How Medieval Ethnoreligious Cleansing Shaped Western Europe

Şener Aktürk discusses his International Security article “Not So Innocent: Clerics, Monarchs, and the Ethnoreligious Cleansing of Western Europe.” In it, the author points out that ethnic cleansing and genocide are not only a contemporary problems. He traces them back to the 11th century in Western Europe, when the Catholic Church and clergy began to drive out all non-Catholics, including Jews and Muslims, in order to consolidate their own power. This history helps explain the sometimes violent tensions in Western Europe today over demography, immigration, and who “belongs” and who does not.

Could you give us a brief overview of your article? 

In this article, I explain how and why all Jews and all Muslims across medieval Western European polities that correspond to present-day England, France, Portugal, and Spain, as well as all Muslims and most Jews across Hungary and Italy, were eradicated through a mixture of expulsions, forced conversions, and massacres, roughly from 1059 until 1529. Such a complete ethnoreligious cleansing across numerous countries was historically unprecedented, and this development made Western Europe the most religiously homogeneous region in the world at that time. 

One finds outbursts of religious persecution, sporadic massacres, or local expulsions in many parts of the non-Western world where non-Catholic and non-Christian traditions prevailed at the elite or the popular level. Apart from late medieval Western Europe, however, all other comparable regions of the world had groups of people who publicly affiliated with different religions and sects. 

Across many different regions of Eurasia and Africa, Jews, Muslims, and non-Orthodox Christians have lived under Orthodox Christian rule; Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Zoroastrians have lived under Muslim rule; Christians and Muslims have lived under Buddhist and Hindu rule; and Jews and Muslims have lived under Coptic Christian rule, among other examples. 

Only in the key Western European polities that I examine in my article did the entire population, across numerous neighboring countries and societies, publicly and nominally adhere to a single religion and sect, namely, the Roman Catholic Church. This was the result of the eradication of Jews, Muslims, and other non-Christians over several centuries. 

Moreover, four of these polities, namely, England, France, Portugal, and Spain, later became the greatest Western powers. They shaped the rest of the world through their colonial empires. The momentous and exceptional religious demographic transformation in their history has global consequences. The Americas and the Oceania became the most Christian continents on earth, which is a direct consequence of the late medieval story I tell in my article. If Jews and Muslims of England, France, Portugal, and Spain were not completely eradicated, we could have had very sizeable Jewish and Muslim populations among the Western Europeans who settled the Americas and Oceania.

 The virulent backlash against immigration and religious diversity in Western European countries that we observe at present also has to do with what I explain in my article. These European countries achieved an unprecedented level of religious demographic homogeneity at least five centuries ago if not earlier, and therefore the appearance of non-Christian people and public manifestations of their non-Christian cultures and religions in Western Europe come as an extraordinary shock that they have difficulty dealing with. Against this historical background, it is somewhat unsurprising to me that it is in this corner of the world that there have been many attempts to ban religious headscarves, minarets, call to the prayers, circumcision of boys, and ritual animal slaughter. You had the church, the mosque, the synagogue, and various temples in close proximity in places like Egypt, Lebanon, India, and Russia for centuries if not millennia, so they have a good idea of what the coexistence of different religious customs entails, but that is not the case for much of Western Europe until the recent waves of migration, precisely because historic communities of Jews and Muslims were completely eradicated in the late medieval period.

What is the conventional wisdom on this subject?

What happened across numerous medieval Western European polities, the eradication of all Jews, Muslims, and others deemed as non-Christians, is what we would today call ethnoreligious cleansing or genocide. 

The conventional wisdom on genocide is that it is a modern phenomenon. Many scholars associate genocide with the rise of modern nationalism, and some also associate it with the rise of modern democracy and highly contentious elections. Genocide is mostly seen as a terrible and yet common consequence of modern state- and nation-building. Other scholars highlight the dynamics of partisan competition in new democracies that stoke ethnoreligious tensions and facilitate state-sanctioned pogroms. 

If you randomly pick a scholarly book on ethnic cleansing and genocide, most likely all or almost all the cases discussed in it will be modern cases and even mostly 20th century cases. In a nutshell, the conventional wisdom sees ethnic cleansing and genocide as modern phenomena, committed by nationalist actors, motivated by political and secular goals, and committed at the national, local, or communal level.

What’s wrong with that argument?

The arguments in the extant scholarship on ethnic cleansing and genocide fail to explain the chronology, the actors, the motivations, and the geographic scale of the ethnoreligious cleansing of Jews, Muslims, and other non-Christians across medieval Western Europe. 

First, ethnoreligious cleansing of Jews and Muslims in Western Europe took place during the Middle Ages, and thus it is clearly not a modern phenomenon. Second, it was not committed by nationalist actors. Instead, it was primarily engineered by religious actors, namely, the Catholic clergy under papal leadership. Third, although papal-clerical actors had a political motivation in seeking the eradication of Jews and Muslims, they also clearly had a religious motivation. Fourth, the eradication of Jews, Muslims, and others deemed non-Christian by the Catholic Church was not limited to a specific national, local, or communal unit. It was continental in its scale and global in its aspirations. 

In all four of these dimensions, the chronology, actors, motivations, and scale, the conventional arguments fail to explain my puzzle. Therefore, my argument revises the existing accounts of ethnic cleansing and genocide by discovering and explaining the medieval origins, religious motivations, and supranational actors of ethnoreligious cleansing across Western Europe. 

I would like to emphasize that existing modernist accounts of ethnic cleansing and genocide explain the modern cases well, perhaps because they were inductively built by studying mostly 20th century cases. 

I am suggesting that there is an alternative supranational path to ethnoreligious cleansing, led by a priestly class, that has been overlooked. It explains, among other momentous outcomes, why there is not a single Jewish or Muslim community that survived anywhere in Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the present. 

What is your argument and why is it better?

I argue that the Catholic clergy under papal leadership became exceptionally powerful supranational actors starting with the Gregorian Reforms of the late 11th century. These papal-clerical actors successfully coerced Catholic monarchs across Western Europe to eliminate all Jews, Muslims, and other people whom the Catholic clergy deemed non-Christians. 

Papal-clerical actors punished monarchs who protected non-Christians and refused to eradicate them. They deposed and replaced these monarchs with other rulers whom the papal-clerical actors favored. In contrast, papal-clerical actors often rewarded and supported monarchs who eradicated non-Christians. 

In other words, Catholic clergy under papal leadership acted as “kingmakers” in medieval Western Europe. In this, they differed from any comparable religious authority in other parts of the world and in other religious traditions. 

For example, neighboring Western Europe to the east and south, Orthodox Christian and Islamic religious authorities did not depose and replace monarchs, and societies under Orthodox Christian and Islamic dynasties across Eurasia and Africa remained far more religiously diverse than Western Europe for centuries.

The exceptional power of the papal-clerical actors after the Gregorian Reforms is the first but not the only factor that explains the ethnoreligious cleansing of Western Europe. The gradual increase in papal-clerical powers in the decades and centuries following the Gregorian Reforms explains the increasing ability of the papal-clerical actors to shape Western European politics, but it does not explain their motivation to eradicate non-Christians.

Second, the main political power struggle in medieval Catholic Europe was between the clergy and the monarchs, and although this power struggle was not primarily over non-Christians, all non-Christians were eliminated during this struggle because they were identified as monarchical assets, literally monarchical property, by the early 13th century. Jews and Muslims were classified as inhuman property because of their refusal to convert to Christianity. This made them obvious targets for the clerics. 

Also related to this second point on clerical motivations to eliminate non-Christians, the refusal of Jews and Muslims to convert to Christianity even after decades under Catholic rule shook the Christians’ faith in the superiority of Christianity. It even stoked clerical fears that Christians themselves would convert to Judaism and Islam as they encountered Jews and Muslims in everyday life.

Third and finally, the fierce geopolitical competition among the many small states and other polities in Western Europe made it possible for the papal-clerical actors to successfully pressure, depose, and replace monarchs who would otherwise protect non-Christians. 

If Western Europe had had geopolitically hegemonic empires such as the Orthodox Christian Byzantine and Russian empires or the Islamic Mughal and Ottoman empires, probably the emperors could have successfully resisted the papal-clerical actors and perhaps even completely subordinated the papal-clerical actors to the imperial authority, as happened in other parts of the world. But Western Europe did not have a hegemonic empire after the Roman Empire split in 395 with the death of Emperor Theodosius. 

These three factors together explain the eradication of Jews, Muslims, and other non-Christians across medieval Western Europe. Given similar configurations of domestic and international power, other supranational priestly authorities with committed adherents around the world, whether it be the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or the Twelver Shiite Supreme Leader of Iran, could and did play similar roles in modern times. Soviet leadership supported communist factions across intrastate conflicts from Afghanistan to Vietnam, whereas the Iranian clerical leadership supported Shiite factions across intrastate conflicts from Iraq and Lebanon to Syria and Yemen.