23 - Christian Violence against Heretics, Jews and Muslims

Summary

This chapter surveys violence imposed by medieval western-European Christians upon their chief religious “others”: heretics, Jews, and Muslims. Modern scholars have often found it useful to understand such violence collectively, echoing medieval Christians’ own frequent grouping together of those “others.” Yet it is important to disassemble the differences in why and how Christians wielded violence against each, and to recognize how violence took variegated forms, was committed by diverse actors, and resulted from multiple, coexisting motivations. Violence against Jews interpenetrated with their increasing demonization in Christian polemic and with their subject status in Europe. Both church and state, increasingly ambitious institutions, assisted in the general transformation of European Jews from protected minorities to not “real” Jews rightly deserving toleration. Violence against heretics (a more subjective identity than that of Jews and Muslims) was only rarely and early the object of mob violence. That was soon succeeded by “crusade” and the institutional violence of inquisitions, which owed a debt to monastic and penitential violence. While Christian violence against Muslims in Europe was geographically limited, key there was the evolution of Muslims from rulers to ruled, and even an acceptance of Muslims as agents of violence. Despite the varying circumstances, motivations, agents, and forms of Christian violence against all three, it was nevertheless embedded within a universalizing Latin-Christian theology and ecclesiology.