I’m reading the free sample of Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires
Here’s an interesting passage on the Arabic language:
’Arabiyyah, the high language, ‘is regarded by most Arabs as the most significant unifying factor of the Arab world’. The trouble is, even if people write in it (or try to, and fall far short), nobody actually speaks it; nobody ever has spoken it as their mother tongue, not since the mists of time when it began to be constructed. High Arabic is an imagined bond, but also a bind – an unattainable ideal that constricts free expression. The reality is dialect, and disunity. Arabs have never been united in speech, or in any other way, only in speeches; never in real words in the real world, only on paper.
High Arabic is shared by more than 400 million people as the idealized literary form of their spoken language (not to mention another 1.4 billion Muslims as their liturgical language). On the ground the situation is different. Even in quite a small country like Tunisia, with eleven million inhabitants, there are four different dialect words for ‘I’ (in high Arabic, ’anā): anī, ’anī, nā and nāy. Another more extreme case is that of the small island state of Bahrain (with an area of 660 square kilometres), where the ruled Shi’i majority – the ‘Baharnah’, or (native) Bahrainis – speak a ‘settled’ dialect, and the ruling Sunni majority – the ‘Arabs’, as they are still called, who took over in a raid in 1783 – a ‘bedouin’ one. Sectarianism apart, what hope is there for unity, even in a kingdom smaller than the Isle of Mull, when its inhabitants speak two different tongues?
That last bit reminded me of David Eddyshaw’s discussion here of the diversity of the similarly tiny Kusaal-speaking area.
There are (or, alas, were) quite a few cases where Jews and Christians from the same locality speak/spoke different Neo-Aramaic languages.
The Kusaal case is probably related to the fact that the separation line between the dialects is the White Volta: not a great physical barrier in itself, but until recent times a breeding ground for river blindness, with the result that it created an unpopulated strip right through the area where Kusaal is spoken. Bisa, the Mande language spoken just to the north, is similarly divided by the White Volta into surprisingly divergent dialects.
The westerly dialect of Kusaal actually seems to resemble the adjacent language to the west, Nabit, more closely than it resembles eastern Kusaal; but the Nabdema don’t regard themselves as Kusaasi and have been swept up into the culture and political system of their traditionally powerful and prestigious westerly neighbours, the Gurensi/Frafra, whose own language is substantially less closely related.
Nobody in those parts has an army or (especially) a navy (the word for “sea” is borrowed from Hausa.)
Crescaders …
Yeah, I don’t like it.
Still, it’s an interesting idea – that we have no single word for conquerors in the name of Islam. Crescader did foreground the idea that there was a parallelism between the two conquests. “Crusader” also leaves a little conceptual space between itself and Christian that isn’t there with “Arab conquest” or “Muslim conquest.” I would guess that this leaves people either giving less focus to the Muslim conquest, as I tend to do. Crusaders were awful religiously-inspired attackers of an area that was Islamic by nature and from time immemorial. Which I know isn’t accurate, but that’s where my head goes if someone in the news talks about crusaders. For many others, I would be that talk of the Arab conquest adheres to their ideas of Arabs. I like the idea of a term that separates these concepts.
But crescaders is just fugly. It’s more llke a horrendous pun than a real word. Also, it sounds like a toothpaste, pressed together out of Crest and Colgate rather than crescent and crusade.
For what it’s worth, in Crusader Kings II, the Islamic equivalent of “crusade” is “jihad”, which does (even aside from the CKII connection) appear to be a fairly reasonable term for “conquest in the name of Islam”.
It does not, however, provide a good equivalent of “crusader” – I mean, sure, in principle there’s “jihadist”, but that apparently has far too wrong connotations.
I do agree that just about anything would be better than “crescaders”, though. (As it happens, to me, personally, it sounds like some kind of extreme sport.)
I can just imagine the conversation:
Tim: Man, Bahrain is really small. What’s a really well known small island of equivalent size where they speak more than one language?
Tim’s Friend: Singapore.
Tim: You’re right, the Isle of Mull is a very popular tourist destination. Plus, those in Mull are notoriously divided between their various languages, unlike Singapore, which would go against my point.
a kingdom smaller than the Isle of Mull, when its inhabitants speak two different tongues
Huh. What a coincidence.
Nobody in those parts has an army or (especially) a navy (the word for “sea” is borrowed from Hausa.
Good. I hope no one invades. Everything that happens in Africa seems like a bloody tragedy.
Bisa, the Mande language spoken just to the north, is similarly divided by the White Volta into surprisingly divergent dialects.
So it’s the the White Volta that separates the dialects of Kusaal? I was wondering.
Everything that happens in Africa seems like a bloody tragedy.
Don’t get me started. This is because the international news media have basically got their scripts prewritten for anything that happens in Africa, and whatever has actually happened has to be shoehorned into one of the acceptable scenarios whether it fits or not. There are five different scripts altogether: Pestilence, War, Famine, Death and International Aid. Sometimes Corruption gets a look in.
Most of Africa is full of people trying to make a living and look after their families, and doing pretty well considering.
On another tack:
Strictly speaking, don’t the inhabitants of Mull speak two different languages?
Ok. But the languages aren’t separated by a river.
I don’t know, I find “crescaders” pretty clever, as a nonce word. Although I seem to remember reading that the crescent was originally an Ottoman symbol, so it’s not really accurate in this context, is it?
Strictly speaking, don’t the inhabitants of Mull speak two different languages?
Scottish English and Yorkshire English?
There’s no Gaels in Mull.
Speaking of river blindness, there’s an incredible image of an “adult black fly with the parasite Onchocerca volvulus (which causes river blindness) coming out of the insect’s antenna” on the wiki page for river blindness.
If the Crescaders were emblazoned with their symbol, then it could give lease to life to an even uglier полумесяценосцы
“Crusader” also leaves a little conceptual space between itself and Christian
Following the mosque shootings in Christchurch last month, we’re having a debate about the brand name of the local Rugby (Union) franchise: “The Crusaders” (been in use some 20 years). Although it’s based in Christchurch, in Canterbury Province, it represents the upper half of the whole South Island, so the namers wanted to avoid tying it to any locale. Then “Crusaders” was suitably generic, and alliterative.
The brand includes pre-match knights on horses galloping around the pitch wielding swords. They stopped immediately after the shootings.
All the teams in the franchise, which spans Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Japan have brand names, many of them war-like. The team in the other half of the South Island (based in Dunedin) are the “Highlanders”. The Rugby League franchise based in Auckland are the “Warriors”, branding features fearsome-looking Maori iconography. Many other Union brands are based on carnivores: Lions, Pumas, Jaguares, Cheetahs.
Crusaders were awful religiously-inspired attackers of an area that was Islamic by nature …. Which I know isn’t accurate, but that’s where my head goes if someone in the news talks about crusaders.
Mine too. And I’ve always felt embarrassed by the name and the imagery. But many locals are claiming they see no connection. And that “crusade” is a perfectly ordinary English word with no connotation of bloodthirstiness or religious campaign. Then it’s a bit hard explaining away the sword-wielding knights. Also how do they not hear the ‘cross’ in “crusade”? Did they not notice how quickly George W backtracked on the word after using it in the Gulf War?
The reaction of the management of the franchise/league has been eerily similar to the gun control lobby after each mass shooting: it’s too early to hold the debate, we’ll wait and see. (They’re keeping their heads down and hoping it’ll go away.)
The word crusade has an everyday meaning that does not necessarily have anything to do with religion, merely fervor or energy in taking something on. However, the original meaning of Christian warfare—although it is no longer the primary meaning of the word—is still too near for the word to be used in certain contexts. “A crusade against homelessness” is fine; “a crusade against terrorism” is not. The corresponding word for Islamic warfare has to be jihad, but outside the Muslim world, the word is still closely tied to its original meaning, and it has strong political inflections. The nonce word crescaders strikes me as a hideous alternative, most prominently because (as Kristian notes) the star and crescent symbol arose as Ottoman (rather than Islamic) iconography.
because (as Kristian notes) the star and crescent symbol arose as Ottoman (rather than Islamic) iconography
some note “occasional” earlier use, but …
There is a lot more asymmetry between the phenomenon of Crusades and the wars against Crusader states anyway.
A crusade was called by the highest religious authority and transcended feudal states, organizing into transnational campaigns and military orders. The wars against it were by regular states and alliances, if I understand it right.
And Crusades were not just against Saracenes but also against Jews, Pagans, and heterodox Xians. Even against Catholics who were soft on ideology (Hungarians when they were guilty of allying themselves with the Cumans).
Sounds like the defenders of my local (American) football team, the Washington (DC) Redskins, who claim there couldn’t possibly be anything offensive about the name and that it’s intended to honor Native Americans.
The crusades in the Holy Land have traditionally been described as wars between the crusaders and the Saracens. Who the Saracens were was always a bit unclear, as the First crusade was said to have been organised in response to Seljuk Turks banning Christians from the Holy Land. The most famous opponent of the crusaders was Saladin, who i think might have been Kurdish. So the word Saracen is wide enough to cover Turks, Kurds and Arabs. The word crescader doesn’t really add anything.
However, if the crescader is meant to refer to the 7th century muslim conquest of Jerusalem and other Roman territories, then its superfluous. That event is well known as the Arab conquest or the Islamic conquest.
The crusades in the Holy Land have traditionally been described as wars …
Yes. Killing people because of their religious affiliations. I suppose (since this is Language Hat not Religious History Hat), I should go with the “happiness boys” and consider descriptively how “crusade” is used. Except, again, the Rugby team using knights in armour and swirling swords.
I just don’t understand how the cricket-playing nations (which almost correlates with the rugby-playing nations) can see anything righteous about crusades. The Crusaders were a bunch of thugs who went picking fights in far-off lands with peoples who weren’t hitherto-fore causing any trouble.
There must be some folk memory about Richard Lionheart and Robin Hood(?) But Richard is notable mostly for hardly being English or spending much time in England. And for being bloodthirsty; and duplicitous.
The Crusaders.
Crusades should be seen as a failed Reconquista attempt.
Formerly Christian Spain and Sicily captured by Muslims in 8th and 9th centuries were liberated by Christians in the 11th century.
They also attempted to liberate the formerly Christian Palestine and Syria (captured by Muslims in 7th century), fought bravely, but ultimately failed. This reconquest attempt is called the Crusades.
That’s certainly how they were seen in Europe at the time.
I don’t know where the current propaganda “the bunch of thugs who went picking fights in far-off lands with peoples who weren’t hitherto-fore causing any trouble” comes from.
When you take someone’s lands by force, sooner or later the people who lost them will attempt to take them back. (I note that the Crusader states in their search for legitimacy voluntarily recognized suzerainty of the Byzantine empire which ruled Holy Land before the Arab conquest).
I do not believe the crusaders were the “same people” as the residents of the Levant several hundred years earlier. And I believe the seizing of lands by force had been already completed by or under Vandals and Visigoths before the Muslim Conquest.
AntC: If people want to gallop about on horses waving swords, it seems to me that there are quite a few options for naming them. Knights-errant, Paladins, Questers, Jousters, Lancers … if I spent more than a few minutes I’m sure I could come up with more.
Keith Ivey: It’s difficult to defend this, although some people have proposed using a picture of an appropriately coloured potato. But perhaps the Washington Lobbyists?
Because the structure of medieval European government was so militaristic, the Crusades were devised by the Papacy to redirect that militarism into reconquering the Holy Land instead of fighting each other.
SFReader: the Crusader states in their search for legitimacy voluntarily recognized suzerainty of the Byzantine empire
I don’t think that the Reconquista in Spain is usually thought of as part of the Crusades–it wasn’t over until 1492. But certainly the kingdom of Sicily and control of some of the islands like Rhodes and others could be cited as successful outcomes of the Crusades. Even in Syria they hung on for quite a while, although they were eventually defeated.
I agree with people saying that the history of the Crusades was much more complicated than most people think.
So the careless use of the term Crusaders is not very helpful. It’s like if anti-vaccination people had suddenly decided to call themselves Monophysites.
PlasticPaddy: I don’t know that any Vandals and Visigoths were present in Syria. And the Vandals and Visigoths who conquered the Western Roman Empire were Christians, although they followed Arianism rather than Catholicism.
Mutinous Crusader armies
Mutiny is a good word, actually, to describe what happened in 1204.
I agree it all went downhill from here. Having lost their best ally in the region, the Crusader states were doomed.
I do not believe the crusaders were the “same people” as the residents of the Levant several hundred years earlier
Have a look at demography of Crusader states.
Kingdom of Jerusalem was half Christian (with Latin settlers accounting for about 20% of the total), half Muslim. Principality of Antioch – mostly Greek Orthodox Christian, County of Edessa – mostly Armenian Christian, County of Tripoli – mostly Maronite Christian.
I will say an extremely unpopular thing – the Christians of Holy Land were liberated by the Crusaders from Muslim yoke and enslaved again after the fall of the Crusader states.
“I don’t think that the Reconquista in Spain is usually thought of as part of the Crusades”
The military orders such as Santiago and Calatrava that participated in the Reconquista were crusading orders modelled on the same lines as the Templars, Hospitalers and Templars in the Levant. The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades covers the crusades in the Levant, in North Africa, Iberia, France and the Baltic.
Interestingly, the Great War of Liberation aka the Great Turkish War (1683-1699) that pushed the Turks back into the defensive after the failed siege of Vienna is not considered a crusade. Perhaps this is because the war has been portrayed as a war to restore and liberate occupied territory rather than a religious conflict.
The Wikipedia article says that the word “crusade” wasn’t used until the late 12th century. Before that, what we now call crusades were referred to as a pilgrimage.
I also don’t see how the Crusaders are any worse or objectively different than the Arab armies that conquered the Middle East and North Africa in the preceding centuries. For the most part all these armies were composed of rough young men looking for a way to gain more social prestige, power and coin in agrarian or pastoral societies that didn’t offer many alternative paths for jumping the queue. In that sense Crusaders would actually be an ironically appropriate name for a football team composed of lower income kids playing a violent debilitating sport as a way to escape.
as a war to restore and liberate occupied territory rather than a religious conflict.
I wonder if the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878 should be classified as a Crusade, rather than liberation war.
I mean, the Turks ruled Bulgaria for five centuries, longer than the Arabs ruled Palestine by the time of the First Crusade.
Surely Russians had no business liberating Bulgarians if their oppressors lived there for so long…
the Christians of Holy Land were liberated by the Crusaders from Muslim yoke and enslaved again after the fall of the Crusader states.
Except that they were mostly heretics by the standards of Western Europeans and were treated as such.
I also don’t see how the Crusaders are any worse or objectively different than the Arab armies that conquered the Middle East and North Africa in the preceding centuries.
They’re not, but for those of us raised in the Western (putatively Christian) world, they’re “our guys” and thus reflect on us and our alleged civilization. Me, I don’t approve of anybody going off and attacking somebody else with fire and sword, whatever the historical/religious “justification.” Just stay home and cultivate your damn garden.
I highly recommend Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes for a salutary shift of perspective.
Day saved.
Also because it… wasn’t a religious conflict, with Calvinist Hungarians fighting on the Ottoman side which was allied with the Catholic French, while Sunni Muslim Lipka Tatars were fighting in the Polish army in a very important role. Attempts to frame it as a religious conflict seem to date from the 19th century and no sooner, becoming really popular only since 2001.
The Wikipedia article says that the word “crusade” wasn’t used until the late 12th century. Before that, what we now call crusades were referred to as a pilgrimage.
The first part of this is demonstrably wrong (it wasn’t used until much later); I’m guessing the second sentence is wrong too. OED (not updated, first published 1893):
Here is a recent article about the Crusades. It suggests that many people living in the area fought on the side of the Crusaders.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/18/crusader-armies-remarkably-genetically-diverse-study
Apparently Old French pelerinage was used in one text around 1210 to mean ‘crusade’ (HERBERT DE DAMMARTIN, Fouque de Candie, 14108 ds T.-L.); it has never been so used in English.
Except that they were mostly heretics by the standards of Western Europeans and were treated as such.
Absolutely not. In 12th century Crusader states, Catholic and Orthodox Christians were thought to belong to the same faith, with slight differences in rites. E.g, both the Orthodox and Catholic population of the Kingdom of Jerusalem had the same Patriarch and prayed in same churches.
As for how the Orthodox population greeted arrival of the Crusaders, we have an eyewitness account – abbot Daniil from Chernigov in Russia, who visited Holy Land during the First Crusade. He describes how the local Christian population welcomed the Crusaders and how Catholic and Orthodox priests conduct joint service side by side in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and generally how nice is “knyaz Balduin” and how he loves Russians and the Orthodox Christians. (King Baldwin was married to an Orthodox queen, by the way).
The real schism started after 1204, I think.
It’s absurd to rewrite history by the standards of today. #henry8 #metoo
In 12th century Crusader states, Catholic and Orthodox Christians were thought to belong to the same faith, with slight differences in rites.
I was thinking of Monophysites, not Orthodox (who, as you say, were not yet strongly differentiated).
So the careless use of the term Crusaders is not very helpful. It’s like if anti-vaccination people had suddenly decided to call themselves Monophysites.
Well, since nobody calls themselves monophysites, it’s available for use as a slur: “The crap anti-vaxxers believe, they’re just a bunch of monophysites as far as I’m concerned.” Try saying it: mo-no-FIZZ-ites. Just rolls off your tongue, doesn’t it?
mo-no-FIZZ-ites
I say mo-NOPH-i-sites, which appears to be the standard pronunciation (at least, it’s what the dictionaries give).
“In 12th century Crusader states, Catholic and Orthodox Christians”
Didn’t the Roman (anachronistically: Byzantine) emperor request assistance from the West to help fight the Seljuk Turks – resulting in the First Crusade?
Then, once the “Latin” empire was established in Constantinople, the Christian states in the Levant organised themselves in a feudal hierarchy where the emperor in Constantinople and the king of Jerusalem held primacy.
One of the last remnants of these Latin ruled territories in the Levant were the Venetian-ruled islands in what is now Greece. These territories were ethnically mixed with Orthodox and Catholic populations, as well as other minorities. The last of these territories held out until the fall of Venice, when they were taken occupied by the British (who obviously didn’t want to stay home and cultivate their garden). This was the Septinsular Republic. These Ionian islands were handed over to Greece in 1864.
Armenian chroniclers (for example Matthew of Edessa) were extremely enthusiastic about Crusaders. For example:
“In this period the rise of the Romans occurred and the gates of the nation of the Latins was opened. So it came about in this year that [many nations] were on the move: all Italy and Spain to Africa and the distant nation of the Franks swarmed in a countless and immense multitude like locusts which cannot be counted or like the sands of the sea which the
mind cannot reckon. In awesome grandeur and high-ranking leadership there arose and came princes of the Franks, each with his own troops, coming to the aid of Christians and to save the holy city of Jerusalem from the foreigners and to free from the Tachiks the blessed Sepulcher which had received God in it.
They were glorious men and kings, adorned with faith and all piety, nourished in good deeds. Here are their names: Godfrey (Kondop’re’), a mighty man, from the line of kings of the Romans and his brother, Baldwin (Paghtin). Also [arriving were] the great count named Bohemond (Pemund) and his sister’s son, Tancred (Tangri); the count named Saint Gilles (Znchil), an awesome, glorious man; Robert, count of Normandy; and also another Baldwin. Subsequently there arrived the count named Joscelin (Cho’slin) a mighty and valiant man. Such mighty and martial men as these came with an immense multitude, as numerous as the stars in the sky. Along with them came many bishops, priests, and deacons, With much labor they travelled through the distant land of the Romans”
“Armenian chroniclers (for example Matthew of Edessa) were extremely enthusiastic about Crusaders.”
The Armenian Apostolic Church is usually regarded as Monophysite. sounds like the Monophysite Armenians were stoked about the arrival of the First Crusade.
I propose to rename the First Crusade to Holy Land Liberation War.
And the Crusader movement obviously should be called People’s Liberation Front of Judea
“The Wikipedia article says that the word “crusade” wasn’t used until the late 12th century…this is demonstrably wrong”
Here is a direct quotation from Wikipedia, to clarify what it says there:
” It was not until the late 12th to early 13th centuries that a more specific “language of crusading” emerged. Pope Innocent III used the term negotium crucis “affair of the cross” for the Eastern Mediterranean crusade, but was reluctant to apply crusading terminology to the Albigensian crusade. The Song of the Albigensian Crusade from about 1213 contains the first recorded vernacular use of the Occitan crozada. This term was later adopted into French as croisade and in English as crusade. The modern spelling crusade dates to c. 1760. Sinibaldo Fieschi (the future pope Innocent IV) used the terms crux transmarina for crusades in Outremer against Muslims and crux cismarina for crusades in Europe against other enemies of the church.”
@maidhc If people want to gallop about on horses waving swords, it seems to me that there are quite a few options for naming them.
You’ve completely missed the point. We’ve just suffered a nutcase driving around the city waving semi-automatics at mosques. He killed 50 muslims at prayer.
We want to avoid any name that suggests killing people. Particularly killing them for their religious affiliation. Whether or not “crusade”/”Crusader” might in today’s usage carry a non-killing-people sense, it completely undermines that sense if the city’s rugby branding features a sword being waved menacingly/victoriously. Like this, which hasn’t been removed at all.
Here is a direct quotation from Wikipedia, to clarify what it says there
Thanks, that all sounds right.
You’ve completely missed the point.
I think you’ve missed his point; he was saying there’s plenty of names you could use other than ”Crusader.”
Saracens is a very good rugby name.
Saracens Football Club (/ˈsærəsənz/) are an English professional Rugby Union team based in London. Established in 1876, Saracens were founded in 1876 by the Old Boys of the Philological School in Marylebone, London (later to become St Marylebone Grammar School). The club’s name is said to come from the “endurance, enthusiasm and perceived invincibility of Saladin’s desert warriors of the 12th century”. Their local rivals were called the Crusaders, which may also have been a factor. The Crescent and Star appearing in the club’s emblem are reminiscent of those appearing on the flag of the Ottoman Empire.
Saracens absorbed the Crusaders two years later.
he was saying there’s plenty of names you could use other than ”Crusader.”
He’s saying there’s plenty of names to denote knights on horseback waving swords.
Sure. What we precisely don’t want to denote is anybody waving arms to kill people — even if it’s by some code of chivalry. Our Rugby team might be fearsome and physical, but that’s supposed to stop short of killing.
The waving-swords branding is a consequence of the name, not the other way round. The name was allocated to the team by SANZAR, the international body. Prior to 1996 there was no franchise; no such name. There is no history/continuity to try to perpetuate.
We want no knights. No horseback. No swords. No killing. No killing Muslims. No killing Christians, come to that.
Then I’m not seeing “Saracens” is any improvement: “connotation remained negative, associated with opponents of Christianity,” [wp]
I guess “Mongols” wouldn’t even make a shortlist…
Pffft, you would. This time it’s me who will stick with his old mumpsimus.
With all the Crusader-bashing, can’t resist joining the chorus to remind that there was an anti-Prussian Crusade too 🙂
By the same Teutonic Knights who previously were sent on a Crusade against the Cumans (and soon turned against their Hungarian hosts). With the Prusses, the Teutons quickly turned against their Polish hosts too. I guess the 1204 Constantinople example was too tempting.
Also, the zeal of the Holy Sepulcher Liberation Front wasn’t limited to the feudal lords who could actually afford to march on Jerusalem in proper armed formation. Many lower-class pilgrims and preachers went without proper equipment, and often didn’t go very far in search of a fight. The Jewish communities close to home have become their major target, during each of the Crusades, but it is the 1st Crusade with its massacres of Rhineland Jews which is traditionally understood as the formative event in the ethnogenesis of the Ashkenazi Jewish people, starting the long chain of migrations East which eventually led it to Poland and Russia.
(Although truth be said, the anti-Jewish attacks were carried out by the rich-and-armored crusaders as well, and the Cairo Geniza letter describing the destruction of the Jerusalem synagogue by the Crusaders remains the only realtime eyewitness account of the sacking of Jerusalem)
While the Frankish bulk of the armies of the first crusade were primarily concerned with the Holy Land, especially Jerusalem (Pope Urban preached of the land itself as a sort of relic), the south Italian Normans seemed to have been more interested in just carving out a temporal state for themselves. The Normans’ leader Bohemond had been effectively disinherited, because he had been promised any Norman conquests on the Eastern Shore of the Adriatic. The Normans were unable to maintain an enduring hold on the far side of the Adriatic, since the strategy that had worked for them in southern Italy (playing the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire off against one another) was not possible there. So when the opportunity of the crusade became available, Bohemond headed off to the East, taking along his nephew Tancred, who was also not expecting to inherit anything of much worth. While most if the crusaders were trying to solidify their control in Palestine, the Normans went back North to conquer more territory around Antioch, thus expanding Bohemond’s personal domain.
For whatever reasons “monophysite” has come in many/most circles to be perceived as carrying pejorative baggage, so the brethren and sistren of the long-separated churches traditionally referred to by that term — or, rather, the tiny percentage of them that are both English-speaking and interested in having strong opinions on terminological matters — often prefer to be called (in contexts where focus on their specific distinctive teachings as to Christology is relevant) “miaphysite.” I’m not convinced that there is really a meaningful nuance of semantic difference even in theological Greek between mono physis and mia physis, so this may just be the Euphemism Treadmill at work, but otoh “miaphysite” isn’t a euphemism in the bad sense of obscuring the underlying reality. AFAIK, adherents of “mainstream” Chalcedonian theology don’t find “dyophysite” to be pejorative, but political contexts where the miaphysites control the local secular power structure and dyophysites are marginal are few and far between, so it may not be a fair comparison.
The deep-seated hatred that disagreements over the nature of the Trinity engendered has always struck me as one of the major gulfs between the modern mind and the ancient. You shake your head and think, they were fighting over that?
When Swift wrote of Little Endians and Big Endians, he was talking to the modern sensibility.
It was much more important than a mere matter of life & death.
Plus, they would feel the same about many of the things we fight about.
It was much more important than a mere matter of life & death.
Exactly so: given the premise, it makes a lot more sense to fight over such things than temporary matters like power and land.
The idea that it is stupid to fight over such matters puts me in mind of CS Lewis’ observation that there is no actual moral advance in not burning witches because you don’t believe there are any.
In other words, Bathrobe is right. And if I may be permitted to preach, tolerance is regarding people whom you believe to be fundamentally mistaken about the most important things of all as human beings like yourself with a right to respect and understanding, not smugly declaring that all parties are just being silly and should get on with pursuing the nice morally neutral aims we share with out animal cousins. This is harder …
To quote a famous fascist sympathiser, who was right about this and numerous other things:
Anyone can run to excesses,
It is easy to shoot past the mark.
It is hard to stand firm in the middle.
“But after that, reproaching us for the Nestorian heresy, in order to intimidate us, they exclaimed: “In two pieces cut those who acknowledge the two natures; those who recognize duality, split into parts, slay, throw away”, so that we, accused of Nestorian heresy, would not be judges and Orthodox, but condemned, as heretics.” (c) from The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon
Catchy slogan for dyophysite pogrom
CS Lewis’ observation that there is no actual moral advance in not burning witches because you don’t believe there are any.
I don’t see how any Bible-believing Christian can claim there are no witches (that is, people with supernatural powers due to their allegiance to the powers of darkness) semper et ubique. That is very different from burning this particular person before you because you believe they belong to that group. And contra Lewis, I think that moving from superstitious killing for impossible actions to rational punishment for actual crimes is a huge moral advance.
All praise, therefore, to Alonso de Salazar Frías, called the Witches’ Advocate, for establishing to the satisfaction of his superiors in the Spanish Inquisition that the methods for establishing who was and was not a witch were hopelessly inadequate to the task, that statements given with or without torture were inconsistent and unreliable, and that people would, to stop the torture, accuse anyone at all. He wrote in 1611, “I have not found one single proof nor even the slightest indication from which to infer that one act of witchcraft has actually taken place…the testimony of accomplices alone without further support from external facts substantiated by persons who are not witches is insufficient to warrant even one arrest.” The result was that in Spain witch-burning ceased many years before the rest of Europe.
And contra Lewis, I think that moving from superstitious killing for impossible actions to rational punishment for actual crimes is a huge moral advance.
Lewis’ point (as I understand it) was that it was an intellectual advance, not a moral advance. An intellectual advance is only ipso facto a moral advance if you’re a Gnostic.
Salazar’s contention was not that witches shouldn’t be burnt at all, or that there was no such thing as a witch at all: it was that rampant injustice and hysteria made almost all convictions for witchcraft unsafe. You can (to take a modern example of hysteria) be firmly convinced that real Soviet spies deserved to be severely punished while simultaneously maintaining that Joseph McCarthy was a shameless self-seeking enemy of truth and justice.
An intellectual advance is only ipso facto a moral advance if you’re a Gnostic.
Well, perhaps. But some intellectual advances may lead to moral advances: if sufficient evidence to show that torture is ineffective leads to the abolition of legalized torture, morality does indeed advance.
some intellectual advances may lead to moral advances
Indeed so, happily. In fact, I would say that that is a non-trivial discovery about how things are, not at all a given a priori.
I’d maintain another linkage between intellectual progress and morality, too: the scientific method boils down to systematic humility before the way things actually are, as opposed to how we imagine they are or how we would like them to be. This is a moral attitude.
Consequently, bad science is not just stupid, it’s immoral.
(Their failure to appreciate the moral claim that scientific method has on belief is my main problem with creationists, to whom I am in general far more sympathetically inclined, I would imagine, than most Hatters.)
As made clear in the first two paragraphs of The Ethics of Belief.
rampant injustice and hysteria made almost all convictions for witchcraft unsafe
It occurred to me that Americans, even American legal professionals, don’t talk about unsafe convictions, and then to wonder why. The answer, I think is that in the U.S. the presumption of innocence afforded to unconvicted defendants becomes a presumption of guilt on conviction: a successful criminal appellee must show that the absence of whatever they are objecting to would probably have led to their acquittal. In the UK, however, once the conviction has been declared unsafe by a higher court, it is up to the prosecution to defend it. No U.S. convictions are “unsafe” a priori: until a defendant has proved them actually incorrect due to tainted evidence or judicial error or prosecutorial misconduct or whatever, they are always considered valid. This is in line with the generally harsher standards of criminal justice in the U.S.
@John Cowan: In the American criminal justice system, it seems that when there is sufficient uncertainty about the procedural validity of a conviction that the state needs to provide a compelling affirmative case that the verdict should be upheld, the defendant is automatically entitled to, at the very least, a complete de novo trial.
The reason American lawyers generally do not use the phrase “unsafe convictions” is because it is not part of our dialect of jargon. It does not (per some quick googling) appear to have become common in the separate dialects of legal jargon found in the UK and various Commonwealth nations until circa the 1970’s or 1980’s, long after the American dialect had diverged from the common ancestor and was sufficiently isolated that it generally did not even acquire loanwords or areal effects from innovations in foreign varieties. The notion that we must not have the concept if we don’t use the same phrasing to refer to it as foreigners do is not sound, although it may be possible that the exact parameters of what an English lawyer might mean by “unsafe” don’t map perfectly on to the specific referent of any of our jargon because we have not done exactly the same lumping and splitting of conceptual categories.
FWIW, the usual U.S. rule is that the prosecution trying to defend a conviction on appeal has the burden of proof of establishing that an error by the lower court that the defendant-appellant is complaining about was harmless. (Certain “structural” errors will lead to reversal even w/o consideration of harmlessness but that’s a narrow category in practice.) This is consistent with the rules for appeals more generally, where the party who prevailed below is free to argue that the lower court got to the right bottom-line result even if its rationale for doing so was flawed and is free to offer the appellate court the different and correct rationale that would justify the same result.
This scenario seems conditional on there already being an understanding that imprisonment comes with its share of disutility and is only committed for the greater good that is wringed out of consequences like deterrence. I would argue this is itself already a more moral position than either categorical endorsement or categorical opposition, and that hence the real advance in morality had already been made.
Another important moral point in this would be that discovering a false positive is a major violation of the principle of caution, and therefore whatever system had originally set up legalized imprisonment should be put to wider scrutiny, but this scenario also does not seem to imply anyone actually learning that lesson.
(The example of “torture” is a bit too polarized; hence I’ve substituted a less widely vilified punishment for better illustration; the point stands either way though. Even, indeed, for various today mostly accepted interventions.)
On topic:
Doubt; standard Finnish is a similarly constructed standard variety, in a much smaller smeaker community, and regardless people who learned to read already in early childhood, such as myself, can in fact speak it natively.
Wasps and Harlequins are both Rugby Union names that have great team outfit potential. If it were up to me, I’d just go with Harlequins.
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I don’t see how any Bible-believing Christian can claim there are no witches (that is, people with supernatural powers due to their allegiance to the powers of darkness)
Really? What in the Bible would actually support that belief? “Powers of darkness” don’t play much of a role in either the Old or New Testament. Satan appears as a tempter, appealing to human weakness. Are there any examples in the Bible of humans given supernatural powers to do evil?
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What in the Bible would actually support that belief?
The obvious example is the Witch of Endor. She’s more of a medium or shaman than a witch in the “modern” European sense, though.
In general, words from different cultures rendered “witch” in English cover a very wide range. Kusaasi “witches” (soonb) are more like vampires.
There is also Gal 5 19:20: “The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions […]” Paul would hardly condemn something that didn’t exist.
Torture doesn’t strictly connote punishment; the methods of pain infliction stereotypically used as torture differ from those commonly used for corporal punishment. Of course if the goal of torture is to extract a confession, or other information, from someone you are already sure is guilty, then the torture can do double duty as punishment.
The Nazis might have done a double-blind study into the reliaability of different types of information extracted under torture. If the CIA has done so then I guess the results are classified.
Re not “condemn[ing] something that didn’t exist,” the verb “exist” is sort of ambiguous here. The thing condemned just before “witchcraft” is “idolatry.” Did idolatry “exist”? Well, it manifestly existed in the sense that certain people actually venerated idols, but not necessarily in the sense that their veneration of idols was efficacious in the way they hoped and presumed, and indeed much Biblical condemnation of idolatry treats it as a species of fraud or quackery, not as a thing which is objectively-efficacious-but-bad. “Witchcraft” in the KJV translation of this passage is btw a rendering of φαρμακεία, which looks rather like “pharmacy” and has a core sense of “use of drugs and/or poison,” with “witchcraft, sorcery” being an extended sense presumably using a similar metaphor to that underlying “medicine man.”
Re sorcery in the NT context there is also of course the career of Simon Magus, which is treated rather tersely in the actual text of Scripture but much more elaborately in other narratives current in the early Church. (Those other, extra-canonical narratives are, one could say, evidence of what many early Christians did believe on the topic but not necessarily of what their Christianity per se obligated them to believe, since presumably belief in various sorts of sorcery was independently widespread in the broader cultural context in which they lived. To use a more high-falutin’ example, St. John of Damascus somewhere or other in describing the details of Creation gives a Ptolemaic/pre-Copernican account of the structure of the solar system with some hedging language indicating that this is what the smart pagan guys thought and John believes it because those guys seem smart and it’s not actually inconsistent with any Christian teaching.)
This seems relevant:
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/thou-shalt-not-suffer-a-witch-to-live-a-murderous-mistranslation-1.5443682
φαρμακεία
I once accompanied a German anthropologist on a tour to interview various Kusaasi traditional healers in our district. They varied from a few with an extremely scary occult vibe to others who had pretty much exactly the demeanour of a British general practitioner (of the good old-fashioned avuncular sort.)
Are there any examples in the Bible of humans given supernatural powers to do evil?
Balak thinks Balaam falls into this category, but things turn out to be more … complicated.
In Exodus, the priests of Egypt could turn their own staffs into snakes. They were just inferior snakes.
I think Vanya is basically right, if you interpret “witch” in the specific Malleus Maleficarum sense of “person (female by default because women are like that) who gets powers from Satan in exchange for worshipping him.” The relevent concepts just weren’t there previously. The nearest approach to it was, on the one hand, priests of false gods, and on the other, magicians, neither of witch is what we would now mean by which. So to speak.
The WP article on MM is remarkably informative, I see:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum
Note the irony (taking wikipedia at face value) that the MM perspective on the phenomenon arose quite late in the medieval era but survived the Reformation just fine, being viewed as equally plausible by those who disagreed vehemently on other issues.
I think the conclusion to be drawn is that this particular human vileness (witch-hunting) is purely parasitic on religion: the purpose of the cod-theological justication is just to give the persecutors the added thrill of imagining that God approves of their debased impulses.
The analogy with McCarthyism is not just metaphorical. What could be more satisfying than to indulge your worst vices while convinced of your own impeccable virtue?
The fact that such people have no damn right to be convinced of their own virtue because they’ve not taken the necessary steps to find out whether they are in fact acting virtuously links back to the question of science and morality again.
The Church doesn’t really seem to have decided whether witches really do have powers or not, though: sometimes they do, sometimes they are just deluded (but still dangerous because they can lead others away from worship of the True God).
I should perhaps also say that cultures with no belief in a devil at all manage to find perfectly fine justifications for persecuting witches, who (oddly enough) seem usually to be older and/or marginalised women.
In college, I took a class (21A 211, Magic, Witchcraft, and the Spirit World, taught by James Howe, who was the head of the Anthropology program. He had gotten interested in the subject because it was related to his own research, which was in about missionary conversion activity. About half the class was specifically about witch hunts, which turn out to be a rather complicated subject. We talked a bit about the Red Scares (of both the 1920s and 1940s-1950s), but a much closer analogy to traditional witch hunts could be found in the 1980s wave of accusations of Satanic ritual child abuse. In that situation, it was clear that most accusers did not believe the Satanists had magical powers, but there were plenty who did.
That was a very common comparison at the time, in fact almost inescapable.
That is always the case.
From Roman times into modern American fundamentalism, lots of Christians have believed that, yes, it is efficacious in just that way, it’s just a blasphemous thing to do. The pagan Romans thought that every deity ever worshipped really existed; the Christian spin on this was merely the addition that all except one are actually evil demons.
I think Elaine Scarry is right about torture. It’s not about the questions, it’s about power. The questions are an essential part, but not because extracting information is the objective. From The Body in Pain:
But for every instance in which someone with critical information is interrogated, there are hundreds interrogated who could know nothing of remote importance to the stability or self-image of the regime.
[For the torturers] the moral fact of inflicting that agony is made neutral by the feigned urgency and significance of the question.
Torture as a mode of interrogation is not only morally repugnant but deeply stupid.
But that is not what it’s actually about. Listen to apologists for it. They tell you whether they mean to or not.
if the goal of torture is to extract a confession, or other information, from someone you are already sure is guilty
That’s also the goal of ordinary, perfectly legal, interrogation as used by all First World police forces.
Torture is quite often used by police forces all over the world, because it is effective against certain types of criminals.
And it is also illegal all over the world and rightly so.
The rules of the game are quite simple – torture criminals to get convictions, but don’t get caught. If you get caught, you’ll probably avoid prison anyway, but will lose your job.
Again, that’s what the rules of the game for police were and are all over the world.
I don’t want to say that it’s good or acceptable, but at least it’s understandable.
What I don’t understand is the American attempt to legalize torture under the Bush administration.
Why? It’s not as if American police or special services didn’t torture criminals and terrorists before with the same effectiveness against certain types of criminals and the same ineffectiveness against others.
They did, but just like the police elsewhere, they would and did face consequences if caught. (mild consequences, mind you, basically just getting fired)
American legalization of waterboarding was essentially designed to help cowardly types who also wanted to torture folks like their bolder colleagues, but unlike them were too afraid of losing their job for the pleasure.
What I don’t understand is the American attempt to legalize torture under the Bush administration.
In my opinion (and I have no evidence at all for this) it was an attempt to openly demonstrate to the Chinese government that we could and would use the same techniques they had used against American soldiers during the Korean war: essentially a war of nerves.
Keith Thomas’s Religion & the Decline of Magic.
That was a very common comparison at the time, in fact almost inescapable.
There was even a book about the scare titled Spectral Evidence.
John Grisham wrote a non-fiction book about a real life case in Oklahoma, where an innocent man was sentenced to life in prison based on “dream” confession.
Spectral evidence lives on…
In Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, the case turns on a “sleepwalking” incrimination. I’ve always thought that’s cheating: why isn’t someone guilty of crimes they committed while sleepwalking? Albeit with maybe reduced culpability.
Anyway, an innocent girl drowned herself.
There’s a whole book on that subject.
The general answer is a lack of mens rea (‘defendant’s mind’, the state of mind necessary to commit a crime or a specific element of a crime). There are four levels of this: purposefully, knowingly, recklessly, and negligently, and which is required for what is varies between jurisdictions. However, we may generally say that one who acts knowing that his actions may reasonably cause death (and they actually do) commits murder, whereas one who merely disregards a substantial risk of causing death commits manslaughter, for example. Sleepwalkers are not conscious and so lack even the lowest level of mens rea: they can at most commit a civil infraction such as careless driving (some sleepwalkers do unfortunately become sleep-drivers as well).
The equivalent is in civil-law countries is dolus (malus) ‘(evil) intent’, which likewise comes in several flavors.
Here‘s an interesting review by Mike Jay of Mad-Doctors in the Dock: Defending the Diagnosis, 1760-1913 by Joel Peter Eigen that discusses the whole issue, if you haven’t used up your free LRB articles for this month (which you probably haven’t, since it’s the first of the month).
The case that Grisham wrote about (I have not read the book, but I heard most if it on The Radio Reader) was actually the second case in which the police in Ada, Oklahoma* used statements about suspects’ dreams to send a pair of innocent men to prison. In the later case, the men were eventually freed, when the actual killer was caught (who the police had not investigated properly, since he had a “business” relationship with the police chief) for other crimes. The way Grisham tells the story, the identity of the true culprit is really obvious. However, nobody has ever figured out who the actual killer was in the earlier “Dreams of Ada” case.
Regarding mens Rea in The Moonstone: The thief is not really sleepwalking as we would probably describe it today. He is under the influence of a narcotic. While the story calls this “sleepwalking,” Collins does show an appreciation of the fact that actions taken under the influence of drugs (and not remembered afterward) are not exactly the same as regular sleepwalking.
If a person gets high and commits a crime, their intoxication is not generally an extenuating factor, since the use of drugs demonstrates a degree of recklessness, even if their is no actual malice. However, in The Moonstone, Franklin Blake has been drugged against his will. His judgement has been impaired through no fault of his own, so he is not considered criminally or morally liable.
* I wasn’t sure how the town name was spelled, so I went about to Google the title of another book written about the earlier case. (Grisham talks a bit about the Ward and Fontenot case, but it is not his main focus.) I got as far as, “the dreams,” and Google’s first suggestion was “The Dreams of Ada,” before even “The Dreams in the Witch House,” which I recently reread on my phone. (The corrected versions of all Lovecraft’s stories are available online, by the way.) I was initially shocked that Google had done such a good job (based on what? a mention of Grisham’s nonfiction book on this page that I had just read?) figuring out what I would be interested in. However, it just turned out to be a coincidence. Apparently, some nut came forward yesterday with a nonsensical story he says proves Ward and Fontenot (who are still in prison) really are guilty.