Religious Conflict and Accommodation in the Early Modern World (review)

The new history of the ideas and practices of religious toleration is now global, and this volume fits very well in that trajectory. It covers both interreligious (Christians versus Muslims versus Hindus versus Chinese and more) and intra-religious (Shiite versus Sunni, Protestant versus Catholic and more) conflict and accommodation in many a variation on the theme.

The opening chapter by James D. Tracy makes the valuable point that all of the conflicts among Catholics and Protestants and dissenters in Europe took place against the background of the looming threat of Islam, and yet the Turks were often more worried about their conflicts with Persia than with the Europeans. War and peace between the two religious blocs were only the tip of the iceberg of raids, piracies, and incursions on the one hand and trade, cooperation, and peaceful interaction at the local level on the other. Different levels of conflict could become salient or recede in importance at different points in time.

Ideas counted and were manifold. Anne Marie Wolf analyzes a letter from Juan de Segovia of 1455 in which a strong case for toleration of Muslims is made almost exclusively from texts of the Bible, not from pragmatism, natural law, rationalism, or human rights. Wolf thinks the author’s concern for conversion may “not fit most conceptions of religious tolerance” (p. 61), but surely the term can be ample enough to include peaceful conversionists.

The Mughal emperor Akbar’s House of Religious Assembly, analyzed by Stephen Blake, brought together a breathtaking array of figures for discussion: Sufi, philosopher, orator, jurist, Sunni, Shia, Brahman, Jain, Nazarene, Jew, Zoroastrian, and others. The goal was “lasting reconciliation” as a political strategy for governing a very diverse empire, and it seems to have worked up to a point.

Denis Crouzet finds a transition in sixteenth-century France from understanding the king as a figure of violence—defender of the faith, punisher of evil—to representing him as a peacemaker. The king against his (and God’s) enemies morphed into the king as guarantor of civil peace. Accommodation of religious diversity was a duty of peace. A century later, that had changed again.

Transylvania was probably the most officially tolerant place in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with repeated decrees permitting Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, Arian (a heresy everywhere else), and even sometimes Orthodox services. Graeme Murdock explains that this can probably be attributed to the precariousness of frontier living, and the danger of provoking internal violence in the face of an external threat.

Timothy Brook tells the fascinating story of a Spanish-Chinese massacre in Luzon in 1639–40. In China, the state was strong enough to enforce accommodation from European merchants and missionaries. Not so in the Philippines. Economic distress led to a battle of the gods, and the Chinese merchants and farmers there lost, perhaps in part because their state would not back them overseas. The idea of henotheism caused the Spaniards to fight for the superiority of their deity, whereas the Chinese were accustomed to appealing to different gods at different times. And the Chinese center saw the Chinese who had strayed so far away as unfilial, in contrast to the Spanish view of their adventurers as righteous conquerors.

A chapter from Luca Codignola on conservatism as a survival strategy for the Catholic Church in North America, 1760–1829, is reprinted from the William and Mary Quarterly (2007). And Frederick Asher explores the reconstructions of Hindu history today that are used to justify encroachment on Muslim mosques. Nationalists seek conflict; local merchants seek accommodation so they can live on tourism.

In books like this one, the history of the world is being rewritten as the history of variations on the theme of conflict and accommodation. The present may later be understood as part of...