HIST 111 Holy War, Medievals and Moderns
Taught as schedule allows (consult the Course Directory)
Benjamin Franklin Seminar
In 1099, people claiming to be Christian pilgrims massacred crowds of men, women
and children taking refuge at the Temple Mount as the last step in the conquest
of Jerusalem, and celebrated that they had waded in blood up to their knees.
More than 900 years later, people claimed Muslim martyrdom in flying airplanes
into skyscrapers and killing crowds of men and women going about their daily
business. Are these events related? Do they express the essence of the
religion the actors say they represent, or a strange and abhorrent aberration?
More broadly, how did some adherents to these religions come to understand
warfare as a legitimate part of religious practice, or even a religious
obligation? How widely shared were these views at different points in history,
how disputed?
In this course, we will focus on the problem of Crusade and Jihad in
Christianity and Islam, the forms of Holy War that cast the longest shadow into
the modern world. We will begin by looking at the roots of ideas of Holy War in
the scriptures of these two traditions. We will then spend a number of weeks
looking at the history of medieval Crusade and Jihad to see how scripture,
society, and cultural interaction shaped the way ideas of holy war developed
and were disputed. We will then turn to the 20th century and contemporary
events and look modern interpretations of the relationship between religion and
warfare, and how the history of the medieval period has been written,
re-written, and re-interpreted in debates about that relationship. As we
explore this material, students will be challenged to think about how solid and
sturdy the "facts" of scripture and history are, and the stakes involved in
constructing these facts.
