Shadows of Faith
The darker side of religious history, told as history: witch hunts and inquisitions, ordeals and sacrifices, relics and indulgences. Every page sets historians’ figures against the legends, and says how the practice ended.
This page describes persecution and violence in the past. It is written as history, without graphic detail.
Hunted for belief
Accusations, trials and persecutions in the name of faith, and the people who suffered them.
- Roman persecutions How the Roman Empire treated Christians from Nero’s reprisals in 64 CE to the Great Persecution under Diocletian, why the number of martyrs is debated, and how Constantine ended it.
- Blood libel The false accusation that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, from Norwich in 1144 and Trent in 1475 to papal condemnations and its modern echoes.
- Inquisition The medieval, Spanish, Portuguese and Roman Inquisitions, how their tribunals and the auto-da-fé worked, and how archival research has revised the numbers of their victims.
- Witch hunts How fear of a satanic conspiracy led to some 40,000–60,000 executions in early modern Europe, why the trials happened where they did, how they ended, and what Salem added.
The body as offering
Penance, renunciation and death taken on as a religious act.
- Sati The history of sati, the immolation of Hindu widows on their husbands’ pyres, how common it really was, the reformers who fought it, its abolition in 1829 and the law of 1987.
- Flagellants The medieval Christian penitents who whipped themselves in public processions in 1260 and during the Black Death of 1349, their condemnation by the pope, and their later heirs.
- Sokushinbutsu How a small number of Japanese Buddhist ascetics, above all in the Dewa Sanzan mountains of Yamagata, sought to become living Buddhas through years of austerity, and why they are still venerated.
Rites of blood and judgement
Sacrifice, ordeal and the stories told about killing in the name of the gods.
- Trial by ordeal How medieval courts asked God to judge guilt through fire, water and combat, why the Church withdrew its support in 1215, and why ordeals may have worked better than expected.
- Human sacrifice How archaeology and texts reveal human sacrifice in Shang China, Carthage, the Aztec and Inca empires and the Greco-Roman world, and why the numbers are still debated.
- Thuggee How British officials in 1830s India described the Thugs as a hereditary cult of stranglers devoted to Kali, and why modern historians see much of that picture as a colonial construction.
Faith, power and money
Images destroyed, pardons sold and relics stolen: when the sacred met politics and trade.
- Relic trade How the bones of saints became the most prized objects of medieval Christendom, bought, sold, stolen and forged, from St Mark’s journey to Venice to the looting of Constantinople in 1204.
- Iconoclasm How arguments over sacred images led to the Byzantine iconoclasm of 726–843 and the image-breaking of the Protestant Reformation, and how Islam and Judaism approach religious images.
- Indulgences What indulgences meant in Catholic doctrine, how the treasury of merit and the St Peter’s campaign led to abuses, and how Luther’s protest of 1517 and the Council of Trent changed them.