| The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy in French) was a wave of Catholic mob violence against the Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants), traditionally believed to have been instigated by Catherine de' Medici, the mother of Charles IX. Starting on August 24, 1572, with the murder of a prominent Huguenot, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the massacres spread throughout Paris, and later to other cities and the countryside, lasting for several months. The exact number of fatalities will never be known, but several thousand, possibly tens of thousands, of Huguenots died in the violence. Though by no means unique, "it was the worst of the century's religious massacres." [1] The massacres marked a turning-point in the French Wars of Religion by radicalising the Huguenot faction. Huguenots from France |  |