Joan was the first woman to lead the armies of a major nation to victory. Often compared to the biblical warrior-prophet, Deborah, Joan fought a holy war to expel foreigners from the promised land of her ancestors. Joan’s battle-standard carried the name of Jesus, but Joan’s claim to hear a private divine voice reminds one of Socrates. However, if Socrates’s voice told him only what not to do, Joan’s voice also told her what to do. Joan’s insistence that France be ruled by the French laid the foundation for modern patriotism just as her military exploits laid the foundation for modern France. Her faith in her divine voice led Joan boldly, even recklessly, to confront the kings and priests of her day, leading her to condemnation and execution by both an English king and a French bishop. King Henry killed her as a traitor; Bishop Couchon killed her as a heretic.

In 1208 Pope Innocent III proclaimed a crusade of “extermination” and “expurgation” against the heretics supposedly infesting the lands of the count of Toulouse. What is now known as the “Albigensian Crusade” lasted twenty-one years and was the first holy war in which Christians were guaranteed salvation by killing other Christians. The massacres during the crusade, especially at Béziers in 1209, were “genocidal moments.” The victims, though, were neither an ethnic, national, or racial group. The victims were arguably a regional or possibly a cultural group, but such groups are not covered by the modern legal definition of genocide. Nevertheless, they were deliberately targeted for destruction. Despite accusations of heresy, the victims were not initially a self-consciously different religious group either. Crucially, they were not “Cathars,” which is what most medieval historians and genocide scholars assume the victims to have been. “Catharism” as a medieval heresy never existed; it was an invention of nineteenth-century scholars trying to understand the Albigensian crusade more “scientifically” and less confessionally. Finally, were the individual testimonies collected by the first inquisitions into heretical depravity, established in Toulouse in the aftermath of the Albigensian crusade, analogous to the memories of individuals who witnessed or survived genocides collected by modern tribunals?

The Sultanate was a global state that interacted with regimes in North, West and East Africa, Mediterranean Europe, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia. Its ideology of diplomacy focused on maintenance of the balance of power extant during the formative stage of its founding: control over the Syrian Littoral and Red Sea nautical routes to South and East Asia. Senior officers appointed from Cairo ruled Syrian provincial capitals as viceroys, tying them directly to the imperial center. On the Red Sea coast of Arabia (Hijaz), the Hasanid Sharifs of Mecca exercised local political authority, but from Baybars’ reign were compelled to comply with the Sultanate’s commercial and fiduciary policies over the spice trade. Tensions in Southeastern Asia Minor heightened when objectives of territorial stasis advocated by the Mamluks clashed with aims of territorial conquest asserted by the Ottomans. Regional principalities pursued their own goals of autonomy with varying degrees of success. The international system of commerce, centered on Venetian and Mamluk exploitation of trade routes to Asia through the Red Sea, was decisively altered by the Portuguese entry to the Indian Ocean. When the Ottomans defeated the Cairo Sultanate, its centrality in the global environment was already diminished.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between the state, attitudes to warfare as enshrined in Christian theory, and the practice of warfare as exemplified in medieval eastern Roman, or Byzantine, relations with its various enemies, with a short introductory section on violence in non-warfare contexts. While nominally opposed to violent means to achieve its ends, the Christian Byzantine state found ways to justify engaging in warfare against its enemies, primarily based on the notion that it was involved in a perpetual defensive struggle with those who threatened its territorial integrity as well as its moral existence. All warfare could thus be understood by definition as a defensive struggle against those who threatened the empire’s existence. This applied likewise to overtly offensive warfare, which was legitimated within a Christian eschatology as a divinely-approved effort to recover lost territories and restore them to the Christian community. Hence, no theory of ‘holy war’ or ‘crusade’ evolved, because such was irrelevant. Such an ideology offered a constant theoretical basis for fighting the empire’s foes; and it also served the needs of the imperial elite and the court on an opportunistic basis, to justify offensive warfare whenever the empire was in a position to undertake such action. Such an ideology legitimating warfare could also deployed against Christian neighbours, when it suited the interests of the imperial state or its elite.