{"id":3800,"date":"2026-01-26T12:52:20","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T12:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lawyersupdate.co.in\/?p=3800"},"modified":"2026-01-26T12:52:21","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T12:52:21","slug":"how-tyranny-sneaks-up-vii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lawyersupdate.co.in\/index.php\/how-tyranny-sneaks-up-vii\/","title":{"rendered":"How Tyranny Sneaks Up – VII"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

Tyrants don’t impose themselves. They are invited to. Here is how and why.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

On April 9, 1241, the Battle of Legnica saw the Mongols take on the combined European forces comprising Poles and Moravians, who attempted to halt the Mongol invasion of Poland, and were squarely defeated. Two days later, at the Battle of Mohi on April 11, 1241, the Kingdom of Hungary was brought to its knees by the Mongols under Batu Khan and General Subutai. These two were humiliating defeats of the Europeans at the hands of the seemingly invincible Mongols.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since European Christians could not muster effective resistance against the invaders, they turned on those they saw as their enemies, and through contorted fiction, connected the invaders and the resident Jews. The rage was then channeled against the \u201coutsider\u201d within.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the Mongol invasion did not spontaneously spark the animosity against the Jews, for the deep-seated prejudice and resentment had always been there, simmering under the surface, in the medieval Christian minds that saw the Jews as the \u201cenemies of Christ\u201d. When a new, formidable enemy appeared in the form of the invading Mongols, the Christians fused the known enemy with the unknown to invent an imagined evil force conspiring against Christendom. The Jews were painted as the \u201cfifth column\u201d, meaning a hidden enemy working from the inside to dismantle Christendom. And the Christians were called upon to fight the evil Jews collectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just like this intense hatred for the Jews had not started with the Mongol invasion, it did not die with the end of the invasion either. The Mongol invasion ended when the Great Khan \u00d6g\u00f6dei died in 1241, necessitating the return of the Mongol princes to Mongolia, where a successor had to be picked. So, the Mongol leaders, Batu Khan and Kadan, went back, leaving Europe to Europeans. Other factors that played a role in the Mongol withdrawal included the harsh terrain, fortified castles, and logistical challenges, which were impeding the progress of the invasion anyway, making withdrawal more sensible than pressing on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1242 CE, the Mongols had backed away from Central Europe, and it had been established that European Jews had nothing to do with the Mongols, and much of the narrative built around the Jew-Mongol conspiracy held no water at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reports by the travelers who had visited the Mongol Court, like William of Rubruck and Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, had provided enough details in the 1250s to show that there was no connection between the Jews and the Mongols, because Mongols had no knowledge of Hebrew, worshipped their own gods (\u201cthe Eternal Blue Sky\u201d, that is), and looked nothing like the Jews, nor did their culture have any semblance with Jewish life. A few of these problems had also made Matthew Paris wonder for a bit before he found a way around to push his agenda and keep his conspiracy theory alive to the extreme detriment of European Jews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the light of truth did not clear the mist of hatred. On the contrary, in 1267, at the Council of Vienna, the Church formalized distinctive attire for the Jews, complete with the yellow badge or the horned hat (Pileum cornutum) to make the enemies within distinct and readily identifiable. Prejudices and hate hold fast and do not let go easily, and once the seeds are sown, it\u2019s hard to prevent the tree from taking root, and even harder to uproot a grown tree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Mongols left, but the financial and social instability that predated the Mongols and had little to do with the Mongol invasion remained. European kings were deep in debt and found it expedient to exploit the anti-Jewish sentiment that had found a new lease of life from the narrative engineered during the Mongol invasion, resulting in widespread persecution and expulsion of Jews between 1290 CE and 1306 CE, even in places that had faced no Mongol invasion at all, like England. In England, the anti-Jewish propaganda circulated by Matthew Paris and his likes came in handy for Edward I of England, who ordered a nationwide expulsion of Jews and seized their property to finance his wars, citing “usury” practiced by the Jews as the moral justification for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1306, King Philip IV of France followed suit, arresting all Jews in France on a single day, confiscating their goods and properties, and expelling them en masse<\/em>. Portraying himself as the “Most Christian King” who needed to purify his realm, King Philip (also called Philip the Fair), positioned the expulsion of the Jews as the removal of a spiritual \u201cstain\u201d on France in the service of religious piety aimed at ridding his Christian subjects of “perfidious” (faithless) influences. And much like Edward I of England, Philip also used \u201cusury\u201d as a moral cudgel against the Jews, playing on the Church’s condemnation of usury (lending money at interest). Expelling the lending Jews, Philip claimed, amounted to releasing his Christian subjects from the “yoke” of Jewish debt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1298, in Germany, the place where Matthew Paris claimed Jews were smuggling weapons, a nobleman called Rindfleisch made an unfounded claim that the Jews had desecrated a communion wafer, and led a mob through 140 communities in Bavaria and Austria, murdering an estimated 20,000 Jews, mirroring the “wild beast” violence they had previously blamed the Mongols with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between 1348 CE and 1351 CE, the propaganda engineered in the Mongol era touched a new low in the Black Death, with Matthew Paris\u2019 ideas of Jewish conspiracy, poisoning, and secret meetings being revived. The Jews were falsely accused of poisoning wells to destroy Christendom, leading to the burning of as many as 2000 Jews alive in Strasbourg in a single day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026to be continued<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tyrants don’t impose themselves. They are invited to. Here is how and why. On April 9, 1241, the Battle of Legnica saw the Mongols take on the combined European forces comprising Poles and Moravians, who attempted to halt the Mongol invasion of Poland, and were squarely defeated. Two days later, at the Battle of Mohi […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-street-lawyer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawyersupdate.co.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawyersupdate.co.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawyersupdate.co.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawyersupdate.co.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawyersupdate.co.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3800"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lawyersupdate.co.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3810,"href":"https:\/\/lawyersupdate.co.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3800\/revisions\/3810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawyersupdate.co.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawyersupdate.co.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawyersupdate.co.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}