The Reformation: Islamophobia and a slavery past

It's usually my practice, when writing about books here, to hold off until I finish them. That seems a fair, even prudent, idea. But it doesn't feel necessary, or wise, to follow this course with Diarmaid MacCulloch's enormous 2004 volume The Reformation: A History. This book is erudite; and long. This book is wide-ranging; and long. The book is opinionated; and long. This book is held up as masterful historic writing; and long. This book is gripping to me; and long.

As I said, it's long. I am reading the audio edition, all 36 hours of it and can highly recommend it. As of today, I only have 18 more hours to go. Some familiarity with maps of Europe and major historical markers help; as I usually feel when reading sprawling histories, I don't quite have enough background to take everything in. But who does, besides MacCulloch? Interestingly and happily in a scholarly text, the narrator is a woman. The only stumbling block I've encountered is her high British pronunciations -- we Yanks sometimes render historical names and places quite differently in speech and it takes a moment to decode.

MacCulloch tells the story of the multiple facets and formations that arose from the splintering of western Christendom. There's the magisterial Reformation (roughly the denominational ancestors of what we call mainline Protestantism); the Tridentine Roman Catholic Reformation which was as thoroughgoing in its way as the breakaways; the Anglican Reformation which was a national horse of another color; and radical reformations -- Anabaptists, Hutterites, Unitarians, etc. -- which went off in their own directions.

What I am going to do as I read along is periodically share bits that leap out at me. I hope they seem interesting to others.

MacCulloch begins by insisting that the story of early modern Europe's religious upheaval cannot be appreciated without being aware that reformers and orthodox alike were scared near out of their wits.

The biggest fear for western Christendom around 1500 was the prospect that it might disappear altogether. ... By the 16th century that destiny lay with the Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman Sultans had created an Islamic empire-building enterprise designed for conquest. They advanced inexorably out of Asia Minor, completing their absorption of the Byzantine empire when they captured Constantinople in 1453, and for a decade from the late 1510s they hugely expanded their territories ...

While far away in north Germany in 1516-17 Luther brooded on his campaign against indulgences, the Sultan overran the territories of fellow Muslims in Egypt and Syria ...

Then it was the turn of the Latins... The Turks occupied and wrecked the royal [Hungarian] capital Buda, whose palace castle was a show piece of Renaissance art as spectacular as anything in Italy and home to one of Europe's most distinguished and up-to-date libraries. This was the first loss in the heartland of Latin Christendom: might the Turks overrun everything?

... In southeastern Europe, ... the Turks were a real and present source of terror to all ranks in society ... Popular suspicions grew that the nobility did not have their hearts in the task of defending Europe ...

The fear which this Islamic aggression engendered in Europe was an essential background to the Reformation, convincing many on both sides that God's anger was poised to strike down the Christian world, and so making it all the more essential to please God by affirming the right form of Christian belief against other Christians. ...

Living under threat of annihilation doesn't make humans better people, then or now. I have to wonder if a visceral fear of Islamic invasion, long more conventional in Europe than in the U.S. (at least before the 9/11 attacks), doesn't include a dim ancestral echo of the true clash of civilizations half a millennium ago.

Part of that clash was a flourishing trade in capture and sale of enslaved people -- a commerce which ran in a direction white residents of the western hemisphere may find unexpected:

Even when the activities of the Ottoman fleet were curbed after the battle of Lepanto in 1571, north African corsairs systematically raided the Mediterranean coast of Europe to acquire slave labour; in fact they ranged as far as Ireland and even Iceland, kidnapping men, women and children. Modern historians examining contemporary comment produce reliable estimates that Islamic raiders enslaved about a million western Christian Europeans between 1530 and 1640 ... Large areas of Mediterranean coastline were abandoned for safer inland regions, or their people lived in perpetual dread of what might appear on the horizon ...

The modern condemnation of buying and selling people is just that: "modern." We humans make structures of society which accord with our moral first principles. So these matter.

More to come about The Reformation.