368 brian a. catlos
popular and official pressure, and were subject to violence and repression. With the
expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal beginning in 1492, their communities
became more numerous, but hardly less vulnerable—they persevered largely as a
consequence of the importance of wealthier Jews in commerce and administration.
In the Muslim eastern Mediterranean, the expansion of the Ottomans brought huge
populations of non-Muslims under Islamic rule. The Ottomans responded by further
institutionalizing and legitimizing the position of minorities via the millet system, and
by incorporating dhimmis into the imperial military and administrative apparatus to
an unprecedented degree—a process which intensified over the course of these two
centuries.
In sum, in the Muslim-ruled medieval Mediterranean, the position and condition
of religious minorities varied according to the priorities of rulers, popular sentiment
among the Muslim population, and those minorities’ economic weight and political
utility. Thanks to the Qur’an and the “Pact of Umar” dhimmi communities enjoyed
a “constitutional” right to exist that was generally not challenged in principle,
although the conditions of their submission were open to broad interpretation, and
repression could easily be rationalized on the grounds of the need for humiliation, or
in response to alleged abrogations of the Pact committed by these communities.
Mediterranean Christendom in the Middle Ages (c. 600–c. 1550 Ce)In terms of ideology and doctrine, this contrasts clearly with the situation of ethno-
religious minorities in the Christian Mediterranean. Here, they had no inherent or
divinely-established rights. Roman law had developed an aggressively hostile position
towards Jews—the only substantial minority in early medieval Christendom—and this
had been exacerbated by the Church’s antipathy. Hence, in Visigothic Hispania
(including Septimania, modern south-west France), which it is assumed had a sub-
stantial Jewish population, the Church encouraged the newly-converted monarchy to
pass a series of repressive laws. These aimed to severely limit the rights of Jews (up to
the point of forcible enslavement) and isolate them from Christian society; however,
it is not clear whether these were enforced with any regularity, or at all. There are
indications that Jews in Visigothic Spain and nominally-Byzantine North Africa may
have collaborated with the Arabo–Islamic invasions of the late-seventh/early-eighth
centuries. In the Byzantine Empire itself, the period prior to 1200 saw an abatement
in the aggressive legal reforms aimed at Jews. These seem to have settled down into a
stable existence punctuated by rare official persecutions on the initiative of the emper-
ors. There was a large community in Constantinople, and smaller ones in the major
Byzantine-controlled ports. Prior to 1050 there were also communities in Italy, Sicily
and Provence, who seem to have been active in commerce and trade, and who were
not subject to the same repressive measures as in Hispania or Byzantium.
The period from 1050 to 1350 marked a transformational period in Christendom:
one characterized by aggressive political and economic expansion in the Islamic and
Byzantine Mediterranean and tremendous institutional, cultural and ideological
developments. It was also an age in which the Christian societies of the Mediterranean
(and particularly those of the Latin west) absorbed significant Jewish and Muslim
populations, as well as non-Latin Christian communities. This was a consequence,
first and foremost, of Latin political expansion. From 1050 to 1300, al-Andalus and