Was there ever a war because of religion?

Great Debates
21

Well, yes, that’s a bit obvious, innit ? No religion, no Pope ; no Pope, no decree across Christendom.

Yes and no. Depends on what you refer to for “people”.

For Kings and high profile barons, avoiding being on the Pope’s shitlist and scoring brownie points by acquiescing to his wishes was a powerful incentive, too. I’m not sure this was already the case for the first one, but the Vatican also loaned lots and lots of moolah to help finance the war effort later on as well - another bonus, especially when you’re in position to skim a bit, or a lot, off the top.

What factors led commoners, men-at-arms, petty nobles and fanatics to join up vary from crusade to crusade, region to region, person to person. You really can’t chalk it *all *to blind religion.

Look, I’m not saying there wasn’t a religious aspect to the Crusades. That would be absurd, even for me ;). But the higher up the Crusade counter you go, the less they had to do with religion at all.
Although the alternative history scenario you propose is interesting. I really wonder how European history would have unfolded, without the unifying factor of Catholicism.

[QUOTE=Sitnam]
Nonsense, I think you seriously underestimate the power of the Church over medieval minds. Whether religion was the casus belli or just the major tool used to propagate the conflict it makes no difference, religion was at the center so it’s a religious war.
[/QUOTE]

Nonsense right back atcha. People of the Middle Ages might have been lacking in accumulated knowledge, they mightn’t have stood on the shoulders of giants, but they weren’t stupid. Nor were they religulous automatons played by their priests. Especially the nobles, who were for the most part well educated, and often had minds like corkscrews.

The Church had enough symbolic power to nudge events, sure. It also had money to nudge events. But the Pope really wasn’t Big Brother, the All Controling Man-Behind-The-Crowns, strongarming the shaking masses to his iron will using his ju-ju threats. The Fourth Crusade alone is a testament to that.

22

The Muslim invasion of Europe (and seizure of the Holy Lands) happened in the early 8th century. The First Crusade was launched at the turn of the millenium - by then, the situation in Spain was pretty much a stalemate, and had been so for a while. As for threatening Eastern Europe, that would have to wait until the fall of Constantinople, in the *15th *century.
I really don’t think you can attribute any crusade to an existential threat to Christendom on the part of the various Muslim Caliphates.

23

Tibet was at times wracked by infighting between rival Buddhist sects. Meanwhile the founder of Burma’s aggressive and expansionistic Konbaung dynasty adopted the moniker of Alaungpaya ( ‘future/embryo Buddha’ ) and, shortly before being blown up by a faulty piece of siege artillery, issued propaganda declaring that his expansionism was just an attempt to make the world more “radiant” for Buddhism.

Of course you can have the same objections that others have raised - namely that religion in these cases were justifications for struggles over territory or resources. But really teasing out religion from other justifications becomes difficult - wars are rarely ( never, probably ) fought for ONE reason. There are usually complex matrices of intersecting human desires and impulses that result in hostility. Ultimately Malthus is correct that people will always find a reason to fight - we seem to be at base a pack-oriented species. We may be able to embrace variable definitions of in-group, but there are always out-groups to strive with.

Even seemingly straightforward religious wars like the expansion of Islam can be teased apart to find different motives. To a significant extent that seems to have been a snowballing affair - the initial trigger drawing the Arabs north were tribal rivalries with Byzantine/Persian Arab clients, many of the new conquerors were barely converted and the immense wealth to be looted a huge incentive. Muhammed arguably favored a universalist faith - his successors initially did not, limiting Islam to a largely untaxed plutocratic ethnic Arab elite. Even the popular notions of Dar al-Harb didn’t appear until 3/4 of a century after Muhammed’s death, post-hoc triumphalist justification for the remarkable Muslim success up to that point ( and the guy who originated the concept ended up dieing in prison ).

So the OP has a problem, because there are probably no religious wars one can point to, that you can’t dig up plausible alternative reasons for. However, that doesn’t mean that religion has no impact and that religious wars in a looser sense don’t exist because they certainly do. I don’t have any problem referring to the early Islamic expansion or the Crusades as “religious wars”, insomuch as they had very strong religious components. Piety really did propel them as a major motive. The only motive, no. But it was justification and an impetus, something that shouldn’t be hand-waved away.

Where to draw the line is tricky. If one side has actual religious doctrine as a primary driving force, I’d be inclined it to label it a religious or at least partly-religious war. So:

1.) Northern Ireland - mostly not. "Catholic"and “Protestant” in this case seem to be in-born tribal identifiers, but the struggle is only brushed by doctrinal differences on the extreme edges. Nutty Ian Paisley could probably be fairly said to have been waging a religious struggle, but he seems to be an outlier.

2.) Founding of Israel - mostly not. Again we have tribal identifiers. The then Christian president of Lebanon had no problem joining other Arab forces in invading the region and many of the Jewish leaders were atheists. For that matter the Syrian Ba’ath were at that time still led by its primary founder Michel Aflaq, a Greek Orthodox Christian by origin.

3.) The Mahdi Uprising - arguably. The primary motivation was anti-colonial, but the Mahdi’s claim of being…well…the Mahdi, was a major impetus to his unifying Sudanese factions.

4.) Thirty Years War - arguably. Like slavery in the American Civil War, religion may not have been the only issue, but it was a major underlying issue from which many of the others stemmed or swirled about.

24

I second the Albigensian crusades (the war to wipe out the extinction of the Cathars in southern France during the 13th Century) as one of the most cut and dried examples of this.
There was no underlying ethnic or political conflict that was merely exacerbated by religious differences. The only reason for the war (which was one of the more brutal medieval conflicts) was that the population had heretical beliefs according to the Catholic church.

25

I’m not sure about that - wasn’t there a difference in the culture, north and south? Was there not an attempt to use the 'crusade" as a means of crown consolidation?

From wikipedia (for what it’s worth):

26

Malthus and Tamerlane have it right. No (or extremely few) wars can be said to be a result purely of religion, but many have religion as an element to varying degrees.

Ultimately all conflict, throughout human history, is the clash of identities, of us vs. them. However that can be defined, either through religion, nationality, tribe or just which football team you support, it doesn’t ultimately change the fact that in order to get large numbers of people do unify, you need to define a common identity, and in order to then get them to kill others, you need to create a distinction between your identity and the others’.

Keep in mind too, religion is the product of humanity and thus ain’t much different than greed, politics or self-righteousness when it comes to stirring up conflict.

27

Religion doesn’t cause a war, it defines the sides, and by dividing people on different sides it can cause a war. But this is no different from a nation-state, tribe or any other cultural category that separates people into separate peoples.

The Crusades for instance were NOT caused by religion, religion provided a telos, but they weren’t caused by religion. The feudalism of the period was such that Europe domestically had internecine conflict, constantly all the time. So the Crusades was an attempt by the church to get Christians to stop killing one another, and instead use that violent energy to expand the church. So in a way religion caused the crusades, but it also stopped the internecine conflict, or at least slowed it down. The violence was there regardless, but what religion did was help guide that violence toward particular ends.

28

Your examples of the Old Testament violence are poor examples, because the Jews were not a religion at that time, they were a tribe. It was tribal conflict. Every tribe had its various flavors of religion, so arguing that religion caused it is rather silly. Religion helps define the character of a culture, and therefore can define a culture as violent, like Sparta, or more peaceful like the Taino who were native to Puerto Rico, next to the violent Caribe. Christians might argue that the people who became Christians were MORE violent before they became Christians for instance. It’s not a bad argument when you consider the Warrior culture of the Europeans in pre-Christian times, the Gauls fighting other Celtic tribes, the Germanic tribes invading the Gauls. Rome invading and conquering everyone.

Religion is ever-present throughout history, but so is war and violence. Religion is a much a cause of peace as it is a cause of violence as Religion is just the cultural narrative that developed people into ‘peoples’ with common identities.

29

Were not the Cathars also an apocalyptic death cult who wanted to bring about the end of humanity by ushering in the apocalypse? IIRC the Cathar heresy was a pretty virulent and poisonous cultural doctrine. But then again, I don’t know that much about it.

30

There actual CAUSE of the war was the religious difference. It would never have occurred but for the Catholic church’s objection to the Cathar’s religious beliefs.

Some of the powers invovled may have exploited it for their own political ends, but that doesn’t make it any less about religion.

31

Yes, this is probably a good example.

32

There were spiritualist sect who beleived that the physical world was inherently evil, but that doesn’t make them a “death cult”, anymore than Christianity as a whole (and certainly no more so than say Buddism).

Well to the Catholic hierachy they obviously were.

33

But the end result was a far more brutal and genocidal conflict than would otherwise be the case. Contemporary accounts (both Christian and Muslim) make clear that the first crusade was particular horrendous even by that standards of medieval warfare.

34

First, as **Malthus **said, France had at the time a profound North/South cultural divide - they didn’t even use the same language. Secondly, the South was rich. And the Cathar cities were really filthy, stinking rich : they were major trade cities in their own right, and on top of that didn’t pay any tithe to the Catholic churches and monasteries. Thirdly, the Cathar philosophy lessened the importance of nobility and threatened the feudal order.

It’s also interesting to note that Innocent III, in his call for crusade, promised to divvy up the conquered Cathar lands and their wealth among whoever took up the banner. Prior to that, his exhortations for people to renounce Catharism had fallen on deaf ears. So, 100% religious war ? Hmmm…

35

Well there are different levels of such. Preaching that one should not breed at all is the more extreme end of that.

Yes, but this kind of view generally presupposes that the Catholic Church had no good reason for believing as such. The morally relativistic argument generally assumes that the Church were merely violent bigots, rather than recognizing them as essentially the de facto government of Europe, trying to manage a multi-ethnic polity.

36

Yes, clearly. As I say about the CAUSE of the war was 100% the religious differences. In order to muster enough troops to carry out he need to promised worldly rewards, but that doesn’t change the fact that the reason for that war was religious, and had NOTHING to do with cultural or ethnic differences.

37

Later, yes. Initially the French crown was a bit peripheral, as Philip Augustus had his hands full dealing with the Angevins. It was his son Louis VIII who intervened forcefully to bring the whole mess to a ( eventually negotiated ) close.

But earlier the crown of Aragon was heavily involved on the “Cathar” side, backing the counts of Toulouse and the Trencavel viscounts. At that point in time they had the submission of most of the Pyrenean counts ( Foix, Comminges, Bearn, Bigorre - all now part of France ) as well several Languedoc viscounties. Peter II “the Catholic” of Aragon, a faithful vassal of the Pope since 1205, thus intervened forcefully in the Languedoc against the Crusaders to support his vassals, ultimately falling in battle at Muret in 1213, ending the dream of a trans-Pyrenean kingdom of Aragon. Which illustrates that non-religious issues clouded the whole campaign - a monarch surnamed for his orthodox piety fighting the church on behalf of subjects denounced for their failure to forcefully enough suppress heresy.

As another Bernard Ato VI, viscount of Nimes and Agde, was targeted by the Crusaders even though he attempted to submit ( most of the Languedoc nobility did, actually ) and had no substantial connection to Catharism. He just was conveniently linked to his Trencavel cousin who was accused of being weak on heresy.

ETA:

Certainly true. I’d call it a religious war myself. But as above there were in fact political issues beyond just religion entangling the region. I don’t think there is much disagreement here.

38

Not to mention the Buddhist sect armies in Japan and the Ikko-Ikki revolts.

There’s actually a Buddhist insurgent group in Burma right now. The Karens have been rebelling for quite a while, and about 15 years ago, the Buddhists in the Karen guerrilla forces, claiming that the Christian leaders of the guerrilla force were anti-Buddhist (but probably really because they were bought off by the government), split off and founded their own guerrilla group, which then went on to make peace with the government and were given land, in exchange for fighting against the main Karen guerrilla force.

39

Only the “perfecti” were required to be celibate. There general attitude was no different to that of St Paul. The main problem they had was the lack of rigid power structure like that of the Catholic church.

Eh ? Arguing that the Cathloic church was on on some level justified as they had their reasons and were only acting according to the prevalent morals of the day would seem the very epitome of extreme “moral relativism”

The fact is they had the entire population of Langeudoc wiped out as they disagreed with their religious beliefs. Yes it was a different age, with different moral standards, but (as with the other crusades) its clear that Albergenisan crusade stands out as something really heinous and unjustifiable.

40

Not arguing against that - merely quibbling with this:

Clearly, the heresy was the trigger, but there certainly was “underlying ethnic or political conflict …”.