In a pit thread, Kobal2 makes this statement -
This is not the impression I had from what little history I know. Some conquerors did, certainly, but I was not under the impression that it was universal. What’s the straight dope?
Right then! Wrecking every sacred site and annihilating the local history, what what? I say, old chap, that’s not British!
As a generalisation, flat out false. That kind of thing has certainly happened many times, but has also provably not happened many times.
Pulling a few NOT examples out of my head:
- Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia
- Rome’s conquests of just about everywhere
- the Ottoman’s conquest of the Byzantines
- Napoleon’s conquest of most of Europe and (briefly) Egypt
- Britain’s conquest of India
and so on.
I would go further than that. I think it happens rarely, if ever. Has anyone got any examples where conquerors quickly and deliberately moved to wreck all the conquered people’s sacred sites and “annihilate the local history” (whatever that may mean)?
Maybe the Catholic Church’s suppression of the Albignesian heresy fits, but that was far from a typical sort of “conquest”. Perhaps the Reconquista of Spain from the Muslims. (I do not know much about that). I can’t really think of any others.
Of course, the religion of the conquerors often did eventually replace that of the conquered, but I think that was normally a slow, organic process of cultural assimilation, not one of forcible conversion.
When the Babylonians defeated Judah and took Jerusalem, they pretty much laid waste all around them, culturally speaking. And that was their standard operating procedure, SFAIK.
On the other hand, when the Persians in turn conquered the Babylonians, they didn’t do anything of the kind. And that was pretty much their standard operating procedure.
So, no. It depends on the custom of the country.
Castro threw out all the history books and rewrote them with Russia as the good guy.
Pretty much left the churches alone.
I have met some young adult Cubans that their history books say it was Russia that went up San Juan Hill, etc.
IIRC ( Married to a Cuban for 23 years. )
The Spanish in many areas did their best in during the Conquest of the Americas. For example, they pulled down many of the Aztecs’ temples and burned all the Aztec and Mayan codices they could find. Very few records survive. The main cathedral in Mexico City is built over the foundations of the Great Temple of the Aztecs. Likewise in Cuzco the Spanish razed most Inca buildings and rebuilt on their foundations. Local religions were often characterized as devil worship and suppressed. (Of course, that didn’t prevent some syncretism from occurring but it wasn’t for want of trying by the Spanish.)
From a purely pragmatic perspective it seems counter productive to destroy the subject population’s religious sites. Co-opting the priesthood and have them legitimise your rule would be a much better strategy.
Sometimes the invaders find the local religion to be offensive, and deliberately set out to destroy it. Examples include Hernán Cortés destroying the Aztec religion, or the Romans destroying the Druids.
Usually, though, the invaders are out to plunder. They simply don’t care about sacred or historical sites. They just take anything of value, and dispose of the rest. Gold idol of a local god? Melt it down. Finely crafted box containing the sacred scrolls? Sell the box, and throw the scrolls away. It’s not about destroying the religion, it’s about getting rich quick.
The Spainiards who went to Americas were religious fanatics. More so than the Church indeed, many Churchmen spoke out against anti-native policies. The Druids were on the Roman shitlist, because of a tendency for human sacrifices and that fact that Roman soldiers were often the offerings. Otherwise the Romans usually were more than happy to worship the local gods or project their own Pantheon onto them.
What was the purpose of the conquest? Destroy an annoying enemy like ROme in Carthage or Corinth? Sure. Want to actually rule the place and get people to pay their taxes and fill the armies? The Arabs in most of their territory post 640 AD.
Exactly. That is the norm. Trying to wipe out indigenous beliefs is the exception, and rarely effective. If it worked (sort of) with the Aztecs that is probably because the Aztecs were already so hated by most of the other tribes they had subjugated.
The Mongols and Persians were also super chill on the tolerance front. The Mongols in particular were probably the most accepting of any imperial culture until modern times, which they used to great effect. If anything there was a reverse conversion where several of the conquering khanates ended up Islamic.
For most of history Islam was pretty alright. The Indians had it rough. But generally just pay the jizya, don’t cause trouble, you’ll probably be OK.
The Khmer Rouge, not so much. They killed anyone practicing religion in public. Executed the monks. Tore down shrines and churches or used them as prisons. A lot of communist countries when they first started out talked a big game about getting rid of religion and the old ways and gave it a good college try, but at least in the USSR, Vietnam, and China the efforts petered out and the persecution relaxed. But the Khmer Rouge was totally nuts about returning to some delusional agrarian ideal and wanted to tear down almost everything. Interesting that communist Vietnam put them down.
But yes, as others have pointed out, this is an exception, rather than a rule. Rome, Persia, the Mongols, etc. were all more than happy to let the locals worship whatever they wished to worship, as long as they didn’t start any trouble.
In Britain it was Henry VIII with the dissolution of the monasteries, and later on Cromwell that did the most damage, and both were home grown. The Romans didn’t find a whole lot to knock down anyway, but the Normans did knock down a lot of the old wooden Saxon churches to build proper stone Norman ones.
Hindu temple destruction by Muslim rulers is India is a source of much study and contention. Some scholars argue that when it happened, it was relatively rare and it usually followed a political pattern set by Hindu kings: we beat you in battle, we’re going after your best temple. Needless to say, others disagree with this view and offer a starker vision of history. Many temples sacked by invading armies were incredibly wealthy; orders of magnitude more than in anything in nearby Persia.
Its not a point of much study and contention. It happened, on occasion, but not usually. Anyone who says otherwise is usually of a Hindu Nationalist persuasion. Its been more or less muslim practice to not attack places of worship. Probably for the ever practical reason that if you want to rule a place, it does not really help you much if you piss off the locals so much that they will do anything to get rid of you,. Destroying places of worship will do that very quickly. For probably the same reason why the Romans and Persians acted in same way as well.
Do note that C Asia steppe raiders usually did not adhere to this, Mahmud of Ghaznavi is an example.
Their persuasion does not invalidate their facts. There is a book by Shourie et al that claims 2000 temples destroyed, based on mosque inscriptions and histories written by Muslim historians. I cannot tell if their facts are bunk or not, but if there is no clear refutation of that claim, then you can’t dismiss it out of hand by saying they’re Hindu Nationalists by persuasion. Some refutations (Eaton’s for instance) depend on saying that these historians that are quoted were lying, and uses other data to establish that the number is much lower, though not zero. And why those other sources are not lying I’m not sure. I’m not much for Hindu nationalists, but I generally trust Shourie’s integrity, and would like a better rebuttal of his claim if I’m to disbelieve it entirely.
At the same time, I’m reasonably convinced that many Muslim rulers of India, particularly Akbar through Shah Jehan, did not systematically destroy temples as an ideological or religious matter, and that the rabid Hindu nationalists were whipping up the issue(their claims were ~30,000). But I’m also convinced that plenty of temples were destroyed by Muslim rulers. Even opponents of the claim(Eaton for instance) concede a minimum of 80 temples from 1200 onwards.
There were particular (Muslim)invaders, rulers and periods where it happened a lot. Khiljis, Aibaks, Ghori, Ghaznavi.
I did specifically exclude the archaic/ancient Greeks & Romans in my original synthesis, as their approach to imperialism was indeed more about amalgamation and synchretism than obliteration and assimilation - at first, anyway.
Alexander is really a special case, too, since he didn’t so much conquer as do a drive-by on a continental scale :).
And even then there are exceptions. You know why we know next to nothing about Celtic druidism, and what we *do *know mostly comes from the British Isles, which the Romans notoriously never could conquer in full ? Yeah, you can thank Gaius! Iulius! Cesar! (watch HBO’s Rome :p) and Tiberius for that.
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From a purely pragmatic perspective it seems counter productive to destroy the subject population’s religious sites. Co-opting the priesthood and have them legitimise your rule would be a much better strategy.
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Short term, possibly, in particular when their faith and yours are compatible - although even then you might also find yourself with a Jesus problem, preaching “purity” and railing against the corruption of the priesthood by foreigners. And of course holy men with a burning faith prove harder to corrupt than greedy tyrants.
Long term, it’s just more efficient to destroy or dilute local identities so that their kids, and their kids’ kids have as little as possible to remind them that at one point they were not something apart from the dominant culture. It’s one reason fewer to start causing trouble.
(I really wish **bldysabba **had pasted my entire post :o)
The first thing the Persians did when they reached Athens was putting the torch to the Acropolis 
I provided a slew of examples in my original post, linked in the OP.
The phenomenon is not strictly constrained to conquest, either (although it’s always about order and control). For example, at one point my country’s education system did its level best to sanction “tribalism” or “localism” in a bid for national unity & cohesion - e.g. in Brittany you got punished harshly by the schoolmarms for speaking any Breton.
Destroying or locking away the history books, defacing or pulling down the monuments, killing/punishing/buying out the oral historians, mandatory teaching of the dominant guys’ version of history, repression of local cultural mores…