A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
chapter twenty-three
Perhaps the most notable characteristic of the Mediterranean region in the period
between the disintegration of Roman hegemony and the establishment of modern
European domination was the region’s ethno-religious diversity. The medieval
Mediterranean is broadly recognized as being the arena of contact between the three
major religious cultures of the West: Christianity, Islam and Judaism. However,
Mediterranean diversity was at once more profound and more complex than this
thumbnail suggests. This was not merely a region bisected by a frontier between
Christendom and dar al-Islam, and sprinkled with Jewish communities, but a region
in which Christian and Muslim-ruled societies embraced and contended with signifi-
cant and influential out-group confessional communities as subjects, and in which the
three major ecumenical cultures were riven by formal religious factionalism and inter-
nal competition. In the Mediterranean an array of distinct Muslim, Christian and
Jewish communities lived amongst each other within the same principalities and
societies. Not uncommonly, the differences between these religiously-orientated
communities were manifestations or extensions of broader communal identities
emerging out of, or reflecting, local, linguistic, cultural, tribal, socio-cultural, or
socio-political affiliations. Hence, these are more appropriately referred to as “ethno-
religious” communities. Nor were the definitions of these groups, or the boundaries
that separated them, clear or constant. They were blurred by acculturation and
syncretism, and by the tendency for individuals to manifest diverse and distinct, or
even multiple, identities according to context and circumstance; and yet, conflict,
whether political, legal or social could suddenly draw identities into sharp relief with
violent and catastrophic results.
Minorities and majoritiesThe ethno-religious diversity of the Mediterranean cannot be considered in isolation
from the relationships of power that characterized the region. Moreover, it was pre-
cisely due to this diversity that in the medieval period, hierarchies of power and of
Ethno-Religious Minorities
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