. Some were shot on the roofs of houses, others were cast out of the windows. Some were cast into the water and knocked on the head with blows of iron bars or clubs; some were killed in their beds, some in the garrets others in cellars; wives in the arms of their husbands - husbands on the bosoms of their wives, sons at the feet of their fathers. They neither spared the aged, nor women great with child, nor even infants. It is related that a man was seen to stab one of them who played with the beard of its murderer and that a troop of little boys dragged another, in its cradle, into the river. The streets were paved with the bodies of the dead or the dying; the gateways were blocked up with them. There were heaps of them in the squares; the small streams were filled with blood which flowed in fresh torrents into the river. Finally, to sum up in a few words what took place in these 3 days - 600 houses were repeatedly pillaged and 4,000 persons massacred, with all the confusion and barbarity that can be imagined."

Intelligence of the event was borne to Rome and the Pope went to St. Peter's and rejoiced. Fleury, another Romish historian, in his "Ecclesiastical History", says: "Gregory XIII only regarding the good which he thought likely to result from this to the Catholic religion in France, ordered a procession, in which he himself joined, from the

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Church of St. Peter's to the Church of St. Lewis, to return thanks to God for so happy a result; and to perpetuate the memory of this event he caused several medals to be struck werein he himself is represented on the one side, and on the other side, an angel carrying a cross in one hand and a sword in the other exterminating the heretics, and more particularly the Admiral in Spain the same deed was panegyrized in the presence of king Philip II and they dared to call it "the triumph of the Church Millitant." "