Word: manuel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...then it swelled once more. Pope Benedict seemed to revive it last week, with the help of an old -- make that a very old -- friend. He cited Manuel II Paleologus, the emperor of Byzantium from 1391 to 1425, who in a ?dialog? with ?an educated Persian? said: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.? Benedict then paraphrased Manuel's complaint using the explicit phrase ?forced conversion...
...that matter, was Emperor Manuel. He was the political and religious head of a much-shrunken and highly endangered Byzantine Empire, surrounded by the Ottoman Turks, who would swallow it up 53 years after his death. At a very early age he began a career as the public face of Byzantium in the West. ?He was notable for traveling the courts of Europe and arguing the case that Europe needs to come to the aid of the Greeks in the East, to revive, if you will, the crusading spirit," says Charles Barber, an art historian and expert in the Byzantine...
...possible that Benedict has misconstrued what Manuel meant about Islam's being spread by the sword. The ancient emperor may have been alluding not to sword's-edge conversion, but merely (if "merely" is the right word) to Islam's early intent to conquer the world, whose inhabitants would eventually come around to the true faith of their own accord. In that case, it?s probably accurate. That was the plan in the first generations after Mohammed, and that may be enough to scare anyone who thinks that it has been sustained since then...
...However, Manuel's personal history suggests that might actually have had forced conversion in mind. At around age 40 he was sent to the Ottoman court as a kind of ceremonial hostage; and before he returned to Constantinople to take up the imperial throne, he was forced to participate in a campaign against a Byzantine region in Anatolia. Perhaps during that fighting he witnessed an atypical forced conversion-- a bit like that of the Fox journalists...
...That was not an option that Chrisitianity granted to Islam when the roles were reversed in Southern Europe. The best-known forced conversion of Manuel?s century or any since was not executed by Muslims, but by the Spanish Christian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, who served Spanish Moors (and Jews) a convert-or-leave edict in 1492 and then backed it up with the Spanish Inquisition...