the king decided he could no longer remain above the fray. Instead, he tried to eliminate the Protestant leadership at a stroke. Before dawn on Sunday, August 24, 1572, St. Bartholomew’s Day, royal soldiers murdered the wounded man and several other Protestant dignitaries in their beds. It was intended as a surgical strike, but the people of Paris could read the signals. Crying, “The king wills it,” Catholic mobs set out on an unprecedented orgy of destruction. In three days, some three thousand Protestants were killed, along with any Catholics who defended them. Over the following month, this massacre was echoed in a dozen French cities with histories of bitter interreligious tension; perhaps a further six thousand died.11 The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was the defining moment of the French religious wars. It was not exactly premeditated, nor did the perpetrators try to disown it. Pope Gregory XIII struck a medal in celebration of the massacre and commissioned commemorative frescoes. And not without reason: the massacre achieved something that individual trials and executions could not. It broke the bravado of Protestantism’s martyr complex. The scale and speed of the killing dazed Protestants, who now questioned whether God was really on their side.