HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-10-16T15:01:03.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/topic/religion/feed/atom James Osborne <![CDATA[Was the story of Jesus inspired by Emperor Augustus? The clever trick early Christians used to convert ancient Rome]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/was-the-story-of-jesus-based-on-emperor-augustus/ 2026-10-16T15:01:03.000Z 2026-10-16T15:00:46.000Z It’s an ancient story. A child is set to become a king. But when those in power learn of his coming, they attempt to orchestrate his death. The child escapes, his future greatness apparently beyond the reach of those who would rather see him dead.
This is a narrative arc that, of course, harkens to Herod’s attempt to kill the infant Jesus. But it’s also the origin story of Rome’s first – and arguably greatest – emperor: Augustus.
For classicist Tim Whitmarsh, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, this resemblance is resonant enough that it could be deemed intentional. If the early Christians could present Jesus as a figure comparable to Augustus, would that help them to explain why the religious figurehead was worth replacing the old Roman gods with? It’s an argument that relates specifically to how Jesus was described and understood, rather than comparing the two men’s life biographies.
“Augustus and Jesus are clearly very different figures in terms of their backgrounds and in terms of the message that they're projecting,” he says. “But I think the way in which Jesus was, if you like, ‘packaged’ in the first century was designed to gel with elements of Roman propaganda around the figure of Augustus himself.
A new order rooted in the past
Augustus was born in Rome in 63 BC, roughly six decades before Jesus. Originally named Gaius Octavius, he rose to power during the civil wars that followed Julius Caesar’s assassination. In 27 BC, he received the title Augustus, marking the conventional beginning of his reign as Rome’s first emperor. He ruled until AD 14.
In the context of the traditions and norms of the Roman Republic, this was a move that required some PR. Romans associated kingship with tyranny, and their Republic had traditionally distributed authority among magistrates and the Senate. Augustus concentrated power in his own hands while presenting himself as the restorer of established institutions.
“Augustus creates this paradoxical relationship with the past, whereby the Roman Republic is both fulfilled in the figure of Augustus, who's returning to the Republic, but also in a sense radically changed by it,” Whitmarsh explains.
“So you've got this sense of simultaneously re-rooting the Roman Empire in tradition but also transforming it.”
The Christian claim about Jesus had a comparable structure. His followers understood him through Jewish scripture and expectations, while proclaiming that his life, death and resurrection had brought something new: an expansion on the past, while still seeking to derive validation from it. Both the Roman Empire and the new Christian religion rooted themselves in one transformative individual who sought legitimacy, in some regard, from an older, respected past.
- Read more | “The Roman empire cannot have been governed by a series of psychopaths. It would not have survived”: Mary Beard on Roman Emperors
Birth stories with striking parallels
This narrative work begins with the birth stories. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke, written in the first century AD, describe Jesus’s beginnings through divine announcements and a prophetic fulfilment of his future significance.
“There are surprisingly similar stories told about Augustus,” says Whitmarsh.
In his Life of Augustus, the Roman biographer Suetonius reports on a portent that announced that a king would be born for the Roman people. The alarmed Senate decreed that no male child born that year should be allowed to live. However, senators with pregnant wives prevented the decree from being formally registered: each hoped that the predicted ruler might be his own son.
- Read more | A history of the Bible: who wrote it and when?
Now think back to the stories of the Bible. In Matthew’s account, Herod, Rome’s client king in Judaea, learns that a child has been born who is described as king of the Jews. He orders the killing of boys aged two and under in Bethlehem and its surroundings. Jesus survives because Joseph, warned in a dream, takes him and Mary to Egypt.
“[Augustus’s birth story] is so eerily close to the story in Matthew of the Massacre of the Innocents that it seems to me unlikely that the Massacre of the Innocents was not, in a sense, reflecting on that.”
The imperial language of “good news”
Another link between the two figures’ narratives is an inscription linking Augustus’s birthday to the beginning of the year.
In 9 BC, the Roman governor of Asia, Paullus Fabius Maximus, proposed a calendar reform adopted by the province’s Greek cities. Asia here means the Roman province in western modern-day Turkey.
Under the arrangement, the year would begin on 23 September, Augustus’s birthday. Copies of the relevant texts survive from several places, most famously Priene. They show how provincial institutions incorporated loyalty to the Roman emperor into the organisation of everyday life as a symbol and method of devotion.
The accompanying praise presented Augustus as a saviour who had ended war and brought order. His birthday marked the beginning of benefits for the world, expressed through the Greek word euangelia: “good news”.
“This euangelia is taken up by Christians to mark the Gospel.”
Mark begins his account by announcing the “good news” of Jesus Christ. Paul’s earlier letters also use this language.
Jewish culture also plays an interconnected role here. In Jewish scripture, Isaiah describes the announcement of good news concerning God’s deliverance of his people. Greek versions of those scriptures gave early Christians a vocabulary through which to express their hopes.
Early Christians seem to have been drawing from the Jewish roots of their religion, while also referencing the history of Roman imperial rule. These dual origins shouldn’t be surprising – Christianity explicitly emerged from Jewish life within a Roman imperial world.
So for Whitmarsh, the evidence suggests that the early Christians were consciously adapting Jesus’s story to align with familiar archetypes of authority, even if the details of their claims differed profoundly from those made for Augustus.
- Read more | From secret cults to Christianity, how did ancient Roman religion change so dramatically?
“We're not being told that Jesus is Augustus,” he says, “but they're using the same language and the same tropes, if you like, to establish Jesus as a radically new figure who also roots us in the past.”
Tim Whitmarsh was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> Roland Hughes <![CDATA[This Iron Age woman had her brain scooped out. Why?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/iron-age/scotland-brain-removal-research/ 2026-10-13T19:15:57.000Z 2026-10-13T19:15:57.000Z Iron Age people living in Scotland removed the brains of their dead and turned human bones into tools, research published in the journal Antiquity has found, providing evidence of complex and previously unknown funeral traditions thousands of years ago.
The findings became apparent after bones were uncovered at a site next to a loch in the far north-west of Scotland. They give a fascinating glimpse not just into how Iron Age people appeared to treat the dead with respect, but also how people migrated around the region. One expert has called it “a wonderful story of a cold-case piece of forensic archaeology” that could help change our understanding of the British Iron Age, roughly between 800BC and 43AD.
The research was carried out on two skeletons, one an adult female and the other a young male, discovered in a stone cairn near Loch Borralie. The area, with its sandy ground and relatively few streams, perfectly preserves bones like these and ensures they are not easily eroded.
A skull with a story to tell
When lead researcher Laura Castells Navarro, from the University of York, opened the box that stored the skeletons, she knew she was looking at something unusual. Firstly, the cranium on the female skeleton appeared to have been fractured after death in a deliberate manner. And if that was not strange enough, once Castells Navarro looked inside the front of the skull, there were clear markings – also apparently man-made. “Those markings, they just made absolutely no sense,” she says. “They’re just way too parallel, too sharp, way too evenly spaced – that just does not look like a natural process.”
After the researchers ruled out other causes for the markings, such as rodents, there could be only one conclusion: not long after the woman had died, her cranium had been smashed and her brain scraped out. But that was not all. Unusually, her long bones – the humerus, ulna and femur – appeared to taper off towards the end. Osteological examination found that this had been done on purpose: the bones had been whittled into sharp points, most probably very soon after her death.
But this was not done out of disrespect. In fact, perhaps the opposite.
An act of care
“One of the theories that we have been trying to really counteract when you find partial remains or have manipulated remains is that these people are the enemy, these are people that were not loved, that these are people outside of the society,” Castells Navarro says. “Sometimes, the level of burial is such that they have been just thrown into pits, basically. But in this case, they had been put into the grave with care, with a lot of knowledge and with a lot of sensitivity. It’s not an act of disrespect; it’s a careful act.”
Such care suggests that the woman commanded a level of respect and reverence within her society, Castells Navarro adds.
A previous study from 2016, focusing on the Danebury hill fort in Hampshire, found that Iron Age Britons had three distinct rites for the dead. One involved burying bodies and exhuming them years later to remove bones, perhaps as relics. Another would see bodies buried in deep pits, then body parts removed and deposited elsewhere. And a third would see bodies left exposed to the elements.
But the suggestion of rituals of respect involving manipulating the body, as in Loch Borralie, is new.
Family ties across ancient Scotland
Another key finding at the site came from DNA and isotope analysis of the skeletons, which involves measuring the prevalence of certain chemicals within the body.
The analysis concluded that the two people were closely related to each other – most probably maternal second cousins – suggesting they had travelled together. It also indicated that they had grown up about 80km south-east of Loch Borralie, and that they had genetic connections with people from Orkney, the islands some 175km north-east of the site, and Applecross, about 225km south-west.
This all paints a picture of a people who were not simply confined to their communities, but were instead highly mobile, intrepid and carried their cultural traditions with them over distances.
- Read more | Living with the dead? You need to know these 7 gruesome facts about the history of human burial
“This research challenges notions that everyone had ‘settled down’ in the Iron Age, and were born, brought up and died locally,” says Dr Melanie Giles, a professor of European history at the University of Manchester, who was not involved in the research. “Whatever prompted their move, they must have been bold, and no doubt they brought new stories and ideas with them, clearly settling in amongst local families.”
Castells Navarro says the discoveries are “absolutely fascinating” in the way they shed light on people who would have looked very much like us, but whose practices, and relationship with the dead, were very different. “It does give you this kind of tiny glimpse into something that is very close and at the same time is just very, very far,” she says.
“This is a wonderful story of a cold-case piece of forensic archaeology,” says Giles. “It’s a level of intimate detail relating to relationships and mobility we are only beginning to explore. It might shock us today but these Iron Age death-workers were the equivalent of our own funeral practitioners, taking care of the messy but necessary care for the body.”
]]> Rob Attar <![CDATA[North Korea's religious dictators]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/north-korea-religious-dictators-podcast/ 2026-10-05T16:09:20.000Z 2026-10-05T16:09:20.000Z More than three decades after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the USSR, the North Korean regime remains steadfastly in place, defiantly ploughing its own path some eight decades after its founding. What might explain this remarkable longevity?
In Jonathan Cheng’s new book, Korean Messiah, the Wall Street Journal correspondent argues that it owes much to the enduring cult of personality around its founder, Kim Il-Sung, who took inspiration from his own Christian roots to create a modern religion that endures to this day.
Jonathan’s book is a finalist for the 2026 Cundill History Prize, and in today’s episode he explores these ideas with Rob Attar.
]]> Charlotte Vosper <![CDATA["The Iraq War was a disaster": a historian's view on the modern Middle East]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-iraq-war-was-a-disaster-a-historians-view-on-the-modern-middle-east/ 2026-10-05T13:24:52.000Z 2026-10-05T15:00:09.000Z Charlotte Vosper: You begin your new book with Abdulaziz’s raid on Riyadh in 1902, a major event in the foundation of Saudi Arabia. Why?
Simon Sebag Montefiore: Virtually all histories of the Arab world start with the traditional Levant – Jerusalem, Lebanon, Syria – or Constantinople; anywhere but Saudi Arabia. Yet Saudi is really the centre of the Middle East. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina are in Saudi Arabia, so the Gulf has become the heart of the Arab and Islamic worlds. I began my book with Riyadh to signal that this is very much an Arab-centric history of the modern Middle East. Plus I think that Abdulaziz Ibn Saud’s raid is one of the best stories – like something out of Lawrence of Arabia.
What powers were at play there at the turn of the 20th century?
In 1900, the Middle East was really another world – and that’s the central point of this book: to get across just how recently the Middle East, as we know it today, was created.
At the turn of the century, half of the Middle East was ruled by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The other half was ruled by the British – the Trucial States (essentially, what’s now the United Arab Emirates), plus places such as Aden, along with Egypt. France ruled Algeria and Tunisia. There were virtually no independent Arab states except central Arabia.
What happened in the Middle East when those imperial powers fought the First World War?
First of all, most people forget that a large part of the First World War was fought in the Middle East. Britain suffered some major disasters in the region – defeat at the Dardanelles, surrender at Kut in Iraq – and it’s often forgotten how resilient the Ottoman empire really was.
More importantly, the war was also a major turning point for the Middle East. With the western front in a desperate state, Britain promised swathes of Ottoman territory to other powers and groups including France, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Jews, the Italians, the Armenians, the Kurds and, above all, Russia. So there were many competing claims to Middle Eastern territory.
One of these promises was the Balfour Declaration of 1917. By the early 20th century, the ancient Jewish desire to return to the Holy Land and the longstanding connection to Jerusalem had inspired a political movement, and Jews – like other nations – sought to create a homeland with a shared religion and language in Palestine. Jewish leaders successfully persuaded the British, French and Americans that one of the entities to be carved from the Ottoman empire should encompass this Jewish ‘national home’. Zionists envisaged this as a land of socialist farming communities under British rule or an Arab monarchy, or a single state shared with the Palestinian Arabs.
In the event, the British and the French divvied up the whole Middle East between them. It was decided that the British would get Iraq and Palestine, and the French took Greater Syria (Lebanon and Syria). Constantinople would be ruled by the Allies, while the Greeks and Italians got half of today’s Turkey, with Kurdish and Armenian states in the east. The British and French provinces were called ‘mandates’: Middle Eastern states that would be under British or French control while the peoples prepared for full statehood. As we can see today in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Yemen, Libya and Sudan, the nation-state structure isn’t necessarily suited to the incredibly complex, multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian patchwork that is the Middle East.
- Read more | “The early 2000s was a strange era of fear and terror”: remembering the Iraq War 20 years on
How did Middle Eastern people respond to the imposed mandates?
Not well. They were extremely disappointed – they’d swapped one empire for another. The state of Iraq, for example, followed a British mandate in 1920 – but, though the British initially promised freedom to the Iraqis, they changed their minds and decided to keep Iraq as a client state. The Iraqis certainly didn’t want to be ruled by Britain, so they launched a huge rebellion against their new mandatory power, which the British brutally crushed. Similarly, the Syrians didn’t want to be ruled by the French, and rebelled in 1925. In 1919, the Egyptians launched a revolution that also resulted in defeat by the British.
You describe the Second World War as the start of a new Middle East. Why?
The Second World War brought about the realisation that the west needed to give independence to the Arab world. During the war, the British occupied southern Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon but, with the European powers financially exhausted by 1945, and the increasing waves of nationalist movements, several of the countries that now make up the Middle East were created as independent nation states. Syria became fully independent in 1946 and, with the termination of the British mandate for Palestine, Israel was created in 1948. Turkey had already formed in 1923, and the British mandate over Iraq had ended in 1932.
Following the world wars, a new Middle East was born – with varying degrees of success. Many of these new states proved either ungovernable or dominated by autocrats – and that’s another of the central debates that runs through the book: who or what should we blame for the failure of many of these states? Is it their corrupt oligarchical dictatorial rulers? Or the imperial powers that created the states? Does it come down to Arab culture or Jewish nationalism? Was it the creation of Israel that poisoned the whole Middle East and made it ungovernable? Or was it the Cold War, and the interference of the Americans and the Soviets, that undermined the Middle Eastern state system? These are all vital questions.
Did new ideologies or identities emerge in these newly established nation states?
With the new states came the rise of Arab nationalism, particularly the ideology of pan-Arabism. This is the idea that the Arab world should be ruled by one state, and it’s a natural reaction to the division of the Middle East by borders drawn by the imperial powers. What’s interesting, though, is that the former imperial powers also embraced Arab nationalism. They wanted to create strong Arab states, and it was actually Britain that sponsored the creation of the Arab League, which promoted the idea that the separate states should act together as a community.
For the next 30 years after independence, pan-Arabism became the ruling ideology among Arab leaders including Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and its greatest champion, Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Of them, Nasser was the most successful and popular; at his apogee, he united Egypt with Syria as the United Arab Republic in 1958. (Three years later, Syria seceded.)
If pan-Arabism had such powerful political proponents, why did it decline?
In reality, the Arab world is much less monolithic than sometimes we in the west like to think. The different states and regions all had their own dialects, agendas and circumstances, and it’s questionable whether a single Arab state could ever have held together.
It also failed badly, in both governance and war. In the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt fought Israel in a series of regional conflicts – and each time, Israel won out. The creation of Israel in itself was a huge blow to Arab pride, and its military victories undermined the confidence of the surrounding new nation states. In 1948, the UN partitioned Palestine into Arab and Jewish sectors, and the State of Israel was declared. Five Arab countries immediately invaded Israel but, with their war aims divided, Israel was able to defeat them all. Then, in 1967, Nasser hubristically threatened war – and was defeated spectacularly by Israel, discrediting Nasserism.
By the 1970s, pan-Arabism was declining and a new ideology, Islamism, was about to explode.
You’ve also described 1979 as a turning point in this history. Why was that year such a decisive moment?
It brought an ideological shift in the Middle East. Islamic anti-western radicalism had always existed in various forms, but in 1979 an Iranian Shia variant mobilised the belief that Islam should govern society as well as the state, in resistance to the west and pro-western versions of Islam. In January of that year, a huge popular revolt overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah, the last Shah of Iran, who had ruled Iran for 37 years.
When the country fell to Ayatollah Khomeini, it shook the whole Middle East. Khomeini was an incredibly brutal and oppressive figure with a vision of Islamic rule that had never really been put into practice before. His idea was that, while Shiite Muslims waited for the Occulted Imam to return as Mahdi (Messiah), a trusted member of the Islamic clergy should rule Iran. With this Islamist ideology, Khomeini created an extraordinary system that was really a sacred monarchy ruled by one man – himself. That is still the system ruling Iran today.
So, first of all, a new system was created in 1979 in Iran – a Shia theocracy, a sacred dictatorship – and, at the same time, the revolution also unleashed a radical Islamism on the rest of the Muslim world. This was a fusion of Sunni Islamist radicalism, Arab nationalism and Arab resistance, making it distinctly anti-western.
If 1979 unleashed the ideological movement, we now see its manifestation in all sorts of ways. Radical Islamism became a resistance movement against a version of moderate Islam that was open to western ideas in pro-American states such as Egypt, Jordan, UAE and, to an extent, Saudi Arabia. Today, we see the influence of Khomeini’s Islamism in Hezbollah in Lebanon and in Hamas in Gaza.
Following the end of the Cold War, did the Middle Eastern states start to become more stable?
No – and where it looked stable, that was due to the stagnant, oppressive rule of long-reigning dictators: Gaddafi, Saddam, Mubarak, Assad. It’s a question that you could ask at any point during the history of the region – or, as I’ve called it, The Cauldron – and you’d get the same answer. This is a story of continued tumultuous bubbling, which is why I gave the book its title.
Having said that, we do see something different after the fall of the Soviet Union: the emergence of the US as a unipolar paramount power in the Middle East. To be fair to the Americans, they did try to use this power in a positive way to create a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Though these attempts are now discredited among many people, they nearly worked. Israel and Palestine needed to recognise the other’s existence, national narratives and possible Palestinian statehood – and, for around two decades (1990–2012), there were people in both nations who were willing to do so. The Madrid Conference took place in 1991 under George HW Bush, and the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 under Bill Clinton, but ultimately peace fell through. Israel-Palestine peace looks incredibly distant now. I still believe that a pathway to two republics, two nations, is the only way – but that means many things.
The rest of the Middle East also didn’t gain stability. It is important to note, though, that by that stage the Middle Eastern states were no longer dominated by imperialist powers, and the end of superpower competition gave them more space to assert themselves. After the end of the Cold War, they were freer than they ever had been. This idea – that the Middle Eastern states were not simply subject to greater powers but had their own agency – is another key theme in the book. The Middle Eastern states really recreated themselves, and they’ve been independent for almost 80 years now.
How much of the recent turbulence in the Middle East do you think stems from the attacks on 9/11?
A lot of it. The story of Osama bin Laden and his ‘Planes Operation’, as he called it, is just extraordinary. It was intended to draw the US into the Middle East – and it worked. When Joe Biden flew to Israel after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, he said of 9/11: “We overreacted”. There are arguments to say that’s true.
There was definitely a case for invading Afghanistan in 2001, but the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was, I think, totally misconceived. It was based on false intelligence, but even if you believe that the invasion was justified, it was utterly misgoverned. The Iraq War was a disaster, its main effect being to empower a rising Middle Eastern state: Iran. The US knocked out the other great power in the Middle East, Iraq, and the country never recovered. To be clear, I’m not nostalgic for Saddam, but I think there’s something to be said for a measured response, particularly in the Middle East.
Why do you think that democracy has made few inroads in the region?
There are all sorts of reasons across the different Middle Eastern countries. I don’t think for a moment you could say that the Arab world is not suited to democracy, but there is a habitual resort to autocracy. I think this comes from the belief that only an autocrat is strong enough to hold together disparate states and resist Islamism, which often resorts to armed revolution. That’s combined with a long Middle Eastern tradition of one-man rule – sultanates, kingdoms. The best-ruled countries in the Middle East are actually the absolute monarchies that weren’t created by the west but grew organically – such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Morocco.
Conflict remains ongoing in the Middle East. Do you think that it is somehow an inherently violent place?
I don’t think that’s really true. If you look at the Middle East across the 20th century, the number of deaths never came close to the bloodletting of the world wars in Europe, or Stalin’s Red Terror, or Hitler’s Holocaust, or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Statistics are sometimes used in a distasteful parlour game of ‘who’s worst’, and I don’t want to play. But, if you look at the pure numbers of people killed in the entire Israel-Arab-Palestine conflict from 1948 to today, it’s a mere iota of those killed just on the western front in the First World War.
That said, every death is a tragedy. The Middle East is a very turbulent place – a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian patchwork with so many interwoven layers of tension piled on top of each other. There’s nothing quite like it.
- Read more | The overlooked history of Muslims in Europe
Why is understanding this history so important?
The truth matters in itself. Its moral lessons matter, and anything based on lies and conspiracies is brittle and will crumble. Our societies are successful because we respect facts, sources, truth – and that encompasses history. In the post-religious, post-Christian world of the west, history has assumed a moral importance that allows it to be a propellant of political power, similar to the power that religion once had.
And for history to matter, it has to be right. That’s why this book aims to show how the present Middle East –19 states in all – came to be, and how to understand the nuances that created it. I don’t just mean Israel and Palestine. You can’t really understand Saudi Arabia unless you realise that it’s the third Saudi Arabian kingdom, not the first. You can’t really understand what’s happening in Iran unless you understand Twelver Shiism and who the last shah was. You can’t understand Turkey without understanding Ataturk.
In a way, I think it’s strange that this book didn’t exist before. There are histories of the Arabs, of the Jews and of the Turks, but no one had put it together. I’ve tried to do it in a nuanced and balanced way that is entirely based on fact – though myths and conspiracies are important, too. But I also want this to be a great read. So you can read it as the history of how the Middle East came to be what it is today – or you can just enjoy this extraordinary story.
Simon Sebag Montefiore is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and historian. His previous books include Jerusalem: The Biography (W&N, 2011, revised in 2024) and The World: A Family History (W&N, 2022)
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Emily Briffett <![CDATA[Inside Venice’s Jewish ghetto]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/inside-venice-jewish-ghetto-podcast/ 2026-10-02T08:39:04.000Z 2026-10-02T08:38:32.000Z In the early 16th century, Venice confined its Jewish population to a restricted quarter on an island in the city. It was the first settlement to bear the name 'ghetto' – a word that would go on to shape the history of Jewish persecution and segregation.
Speaking to Emily Briffett, historian Alexander Lee explores why Venice created the ghetto, examining the uneasy tension between the city’s economic reliance on Jewish money-lenders and its deep suspicion of Jewish residents. He also reveals what life was like inside the ghetto, from its crowded buildings and religious institutions to its vibrant cultural life, intellectual debates and fragile relationship with the Venetian authorities.
]]> Charlotte Vosper <![CDATA["In the 1640s, people searched for the devil’s followers”: hunting witches in the Civil War]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-the-1640s-people-searched-for-the-devils-followers-hunting-witches-in-the-civil-war/ 2026-09-28T10:48:51.000Z 2026-09-14T15:20:50.000Z Charlotte Vosper: You open your book with the story of a man called Meggs who was hanged for witchcraft in 1645. Why did you choose to start with him?
Marion Gibson: I found Meggs’s name in an account by the witchfinder Matthew Hopkins, who writes, flippantly, words to the effect that: “This man Meggs, a baker, voluntarily came to be tested for witchcraft, and we hanged him for his trouble – ha ha ha!”
It’s such a horrible way to be remembered. So I set out to find the real Meggs – actually called Henry Maggs – and to tell his story with dignity and respect, to give him back his voice. Throughout the book I’ve looked for the victims of the 1640s British witch trials and tried to tell their stories as they might have wanted them to be told. I want my readers to hear from the victims themselves – for the first time, in many cases – rather than the sneering voices of witchfinders that often dominate accounts.
Can you set the scene for these mid-17th-century witch trials?
The context is pretty horrible. The Civil War was raging and Britain was tearing itself apart. Not only were there battles being fought but there was economic dislocation and there were refugees moving around, many needing immediate charity. People were anxious, miserable and frightened – and all of those emotions fed into witch trials and witch accusations. It’s also important to note that this Britain was a very religious and very magical place. People were steeped in the idea there were angels and devils in the world, and tended to think in quite a binary way: if you were not on God’s side, you must be on the devil’s. This belief system predisposed people to believe that witches might be living among them.
How did that 1640s witch-hunting epidemic start?
Witch hunting had been ongoing in Britain for quite some time, but the temperature rose in the 1640s. One of the first cases was that of a nameless water-witch who was killed on a Civil War battlefield at Newbury in Berkshire in 1643. A group of soldiers, foraging for food after a long march, spotted a woman floating on a plank on a nearby river, and thought: “She’s walking on water – she must be a witch.” They dragged her off to their commander who, after an interrogation, had her shot. After that, interest in witchcraft swept across Britain.
What sort of things were these ‘witches’ accused of having done?
Initially, claims often grew out of something simple, like a neighbourly dispute: “You did this to me, then my cow died, so I don’t like you.” But in the 1640s, authorities actively went looking for people they suspected of working with the devil by offering their soul, body or allegiance in return for some sort of power. Some ‘witches’ were accused of having a little demonic familiar, supposedly feeding it with their blood to seal their pact with the devil. This was thought to leave a ‘witch mark’ on the accused’s body, so during interrogation the accused might be strip-searched to look for physical evidence.
- Read more | Scotland's season of the witch
Many of the accused confessed. Why?
A lot of pressure was put on these people. In addition to a physical bodily search – in itself, an invasive, terrifying process – these ‘witches’ would be kept awake and told to balance on a stool for hours on end while being questioned. These sound like torture techniques, and they broke down people’s resistance.
Social context also played into procuring these confessions. Against the backdrop of war and fear, local church ministers preached that British people must have sinned to bring about such hardship, and that they must do penance and be wary of the devil.
This combination of context and interrogation prompted a lot of people to confess. Maybe some of them were users of magic – perhaps they’d practised healing rituals. Either way, these ‘witches’ were often apt to agree with the interrogating minister or magistrate and say: “Well, yes, actually I think I am a witch.”
When did the phenomenon develop into a mass witch hunt?
It really kicked off in Essex in 1645. In Manningtree, a young man called Matthew Hopkins and his slightly older friend, John Stearne, together started to suspect that there were witches in the area. In nearby Lawford, a clergyman called John Edes also began questioning women from his community, including mother and daughter Anne and Rebecca West.
Anne was a widow who had been tried for witchcraft a few years earlier, accused of killing a sow owned by Thomas and Prudence Hart, but had been acquitted and allowed back to Lawford. You can imagine the Harts’ horror: the woman they believed to be a witch was again in their village. So when Hopkins and Stearne started asking questions in Essex, the Harts again accused Anne, believing her responsible when Prudence suffered a miscarriage in the churchyard. They also turned on Anne’s daughter, Rebecca – who, according to the records, seems to have fallen out with Prudence.
Rebecca was probably about 30 years old, unmarried and, like her mother, pretty poor. Interestingly, both Anne and Rebecca seem to have been quite religious. Despite this, John Edes questioned Rebecca, and she confessed that both herself and her mother were witches who’d met with others in Manningtree. They were all rounded up, sent to the assize court and imprisoned in Colchester Castle while awaiting trial. There they were questioned further as Hopkins continued to build evidence against them.
Anne was found guilty and executed. The records about Rebecca aren’t clear, though: either she wasn’t put on trial or she was acquitted. Historians have long suspected that, because Rebecca chose to give evidence against other people, she was spared. Either way, as far as we know, she wasn’t executed.
By this time, the witch-hunting campaign reached far across Essex. Some 28 or 29 people from other villages, all of them women, were put on trial alongside Anne West; 19 of them were convicted. Soon the phenomenon spread across eastern England, with the witchfinders moving onto Suffolk, Norfolk and the Midland counties.
How did Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne come to wield such authority?
Hopkins was the son of a Suffolk vicar, but moved to Manningtree when his widowed mother married a clergyman there. He was a religious young man, and his family seems to have been afflicted by illness. His brother John died very young, probably from tuberculosis or another lung condition.
Hopkins had a burning conviction that his destiny was to be a witchfinder, and started thinking that people were meeting near his house for witches’ sabbaths with their animal familiars.
Stearne was another Suffolk man, married and with a family – in many ways a more conventional and seemingly stable figure. But he, too, seems to have been excited by the idea there were witches in his community, and he had a range of methods for testing them.
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Together, Hopkins and Stearne deprived the suspects of sleep, keeping them in constant motion and waiting for their animal familiars to come, all the time bullying, questioning and watching them. These men roped in other villagers from Manningtree and Lawford, and that’s what really kicked off the trials and got stories flowing from the suspects.
The men didn’t have official positions and weren’t recognised by the government, but were self-appointed moral police. Hopkins gave himself the rank of ‘Witchfinder General’. I suspect he was an egotistical, difficult young man.
Stearne was keen on ‘ducking’, in other words throwing suspects into water. If they floated, they were pulled out and interrogated. Essex magistrates told him not to do it but, as he moved through Suffolk, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and some of the Midland counties, he did use this test.
Of course, if you’d been partly tied up and thrown into water wearing very little, maybe a sort of undergarment, and everybody was standing around pointing and shouting, and you’ve been drowning in front of them, it’s likely that if you were pulled out you’d be terrified and physically under a lot of stress, so much more likely to confess.
Why were women and poor people so much more likely to be accused?
Across the history of witch trials in Europe from the 15th to the 18th century, the accused were women in about 75 per cent of known cases. That seems to be because women tended to be more associated with the devil, perhaps because, in the Bible, Eve commits the first sin.
In the 1640s, society came under tremendous strain and people reached for old beliefs. Believing Satan must be behind their problems, they searched for the devil’s followers, or witches. Of course, at that time almost everything was run by men, which made women vulnerable. In some cases, 100 per cent of the accused people in a particular town – Framlingham in Suffolk, for example – were women.
A lot of these people were also poor, not well educated or in positions of influence in their society. Imagine if a powerful man came to see you in his velvets, silks and ruff, and was writing things down, and maybe you already knew him as an important figure in your community – a magistrate or a minister, perhaps – and he said: “You know, Margery, you’re a witch,” you might well have replied: “Well, yes, sir, if you say so I must be a witch.” There was a tendency to simply say what the authorities wanted you to say.
Many ‘witches’ show up in parish charity records, too; in times of war and economic crisis, people tend to get angry with those they see as a drain on their taxes and community.
But not all ‘witches’ were female or poor, were they?
The stereotype is broadly true, but other people did get caught up. One victim from the Suffolk village of Brandeston was a clergyman, which is quite astonishing. The Reverend John Lowes seems to have been a turbulent fellow who often quarrelled with parishioners over many years, taking them to court, fighting them over land and buildings, and accusing them of moral crimes. Back in 1615, he had defended a woman accused of witchcraft, which proved to be a fatal mistake.
When the panic reached his village, Lowes was accused, thrown into water, deprived of sleep, effectively tortured – and he confessed. By the time he was in court, he had recovered and recanted his confession, but it was too late. He was convicted and hanged on 27 August 1645 at Bury St Edmunds, along with 17 other convicted people.
Similarly, Henry Maggs was quite a respectable figure in his Norfolk community – a churchwarden, chosen to be part of the religious leadership. But by the time Hopkins and Stearne arrived in Norfolk,
the idea that anybody might be a witch had become widespread, and Maggs was accused, searched for witch marks and hanged.
Were there people who were accused but acquitted, and what was life like for them afterwards?
The experience of Anne West, who was tried but not executed in the early 1640s, then accused again in 1645, suggests that the accused were not readily accepted back into their communities even if found not guilty.
The case of Ann Jefferies is also fascinating. A young woman living in Cornwall, she was 19 or in her early twenties when accused, so in that sense not a stereotypical ‘witch’. She claimed that she had started seeing fairies who gave her prophecies and healing abilities. She probably thought that she could make a living from this and that it would make her valuable in the community.
Maybe Jefferies did have visions; she certainly seems to have seen herself as a kind of religious mystic, believing that the fairies were associated with God. But in the climate of the 1640s, that was a dangerous claim. During questioning, the magistrates and clergymen said to her that the fairies were really evil spirits, and that she was a witch. However, she seems to have been acquitted at the assizes, and lived to a ripe old age.
I think that there was a higher tolerance of magical belief in the west of England than in the east where most cases were recorded. Jefferies’ age probably helped, too: some juries were reluctant to convict younger people if they could make a good case for themselves, and Jefferies was an articulate young woman. It seems that she was accepted back into her community more easily than Anne West, but I’m sure suspicions continued to dog her. Even later in life, Jefferies was very reluctant to talk about her witch trial because she assumed that people would turn on her again.
How and when did this spate of witch hunting in Britain decline?
The big witch trials of eastern England and the Midlands seem to have petered out by late 1647, for a variety of reasons. One might have been simply that people started questioning the vast numbers accused. John Stearne wrote in his account of the trials, A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft, published in 1648, that he was responsible for having about 200 people executed – an astonishing figure. If you consider all those accused, questioned or charged but not executed, there were many hundreds and hundreds of people. Understandably, people who were not as convinced as Stearne and Hopkins that the world is full of witches started asking questions. Are these people really all witches? Can there possibly be so many in Britain?
Questions also arose about the motives of the witchfinders, especially Hopkins and Stearne, who charged for their services. They asked to be put up in a hotel, given money to feed their horses and themselves, and funds to pay people to search suspects for witch marks. So the costs for communities racked up – and people with an eye on their taxes started to think: maybe a witch trial is not such a good investment.
In 1647, Hopkins fell ill and died. He was still young – probably in his mid-twenties – and it seems likely that he succumbed to the same disease that killed his brother, perhaps tuberculosis. That helped to bring to a decisive end that wave of witch hunts in which he and Stearne were involved, though they continued elsewhere in Britain. There was another big campaign in Scotland in the 1650s, for example. Ripples carried on across the period of the Civil War and beyond. Hundreds more people were accused and executed, and their cases were often undocumented.
How did the legacy of these witch hunts spread beyond Europe?
Most famously, during witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 and 1693, some 30 people were found guilty and 19 were hanged; others died under torture or in jail. So events in England and Scotland had impacts more than 3,000 miles away.
That’s because colonists in the New World – many of them Puritans seeking religious freedom – travelled from communities in Britain where witch trials had been held earlier that century. We have specific examples of people from Framlingham and Great Yarmouth carrying with them to New England the idea that the world is full of witches who need to be hunted. Witch trials were also held in Connecticut and Virginia, in colonies where settlers or their descendants recalled stories of witches they’d heard in Suffolk, Essex, Northamptonshire, Newcastle or Cornwall.
Are there any modern parallels to those 17th-century witch trials?
When people are scapegoated and blamed for problems in our communities today, there is an echo of the witch trials: it’s often poorer people and perceived outsiders who are picked upon. And, of course, we still have problems with misogyny – any woman in public life will tell you what it’s like to be on the receiving end of accusations from conspiracy theorists or others who think that women are generally a problem.
For example, the QAnon conspiracy theory holds that satanists wield power in American politics, particularly Democratic women, offering a close parallel with the witch trials of the 1640s.
There’s a legacy of suspicion and finger-pointing that isn’t justified but which is easy to whip up into hysteria, particularly in times of economic crisis and war. So I think we still live in a society where, in a sense, we hold witch trials.
Marion Gibson is emerita professor of Renaissance and magical literatures at the University of Exeter. Her previous books include Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Mike Soutar <![CDATA[Joan of Arc: The truth behind the legend]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/joan-of-arc-the-truth-behind-the-legend/ 2026-09-09T11:31:57.000Z 2026-09-07T11:27:30.000Z From peasant to martyr, rebellious teenager to national icon, Joan of Arc’s story is one of the most remarkable chapters of medieval history. But how much is it grounded in reality? And what does her meteoric rise, and equally dizzying decline, tell us about the importance of persuasion, self-belief, and leadership authority?
In this episode, Mike Soutar is joined by historian, author and broadcaster Janina Ramirez to explore those questions and more – and to investigate just how far having the courage of your convictions can take you.
Watch below or listen to the full interview, ad-free:
View Green Video on the source website
For more on the life of Joan of Arc, don’t miss our curated collection of articles, podcasts and videos
]]> Rob Attar <![CDATA[Do Jesus’s descendants live among us?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/historys-greatest-conspiracies-episode-2/ 2026-09-01T11:11:23.000Z 2026-09-01T10:32:33.000Z In the early 2000s, The Da Vinci Code was everywhere. Dan Brown’s novel – and its subsequent film adaptation – popularised the idea that Jesus Christ fathered children whose descendants have lived among us for millennia. The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction, but could the theory underpinning it be true?
In this episode of History’s Greatest Conspiracy Theories, Professor Helen Bond, an expert on early Christianity, joins Rob Attar to investigate the concept of the secret bloodline of Jesus.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Catholic missionaries spread their faith around the world – so why couldn’t Protestants keep up?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/catholic-missionaries-spread-their-faith-around-the-world-so-why-couldnt-protestants-keep-up/ 2026-09-28T10:46:08.000Z 2026-08-28T15:00:57.000Z In 1650, amid the excitement over the establishment of Oliver Cromwell’s new godly republic, the Baptist minister Henry Jessey published a pamphlet entitled Of the Conversion of Five Thousand and Nine Hundred East-Indians, in the Isle Formosa. It told of how, under the Dutch East India Company’s benevolent rule and thanks to the diligent preaching of the Dutch Reformed Church, tens of thousands of Indigenous people in Formosa (Taiwan) had “turned from their paganism”. More than 5,000 had been baptised as Protestant Christians.
These were not merely nominal converts. By the time they were baptised, they knew their catechisms, could answer questions about their new faith “wisely and solidly”, and lived lives of such virtue it would put most European Christians to shame. Jessey linked this to news of English Puritans converting Native Americans in Massachusetts. Perhaps, he suggested, it was a sign that “the fullness of the gentiles was ready to come in”, so all the world might be illuminated by the Protestant gospel.
Most of the pamphlet’s claims were true, but it didn’t tell the full story. The Dutch had indeed baptised thousands, and established churches and schools in south-eastern Formosa. They had produced catechisms and gospel translations in Indigenous languages. They had staffed the churches with Indigenous elders. However, what the pamphlet didn’t highlight was the Dutch military takeover of the island during the 1620s.
In classic colonial divide-and-rule style, the Dutch had used local alliances as a springboard for wider conquests. The first allies the Dutch had made were clear about the terms of the deal: they would convert, but only if the foreigners demonstrated the power of their religion in battle. As a result, the Dutch obligingly provided musketeers to support local headhunting raids. A firearms volley would scatter the people of a village and the Formosans would then close in to collect heads. Calvinist ministers even blessed proceedings. The East India Company also supplied rice to villages that converted and to children who attended Dutch schools.
By 1650, the shine was already coming off these arrangements. Overhunting decimated the island’s deer population, crashing the company’s revenues. Instead of being bribed, the converts were taxed. Worse was to follow. In 1661, Chinese forces landed. The islanders rushed to burn Christian books and returned to “the abominable usages and customs of heathenism”. One minister who tried to reprimand them was found without head, limbs or entrails, a “mutilated trunk”. Dutch rule on Formosa lasted less than 40 years. The Protestant missionary effort that Jessey celebrated left almost no trace behind it.
Forgotten initiatives
The story is typical of early Protestant missions. While the first global age, c1500–c1800, was an age of Catholic missionary expansion in South America, Africa, India and China, the Protestant Reformation hardly spread out beyond Europe until the 1790s. However, as the Formosan experience shows us, this failure wasn’t from a lack of trying. Moreover, although Catholic kingdoms such as Spain, Portugal and even France had a century’s start over Protestant rivals such as England and the Dutch Republic in the race for overseas empire, the Protestants were very much in the game by the 17th century. And for many of these Protestants, empire was a profoundly religious project.
“The main end of our plantation,” insisted the founders of the colony in Massachusetts, was “to bring the Indians to the knowledge of the gospel”. The great Dutch trading companies were determined “to instruct… Blacks and Indians in the rudiments of the Christian religion”, sometimes sinking far more than they could afford into missionary projects. Idealistic aims such as saving souls and honouring God’s name were alloyed with more pragmatic motives, such as using religion to cement political alliances and lubricate trade deals. Protestant donors gave hundreds of thousands of pounds, guilders and thalers to missionary ventures, often spurred by thrilling accounts such as those written by Jessey.
These forgotten early Protestant missionaries spanned the globe. The Dutch empire in Asia saw substantial missionary initiatives in the Indonesian islands and on what is now Sri Lanka, where more than a million children attended mission schools from the 1660s onwards. A remarkable Danish-Prussian-English missionary joint venture in southern India after 1706 built up a substantial Protestant community, and there were parallel efforts in Madras, Calcutta and elsewhere.
Faith goes global
There were also serious attempts to reach into the Ottoman empire. In the 1720s and 1730s, England’s Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge spent tens of thousands of pounds producing Christian texts in Arabic, alongside similar English, Dutch and German ventures in Arabic and Turkish printing. One German Lutheran even reached the isolated Christian kingdom of Abyssinia, where he spent 17 years as a close confidant of the emperor and translated John’s gospel into Amharic. There were initiatives all around coastal Africa, from brief forays into Madagascar and Mozambique, through half-hearted efforts by Dutch settlers at the Cape of Good Hope, to more sustained but deeply troubled attempts to proselytise from slave-trading forts in west Africa.
As to the Americas, from the first recorded presence of Protestants in the New World in the 1550s, we find them filled with naïve optimism as they try to convert Indigenous peoples. Short-lived Protestant colonies in South America, from the French and the Dutch in Brazil to the most disastrous of all, the Scots in Panama, made strenuous missionary efforts while their time lasted. So too did French Huguenots in Florida, Swedes in Delaware, and the Dutch on Manhattan and in the Hudson valley. In Britain’s American empire, there was an assortment of local projects, partly paid for by well-funded bodies such as England’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (founded 1701).
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So why has this story been almost forgotten? Partly because it did not leave much of an archival footprint and partly because the Catholic missions of the era were so much larger. Indeed, Protestants often lamented over how little they were doing – rhetorical attempts to stir consciences and raise money that have subsequently been accepted at face value by historians. But there is an even more obvious reason these early Protestant missions have been forgotten: they largely failed.
Although not completely. The thousands of converts on Formosa were real enough. Some of the Tupi of Brazil converted firmly enough to Calvinism that, when the Portuguese retook the colony, there were leaders of the Tupi resistance who refused to save their lives by renouncing their faith. The Anglican mission to the Mohawks of the New York colony turned the “faithful Mohawks” into loyal allies, who fought for the crown during the American Revolution.
Around the world, most Protestants were readier than Catholics to ordain Indigenous converts during this era. There were hundreds of “country pastors” in India, Africa and North America, such as Arumagam Pillai in southern India, whose German friends said he was “well-informed in all matters; he even knows how to talk in a royal palace”. Another was Samson Occom, a Mohegan from Connecticut who became a bestselling author, celebrity fundraiser and dogged advocate for his people’s rights, and who dismissed all the dangers that beset him: “They could not kill me but once.”
Diminishing returns
Still, there is no mistaking the overall picture. Enormous hopes, slabs of money, an impressive amount of effort and thousands of lives were invested in early Protestant missionary projects. The return, in terms of communities of converts, was minimal. If what you want from your missionary history is a heroic tale of white saviours bringing redemption to a world of heathen darkness, then this is disappointing. For the rest of us, it poses a fascinating question: why did this worldwide effort, sustained across centuries, bear such meagre fruit?
One answer is that the best foundation for missionary success was colonial conquest. In contrast to Catholic powers, the Protestant powers’ empires in this era were small and fragile. There was a pattern of promising missionary efforts being abruptly terminated by military defeat. Even in British North America, repeated wars with France disrupted missionary work.
In addition, Protestant churches were not so well structured for proselytisation as their Catholic rivals. Religious orders, those great engines of missions, were suppressed at the Reformation. Protestant missions were often kept on short leashes by imperial powers and by micromanaging home churches. In any case, many of these churches had shaky financial systems and flat, egalitarian structures that made the effective planning, direction and sustenance of missions almost impossible.
Crucially, deep-seated attitudes underpinned the failure. European Protestants, secure in their own cultural and religious superiority, and mostly at ease in their alliance with their emerging colonial empires, were simply unprepared for the task of trying to take their gospel to peoples across the planet. As a result, they didn’t make enough of an effort to reach people more alien to them than anyone we might ever meet in today’s globalised world.
Their preconceptions were set by their earlier encounters in Europe with Jews, Muslims and ‘barbarians’ – that is, with peoples such as the ‘wild Irish’ or the Sámi of northern Scandinavia. Those encounters seemed to teach that the best route to conversion was conquest and the top-down imposition of Christian norms. For generations, Scottish Highlanders’ children were dragooned into schools where, to ‘civilise’ them, they were forbidden to speak a word of Gaelic. The same model was exported to residential schools for Native Americans, institutions that were intended as charitable yet we now see as perpetrating cultural genocide.
Or again, the proverbial reluctance of Jews and Muslims to convert, even under pressure, suggested that sometimes unbelievers were simply too sunk in their own stubborn errors to be ‘rescued’. It was all too easy, like one Calvinist minister at the Cape of Good Hope, to conclude that the “heathen” were “senseless cattle”. If conversion was impossible, you could stop trying with a clear conscience.
But almost worse than despair was over-optimistic idealism. European Protestants were convinced their religion, and indeed their entire way of life, was superior to any of the barbaric delusions in which heathen people were mired. So, they believed that, as soon as their gospel was declared, grateful infidels would flock to convert. The great Welsh philologist William Jones – who was no fool – believed that if Christians discreetly scattered selections from the Bible across the Indian subcontinent and left the population to discover the text for themselves, they would be convinced by its intrinsic power with no need for heavy-handed missionary interventions.
Reverting to despair
In parts of the world with no Indigenous literary tradition, the same hope lay behind projects of mass education. In the meantime, Protestants were sure that the heathen would be allured by the evident purity of Protestant worship, and by the shining moral example of the godly Christians who had come to live among them. When these hopes failed, the obvious response was to revert to despair. “We gave the heathen an example,” one Massachusetts Puritan reflected bitterly in 1723, “If they had not been miserably besotted, they would have taken more notice of it.” He could only deduce that God had chosen not to save these feckless barbarians.
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It is easy to mock this smug wishful thinking, but what else do any of us ever do in a new situation than draw on our pre-existing experience and presumptions? Generations of hopeful Protestants repeated the same doomed strategies, convinced that when the time was right – but not until then – God would ensure their efforts bore fruit.
Where this became lethal was in Protestant attitudes to the slave trade. Most Protestants disliked Atlantic slavery, but it was too vast an economic reality to be wished away. They concluded that slavery needed to be redeemed by being made Christian. But most slave-holders steadfastly refused to allow any efforts to preach to the enslaved, correctly suggesting that Christian notions such as the spiritual equality of all humanity, and Protestant practices such as assembling for worship or learning to read and write, would be deeply corrosive to the slavery system.
So would-be Protestant missionaries bent over backwards to reassure slaveholders that their gospel was harmless, that enslavement was entirely compatible with Christianity, and that conversion would render enslaved people more diligent, obedient and docile. Jacobus Capitein, an African who had been enslaved but was ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church in 1742, had to buy his respectability by writing a treatise defending the legitimacy of slavery. This desperate cant did nothing to reconcile slaveholders to Protestant missionary efforts. What it did was turn the Protestant gospel into an apologia for slavery. One Englishwoman tried to teach enslaved people in the Caribbean a song ending:
God, the master we serve, knows for us what is best:
And when life’s toils are ended we sweetly shall rest;
For every good deed in God’s book is recorded.
So faithful good negroes will be surely rewarded.
A faith so nakedly designed to serve vested interests had no chance of appealing to the enslaved.
For two centuries, most Protestants lived inside a comforting bubble, so sure of their approach that they could not be shaken by the mere fact of failure. A few discordant voices questioned these truisms, but it took the American Revolution to burst this bubble by triggering a sudden Protestant moral awakening over the slave trade. This eventually led to slavery’s abolition. It also started a new wave of Protestant missions, which finally began to learn from the generations of failure that preceded them. The key insight of these missionaries – so obvious to us that we can miss the enormity of the imaginative leap it represented – was that they needed to deal with the world not as they believed it would or should be, but as it was.
Alec Ryrie is professor of the history of Christianity at Durham University. His latest book is The World’s Reformation: How Protestantism Became a Global Religion (Yale University Press, 2026)
This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Isabel King <![CDATA[Did Britain really 'keep calm and carry on' in WW2?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-britain-really-keep-calm-and-carry-on-in-ww2/ 2026-08-28T12:31:20.000Z 2026-08-28T12:31:20.000Z Keep calm and carry on' has long been held up as the defining spirit of wartime Britain. But was the nation really as united, stoic and unquestioning as popular memory suggests?
In this episode, Steven Casey takes Isabel King through the often surprising reality of Britain's wartime morale.
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