Chapter 1 outlines the volume’s cases, methods, and arguments. It begins by tracing the linguistic history of the term “martyr” before proceeding to locate martyrdom as an act simultaneously religious and political, personal and collective, and seeking self-actualization rather than self-destruction. In contrast to studies that treat martyrdom as a subset of suicide, I articulate a distinction between self-killing—sanctioned towards certain ends—and self-murder, which is condemned in all religious (and political) traditions. As such, I argue, martyrdom must be approached through a dual window that appreciates both the rationales given by martyrs and their celebration by social groups. I analyze the promise and perils of comparative study towards that end by giving global context to localized crises, and offer a brief reconsideration of the category of sacrifice that will guide my discussion. Finally, I outline the structure of the work and the methodology that uses words written by martyrs in tandem with contemporary accounts and statements by religious and political leaders.

The book is devoted to the relationships between Nicene and Homoian Christianities in the context of broader religious and social changes in post-Roman societies from the end of the fourth to the seventh century. The main analytical and interpretative tools used in this study are religious conversion and ecclesiastical competition. It examines sources discussing Nicene–Homoian encounters in Vandal Africa, Gothic and Lombard Italy, Gaul, and Hispania – regions where the polities of the Goths, Suevi, Burgundians, and Franks emerged. It explores the extent to which these encounters were shaped by various religious policies and political decisions rooted in narratives of conversion and confessional rivalry. Through this analysis, the aim is to offer a nuanced interpretation of how Christians in the successor kingdoms handled religious dissent and how these actions manifested in social practices.

Violence in Nicene–Homoian relations is abundantly attested in Africa and attracts most scholarly attention. Chapter 2 attempts to place the problems of violence and coercion in a larger context and examine issues such the role of wealth and political power in the establishment of the Homoian church in Africa and its ability to spread throughout African society and compete with the Nicene church.

Romances’ formal innovations and authorial self-consciousness are studied from another angle by Sylvie Lefèvre, who examines the variety of authorial framing techniques and narratorial interventions in French romance. Although we possess little information about historical authors before the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many stories call attention to their creators, sometimes billed as an “acteur,” who can assert himself (or, more rarely, herself) in numerous guises: as an omniscient narrator who animates the dialogue of characters; as a parallel persona who compares his amorous affair to that of his characters; as an intradiegetic narrator who plays a role inside the story beside the characters; as a full-blown amorous persona himself, who describes the progress of his affair; or as a pseudohistorical agent based on a historical author from the previous century. Whether in verse or prose, in intradiegetic or extradiegetic narration, romances proved fertile ground for artistry, experimentation, and innovation, first in French and later in other European traditions. While some authors remain firmly entrenched inside the fiction of their creations, others created bridges to “real” incidents beyond the tale, blurring the distinction between fiction and history in ways that anticipate the modern novel.

The chapter is a brief attempt to follow the development of Brent Shaw’s work from his first, splendidly iconoclastic revision of the role of pastoral nomadism in Roman North Africa and in the ancient world in general (from 1981 onward) to his recent pair of crowning masterpieces, both published in 2013 – the first, on religious violence in Roman North Africa in the time of Augustine; the second, on harvesting in the ancient world. In between, I have tried to do justice to the breadth and coherence of his principal concerns for major themes of ancient history – for the nature of power and of resistance to power, for the structures of the family, for the nature of the Roman economy, and for the mobilization of opinion (largely of hatred) in the interconfessional conflicts of the later empire.

I introduce the dilemma of monotheistic intolerance in the context of religious violence and the concerns about the limits of liberalism and liberal violence. I then introduce Jan Assmann, René Girard, and Chantal Mouffe as figures useful in reconceptualizing our notions of intolerance, pluralism, and monotheism.

Chapter 6 outlines a political theology of monotheism using Assmann’s concepts of the Mosaic distinction, supplemented by other scholars like Mark S. Smith, Robert Gnuse, Rainer Albertz, et al. We dwell closely here on Israel’s political conditions of sovereignty, subjugation, and exile that all help illuminate – as we saw in Gans’ critique – what historical peculiarities constitute the Hebrew discovery of monotheism. I explore how monotheism could be composed of polytheistic building blocks – first in state-based religion and political symbols, like monolatry and despotic vassal treaties – but transform among an exiled people into a division of God from political representation.

Chapter 6 examines what accounts for Tawhid’s involvement in high-level, seemingly ideological violence in 1983 against Tripoli’s leftist movements and Christians. It acknowledges the causal role of ideology in this exercise of violence, mainly through the activism of a handful of highly ideologized Tawhid cadres who lobbied the leaders to engage in militant Islamist behaviour and exacerbated a climate of ideological polarization. But it also notes that, in spite of their increasing success in steering the movement’s behaviour in ideologically driven ways, these figures were a minority. Instead, the chapter finds that many of the rest of Tawhid’s members and leaders were not primarily guided by ideology in their exercise of violence, but rather by considerations of a primarily political, strategic, geopolitical and social nature. The heterogeneity of motivations which had led Tawhid to engage in violence became evident as the dynamics of conflict exposed too much variation across space and time to be solely guided by ideology. And, in a show of how the movement’s internal diversity could affect its behaviour, Tawhid would eventually be penetrated by criminals who steered its behaviour and exercise of violence in a direction at odds with its Islamist ideology.

The question of rights for non-Christians emerged out of a theocratic papalist conception of world order during the medieval crusades typified by the canon lawyer Sinibaldo Fieschi (later Pope Innocent IV). It then informed the dominant and ambivalent legal view of Christian-infidel relations in Latin Christendom represented in very different ways by both Innocent IV and his creative commentator, Polish jurist Paulus Vladimiri. This chapter considers the political translation of Innocent’s canon legal opinion on Christian-infidel relations to support the Iberian cause of missionary war in spreading the faith through Crown and Empire across the Atlantic. Theocratic world order, as articulated by Spanish royal jurists and conquistadors like Juan López de Palacios Rubios and Hernán Cortés, chiefly rested its justification for European expansion on the right of punishing infidels for their violation of natural law, the sin of idolatry above all. Infidels had dominium, in principle, but Europeans could claim superior jurisdiction over them when they presented obstacles to the spreading of religion and civilization.

Was there such a thing as ‘crusading violence’? Traditionally the crusades have been distinguished from other forms of Christian warfare and violence motivated, or at least justified, by religion. However, as this chapter demonstrates, crusading violence cannot be distinguished by its practices, brutality, or complex ideologies. Given its diversity, crusading violence can only be demarcated as violence against purported enemies of Christ that was organized, communal, purportedly authorized, and believed to be spiritually beneficial. Viewed in this light, the distinction between crusading violence and other forms of Christian violence is tenuous indeed.

This chapter starts by locating the common association of religious violence with Christianity and late antiquity in a Protestant polemic which was further developed by the Enlightenment. New approaches have started to question this master narrative, however, by highlighting the limited number of temple destructions and other paradigmatic acts of religious violence, contextualising religious violence within the prominent role played by violence in the later Roman Empire, and dissociating violent language from violent acts. Moral principles and specific understandings of religion and history produce a Christian discourse that makes violence highly visible because the church is associated with peace and society with violence. Two well-known case studies illustrate the point. First, the destruction of the Serapeion in Alexandria (391 CE) allows us to notice how the historian Rufinus constructs a narrative playing on Christian understandings of martyrdom and pagan, sacrificial violence. Second, the letter of Severus of Minorca on the conversion of the Jews (418 CE) is not an aggressive tract to promote widespread conversion of the Jews, but a defensive document that tries to free Severus from accusations of having stirred up violence.

How does the Bible represent violence? How does its literary nature shape these representations? How is violence central within biblical theologies? This chapter provides an analytical overview of biblical representations of violence and theorises ‘sanctification’ of violence. Biblical stories feature the range of violence common throughout ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean societies: war, ritual violence and violence between individuals, both ‘criminal’ and normalised. Socio-narrative context determines the legitimacy or illegitimacy of violence attributed to patriarchs, prophets, priests, Israelites, Judeans, ‘foreigners’ and royals. Some violence follows purported divine directive, but much is mundane. Yhwh’s (or divine subordinates’) violence is typically rendered legitimate. The ‘justness’ of divine violence rhetorically impacts explanations of misfortune: suffering of direct and symbolic violence indicates godly punishment. Within the Hebrew Bible and New Testament the notion that divinely decreed violence accomplishes theistic plans enables misrecognition of ritualised violence. Since antiquity, people have employed biblical themes to claim divine approval of violence. Theorisation of ‘religious violence’ facilitates distinguishing between assertions of biblically ‘justified’ violence versus how the biblical anthology represents violence. Investigating portrayals of violence, especially who benefits and who suffers from each portrayal, is key for examining social impacts of ancient ‘biblical violence’ and modern ‘Bible-based violence’.

This chapter presents a thorough re-examination of the so-called ‘Great Conversion,’ a period after the Spanish Conquest when millions of natives were baptized.Countering mendicant apologetic narratives that presented the process as a great spiritual turning, and more recent work that has limited itself to critique the apologists, this chapter demonstrates baptism was inextricably related to the social and political repercussions of conquest and demographic crisis.The chapter begins by examining the politics of indigenous adhesion to Christianity in the aftermath of conquest, highlighting the early alliances between rulers and missionaries. The chapter then examines the role of spiritual warfare and iconoclasm in mass-baptisms, which was a by-product of these early alliances.Amidst this violence, however, missionaries also extended a promise to protect indigenous communities from Spanish exploitation and enslavement of the native population.By the mid-1530s large-scale conversions resulted from an emerging consensus in indigenous communities that the mission provided them with a means to preserve their lives, property, and communities.Self-interest, spiritual warfare, and the search for sanctuary all drove this phenomenon.Through the waters of baptism, native communities began the process of remaking Mesoamerica in the 1530s.

This chapter explores the mission’s vital antecedents by employing a transatlantic comparison of the ways in which religion served as a marker of sovereign power, connected violence to theologies of imperialism, and offered sanctuary amid the disruptions of unprecedented transatlantic contacts. Three lines of inquiry form the basis of this chapter.First, I examine religion as an expression of political sovereignty in fifteenth-century Mesoamerica and Iberia. Second, I address the most fundamental differences between Iberia and Mesoamerica. In Iberia, religious exclusivism fuelled a Spanish theological imperialism that sought to extend Catholicism to the exclusion of all competing god and religious institutions, while Mesoamerican empires integrated defeated gods to their pantheon. Part three, meanwhile, examines the way in which unprecedented cycles of encounter, conquest violence, widespread enslavement, and severe demographic crises in the Canaries and the Caribbean also made the mission a sanctuary from the worst depredations of early colonization. The transatlantic roots of the Mexican mission enterprise consist of three interconnected but also contradicting elements: religion as an expression of political sovereignty, as a basis for repression and violence, and as a promise of protection.