The Reformation was a turning point in history.Many scholars have argued that it played a crucial role stimulating economic growth, liberal ideas, and institutional change. However, assessing these claims is challenging because identifying the effects of the Reformation is extremely difficult.

The schism between Reformed and Catholic Christianity coincided with so many other developments that clear chains of causation are difficult to pick out. Many important events occurred between the invention of the printing press circa 1450 and 1648 when the Thirty Years' War ended. Stronger and more centralized political units emerged in France, Spain, the Netherlands, and England. The New World was discovered, and colonial empires were established.

We describe how, in conjunction with the rise of more powerful and centralized states in Western Europe, the Reformation undermined the equilibrium of conditional toleration that we outlined in Part 1. By significantly increasing religious diversity across Europe, the Reformation placed pressure on existing systems of conditional toleration. Keeping Jewish communities confined to ghettos was something an early modern city could manage, but separating Catholics from Protestants would often prove too much. The larger the polity in question – and themore involved the government was in people's lives – the more severe the problem of heterogeneity became.When the pressure was too great, civil conflict, always a possibility, became a terrible reality. The years followingMartin Luther's declaration of independence from Rome saw some of the most savage acts of religious violence Europe had ever experienced. Violence and unrest instigated political reform; however, many rulers decided to abandon the use of identity rules and religion to legitimate rule, relying instead on more secular institutions that were founded on more general rules.

The states that emerged out of the inferno of persecution and violence of the sixteenth century differed fundamentally from their medieval predecessors, and these differences would have important consequences for economic development and the rise of liberalism. In the Dutch Republic, Great Britain, and to a lesser extent, France, the enforcement of strict religious conformity ceased to be viable by the eighteenth century. All three of these polities were relatively powerful and centralized, qualitatively different from their medieval predecessors even if to modern eyes they appear to have been riddled with cronyism and corruption. All of these societies saw fierce religious persecution in the decades after 1517.

On the night of April 12th (Palm Sunday) 1348, townsmen stormed the street where Toulon's Jewish community predominantly resided. They killed forty Jews and pillaged their houses. In this way a long-standing Jewish community was destroyed. This pogrom coincided with the arrival of the Black Death, the most devastating epidemic in European history. It was one of the first pogroms in a wave of violence against Jews between 1348 and 1350. Why were the Jews blamed for the plague? And how was the scapegoating of Jews mediated by political and economic considerations?

The Black Death was an unprecedented demographic and economic shock. Between 1348 and 1353, it killed between 30 and 40 percent of Europe's population. Moreover, it was a catastrophe with huge consequences. Many distinguished scholars view it as a turning point in European history. In the short run, commerce and trade dried up, agricultural land went untilled, prices soared, and disorder spread. In the long run, wages rose, rents fell and, more importantly, the plague brought about an institutional transformation across much of Western Europe.

The plague spread first from Kaffa, a trading port on the Black Sea run by Genoese merchants, toMessina in Sicily. But the story that it was spread by Mongol besiegers catapulting infected bodies into Kaffa is almost certainly false. The disease vector was black rats that likely entered the city through simpler means. These black rats bore fleas infected with bubonic plague.

From Sicily the plague spread to Marseilles and from there it spread to much of Western Europe in 1348. When it arrived in a country, it moved quickly. For instance, it arrived in southern England in June 1348. It reached London by November and northern England in summer 1349. By late 1349, it had also spread across Central and Northern Europe, including the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and Germany.

The demographic and economic impact of the plague was tremendous. Rural and urban populations died at similar rates. Medical knowledge was rudimentary and ineffective. And there was no effective policy response to the new disease. Figure 6.1 from Jebwab, Johnson, and Koyama (2016) depicts estimates of Black Death mortality. Cities like Florence saw their populations fall by around 60 percent. But other cities escaped with mortality rates of 15–20 percent.

The twentieth century saw totalitarian states repress freedom on a previously unimaginable scale. Did the same developments that produced the modern state also give rise to totalitarianism? In this chapter we discuss why the rise of more powerful and capable states was a double-edged sword. The existence of a parallel path to totalitarianism is consistent with our argument. It also serves as a reminder of the fragility of liberalism and its dependence on shared prosperity.

Premodern states were weak – they lacked the capacity to raise taxes and to enforce general laws – and illiberal. They governed through identity rules and relied on religion to provide legitimacy. In some cases this led them to tolerate a measure of religious diversity. But this toleration was always conditional. In other times and places, these same factors gave rise to religious persecution. The absence of religious freedom was “built in” to the structure of all premodern states.

The kinds of polities that emerged for the first time in Europe after 1600 changed this. These were modern states that had the ability to both raise large amounts of tax revenues and to legislate behavior.

The shadow of the twentieth century looms large over any discussion of state power. The totalitarian states of the mid-twentieth century not only conducted mass slaughter on an industrial scale, but also presaged the elimination of the possibility of private life and independent thought. Outside North Korea, there are no such states in the world today, butmodern technology opens up the possibility of states restricting offensive or risky behaviors by private individuals. There is no doubt that the power of the modern security state poses a threat to liberty. Genuine commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of thought is rare among politicians even in societies that pay lip service to liberal values.

Progressives celebrate the power of the managerial state to improve the lives of ordinary people. They are opposed by classical liberals and conservatives who wish either to preserve a sphere of freedom for individuals or communities, or disagreed with the direction of economic and social policies. This contemporary debate between advocates of state power as a mechanism for social improvement and its opponents, while crucial for understanding twentieth- and twenty-first-century politics in the developed world,may not be the best lens for viewing developments in premodern Europe or in the developing world today.

Medieval Europe's rent-seeking equilibrium enabled Jews to settle and often to flourish. However, it also left them highly vulnerable to the whims of rulers and to both local elites and commoners who resented their fiscal role. Antisemitic beliefs were deeply rooted in medieval culture, but they manifested themselves most strongly when economic conditions deteriorated. We now describe how these factors combined to bring about a crisis for Jewish communities after 1300.

Already by the end of the thirteenth century the situation of Europe's Jewish communities had deteriorated, but the fourteenth century – a century of plague, warfare, and famine for the entire continent – was nothing short of catastrophic. First, in 1290 England's small Jewish community was expelled wholesale by Edward I. Then, in 1306 Philip IV of France expelled the Jews of France. Though they were invited to resettle a decade later by his son, the unrest that followed the Great Famine of 1315–1321 saw a series of pogroms across the country. Numerous pogroms also took place in the German lands during this period, but these pale in comparison to the Europe-wide persecutions that commenced with the Black Death (1347–1352), which we discuss in Chapter 6.

In this chapter we seek to explain why the conditional toleration equilibrium was particularly fragile in societies whose economies were close to subsistence and where political authority was weak. We test this argument by identifying the impact of economic shocks on the conditional toleration equilibrium using random fluctuations in growing season temperatures across European cities. We then use these temperature fluctuations to probe under what sorts of geographic and institutional constraints the conditional toleration equilibrium was more or less stable.

Agricultural output in medieval Europe was highly dependent on weather patterns. Farmers did not have access to chemical fertilizers or scientific agronomy. Storage technologies were underdeveloped and transporting grain over long distance expensive. The risk of harvest failure due to climatic fluctuations was very real. In Bruce Campbell's evocative words, nature was a “historical protagonist.”

This vulnerability was heightened by the early fourteenth century, as Europe was densely settled by the standards of a preindustrial economy. During the previous two centuries of economic and demographic expansion, forests had been cut down, marshes drained, and marginal land taken into cultivation.With a population of around 80 million, the continent was close to its Malthusian carrying capacity.

On the morning of July 22, 1306 every Jewish home in France was surrounded by soldiers and bailiffs on the order of the king. The timing was inauspicious: the Jews had concluded the ninth day of the fast of Tisha B'Av, which commemorated the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem in the seventh century BCE and the first century CE respectively. As fate would have it, this date would mark a similar catastrophe for the Jews of France. They were arrested, their possessions seized, and given just one month to leave the realm on pain of death.

The writer Ishori Haparchi (1280–1355) was training to be a doctor at the time. He recalled the event as the great tragedy of his age:

In this chapter we describe how the 1306 expulsion of French Jews was related to the new political equilibrium between church and state that emerged in Europe after 1100.

The 1306 French expulsion, and the many other incidents like it, reflect the nature of the conditional toleration equilibrium that emerged in medieval Europe. The alliance between political and religious authorities had two consequences. First, rulers began to persecute religious minorities when this could buttress their sacred credentials. Second, when it was too costly to eliminate the religious minority, states would instead attempt to separate them from the rest of society. In other words, the state would conditionally tolerate the religiously deviant groups.

In this chapter, we describe how this conditional toleration equilibrium applied to Europe's Jewish communities, focusing on why it was self-enforcing, how it also reinforced antisemitism, and how it could break down, resulting in tragedies such as the expulsions of 1306.

The relationship between religion and the state remains contentious. Religious differences continue to be a major source of tension and sometimes violence across the world. Even in liberal democracies there are frequent disagreements about the scope of religious freedom. Do states have the right to regulate religious clothing? Can the state prohibit religious organizations from discriminating against individuals who do not share their beliefs? Should states fund religious schools? How stable are institutions that support religious liberty?

We do not provide direct answers to all of these questions. Rather, we argue that to tackle issues such as these we first need to know where our modern notions of religious freedom come from. This requires an understanding of the processes that governed the emergence of religious liberty. It requires not just a knowledge and understanding of history, but also an appreciation of the political and economic challenges that confronted premodern states. This is what we provide in this book.

Doing so requires confronting several popularmyths that have grown up around the subject of religious toleration. The first myth is that religious violence was ubiquitous in medieval and early modern Europe. This claim is repeated in popular histories and is sometimes accompanied by the claim that other parts of the world such as Islamic Spain, the Middle East, or the Mongol Empire were comparatively tolerant. Books and films have shaped a widely held view of theMiddle Ages and early modern period in which we are led to believe that the execution of heretics and witches was an everyday occurrence. This reflects the influence of novels like Umberto Ecco's The Name of the Rose and less edifying forms of entertainment such as the 2010 film Black Death starring Sean Bean. These popular depictions of medieval Europe suggest that religious persecution was an ever present feature of life in the past. In many respects, this is a reassuring image. At least in the West it allows us to view religious violence as the product of intolerant and superstitious individuals.

But were people in medieval Europe, in fact, more prone to persecute religious minorities? An alternative view is that medieval Europeans, like all people, responded to the incentives generated by the institutions that surrounded them. Religious persecutions did not reflect fanatical or irrational beliefs. Rather, they reflected the political economy of the premodern world, in which rulers depended on religious authorities for legitimacy.

In 1670, a strange sight occurred repeatedly in the villages located at the base of the Pyrénées mountains in western France. A young weaver's apprentice named Bacqué could be seen in the middle of the village square – flanked by two agents of the local parlement, or, high court. While this, in itself, was not so strange – apprentices and agents of the court were not so rare – the actions of Bacqué and the villagers certainly were. The entire village would line up and file past the young weaver, and he would declare each villager either a “witch” or “not a witch,” for the local magistrates in the region of Pau were convinced that Bacqué had the “gift” of seeing into people's souls to determine if they were tainted by the devil. The court agents and Bacqué would do this for as many as 30 villages, in the process identifying 6,210 “witches” (Mandrou, 1979, 236).

What happened next illustrates how the rule of law emerged in a society that was steeped in superstitious belief and clung to identity rules at the local level, but that was increasingly ruled by governments committed to maintaining order. Louis XIV's minister, Colbert, heard of what was going on and decided that it could not stand. He had Bacqué arrested and thrown in the Bastille and commanded the local magistrates to cease their search for witches in the area. On what grounds did he do this? Colbert objected to the irregularity of the judicial proceedings and annulled the prosecutions while issuing a royal proclamation (edict) that ”… prevents the courts and averts the disorders that would be caused by a procedure so irregular that it would envelop the majority of the inhabitants of the aforementioned province, trouble the repose of families and violate the rules of justice” (Mandrou, 1979, 241). Colbert's objection to the violation of the “rules of justice” was about as close to a proclamation in favor of the rule of law as one gets in early modern Europe.

Religious beliefs and practices emerged as a consequence of the deep-seated desire for meaning that characterizes humanity. For anthropologists, the desire to seek meaning in the world distinguishes Homo sapiens from earlier hominids. The quest for meaning led to the creation of myths and cultural beliefs and that, in turn, enabled human communities to band together into groups larger than extended kinship networks.

As religion is coeval with large-scale society, it is unsurprising that the relationship between religion and political authority that arose in early agricultural societies was close. Religion was not a separate sphere from politics. The two were intricately related in every aspect of life as religion was a source of group identity and shared social meaning.

Early human societies existed on the edge of subsistence. They could be threatened by natural disasters, climate change, or invasion by a neighboring group. Given the dangers they faced, and given their beliefs, it is natural that they enforced religious worship because impiety could endanger the entire community. There was no notion of religious freedom.

Over time, agrarian civilizations became more complex. Empires rose and fell. As more sophisticated forms of governance arose, the close relationship between religion and politics strengthened. The most successful religions encouraged pro-social behavior. During the Axial Age (c. 700–200 BCE), Judaism, Buddhism, and later, Christianity developed, each responding to the concerns of ordinary people in highly unequal agrarian societies. These religions were initially radical and destabilizing, but they were soon accommodated into the preexisting political equilibrium, an equilibrium based on a partnership between religion and the state.

This book has examined how this equilibrium first broke down in Western Europe. It has studied the transformation from a world where religion and politics were inseparable to a world where both religious and broader social and intellectual freedoms became both worthy of respect and deserving of protection. Our argument does not imply that modern liberal societies have attained full religious liberty. Today,modern liberal states are committed to the ideal of religious freedom, but this commitment is often observed in the breach. Tensions and unresolved problems remain, and new issues will always arise.

By what right does a government collect taxes? What distinguishes such taxation from robbery at the point of the sword? These are abiding questions in political philosophy. In his great apologia for Christianity, The City of God, Augustine of Hippo tells the apocryphal story of a pirate captured and brought before Alexander the Great.When theMacedonian ruler asked him how dare he keep hostile possession of the sea, the pirate replied, “How do you dare to seize the whole earth? Because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor?”

This is a profound and difficult question. Answering requires the concept of political legitimacy. Principles of legitimation vary widely across societies. The president of a modern democracy might respond to the pirate's question by saying: “Because I was elected by the people in a democratic election.” An Egyptian pharaoh might answer by saying he was the embodiment of Horus and the son of Ra. A legitimate government is one that is perceived to be so. That is, the legitimation principle has to cohere with the belief systems of the population. An American presidential candidate who claimed to be the embodiment of Horus would not get very far. This is because today the most important source of legitimacy is democratic. Prior to 1800, however, the most important sources of legitimacy were religious.

The significance of religion as a source of political legitimacy was a key feature of medieval societies in both Europe and the Middle East. Modern anthropological research shows that rulers of the earliest known states all based their authority on the claims of religion. In the Egyptian case, scholars have documented that “the Egyptian conception of kingship was that the king was a god – not merely godlike, but the very god” (Fairman, 1958, 75).

On May 23 1618, three men could be seen hurtling the seventy feet from the third floor of the Bohemian Chancery tower to the ground below. They were all representatives of the Catholic Habsburg Emperor. Despite all of them surviving the fall, either because they fell in manure (as claimed by Protestants) or because of the divine intervention of angels (as claimed by Catholics), this “Defenestration of Prague” became the precipitating event of the great European conflagration known as the Thirty Years' War. It marked the breakdown in the political modus vivendi that, since 1555 and the Peace of Augsburg, had allowed Protestants and Catholics to avoid war. This equilibrium, described in the Latin as cuius regio, eius religio, or “whose realm, his religion” allowed for peace by permitting the princes of Germany with conflicting religious beliefs, literally, to live in separate realms. This is one of the more salient examples of the identity rules that characterized early modern Europe. The Peace of Augsburg did not enforce religious freedom but rather avoided conflict by allowing intolerance to be legislated at the local level – this was conditional toleration par excellence.

The conditional toleration equilibrium that was shattered in Prague in 1618 was also uniquely suited for the highly fragmented political system of the Holy Roman Empire. As we have seen in earlier chapters this loose political agglomeration had lacked strong centralized government since the eleventh century controversy over investiture of priests that pitted the secular authority against the Church and had ended up weakening both.

This chapter studies the failure to reconstitute the conditional toleration equilibrium in Europe after the crisis brought about by the Reformation. In the aftermath of religious conflict, attempts to impose conditional toleration on their populations resulted in a fragile political-religious equilibrium. This equilibrium eventually undermined itself. And the intensification of interstate competition and state building saw the rise of mercantilist states like France and Prussia.

On the one hand, these states, like their predecessors, sought religious legitimacy as a key pillar of their authority. On the other hand, they also came to see economic development as crucial to political success. Pragmatic and mercantilist considerations led Cardinal Richelieu to offer de facto toleration to Portuguese Jews who could finance war against Spain and encouraged Jean Baptiste Colbert to tolerate Huguenots – a policy that was reversed after his death.

Religious freedom emerged gradually in Europe in the period after 1600. Before the seventeenth century, these things were seen as either impossible or undesirable by all but the most radical and marginalized thinkers. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, a commitment to liberalism became the default position of elites across Western Europe. The question we now turn to is: “What made this transformation possible?”

In modern societies national identity came to replace religion as a source of political legitimacy. Nationalism today has a bad reputation, and we are all familiar with its various pathologies. But the breadth and widespread appeal of nationalism should not be dismissed. In the nineteenth century, for example, nationalism helped pave the way for the emergence of both stronger and more liberal states. We discuss the coevolution of arguments for religious liberty with stronger states and provide detailed evidence from late eighteenth-century France for how state capacity played a role in generating support for national identity and for general rules over identity rules. Lastly, we consider the relationship between the breakdown of the conditional toleration equilibrium and the onset of sustained economic growth.

As we saw in Chapter 7, isolated voices argued for religious identity to be voluntary rather than compulsory throughout the period we study. These included Anabaptists such as Michael Sattler and Menno Simons, and a small group of more intellectually oriented reformers whom historians label evangelical rationalists, most notably Michael Sevetus. Their arguments, however, had little impact on their societies.

For most, the idea of religious freedom was inconceivable because the link between political and religious authority underpinned the entire social order. In his survey of the Reformation, Carlos Eire observes that the Anabaptists were seen by their persecutors as “inherently evil.” They were perceived as a mortal threat to the social order because of, and not despite, their impeccable personal morality. They were dangerous precisely because they were seemingly so good. And it was their belief in a voluntary church that made them especially subversive and in need of eradication: “How could one hope to hold society together without magistrates, executioners, and soldiers, or the oaths that bound people to one another, not just as Christians, but as Citizens?” (Eire, 2016, 262).