The Ideology of Silence: Prejudice and Pragmatism on the Medieval Religious Frontier

Abstract

Historians have long debated the importance of religion as a determining factor in relations between Christians and Muslims during the Middle Ages. On the one hand, each side consigned adherents of the enemy's religion to eternal damnation. Religious animosity provided the casus belli of crusade and jihad; Christian and Muslim met each other on the field of battle with great frequency. On the other hand, Christian-Muslim relations also included peaceful commerce, institutional borrowing, and even cultural exchange. Christians and Muslims spent more time fighting their coreligionists than making war on each other. Churches continued to exist in the lands of Islam, and mosques survived under Christian rule as well. Such evidence has led some historians to minimize the degree to which religious intolerance influenced Christian-Muslim contacts during the Middle Ages.