362 brian a. catlos
priority were established according to religious affiliation. Legal status and identity
came to be seen as correlative to ethno-religious identity. Hence, this diversity can be
thought of in terms of “minorities” and “majorities.” The “majority” group is the
religiously-defined community that is acknowledged as holding formal authority in a
given kingdom or principality—the mandate to rule, and the privilege of full socio-
political membership. The “minorities” were those communities that acknowledged
their subjugation to the majority group, and the subordinate status of their own
religio-juridical regime.
At times minority communities were more populous than the majority that domi-
nated them, at times as communities or individuals they were wealthier, and at times
they exercised tremendous political power in real terms. Indeed, sometimes minori-
ties or their constituents exercised rule or served as the agents of power, even over the
majority community. Minorities were at times subject to coercion, violence, margin-
alization and exploitation, but just as often, they throve. At times they were estab-
lished by sheer force, or by acts of conquest, but more typically their minority status
was the result of a process of bilateral negotiation, and a willing, if usually reluctant
acceptance by minority communities of their own subordination.
Processes of this type were not unique to the Mediterranean, but took place here
with particular intensity and frequency. This is due to several factors. One is the
environmental character of the region (Horden and Purcell, 2000): a fragmented
aggregate of compact, highly-varied micro-regions, each embodying a variety of spe-
cialized and specific productive potentials. Thanks to the character and disposition of
the land- and seascape, these micro-regions have been profoundly linked by transport,
migration and trade since the Neolithic, enabling their productive capacities to
be exploited and giving rise to a regional economy consisting of a web of small,
intimately-linked, and mutually-dependent units. This interdependence at once
encouraged acculturation and mitigated against the effects of catastrophic change,
whether environmental, political or cultural, and established a historical environment
in which social, economic, and consequently, ethno-religious diversity offered clear
advantages to ruling elites, who tended to cultivate the conditions of diversity either
by design, or unconsciously, by a process of stimulus response.
The present chapter will first provide a brief survey of the ethno-religious minori-
ties of the Mediterranean (and their corresponding majorities) in the period roughly
coinciding with the Middle Ages, and then discuss some of the underlying dynamics
and historical consequences of this diversity. Ethno-religious identity may have been
discernible in antiquity, but it was only with the fragmentation of the Roman world,
and the emergence of Christianity and Judaism, that ethno-religious identity became
the primary pole of social identification and determinant of legal status in Mediterranean
societies—a reorientation which would be articulated most clearly and formally with
the coalescence of Islam as a religion, culture, and social system. On the other hand,
from the sixteenth-century forward, and clearly by the nineteenth-century, a new
ideal of cultural identity and legal status had emerged throughout much of the region.
This “national” identity claimed, albeit spuriously and disingenuously, to have estab-
lished “citizenry,” bound by language, irrespective of religious or even ethnic origin,
as the standard for full socio-political membership in societies. Religious identity
became less relevant in this new paradigm either because these societies totally
delegitimized and purged dissenters, or because they held that national citizenship