Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages - Softcover

Nirenberg, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691165769 ISBN 13: 9780691165769

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

In the wake of modern genocide, we tend to think of violence against minorities as a sign of intolerance or, even worse, a prelude to extermination. In Communities of Violence, David Nirenberg argues that violence in the Middle Ages functioned differently. Focusing on attacks against minorities in fourteenth-century France and the Crown of Aragon, he argues that these attacks were often perpetrated not by irrational masses laboring under inherited ideologies and prejudices, but by groups that manipulated and reshaped the available discourses on minorities.

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David Nirenberg is the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he is also dean of the Division of the Social Sciences and the founding director of the Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society.

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In the wake of modern genocide, we tend to think of violence against minorities as a sign of intolerance, or, even worse, a prelude to extermination. Violence in the Middle Ages, however, functioned differently, according to David Nirenberg. In this provocative book, he focuses on specific attacks against minorities in fourteenth-century France and the Crown of Aragon (Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia). He argues that these attacks - ranging from massacres to verbal assaults against Jews, Muslims, lepers, and prostitutes - were often perpetrated not by irrational masses laboring under inherited ideologies and prejudices, but by groups that manipulated and reshaped the available discourses on minorities. Nirenberg shows that their use of violence expressed complex beliefs about topics as diverse as divine history, kingship, sex, money, and disease, and that their actions were frequently contested by competing groups within their own society.

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Communities of Violence

Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages

By David Nirenberg

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1996 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-16576-9

Contents

Preface to the New Paperback Edition, vii, 
Acknowledgments, xvii, 
Abbreviations, xix, 
Introduction, 3, 
CHAPTER ONE The Historical Background, 18, 
PART ONE: CATACLYSMIC VIOLENCE: FRANCE AND THE CROWN OF ARAGON, 
CHAPTER TWO France, Source of the Troubles: Shepherds' Crusade and Lepers' Plot (1320, 1321), 43, 
CHAPTER THREE Crusade and Massacre in Aragon (1320), 69, 
CHAPTER FOUR Lepers, Jews, Muslims, and Poison in the Crown (1321), 93, 
PART TWO: SYSTEMIC VIOLENCE: POWER, SEX, AND RELIGION, 
CHAPTER FIVE Sex and Violence between Majority and Minority, 127, 
CHAPTER SIX Minorities Confront Each Other: Violence between Muslims and Jews, 166, 
CHAPTER SEVEN The Two Faces of Sacred Violence, 200, 
EPILOGUE The Black Death and Beyond, 231, 
Bibliography of Works Cited, 251, 
Index, 281, 

CHAPTER 1

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

IN MODERN TEXTS the words "fourteenth century" are often accompanied by others such as "calamitous" and "crisis." To demographers at least, this must surely be the bleakest of medieval centuries. The previous three hundred years had been expansive ones during which European plows conquered new territories, agricultural productivity increased, trade recovered, and the population grew. By 1300, however, with little fertile earth left to find, agricultural yields (always appallingly low by modem standards) began to fall. A civilization that in the previous century had effortlessly raised new cities, new cathedrals, new governments, came to weigh more and more heavily on its countryside. The result was famine. In 1315–1318, for example, bad weather and bad harvests resulted in "the great" famine that affected most of northern Europe. Hunger and its attendant diseases reduced the population of some areas (like Essex in England) by as much as 15 percent. The Mediterranean basin, spared in 1315–1318, suffered similar dearth in the early 1330s culminating in 1333, a year that Catalans would later call, with hindsight, "the first bad year." These were reminders, if any were needed, that medieval society was walking a knife-edge. Premodern demography is scarcely an exact science, but it appears that the population of Europe grew very little, and perhaps fell slightly, between 1300 and 1347.

Nevertheless, it was not famine but the arrival of the bacillus Yersinia pestis in 1348 that definitively awarded the fourteenth century the title of "calamitous." No precise demographic instruments are needed to measure the effect on the European population of the arrival of the Black Death: whether the death toll was 25 or 50 percent, it was a disaster. The epilogue discusses some of the initial reactions to this disaster and their importance for the treatment of minorities. Here it is sufficient to point out that the fourteenth century pivoted on a mortality so massive, so widespread, and so unexpected that it has few parallels in any age.

Hunger and plague might be attributed to divine wrath. War was a more immediately human failing, and an increasingly expensive one. The fourteenth century was a century of war. It opened with Philip the Fair's wars against England in Aquitaine (1294–1303) and against Flanders (1302–1305), and closed in the midst of the so-called Hundred Years War (1337–1453). Besides destroying people and property, these conflicts further depressed economies already fragile. Even the most bloodless of these wars, like the one in Aquitaine, proved extraordinarily expensive. Armies, then as today, needed to be paid, and kings paid them with funds raised by taxes. The machinery of royal fiscality therefore grew more oppressive at the same time as resources were diminishing, producing conflict.

Some of this conflict occurred between kings and their subjects. If in the thirteenth century kings tended to claim and exercise greater and greater power, these claims were increasingly, sometimes violently, challenged in the fourteenth. Baronial rebellions and tax revolts against monarchs occurred throughout Europe, the deposition and murder of England's Edward II (1327) and of Castile's Peter the Cruel (1369) being the most dramatic examples. But many other social relations were also polarized: between urban elites and laborers, city dwellers and countryfolk, peasants and seigneurs.

Relations between minorities and majority suffered as well. The history of minorities can easily be made to parallel the cataclysms of the fourteenth century. Jews, for example, were expelled from England in 1290; from France in 1306, 1322 (or 1327), and 1394. They were massacred in Germany in 1298, 1336–1338, and 1348; in France in 1320 and 1321. Lepers were attacked, imprisoned, or burned in France in 1321; witches were pursued more or less everywhere after 1348. For minorities, the fourteenth was among the most violent of centuries.

* * *

Within this general European context the Crown of Aragon was in some ways exceptional, in others not. Like the rest of Europe, the Crown suffered from food shortages and famine (e.g., the "first bad year" of 1333, the "year of the great hunger" in 1347, the "bad year" of 1374), from plague, and from war. Some of these wars, like the eternal campaigns against Sardinia, were at least fought away from home. Others—for example, the long "War of the Two Peters," which broke out in 1356 between Peter the Ceremonious (1336–1387) of Catalonia-Aragon and Peter the Cruel (1350-1369) of Castile—were bloody and destructive affairs from which the Crown's economy took decades to recover. All these wars had one thing in common: they were expensive.

Like other European monarchs, the kings of Catalonia-Aragon found their attempts to extend the reach of royal power increasingly resisted by barons and burghers alike. In the Crown of Aragon this resistance sporadically took the form of "unions," sworn confederations of nobles and municipalities mobilized to assert their privileges against the monarchy. In this they were more successful than elites in other countries. At times, and particularly in 1347–1348, the conflict between king and unions was indistinguishable from civil war. In 1347 King Peter was forced to ratify the Aragonese Union's demands to avoid being taken prisoner. For the next year he waged war against the nobles and cities of two of his kingdoms, Aragon and Valencia, and lost. Only the arrival of the plague allowed the defeated king to escape imprisonment in Valencia and reconquer his territories. The bitterness of the conflict is apparent in the king's professed desire after his victory to raze the city of Valencia and sow it with salt. When his advisers counseled against this, he contented himself with beheading and drowning some rebels, as well as forcing others to drink the molten metal of the bell that they had forged to call their cohort to arms.

In all these categories of calamity Europe and the Crown of Aragon were more or less congruent. But there were also more structural similarities in areas that specifically affected the treatment of minorities. For example, virtually the same general legal and ethical principles justified to Christians the existence of Jews throughout Christian Europe. It is tempting to argue that the Islamic concept of dhimmi status survived in Spain even after that land...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691165769
• ISBN 13: 9780691165769
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar