Not So Innocent: Clerics, Monarchs, and the Ethnoreligious Cleansing of Western Europe

Prof. Şener Aktürk from our Department of International Relations published the article “Not So Innocent: Clerics, Monarchs, and the Ethnoreligious Cleansing of Western Europe," which examines the causes and consequences of the ethno-religious cleansing of non-Christians in medieval Western Europe in International Security, one of the most prestigious journals in the field. The paper aims to theorize that the Gregorian Reformation empowered the papacy and the clergy, leading to mass ethnic and religious exterminations.

Arguing that in the Middle Ages, the papacy and the clergy successfully pressured rulers to exterminate non-Christians and that all Jews and Muslims were eradicated as a result, the publication challenges modern theories of nationalist conflict, arguing that ethno-religious cleansing was the result of doctrinal changes by the clergy empowered by the Gregorian Reformation.

Not So Innocent: Clerics, Monarchs, and the Ethnoreligious Cleansing of Western Europe

Click the link to listen to the podcast that Prof. Aktürk was a guest hosted by Prof. Jeffrey Friedman from Dartmouth College.