372 brian a. catlos
In the post-medieval period, however, the whole concept of community was
evolving. Notions of race began to emerge in the 1400s, together with the idea that
true conversion could not take place given that religious identity came to be seen as an
attribute that had a physiological dimension. This is seen foremost in Spain, where
“New Christians” (Jewish conversos, and Muslim Moriscos, and their descendants) con-
tinued to be considered peoples distinct from the “Old Christian” majority—social,
legally and juridically—and continued to be subject to violence and repression. Between
1609 and 1614 all of the Moriscos, some 300 000, were forcibly expelled from Spain.
On a formal level, the Christian-ruled Mediterranean became uniformly Catholic, with
the exception of small enclaves of Jews and Orthodox. By the nineteenth century,
secular notions of citizenship that claimed to grant equal status to members of all reli-
gions came to dominate Christian Europe. In fact, this secular discourse represented
the latest iteration of “Christian” ideology, and the net effect was that religious minor-
ities lost any claim to special communal status or recognition of political legitimacy—as
nineteenth- and twentieth-century anti-Semitism, and present-day debates regarding
the status of Islam in Mediterranean Europe demonstrate.
The communal paradigm persisted in the Islamic lands of the Mediterranean, par-
ticularly in the Ottoman Empire, but also in the Ottoman successor states. Whether
these were democracies, kingdoms or authoritarian republics, whether they were
Christian (as in partially-Christian Lebanon), Jewish (Israel), or Muslim (Syria), they
continued to operate on the principle that ethno-religious communities should be
subject to separate legal regimes, and that minorities should be subordinated to the
jurisdiction of the ethno-religious majority. The exception was Ottoman Europe and
Anatolia, where ethno-religious groups (for example, Turks, Greeks, Serbs, Albanians)
endeavored to establish nation-states that were effectively homogenously-confessional
Volkstaaten. In any event, the diversity that characterized the Mediterranean of the
Middle Ages was no more.
Connectivity and interdependenceIn terms of both law and doctrine Christianity and Islam embodied contrasting posi-
tions in their approach to religious minorities, yet actual policies in Christian and
Islamic societies of the Mediterranean were near-identical through most of the Middle
Ages—which is to say, they followed the same general patterns and exhibited the same
general variations. Moreover, these policies differed from the often less-accommodating
positions that were characteristic of many other parts of the Islamic and Christian
worlds. Finally, these policies did not necessarily change according to the evolution of
religious doctrine and formal law; indeed, they often persisted in spite of it.
Consequently, the nature of minority-majority relationships here cannot be explained
of in terms of “religion,” “civilization,” or of generic Christian or Islamic “culture.”
Three factors contributed to the emergence of this Mediterranean dynamic. First,
the environment engendered a profound connectivity and interdependence among
the coastal and insular micro-regions and continental hinterlands that together com-
prised the Mediterranean—a cohesiveness characterized by reciprocal relationships
that straddled the divides between the Latin, Byzantine and Islamic zones. Second,
the geographical location of the sea, at the nexus of three distinct continental land-
masses, each with distinct climates, resources and societies, made the Mediterranean