Luigi Andrea Berto - Christians under the Crescent and Muslims under the Cross c.630 - 1923

This book examines the status that rulers of one faith conferred onto their subjects belonging to a different one, how the rulers handled relationships with them, and the interactions between subjects of the Muslim and Christian religions.

The chronological arc of this volume spans from the first conquests by the Arabs in the Near East in the 630s to the exchange between Turkey and Greece, in 1923, of the Orthodox Christians and Muslims residing in their territories. Through organized topics, Berto analyzes both similarities and differences in Christian and Muslim lands and emphasizes how coexistences and conflicts took directions that were not always inevitable. Primary sources are used to examine the mentality of those who composed them and of their audiences. In doing so, the book considers the nuances and all the features of the multifaceted experiences of Christian subjects under Muslim rule and of Muslim subjects under Christian rule.

Christians under the Crescent and Muslims under the Cross is the ideal resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in the relationships between Christians and Muslims, religious minorities, and the Near East and the Mediterranean from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century.

Luigi Andrea Berto is professor of History at Western Michigan University (USA). His research focuses on Medieval Italy and the Mediterranean, with a special interest in the use of the past in the medieval and modern periods, and the relationships between Christians and Muslims.

First published 2021

by Routledge

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2021 Luigi Andrea Berto

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ISBN: 978-0-367-60855-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-10074-4 (ebk)

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I wish to thank Laura Pilsworth for accepting this volume for publication, the staff at Routledge, Chiara Frison, Delphine, Stefano Trovato, my brother Massimo, Roberto Pesce, Massimiliano Vitiello, Joe Brandao, Jason Glatz, Tony Shugaar, and Matthew Trojacek for their help.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, in response to an ill-omened event (the appearance of a dog on Jerusalems Esplanade of Mosques, an animal greatly despised by Muslims), the Ottoman authorities decided to eliminate all dogs. They, therefore, required all Christians to bring one, kill it in their presence, and pay a sum of cash; the Jews were assigned the task of burying the carcasses of those slain animals.

Harking back to relations with the faithful of Islam prior to the Balkan Wars in 1912, an Orthodox Christian woman of Anatolia declared: Before the war, we lived in peace with the Turks. We got along like brothers. They came to our homes, and we went to theirs. The Turks attended our religious celebrations, our weddings, and our funerals.

Between 1184 and 1185, a Muslim traveled through Sicily, then under Christian rule for roughly a century at the time, and described how, during an earthquake, the servants of the royal palace had invoked the names of Allah and Muhammad and were greatly embarrassed when they saw the king, but they were reassured when the ruler said to them: Let each of you call upon the name of the God he worships and believes in.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, all of Spains Muslim subjects, in contrast, were obliged to make a choice between converting to Christianity and abandoning their native land. Even the ones who converted were nevertheless expelled some hundred years later.

These are just a few examples of the considerable diversity of experiences encountered by Christian and Muslim subjects in territories under the government of rulers belonging to a faith different from their own. This situation developed in the aftermath of the victories and conquests of the believers in Islam between the seventh and ninth centuries, in areas between the Near East and the north of the Iberian Peninsula inhabited by the faithful of Christ. Between the second half of the eleventh century and the beginning of the early modern era, the Seljuq Turks and, later, the Ottoman Turks occupied Anatolia, much of the Balkan peninsula, and certain areas in Eastern Europe. Between the end of the eleventh century and the fifteenth century, the Christians took back possession of certain of those territories, whose population had in the meantime largely become Muslim (the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, and, for a little over a century, the region corresponding roughly to present-day Israel and Lebanon). With the exception of this latter area and a number of regions in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, the conquered peoples of both faiths evolved from a situation in which they had constituted a substantial majority of the inhabitants into one where they had shrunk to minority.

The aim of this book is to examine the status that was assigned to them, how the rulers managed relations with them, what relationships existed between the subjects of the two religions, and what methods were employed to eliminate or remove the corresponding minority in cases where its presence was considered deleterious. Taking into account the broad chronological sweep, the considerable regional differences, and the fact that the Muslims experienced that condition in the Middle Ages while the Christians underwent a similar experience until the end of the Ottoman Empire, the book is organized by themes, analyzing to the greatest extent possible both the similarities and differences of that multiplicity of experiences. I want to point out immediately that this approach does not spring from any wish to prove that everybody behaves in the same way in good and evil, but rather from a desire to point out how coexistence and conflict were conditioned by particular factors and circumstances, both of long-standing and general nature and others more recent and specific, and how they followed a given direction that was by no means, however, inevitable.

Since certain themes addressed in the book are rather controversial, I wish to emphasize that partisan sources will not be used to reconstruct the actual and factual nature of events, but rather to examine the mindset of those who produced them and of their intended recipients. As far as the chapter devoted to violence is concerned, I will consider only those cases in which the subjects were not involved in revolts and wars of independence and the suppression thereof. Those episodes, however, will be utilized to have a better understanding of the climate thereby created and to determine what repercussions they had on their co-religionists who were not involved in those conflicts.