8 minute read
Robert Christman
from Agora Fall 2022
by ROBERT CHRISTMAN, Professor of History
In recent years, deep concerns about society’s failures in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion have occupied the attention of Americans and others across the globe. At their core, these issues are about how individuals and groups with differing identities, ethnicities, and backgrounds should co-exist. Although they may seem contemporary and even novel, in their own ways and contexts, such questions have always existed. In the German-speaking lands, they achieved a new immediacy in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My sabbatical project, “The Baptism of ‘Turks’ and ‘Moors’ in the Early Modern GermanSpeaking World: Religion, Identity, and Symbolism,” is an investigation of how Lutheran, Catholic, and Reformed Christians in this area responded to the sudden appearance of “others” in their midst and how they went about integrating them into society. Until the sixteenth century, medieval Europe had been a largely closed society, defining and differentiating itself not via race or ethnicity, but by religion. Contemporaries understood Europe as the Corpus Christianum, the body of all Christians, a concept that is encapsulated in our word “Christendom” with its religious, political, and geographic connotations. Of course, there was always movement within Europe so that minority individuals or groups were not unknown. But despite their linguistic and ethnic differences, all were products of a Latin Christian mono-culture that dominated most of Europe, particularly the North. A few exceptions existed. The Jews, for example, were allowed to remain under highly regulated conditions. And individual traders and war captives from around the Mediterranean could be found especially in the cities of southern Europe, but these were mostly individual cases. But in the late sixteenth century, two historical phenomena began to bring significant numbers of individuals from outside of a Judeo-Christian, European context into the German-speaking lands. As a result of wars against the Ottoman Empire, Islamic captives began appearing in large numbers. What began as a trickle reached its peak following the failure of the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. One contemporary observed, “Slavery rolled over our land anew as the result of the successful wars against the Turks achieved with the help of God. From [those wars] came prisoners in numbers heretofore unknown.”1 At the same time, the burgeoning Atlantic slave trade brought “Moors”— Black Africans from Muslim or pagan backgrounds—to the German-speaking lands in significant numbers for the first time. Found mostly in the courts of the nobility, such individuals were regarded as status symbols. Scholarship is still far from able to calculate accurately how many people from the Ottoman Empire and sub-Saharan Africa were living in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German-speaking lands, but they must have numbered in the thousands. For most inhabitants of these regions, such individuals were the first true “outsiders” they ever encountered. Their presence raised new questions for German-speaking society. Although Europeans were still grappling with the fallout from the Protestant Reformation and the break up of the Catholic Church, all of Europe’s Christian confessions nonetheless agreed that entrée into society required conversion to Christianity, demonstrated via the rite of baptism. Lutheran theologians used the German word einverleiben to describe this integration into Christendom, the act of literally becoming a living part of a body, a concept used by St. Paul to illustrate membership in the Christian community. From 1573 on, when the first known of such baptisms was recorded in the Saxon city of Halle, the practice became increasingly widespread and elaborate, reaching its apex around 1700.2 Such baptisms offered early modern society a forum in which to debate questions surrounding the assimilation of “outsiders,” a ritual for that incorporation to take place publicly to which various meanings were assigned, and often insight into the origins, biography, and the degree of integration achieved by the individuals being baptized. These three strands represent the three directions my work is currently proceeding. The first is to consider the intellectual implications of bringing these “outsiders” into the Corpus Christianum, for such baptisms raised new theological questions among Protestants. In published pamphlets Lutheran pastors debated whether, for example, a four-year-old child from pagan Guinea sold into slavery should be baptized like an infant, or must she first reach the age of discernment, then be given the choice? Should a distinction be made
Robert Christman
“Sarazens” (1486), a woodcut by the Dutch artist Erhard Reuwich.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS: PUBLIC DOMAIN
between the age to baptize children from Christian families and those from Muslim or other religious backgrounds? Or was a child simply a child, despite familial religion? And was it compulsory to manumit captives who had converted to Christianity? At the heart of these questions was really the issue of essential difference: can the “outsider” achieve belonging or is he or she somehow essentially and always different. Among Catholics, with longer-standing traditions of interactions with peoples from outside of the Judeo-Christian context, it was the situation of the Ottoman Turks in particular that raised new theological questions, mostly associated with concerns that arose after peace with the Ottoman Empire was signed in 1699. Closest to the military front, cities such as Vienna and Munich, were filled with captive Turks, suddenly freed as a result of the treaty. Letters between churchmen and government officials that I discovered in the archives of those cities indicate that questions regarding the religious status of subjects of the Ottoman empire who had converted to Christianity while in captivity were especially difficult. Had they been coerced to convert or done so out of free will? Were they “true” Christians or not? What would become of those who chose to return to the Ottoman Empire? Would they be executed for apostacy as Islam demanded? What about captive Turkish women who had married Christian men and therefore undergone the Christian sacrament of marriage? Were they Muslims or Christians? And should they be allowed to return to the Ottoman Empire or be forced to stay? And what of children of such unions, were they to be considered Muslims (and allowed to return to the Ottoman Empire) or Christians (and forced to stay in Christendom)? In short, interactions by both Protestants and Catholics with the early modern “other” led to a series of new theological questions that presaged the increasing complexity all confessions would face as Western Christianity encountered the wider world. A second strand of my work is to think about the baptisms themselves, and the meaning of these rituals for society. Certainly they were used as another battle ground for truth claims by the various Christian confessions. But such predictable differences beg more substantive questions of a comparative nature regarding relative numbers, frequency, and utilization of such baptisms, and may ultimately reveal different confessional understandings of “the other.” The most spectacular baptisms took place under the patronage of the nobility, and often included a dozen or more aristocratic godparents, with thousands of spectators in attendance. Such elaborate public services, described in great detail in the archival records of Court Marshals, those officials responsible for all court ceremony, raise the question as to why these events became the prerogative of the nobility. What meaning(s) did they ascribe to them? Was it an issue of increasing fascination with the exotic so prominent in the early modern courts? Or does the praise heaped by churchmen upon those nobles for bringing poor souls to salvation indicate that such patrons received status from these baptisms? The extreme power differential inherent in them suggests that, at least in part, they were examples of performative subjugation. And the third strand of my sabbatical project is to discern as much as possible about the lives and experiences of these forced immigrants to Europe. In this regard, printed baptism sermons are particularly helpful because they often include a short biography of the individual being baptized, such as the young boy from Guinea, stolen by “black Jews” as he gathered wood for his mother, sold to the Portuguese, then to the English, then to a German merchant in London, and eventually gifted to a court official in Saxony. Via such sources, we begin to get a sense for the lives of these individuals.
In a few cases, the archives have been particularly revealing, providing not only insight into baptized “outsiders”, but the lives of some of the unbaptized as well. For example, I discovered the cases of the “Moor” Balthasar from Dessau, accused of stealing from his master, the Elector of Brandenburg, and sentenced to learn the catechism so that he might eventually be baptized and “lead an honorable Christian life”; and the Turk, Osmann, a wealthy Muslim
merchant from Istanbul, who spent years living in Dresden in the house of a Christian butcher, only to die suddenly without having been baptized and without leaving an heir. What should be done with his body? (Answer: it should be buried outside the city as deeply as possible without any marker.) And what should be done with his considerable fortune? (Answer: it should be confiscated by the prince and used in the construction of the Frauenkirche in Dresden). Such examples reveal a great deal not only about the lives of these unbaptized individuals, but about the attitudes of broader society toward them. It comes as no surprise that early modern answers to the question of how individuals and groups from disparate backgrounds should be treated and integrated differ from today’s responses to these questions. In this case, history does not provide us with direct answers. But studying how this past culture grappled with such questions reminds us that they are universal; that we are part of humanity’s long-running effort to address them; and that as historical contexts change, they must be confronted ever and anew.
Notes
1. Postquam igitur servitus de novo quasi invasit ex bello huc usque per DEI gratiam fausto contra Turcas, quorum mancipia nobis obvenerunt quam plurima.
Gottfried Ittig and Johannes Königk,
Disputatio Juridica de Mancipiorum
Turcicorum Manumissione Baptismo implicata. Leipzig: 1689, 4. 2. Markus Friedrich, “Türkentaufen: zur theologischen Problematik und geistlichen Deutung der Konversion von Musilmen im Alten Reich.”
Zeitsprünge 16 (2012): 47-74, 50.
