The Jesuit order, founded by Ignacio López de Loyola in 1534, set itself to fighting a battle of ideas against the enemy. A fiercer, less intellectual movement, arising in France from the 1550s, was loosely grouped under the name of the ‘Leagues’. Their aim was not to outwit the heretics by fancy argument but to wipe them from the face of the earth by force. They and their Calvinist counterparts faced each other without a shred of compromise in their hearts, as fanatical mirror-images.
