The Undivided Past Read online

  None of this is to deny that the Battle of Poitiers, or the Crusades, or the sieges of Vienna took place, or that hatred and intolerance, demonization and negative stereotyping, violence and conflict were among the ways in which Christians and Muslims interacted across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries, or that convivencia was often “fraught and fragile,” and that cultures of intolerance often lay just below the surface of “cultures of tolerance.” But focusing only on such conflicts is rather like ignoring every other page while reading a book: the resulting account isn’t just incomplete, but is misleading to the point of incoherence.83 For while Christianity and Islam often clashed and collided, they also coexisted, conversed, and collaborated across these supposedly impermeable barriers and impenetrable boundaries of confessional identity, and they did so in many places, in many forms, and in a long sequence of interaction and fusion.84 According to the historian Richard Fletcher, having observed the full range and complexity of the Christian-Islam interconnection and interaction during this period, “wherever and whenever we direct our gaze, we find a diversity in the type or the temperature of the encounter.”85 And it was such diversity of behavior on the part of Christians and Muslims, as they encountered and engaged with each other at levels that were more usually individual (and accommodating) than collective (and conflictual), and on many matters that often had little if anything to do with faith, that constantly counsels against depicting their relations as a perpetual Manichean confrontation, in which religious identities trump and transcend all others.

  Such, at least, are the measured and evenhanded conclusions reached by the most careful scholars and thoughtful historians who in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, have studied the many and varied encounters between Christianity and Islam, for they have roundly rejected the historical claim of unbroken animosity and perpetual conflict between these two religious faiths extending all the way back to the Crusades (and before) and all the way up to the present (and beyond).86 On the contrary, the evidence is clear that Christians and Muslims have often lived together constructively and amicably, that they have taught one another much about how to live, and that they have learned a great deal from each other. When looked at as a whole, the “Islamo-Christian world” has much more in common and binding it together than it has forcing it apart.87 Throughout history, its inhabitants have traded, studied, negotiated, and eaten, imbibed, and loved across what have often been the porous frontiers of their religious differences. According to the global historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “a true history of Muslim-Christian relations would encourage tolerance and convince us that collaboration is normal.… For most of history, in most places, Muslims and Christians have been at peace and have lived in mutual respect.”88 That may be overstating the case, but not by much, and it remains a case that needs making (and a perspective that deserves expression) ever more insistently and repeatedly in our post-9/11 world.

  CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANTS

  One of the prime reasons why these interfaith relations between paganism and Christianity, and Christianity and Islam, were so complex, ambiguous, localized, nuanced, and individualized was the invariable tendency of these ostensibly monolithic religious beliefs and confessional identities to fracture and fragment, and this was something of which Gibbon was very well aware. The Decline and Fall is full of discussion (and on occasion derision) of the fissures and the schisms that characterized the Christian church almost from the very beginning, and although Gibbon was less well informed about this matter in the case of Islam, one of his original and lasting insights was to suggest that conflicts within the same religious identity were in practice more bitter and more divisive than confrontations between different creeds: “all that history has recorded,” he noted, was “that the Christians, in the course of their intestine dissentions, have inflicted far greater severities on each other, than they have experienced from the zeal of infidels.”89 Using a rather different mode of approach and analysis, Sigmund Freud would subsequently make the same point, when he explored what he termed “the narcissism of minor differences”: “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well,” he argued, “who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other.”90

  The major consequences of such “minor differences” generating “constant feuds” within ostensibly unified communities were devastatingly displayed between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries, even as the encounters between “Christianity” and “Islam” continued. Across this hundred-year span, the Protestant Reformation and its rejoinder, the Catholic or Counter-Reformation, led religious persecution and conflict on a scale Europe had not witnessed before and would not since. Switzerland was the site of the first such faith confrontations, between 1529 and 1531. The next occurred in the Holy Roman Empire, where the Schmalkaldic War erupted in 1546, to be followed by the so-called Princes’ War, which would not end definitively until 1555 with the Peace of Augsburg. But these were mere skirmishes compared to the French Wars of Religion and the Dutch Revolt against Catholic Spain, which took place during the second half of the sixteenth century, and these would be followed by the British Civil Wars, the Polish Deluge, and the Thirty Years War during the first half of the seventeenth.91 The result was widespread material devastation, economic ruin, and a terrible loss of life. From the time of Martin Luther’s first protests in 1517 until the negotiation of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Europe was increasingly a divided continent: torn between those who espoused Catholic Christianity and those who embraced the Protestant alternative, the two sides seemingly locked in what Thomas Hobbes would call “the war of every man against every man.”92

  This in turn meant that many God-fearing Europeans came to view what had once been their shared confessional world according to a grotesque earthly interpretation of the Manichean division between the (saved) sheep and the (damned) goats that Christ had outlined in Matthew’s Gospel.93 For during these continental “wars of religion,” the battle between good and evil, or between truth and falsehood, or between the light and darkness, or between the forces of Christ and those of the devil was no longer between Christians and those believers in other deities or in none; instead the conflict was among those who subscribed to one version of Christianity and those who subscribed to another. From this perspective, “heretics,” whose beliefs were by definition perverted and debased, and who espoused an erroneous interpretation of the Gospels, were much more reprehensible than “infidels,” who did not recognize the Gospels at all.94 In such a confrontation between those who differed about how to worship the very same God, there appeared to be no scope for compromise or conversation or coexistence. As (the Protestant) King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden put it in an unyielding letter to his brother-in-law, the elector of Brandenburg, written in 1630, at a crucial stage in the Thirty Years War, “I don’t want to hear about neutrality. His grace must be my friend or foe.… This is a fight between God and the Devil. If his grace is with God, he must join me, if he is for the Devil, he must fight me. There is no third way.”95

  These belligerent remarks were not unusual, and they help explain why the Reformation era came to be regarded as one of irreconcilable creedal extremism and confessional polarization. For in such a world of opinion and belief, the very idea of toleration seemed tantamount to condoning theological error, and the slope leading from doctrinal disagreements down through judicial persecution to full-scale war between Catholic and Protestant communities would prove both slippery and seductive. The biblical injunction “he that is not with me is against me” now became a clarion call—for princes and armies to confront each other on battlefields across Europe; for popes to excommunicate wayward rulers and their erring subjects; for assassins to murder sovereigns in the name of the one true religion; for scholars and theologians and polemicists to scorn, mock, deride, and denounce their opponents; for lynch mobs and blood
baths such as the “massacre” of French Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s Day 1572; and for individuals to be imprisoned, tortured, and burned at the stake for having accepted (and refusing to renounce) the “wrong” version of the Christian faith. As the historian Sir Keith Thomas has observed, with an eye also turned to the confrontations of our own day, the Reformation’s rupture of Christianity “offers a salutary warning of the tragic consequences which follow when the world is envisaged as a cosmic battleground on which opposing forces of good and evil contend for supremacy.”96

  Many of Europe’s rulers and priests, generals and polemicists fanned the flames in the manner of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, habitually saluting their supporters and denouncing their opponents in stark, adversarial terms, and their intransigent utterances, irreconcilable attitudes, and belligerent deeds informed the no less partisan narrative histories of both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the earliest of them produced in the midst of the very events they sought to chronicle.97 Hence, on the one hand, the lengthy tradition of anti-Catholic writers, beginning with such figures as Johannes Pappus and Lucas Osiander the Elder in Germany, who sought to establish precedents in the early church for later Protestant practices—a tradition eventually encompassing such authors as W. E. H. Lecky, Lord Macaulay, and John Lothrop Motley, who traced and celebrated “the rise of toleration,” a barely disguised proxy for “the rise of Protestantism” and its triumph over the iniquities of “popery”—and on the other, an equally august lineage of Catholic historians from Cesare Baronio to Hilaire Belloc acclaiming the survival and revival of the one true church and denouncing schismatic and heretical Protestant “reformers” from Martin Luther onward. In the pages of these competing confessional histories, the battles of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation would continue to be fought again and again across subsequent centuries, thereby reasserting, reaffirming, and reinforcing these long-standing adversarial religious identities.98

  Yet while it may be true that “on every level, from the local to the international, co-religionists felt an impulse to make common cause with one another,” this picture of entrenched religious communities at war was by no means universally valid, even in the undeniably polarized Europe of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.99 As with the former divide between “paganism” and “Christianity,” or with the continuing confrontations between “Christianity” and “Islam,” neither the “Catholic” nor the “Protestant” side was as united, coherent, or monolithic as their prelates and princes repeatedly claimed at the time, and as partisan historians have regularly described since. By the end of the sixteenth century, Protestantism was no longer a single oppositional creed, in thrall to the commanding personality of Martin Luther, but had split and subdivided into many local and national variants: Calvinist in Geneva, Lutheran in North Germany and Scandinavia, Reformed in the Netherlands, Anglican in England, and Presbyterian in Scotland. There were also many deep divergences and disagreements among Roman Catholics, about reform, about doctrine, and about relations with the Protestant churches, which were lengthily (and sometimes acrimoniously) displayed and debated at the many meetings of the Council of Trent held between 1545 and 1563. Moreover, by the end of the sixteenth century virtually every European kingdom and principality was home to significant religious minorities, with the result that in many parts of the countryside, and in most major cities, from Paris to Augsburg, Basel to Amsterdam, Cologne to Vienna, Protestants and Catholics of whatever particular persuasion often lived close together and sometimes side by side, in intricate and irregular patterns that were impossible to map or control.100

  With the practical boundaries of collective religious identity far from clear or agreed, it is scarcely surprising that conversations did take place across them, in some instances sponsored and supported by religious and political leaders. During the half century after Martin Luther’s initial protests, there remained hopes that the recent religious divide might be temporary, with some prelates and scholars making determined efforts to bridge the emerging doctrinal gaps and to promote engaged dialogue and negotiation. Such figures included the Italian cardinal Gasparo Contarini, Archbishop Hermann von Wied of Cologne, and Charles de Guise, the cardinal of Lorraine, on the Catholic side, and Martin Bucer and Philipp Melanchthon, both of them renowned Protestant scholars.101 The most significant of such gatherings, known as the Colloquy of Poissy, was held in 1561 in a small town on the Seine north of Paris. It was summoned by the French queen regent, Catherine de’ Medici, on behalf of her young son, King Charles IX, and by the cardinal of Lorraine, with both Protestants and Catholics invited in an attempt to accomplish a general reunion of the churches. Here, and at the Colloquy of Nantes held in the following year, were serious people engaged in serious conversations, and making serious attempts to avert a permanent split in western Christendom, by seeking a “third way” of conciliation and accommodation rather than proclaiming and entrenching a Manichean division between Catholics and Protestants.102

  There were also some lay writers who tried to outline a middle position between the ostensibly irreconcilable “confessional totalities” of Catholicism and Protestantism.103 One such figure was the poet and philologist Sebastian Castellio, who in 1554 published a work entitled Concerning Heretics: Whether They Are to Be Persecuted and How They Are to Be Treated in response to the execution of a Spanish physician named Michael Servetus. Heretics, he insisted, should never be executed, by Catholics or Protestants, and certainly not (as in this case) at the behest of John Calvin.104 Another such writer was Jean Bodin, who in The Six Books of the Republic, published in 1576, expounded the “political” and “prudential” case for religious moderation. Public disputes about faith, he urged, brought all matters concerning belief into disrepute, and if they took on a belligerent character, they might bring ruin to the state. Accordingly, Bodin argued that where a new branch of the Christian faith found firm support in society at large, it was a matter of common sense for the authorities to tolerate it rather than persecute it. Over a decade later, he returned to these subjects in The Sevenfold Colloquium, a sequence of six dialogues among seven wise men, each representing a different point of view: Lutheran, Calvinist, Catholic, Jew, Arab, Skeptic, and Natural Rationalist. At the close, they part, never to converse on such subjects again. Their harmonious discourse on religious differences was over, and the reader is left to decide whether this transfaith conversation was a dead end—or perhaps the promise of a way forward.105

  With cogent arguments for religious moderation and dialogue being made, even as divisions were hardening and intensifying elsewhere on the continent, some European rulers sought to promote accommodation and conversation between Catholics and Protestants. Hence in Transylvania the Declaration of Torda, passed by the Diet in 1568, which set down that ministers should everywhere be free to preach and proclaim the Gospel “according to their understanding of it,” and that “no one is permitted to threaten to imprison or banish anyone because of their teaching, because faith is a gift from God.” Likewise, in Poland-Lithuania, the nobility approved the Confederation of Warsaw of 1573, in which it was agreed that “we who differ with regard to religion will keep the peace with one another, and will not for a different faith or change of churches shed blood nor punish one another by confiscation of property, infamy, imprisonment or banishment.”106 Similarly, in France, the Edict of Nantes, promulgated by King Henri IV in 1598, established the sort of religious compromise that successive monarchs had been seeking since the time of the Colloquy of Poissy, allowing freedom of worship in perpetuity for Catholic and Protestants alike, in return for acknowledgments of loyalty to the crown. Thus did France reject the Manichean divisions that had previously damaged and disfigured it during its Wars of Religion, and for most of the seventeenth century it stood, alongside Transylvania and Poland-Lithuania, for compromise and toleration in matters of belief.107

  Although often regarded as the ultimate European conflict over faith and God, t
he Thirty Years War was a further indication that monolithic religious identities, and their attendant antagonisms and confrontations, were in practice increasingly difficult to justify or sustain. In his conduct of French foreign policy, Cardinal Richelieu held the view that “the interests of a state and the interests of religion are two entirely different things.” He thus not only respected the provisions of the Edict of Nantes, but even entered into an alliance with Protestant powers in his country’s battles against the Catholic Habsburgs.108 Likewise, Pope Urban VIII, who was Richelieu’s contemporary, was no friend of Catholic Spain or the Spanish Habsburgs, and on occasion he even gave thanks for the victories of Protestant “heretics.” In the same way, the Protestant prince Gábor Bethlen of Transylvania was prepared to negotiate with the Catholic Holy Roman emperor, with a view to gaining territories in Hungary. Differences of religion were thus no impediment to cooperation, and confessional commonality was no guarantee of collaboration: no Protestant rulers came to the aid of their coreligionist, the king of Bohemia, when his lands were invaded by a Catholic army at the behest of the Holy Roman emperor.109 Among Catholic and Protestant rulers alike, practicality and considerations of statecraft increasingly won out over religious commitment, as was made plain in the Peace of Westphalia, which brought the Thirty Years War to an end. According to the principle of cuius regio, cuius religio, each ruler would have the right to determine the religion of his own state, but Christians living in principalities where their denomination was not the established church were also guaranteed the right to practice their faith in public during allotted hours and in private at their will.110