Elizabethan distractions and pointless historical ironies

This is a disjointed post that I'll probably regret publishing, but what the hell. (In blogging, it's usually better to regret doing something than to regret doing nothing.)

Quite innocently -- and by that I mean I had no particular ideological axe to grind --last night I was reading about Elizabeth I of England and her intriguing diplomatic initiatives with Muslim rulers:

Trade and diplomatic relations developed between England and the Barbary states during the rule of Elizabeth.[139][140] England established a trading relationship with Morocco in opposition to Spain, selling armour, ammunition, timber, and metal in exchange for Moroccan sugar, in spite of a Papal ban.[141] In 1600, Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud, the principal secretary to the Moroccan ruler Mulai Ahmad al-Mansur, visited England as an ambassador to the court of queen Elizabeth I,[142][143] in order to negotiate an Anglo-Moroccan alliance against Spain.[144][145] Elizabeth "agreed to sell munitions supplies to Morocco, and she and Mulai Ahmad al-Mansur talked on and off about mounting a joint operation against the Spanish".[146] Discussions however remained inconclusive, and both rulers died within two years of the embassy.[147]

Diplomatic relations were also established with the Ottoman Empire during with the chartering of the Levant Company and the dispatch of the first English ambassador to the Porte, William Harborne, in 1578.[148] For the first time, a Treaty of Commerce was signed in 1580.[149] Numerous envoys were dispatched in both directions and epistolar exchanges occurred between Elizabeth and Sultan Murad III.[150] In one correspondence, Murad entertained the notion that Islam and Protestantism had "much more in common than either did with Roman Catholicism, as both rejected the worship of idols", and argued for an alliance between England and the Ottoman Empire.[151] To the dismay of Catholic Europe, England exported tin and lead (for cannon-casting) and ammunitions to the Ottoman Empire, and Elizabeth seriously discussed joint military operations with Murad III during the outbreak of war with Spain in 1585, as Francis Walsingham was lobbying for a direct Ottoman military involvement against the common Spanish enemy.

It has to be borne in mind that Elizabeth's immediate predecessor, the very unpopular "Bloody Mary," had restored Catholicism in England and her widowed husband Philip II, King of Spain, had been the King of England, and believed it was his duty to re-re-Catholicize England. So Spain remained a potent, dire threat, the Moors were Spain's implacable enemies, and seen as no threat to Protestantism. Even if she didn't trust them, Elizabeth was a skilled practitioner of war by diplomatic means. Ultimately, the Anglo-Spanish war resulted, the Armada was sunk, and Spanish decline began. Elizabeth, who had tried to be tolerant of British Catholics turned on them after her excommunication by Pope Pius V, and the latter's declaration that British Catholics owed her no allegiance, thus forcing the issue by turning Catholics into traitors. Elizabeth in turn supported Protestants in the religious wars in France and the Netherlands, and of course the protracted European wars of religion outlived her.

I think the most flattering words ever spoken about Elizabeth came from Pope Sixtus V, who, while he naturally renewed his predecessor's excommunication of her, made this comment (shortly before the sinking of the Armada):

She certainly is a great queen. And were she a Catholic she would be our dearly beloved. Just look at how well she governs; she is only a woman, only mistress of half an island. And yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire, by all.
Anyway, while reading about Elizabeth, I happened upon this map of Europe just before the Counter-Reformation:

Catholicism_Protestantism_and_Islam.jpg

CAPTION

Catholic areas (green), Protestant areas (blue) and Islam-controlled areas (red), before the Counter-Reformation. The Muslim Ottoman Empire shared the boundary with Christian Europe to the southeast.

Inevitably, the question arises of how many people were killed, and by whom. Unfortunately, the figures vary enormously, and there is not enough time in a day -- or a year -- to come up with numbers. Sites like this list them war by war and battle by battle, but as there was no agreement between contemporaneous historians (and considering government and religious biases how could there be?), I see no way to achieve consensus now. It used to be that Protestant and Catholic finger-pointing would tend to inflate the numbers on each side, but then revisionism would reduce them, often dramatically. For example, a post Modernist scholar I know insists that only 35 people were killed by the Spanish Inquisition and that Americans have largely been duped by bigoted British promoters of the "Black Legend."

Of course, a more recent tendency is to see modern atheism as the far greater killer. This (IMO) requires seeing Stalin, Hitler, and Mao as all being atheists first, with a primary goal of eradicating religion, and it has of course been hotly debated. But the analysis of these bloodthirsty tyrants as being primarily driven by atheism is problematic. Stalin (a former seminarian) did persecute religion, but he also revived the church during the war, and Hitler (who condemned atheism, claimed to be a Christian, but flirted with creating a bizarre quasi-pagan state religion) hardly fits the profile of a man motivated by atheism. He may have killed more people for being Communists than he did for being members of religions he opposed. And if Communists are atheists, then Hitler was arguably one of the biggest mass killers of atheists who ever lived. A question that intrigues me is how many Communists did Stalin kill? During the many purges, countless Soviet Communists who imagined they were loyal were summarily murdered and sent to the Gulags to die:

Stalin's drive for total control, and his pressing need for convict labour to fuel rapid industrialization, next spawned the series of immense internal purges -- beginning in 1935 -- that sent millions of party members and ordinary individuals to their deaths, either through summary executions or in the atrocious conditions of the "Gulag Archipelago."
Which leads me to ask, who killed more atheists? Stalin or Hitler?

Or am I not supposed to ask? (Personally, I think it's irrelevant, because they would not have been killed for being atheists -- any more than kulaks were killed for being Christians.)

As to Mao, he killed 45 million Chinese, including Christians, Buddhists, Confucians, and Muslims. But surely there were millions of atheists killled too, for like Stalin, Mao was a paranoid infighter, who launched internal purge after internal purge.

Identifying those who were killed specifically for their religion would be a difficult if not impossible task.

So it would be another one of history's pointless ironies* if Mao turned out to be the greatest killer of atheists of all time, but hey, I was just trying to read about Elizabeth, and I got all distracted.

* But aren't there people who would use such figures to make a point? Hmmm.... Maybe it's inaccurate call them pointless. If some people make a point by claiming that "Christians kill Christians," then why isn't it a point to claim that "atheists kill atheists"? (And Muslims kill Muslims too, in this big happy world.)

posted by Eric on 08.20.09 at 11:45 AM





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In this big happy world the only constant has been mans inhumanity to man.
People seem to believe they have the right to inflict harm on those who have different race, religion, color, dietary habits.
Presently in our western society the wealthy, smokers, obese, and supporters of individual responsibility and accountability seem to be targeted.

Hugh   ·  August 20, 2009 12:45 PM

Exactly Hugh.

Blaming religion for people killing and enslaving each other is like blaming guns for killing people or spoons for Rosie O'Donnell being fat.
It just doesn't make sense.

To quote that eminent understander of people, Robert Heinlein
There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself"

The excuse doesn't matter, except to the ones involved.
It's always The Other.

Another Heinlein quote, he understood that man and monkey hadn't diverged all that much.
If you dye a monkey pink and shove him into a cage of brown monkeys, they'll tear him to pieces.

The exact reason that people do what they do to each other isn't all that important, it seems to be hard-wired into us.

Veeshir   ·  August 20, 2009 02:36 PM

My point, which I didn't make clear, is that when people talk about "Well, people kill each other over religion more than blah, blah", the only response is,

"Well, people like to kill other, why take it out on the excuse they use. Are you saying the religious (or atheist) was askin fer it?

Veeshir   ·  August 20, 2009 02:40 PM

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