The Invention of Yesterday by Tamim Ansary

Author:Tamim Ansary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

THE CONCEPT OF EUROPE

The first crusaders came from France, so Levantine Muslims called all of them Franks. The crusaders meanwhile called all their adversaries by a single name too: Saracens. For Muslims, steeped in their own importance, coining a single term for the invaders was a way of dismissing them: Why bother differentiating one gnat from another? For the Europeans, giving their adversaries a single name had a different import: it aided the construction of a monolithic other.

In Europe’s feudal era, every little area was so sunk in local concerns that no one would have identified themselves as European, just as none of us now living in the Milky Way would identify ourselves as Milky Waysian. The Crusades, however, opened European Christian sensibilities to a sense of common identity, as parts of a single social whole. As Christians streamed to the Holy Lands, they brushed up against people of many backgrounds from many places, and get this: they were all headed to the same place, and they were all on the same side! But “same side” required that there be at least one “other” side. The more binary the two sides, the stronger the identity shared among Europeans. They didn’t have to do any actual crusading to feel pride of ownership in the heroic quest, just as one doesn’t have to play football to exult when the home team wins. Only a minority actually went east to fight, but everyone knew there was an east to go to and a war to fight. The Crusades thus helped give birth to the concept of Europe. By knowing the single thing they weren’t, these diverse peoples came to a stronger sense of some single social whole they were. A new social constellation was gaining definition now.

An identity shaped by the otherness of the other gains coherence by eliminating all traces of the other from itself. It’s no surprise, then, that as Muslims took back the Levant, the Crusades didn’t end; they shifted to Europe, and there turned inward. In 1231, the Catholic Church created a judicial organ, the Inquisition, to sniff out heresies within Christendom. The Inquisition spotted two such impurities right away in France: they were the Albigensians and the Waldensians, two movements of religious revivalists who claimed that poverty and self-denial were essential features of Christian life. Any bishop lolling in luxury could see how sacrilegious that was. Encouraged by the Inquisition, the French king launched Crusades against both of these heresies, crippling the Waldensians and wiping out the Albigensians utterly.

Later, the Inquisition identified witchcraft as a major contamination. Tens of thousands of witches were found and burned at the stake over several centuries, most of them elderly, husbandless women. The Inquisition pressured people accused of witchcraft to name other witches, thus ensuring that the campaign to wipe out witches would never reduce the supply of witches. It was important that the supply not shrink, for the emerging constellation needed witch hunting to help construct itself. In northern Europe, the

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