Although he was not the first to do so, canonist and Dominican master general Raymond Penafort (d. 1275) tidily shows how medieval Latin Christians created a single demographic that was set in opposition to Raymond's orthodox co-religionists.
Writing in his Summa de paenitentia et de matrimonio, Raymond considered ‘those who dishonor God by worshiping vilely, namely Jews, heretics, and Saracens'.1 Closer to our own time, gathering Christianity's ‘others' together in a single scholarly view is already apparent in the late nineteenth century, in the French historian and archivist Ulysse Robert's investigation of mass persecution of Christian Europe's medieval ‘others' through the imposition of external signs.[922] [923] And as is well known among medieval historians, R.
I. Moore brought together Jews, heretics, Muslims, lepers and homosexuals as a class of ‘out-groups' demonised by Latin Christians in the high Middle Ages, ‘created' by them and redefined for purposes of state and clerical power. This has prompted debate within medieval historiography over violence against religious others as a new component of, in Moore's words, a high medieval ‘persecuting society'.[924] Understanding medieval Christian violence against different groups as a single unitary project, then, has a long history, with modern scholarship reflecting medieval categorisations.This chapter surveys violence imposed by medieval western European Christians upon their chief religious ‘others': heretics, Jews and Muslims. A primary challenge is to mediate similarities and differences in the experience of each. Orthodox Christians had associated Jews and heretics since antiquity; after the coming of Islam in the seventh century, Muslims were added in a pure triangulation of imagery and polemic. This happened in two ways: Christians employed similar tropes for all three (sexual licence, demonism), and built actual historical links between them (for example, Christians commonly credited the birth of Islam to monophysite Christian heretics, sometimes in league with heterodox Jews).
Medieval violence against all three lay within, and was influenced by, a single totalising Christian spiritual geography born in antiquity but expanded in the Middle Ages. Still, while the norm in analysis is often usefully collective, we will try below to disassemble the differences in why and how Christians wielded violence against each.Many diversities and contingencies cripple a single, easy narrative of Christian violence against Jews, heretics and Muslims. Within Latin Europe, Christians and their religious minorities had varying situations; there were places of common coexistence, and places without it. Muslims were geographically limited in the Latin West, while Jewish communities were more common and widespread, with thriving urban centres as well as less visible rural presences. ‘Heretics' were inherently more demographically slippery, as this identity within Christianity in many ways depended on perspective and judgement - it was readily possible to disagree on whether someone was a heretic or not - and it could be denied, or change quickly with retraction and penance.[925] A heretic's return to orthodoxy happened much more frequently in medieval Europe than did conversion from Judaism or Islam. Christian violence against religious others also had various domains, from street to court, and various forms. It was imposed formally by people in power, or in moments of impulsive chaos; it was committed by individuals, institutions and armies. It was ad hoc and planned, deviant and formalised, incorporating street fights, pogroms, crusades, executions, conversions by force and expulsions. And for Jews, Muslims and heretical Christians alike, the real violence to which they were subject was accompanied by various forms of secular and ecclesiastical legal restraint, control and supervision - for example, bars to holding office or serving as witnesses - and we should remember this broader context of repression.
Moreover, Latin Christian violence against religious others did not result from the same reasons in all cases, and multiple motivations could coexist.
Christian violence could be simultaneously savvily instrumental and genuinely pious.[926] This is one reason why we will emphasise what this violence tells us about Christianity and its historical mutations. Christian violence tells us primarily about orthodox Christian conceptions and constructions of their faith, and not chiefly about the daily experiences of medieval Jews, heretics and Muslims. This runs the risk of not taking that experience seriously, or implying that the Christian response was sensible.6 But the key lesson here for the history of violence is Christianity's ability to generate it. The violence we see below was expressly Christian, not despite the theological and historical foundations of the faith, but rather because of them. One way to connect Christian belief with Christian violence is the work done by clerical ideology, via different media, in inspiring, fomenting and justifying violence in medieval Europe. As we will see, Christian violence depended upon accusations of prefatory violence by Jews, heretics and Muslims. This supposed violence was diverse: it had souls, bodies, Christianity and Christ himself as targets; it did not occur just in the present, but ranged over the past. This is fundamental in understanding Christian violence against religious minorities: as earthly, gritty and corporeal as it was, Christians often proposed it to themselves as resting within a transcendent complex of divine and human violence; not as proactive eradication, but as pious defensive response.