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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 1928516" data-attributes="member: 6533">Hmm, I would not say that Medievals held cultural or biological diversity as values, no.  Biological diversity would particularly be a problem for them as I don't know that you could claim anyone in the middle ages had an idea approaching that of race.  Certainly you might claim there were proto versions of it in specific cases but no general ideology.Now, biological diversity in nature you might make a claim for, though I don't think they had anything approaching an extinction issue to make that clear for them.  They were very interested in creating long term and stable sustainable land management.Cultural difference, rather than diversity, was something Medievals were sensitive too, I just don't think they saw cultures as whole cloth.  There would be no notion that you had to, say, preserve the French language from pollution, but there would be a notion that a people had ancient rights or customs that were worth remembering and that the identity as a whole gave a lot of claim to various values of legitimacy.  By the time you get to the new world you're dealing with a whole different kettle of fish, but even within the Hapsburg Empire the specific character, laws, and customs of a people were the basis for all interaction with that province, even though the history of those institutions could be questioned and negotiated with, thus the horror that was Charles V tax codes and finances.If I am tilting at a strawman with regard to the issue of genocide then fair enough, but it is a point I felt pretty strongly about clarifying.  And I really do not believe that the purpose/intent of Christianzing work through much of the period was to produce general conformity.  Certainly there would be a high degree of conformity on the ecclesiastical level but even there you can look to the multiplicity of Catholic rites and see a high degree of willingness to accomodate and preserve difference.  But I think the general point of Gregory the Great's stance on Missionary work was that cultural assimilation was not a concern of the church and that cultural difference could be manipulated as just another rhetorical tool rather than an ideological objective.  You still see a lot of that carried over into the early modern period, though by the time the Jesuits get disbanded, the first time, things had pretty clearly been decided against medieval tolerance and laissez faire.Christian versus Pagan claims mostly tend to come long after the actual point of conversion when Christian rhetoric is looking to establish its own strawmen.The policy I see at work through most of the Middle Ages was not the Ostiensian doctrine so much as one that might be called Augustinian.  That is that as with Augustine and the many religious divisions he faced, if you were living in a Catholic polity you could accept that legal force might be brought to bear on internal dissension and you could seek to guide it, but the point was to bring in willing converts so you had to recognize both the value of force for protection of Catholic rights and the extreme limitations of force and coercion as rhetorical tools.  And that doctrine is pretty clearly against the annihilation of rival groups by any means other than co-opting.  Augustine's actual pleas for the preservation of Jewish communities are certainly odd, but they are also very clearly against anything that would be a deliberate attempt to squelch them.  I think Gregory's work complements this idea with regard to communities that do not exist inside Catholic polities.I don't know of an instance in which an armed force is used as an extension of evangelical work prior to the early modern period, but I could easily be ignorant of an exception.  Even in Spain during the Reconquista being Moorish isn't necessarily an impediment,  El Cid was Muslim afterall.  I know of missionary work within the Crusader states, but I don't know of any concentrated effort to really make the Crusader states an evangelical tool.  Again I could be ignorant, but given the reputation of the Crusader states as diplomats and power-brokers within the Muslim world pre-Saladin I think that would be an extremely odd move on their part.The Diaspora is an interesting example of Roman Imperial policy with regard to genocide, though I think it's a little bit difficult in that Jewish communities had already been spread across the empire and the civil war certainly made them concerned with a quick solution.  Still the Romans were looking to destroy any notion of a complete and coherent Jewish community and one of the tools they used for that were executions not aimed so much at people as at populations, which was a fairly common Roman policy.  I would look particularly at the case of Numantia where a Spanish Republic of five cities was deliberately and totally massacred, enslaved, and obliterated.  Thucydides has at least two dialogues within the History of the Pellopenssian War devoted to Athen's tendency to annihilate revolting polities, and there it is not the concept that is exceptional so much as the circumstances.In general, I think genocide was a more acceptable policy to a Mediterranean world where polities were the size of cities, but one good family, a family that could potentially be a polity in it's own right, could cause massive trouble for generations.</blockquote>

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