Religious Conflict and Accommodation in the Early Modern World

Dramatic events involving religious leaders and their more zealous followers have intruded on the world s stage in recent decades, bringing renewed attention to religion as a significant factor in modern society. This collection of essays, drawn from a conference inspired by the tragic events of September 11, 2001, explores religious conflict and accommodation in various places around the world in the early modern period. The individual studies, though focused on an earlier time, illuminate the challenges facing the early twenty-first-century world, some of which may be hauntingly familiar. Professor James Tracy discusses the battle between Christianity and Islam in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean basin, what he calls the background war of the early modern period. His essay reminds us that these two groups of believers were long-standing enemies, both sides preoccupied with challenges to their own faith. The relationship between religion and politics played out much differently in other parts of the early modern world and the studies in this volume reflect a complexity and diversity of experience that ranges from the conflicts within Christianity during the French Wars of Religion to the Mughal emperor Akbar s attempts to forge mutual understanding among the varied cultures under his rule to the struggles between the Spanish and Chinese for supremacy in the Philippines. Religious conflict has long been a worldwide issue, as these essays attest, yet as they also demonstrate, accommodation was not only possible, it was often quite successful.