AS I HAVE already stated in the introduction of the current book, our cross-cultural approach to the relationship between war and collective identities in the period between the sixth and the fifteenth centuries does not claim to offer a wholistic coverage of the topic. In this light, my effort in the current chapter to draw some comparative conclusions from the presented case studies cannot do justice to many aspects of that relationship in the period under examination; especially if we consider the significant number of cultures that were inevitably left out of the picture. The goal when we started this dialogue was, of course, not to state the obvious, namely warfare's diachronically important role in the processes of configuration or renegotiation of different types and visions of community. It was rather to problematize the multifaceted character of war's impact on high-level identifications. The individual chapters speak to each other in many ways when it comes to the question of when and how warfare in the form of interstate conflict, conquest, or civil war converged with institutions, political ideologies, religion, and ethnicity, or informed practices of memorialization in order to shape collective attachments, enhance or weaken groupness, and construct otherness.

The role of religious identifications and religious– political proto-ideologies looms large in the two case studies on civil wars. The well-studied events of the Albigensian Crusade testify to civil war in medieval western Europe as a phenomenon that was circumscribed by the imagined community of western-European Christendom, attributing a secondary role to the state and/or shared ethnicity. Even though the nominal kingdom of France provided the political-territorial scene of the conflict that has been interpreted as an attack of the northern French against the Occitan elites, the southerners distinguished themselves from the French ethnicity of the northerners. Philippe Buc highlights the two main visions of identity that emerge from the narrative sources: the first, a product of Crusading ideology and practice, was a vision employed to demarcate the opposite parties in terms of Catholic versus Cathar and pious versus sinful in order to justify the actions of war; even though such distinctions were by far not clear-cut on the ground.