Şener Aktürk discusses his recent article, “Not So Innocent: Clerics, Monarchs, and the Ethnoreligious Cleansing of Western Europe.” Ethnic cleansing is often seen as a specifically modern phenomenon. But as Akturk explains, the medieval Catholic Church facilitated the ethnoreligious cleansing of Muslim and Jewish communities across Western Europe. Akturk describes the geopolitical conditions that made this possible and his findings’ implications for twentieth- and twenty-first-century ethnic cleansing in places like Cambodia, Iraq, the Soviet Union, and Syria.
Guests:
Şener Aktürk is Professor of International Relations at Koç University in Istanbul, Türkiye.
International Security Article: Şener Aktürk, “Not So Innocent: Clerics, Monarchs, and the Ethnoreligious Cleansing of Western Europe,” International Security, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Spring 2024), pp. 87–136.
Originally released on June 18, 2024.
Jeff Friedman:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the International Security Podcast. We are produced by International Security, a quarterly journal edited at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and published by MIT Press. Each episode of the podcast highlights a piece of research from the journal, drawing out its implications for understanding the theory and practice of international politics. I'm Jeff Friedman, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College.
Today, we're speaking with Şener Aktürk. Sener is a professor of international relations at Koç University. His recent international security article is titled Not So Innocent: Clerics, Monarchs, and the Ethnoreligious Cleansing of Western Europe. The article describes the mass victimization of non-Christian minorities in Europe in the 11th to 16th centuries. Sener argues that this process profoundly shaped modern Europe and that its dynamics challenge conventional wisdom about the sources and conduct of ethnic cleansing more generally. Sener, congratulations on the article and thank you for joining us.
Şener Aktürk:
Thank you very much, Jeff, for giving me this opportunity.
Jeff Friedman:
Okay. Leading off, you write in your article that the significance of ethnoreligious cleansing in the making of modern Europe can hardly be overstated. Just start by telling us a bit about why that's the case.
Şener Aktürk:
Ethnoreligious cleansing of Western Europe shaped the populations of England, France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. To be clear, it made these five countries Christian-only politics and Catholic-only politics to begin with. These five countries include the first nation states and the first democracies in the world, and perhaps more importantly, the four largest colonial empires, namely England, France, Portugal, and Spain, which later shaped the rest of the world, including, of course, North and South America. Moreover, the First Nation States and the first democracies that appeared in Western Europe served as models for the rest of the world to emulate. And these First Nation States and the first democracies only had Christians as their citizens because of the ethnoreligious cleansing of medieval Western Europe that I discuss and explain in my article.
Jeff Friedman:
How do those demographic patterns shape Europe's politics today?
Şener Aktürk:
Since medieval Western Europe became the most religiously homogenous region in the world and remained as such for almost 500 years, it is not surprising that issues of religious diversity and multiculturalism challenge the very foundations of European democracies and nations today. Western European democracies started with an extremely homogenous Western Christian electorate and citizenry and with institutions, symbols, rituals that were shaped by Western Christian heritage. When these Western politics confront the challenge of non-Christian citizens, as they increasingly did with labor migrations in the postwar period, then the appeals of authoritarianism and populism increased and we have been observing demands for a majoritarian push to transform society by closing the door of citizenship and purging the non-Westerners who already acquired citizenship. For example, attempts to prohibit ritual animal slaughter and the attempts to ban circumcision of male children are just two examples of what the challenge of non-Christian populations, in this case, Jews and Muslims, means for Western European democracies today.
Jeff Friedman:
We'll come back to contemporary politics at the end of our conversation. Before we do that, I think it's important to understand the nature of the events that the paper describes. Can you just start by telling us a bit about the broad scale of the ethnoreligious cleansing that took place over the 500-year period the article covers?
Şener Aktürk:
There were sizable Jewish and Muslim communities living under Christian rule across medieval Western European countries that correspond to present-day England, France, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. All Muslim communities and almost all Jewish communities in Western Europe were eradicated between 1064 and 1526, and this process transformed Western Europe into a region that was unprecedented at that time in its religious homogeneity, in comparative perspective. No other region of the world had this kind of religious sectarian homogeneity at the time.
Jeff Friedman:
So that helps to establish the phenomenon in broad terms. Can you give us just one example of a specific place or time in which this cleansing gets carried out?
Şener Aktürk:
Sure. The story with the Jews and Muslims of Spain and Portugal or the Cathars in France or Jews of England and France are relatively better known and I discuss all of them in the article. But let me tell you briefly about Sicily and Italy, which is known less, but it's also chronologically the first example of this process. Sicily became majority Muslim by the late 11th century. Then it came under Christian role starting with the Normans. And Muslims lived under Christian role for the following two centuries. For example, some travelers at the time reported that there were 300 mosques in Palermo alone. The papacy punished Christian monarchs who protected Muslims and who had the support of Muslims. For example, Holy Roman emperor Otto IV who had the support of Muslims was excommunicated. The Pope supported French forces that came into Italy and defeated the emperor in 1240.
Another imperial representative, Markward from Annweiler, who also had the support of Sicilian Muslims was excommunicated. He was declared an infidel worse than the infidels, a crusade was launched against. Again, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II was excommunicated twice and his amicable relations with Muslims of Sicily figured very prominently in the papal politics against the Emperor. Frederick's son, Manfred, had the support of Muslims as well, and the Pope declared a crusade against him and actually offered the crown of Sicily to the son of the English king to get the English to fight the emperor. In the last phase of Muslim life in Italy, the papacy invited Charles the First of Anjou from France to fight against Manfred, which Charles did, and his army defeated Manfred and the Muslims in 1266, and they basically took over southern Italy and established the Angevin dynasty. It was the Angevin dynasty that eliminated the last major Muslim settlement in Italy, Lucera, and sold Muslims into slavery and killed those resisting enslavement. As a result today, there's not a single Muslim community that survived in Italy from the medieval to the present.
Jeff Friedman:
Yeah. One thing I'll say I found particularly fascinating about the article, it's just chockfull of these kinds of rich historical descriptions that really don't appear anywhere else in the contemporary international relations literature, so that's a real strength of this research. Let's pull out a bit to the conceptual contribution.
One of the things you say in your article is that this cleansing process played out in a manner that's very different from the events we've seen in places like the Balkans or Rwanda. Can you just say a bit about what made that behavior so distinctive? How does it challenge our conventional ideas about the nature of ethnic cleansing more generally?
Şener Aktürk:
Conventional wisdom about ethnic cleansing among academics is that ethnic cleansing is a modern phenomena that is committed by national and nationalist actors often for reasons of nation building that is for ultimately secular reasons. I'm challenging this so-called national wisdom by arguing that it was not national, but supernational actors, namely the papacy and the clergy who pushed for ethnic cleansing across Western Europe. They did this not for nationalist or secular reasons, but essentially for religious and factional reasons. Moreover, this ethnoreligious cleansing, which was truly continental in its scope, actually happened centuries before the dawn of modernity in the Middle Ages and especially in the 13th century.
Jeff Friedman:
This idea that the cleansing is carried out by supernational actors is so distinctive. I want to come back at the end of the conversation to potential parallels in today's world. First, let's understand just how that happened in medieval Europe. You say that the cleansing was driven by three main factors. There's the rise of clerics, the decision to target non-Christians, and geopolitical rivalry. Let's just go through each one in turn.
First, can you just tell us a bit about how Europe's clerics gained so much power that they were able to be the instrument of ethnic cleansing? One thing that the article does that's particularly fascinating is just describing the wide range of tools that clerics had at the time to coerce Europe's monarchies. Maybe just give us a brief flavor for what some of those tools entailed.
Şener Aktürk:
Sure. The rise of the clerics is absolutely essential to this process. Catholic clerics gained power in the 11th century as a result of a revolutionary upheaval of the clerics, those Gregorian reforms. The papacy declared the independence of the clergy from secular monarchical control across Europe. The clergy truly became a state within a state, and they did this across Europe, so they became more powerful in that way because of their continental reach.
The papacy insisted that monarchs cannot appoint bishops, which is the best known conflict in the Gregorian reforms known as the investiture controversy. The papacy developed many new tools, new instruments of power after the Gregorian reforms that did not exist before. Crusade is an obvious and very destructive example of these new powers, and the popes declared many crusades against Christian monarchs that they accused of protecting non-Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Chatars and others.
Interdict, which is depriving an entire territory from religious services due to the alleged sinful conduct of its secular ruler, is another such new tool. Mendicant religious orders such as the Dominicans and the Franciscans, military orders such as the Templars, people embargo, and excommunication in the form that we now know are also among these new instruments of papal clerical power that were new innovations that came after the Gregorian reform. All of these new papal powers were used in one way or another to put pressure on the monarchs to eradicate non-Christians.
Jeff Friedman:
It is just wild to learn about the extreme and widespread power that the church had at the time. That doesn't necessarily say why they chose to wield that power against non-Christian minorities. So why is it that the church escalates hostility against Jews and Muslims and other groups during the Middle Ages? What made it particularly important at that time for the church to carry out this ethnic cleansing?
Şener Aktürk:
Clerics attacked Jews and Muslims for two main reasons. First, Jewish and Muslim resistance to conversion shook the clerical belief in the superiority of Christianity. Furthermore, clerics even feared that Christians would convert to Judaism and Islam as they come into contact with Jews and Muslims respectively. In short, the clerics had their religious insecurity. That's the first reason. The second reason is that Jews and Muslims were seen as allies of the monarchs, and that is very important. My main argument is that Jews and Muslims were eliminated in what was essentially a struggle between the clerics and the monarchs, as the title of the article also reflects.
The struggle between clerics and the monarchs was not primarily about Jews and Muslims, it was about who would dominate and shape the Christian society, but Jews and Muslims were eliminated by papal clerical pressure in this struggle as allies and assets of the monarchs. This also goes against the conventional belief that portrays monarchs with their evil politics of state-building and self-enrichment as the main cause of religious persecution. I think that is not true, at least not true for the long medieval period that I studied. On the contrary, Jews and Muslims were often allies and assets of monarchs against clerical actors.
Jeff Friedman:
Yeah, that was one of many things that stood out to me about the article, the idea that because Jews and Muslims are perceived as allies of the state, it's exactly why they're targeted, whereas in the modern world, we typically think of marginalized minorities that are perceived as hostile to the state. So among the many things I learned here, that one really stood out.
Let's now talk about the third element of your explanation for how this process occurred, and that's how geopolitical competition in Europe creates a security dilemma between the monarchs and the clergy. How did that develop? How does the geopolitical structure of medieval Europe facilitate the clergy's ability to conduct ethnic cleansing?
Şener Aktürk:
Yes, Western Europe is almost unique in this respect as well. The division of Western Europe among relatively small politics without a hegemonic imperial power allowed the papacy to play the role of a kingmaker on some occasions. Popes claimed that they had the right to depose emperors since the Gregorian reforms. They could favor one dynasty over another by rewarding and punishing them through the numerous papal clerical instruments of power that we talked about, such as the crusades, excommunications, interdicts, approving and dissolving dynastic marriages.
The background condition of all of this, though, that allowed the papacy to play the role of a kingmaker was the geopolitical division of Western Europe, a region that did not have a hegemonic imperial power since the collapse of the Roman Empire. Western Europe had the longest fiercest bloodiest struggles for survival among numerous relatively small politics, kingdoms, princely states, most of which disappeared from the map today as a result of this competition.
Jeff Friedman:
Okay. Let me just ask you one more historical question and then we'll pull it back to contemporary politics. Why do you think these dynamics of ethnoreligious cleansing are unique to Western Europe at the time? So, for example, why don't we see similar phenomena playing out in the Muslim world or in the Orthodox world? Why is it the papacy in Western Europe as the supernational actor that is driving these dynamics and why is that so unique to Western Europe in the Middle Ages?
Şener Aktürk:
Religious authorities in other regions of the world did not have such a kingmaker role because those regions of the world had hegemonic imperial politics such as the Byzantine and the Russian empires, the Ottoman and the Mughal empires. Moreover, religious clerics could not play the role of a kingmaker by playing one empire against another and deposing Russian czars or Ottoman sultans because most of the caliphs in the Islamic empires were already the sultans. So the competition between the top religious clerical authority and the monarch was not possible because the same person was the monarch and the top religious authority at the same time. Moreover, Orthodox Christian and Islamic religious authorities, Patriarchates and Caliphates were not truly supernational in the sense that they did not have their own separate state, such as the papal states, and their religious authority was practically limited to the politic and parting the more sultanate that they were located in.
Jeff Friedman:
Yeah, that's just another really interesting illustration of how, I think today, we typically think of ethnoreligious cleansing as a domestic phenomenon relying on domestic politics, and I think your article really shows that the structure of the international system can play a crucial role in sparking that phenomenon. Okay. Now that we have a sense of the history, let's zoom out again. All of the events we've been talking about today took place 500 years ago. Catholic churches, obviously, very different today. Does that mean that this is just a history paper? Are the dynamics you describe here purely for understanding medieval Europe, or do you see any parallels in today's modern world?
Şener Aktürk:
There are definitely present-day parallels. For example, throughout the 20th century, a very secular parallel was the use of communist moments around the world by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and later by the Chinese Communist Party, which I find comparable to how the papacy used the clergy.
Soviets provided both political and material support to the communist insurgents and parties around the world who were fighting their non-communist fellow countrymen in civil wars. Chinese communists did the same later. Cambodia is one notorious example of this mechanism. Afghanistan could be another.
Jeff Friedman:
Yeah, that's really interesting. Are there any religious groups in today's world that you think might exert similar influence?
Şener Aktürk:
Sure. In the 21st century so far, Iran is able to use supernational Shiite clerical authority in its interventions across the Middle East today, disastrous consequences, especially in Syria, but also in Iraq and elsewhere. These interventions invariably involve demographic engineering. In fact, my article aims to explain the political historical origins of demographic engineering in the form of ethnoreligious cleansing, whether it is done by the papal clerical actors in Spain or communist actors in Cambodia or pro-Iranian forces in Syria. Their ultimate goal is not to conquer territory, their goal is to shape the demography in the territory that is being targeted. Assad regime and its pro-Iranian allies are settling Shiites from places where Sunni Muslims were forcibly removed with the end goal of making it impossible for the pre-war Sunni majority to reconstitute itself in Syria, for example.
Jeff Friedman:
Another work that was on my mind a bit as I read your article was Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, and I wonder if your argument sheds any light on the role that kind of supernational identity might play in contemporary politics?
Şener Aktürk:
Yes, Samuel Huntington states that the separation of religious and secular authority is a distinctive feature, a hallmark of Western civilization. And he compares it to Orthodox, Islamic, and other civilizations to emphasize this point, and I absolutely agree on that point. But Huntington emphasizes the positive aspects of this separation, whereas I argued that there was a dark side in the birth of Western civilization, and this dark side was directly related to the separation between the church and the state. In fact, the mechanism of ethnoreligious cleansing and genocide that I explained in this article would not be possible without a kind of separation between the church and state that developed in Western Christianity, especially with the Gregorian reforms, with the independence of the clergy.
So one obvious difference is that I attribute religious cleansing as being constitutive of Western civilization's birth, which probably would not be considered a positive feature by most people today, and it is absent in Huntington's works and in anyone else's work on the rise of the Western civilization that I know of. Another difference though is that I see Latin America as part of the Western civilization. In fact, as a direct consequence of what happened in medieval Western Europe, Latin America became the most Christian and the most Catholic continent in the world. Whereas, as you remember, Huntington defined Latin America as a non-Western separate civilization. So the main arguments of Clash of Civilizations received tremendous critical reception, and I can only hope that the arguments of Not So Innocent also provoke lively scholarly debates on the birth and rise of Western civilization and modernity.
Jeff Friedman:
I'm sure the article will provoke debate. One of the things that's just so distinctive about this piece in my view is that it literally spans a millennium of international politics. And as I said at the start, every page I found something I didn't know before. It's such a distinctive piece. Last question for you. For readers or listeners who are interested in these kinds of topics, either from historical or contemporary perspectives, can you give us some other books or articles that you'd recommend they might read?
Şener Aktürk:
I will and I will step out of political science, although I'm a political scientist into a really good medieval history in translation that I benefited a lot. So I'm going to read their titles first and then the names, so hopefully, I'll be able to correctly pronounce them. The first book is probably a classic in Medieval history. The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined by Georges Duby, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, published by University of Chicago Press 1980. And the second book, also a French book in translation, is called Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam, by Dominique Iogna-Prat, translated by Graham Robert Edwards, and published by Cornell University Press in 2000.
Jeff Friedman:
And what makes those works illuminating to you?
Şener Aktürk:
Because they give us such a rich picture and makes us feel the primary fault lines of medieval society and identity politics. That's why and how I benefited from reading these books. Although, as you and readers see in the article, I have benefited from dozens of historians, medieval historians in particular, in working on this article over many years.
Jeff Friedman:
Thanks to everyone for listening to the International Security Podcast produced by International Security, a quarterly journal at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, published by MIT Press. If you liked the conversation, please take a moment to rate and review us or share us on social media, which helps other people find the show. I'm Jeff Friedman. The executive editor of International Security is Jacqueline L. Hazelton. Our producer is Monica Achen. Our associate producer and technical director is Benn Craig. Thanks again to our guest, Şener Aktürk. See you next time.