MEDALS INVOLVING CONFLICTS BETWEEN OTHER RELIGIOUS GROUPS
Other medals, though not as blatantly designed to spread unflattering stereotyped impressions against a particular group of people as the Korn Jew medals, or the virulently anti-Black medals shown later, also serve to commemorate events that either strongly involve the religious prejudices of the period or appear to actually serve as instruments of religious bigotry.  Some relate to conflicts between Christians and Muslims, but the most common of these are within the Christian community itself, i.e., anti-Catholic, and their counterparts, anti-Protestant medals.

The countries involved encompass some of Asia and most of Europe: England, France, Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, and Sweden, to name just a few.  In the period covered by these medals, the countries of Asia and Europe experienced widespread religious wars.  The European continent was held together largely by alliances of marriages between and among the various countries, and were separated largely by religious strife, mainly between Protestants and Catholics but also between Roman Catholics and Byzantine Catholics and between one Protestant group and another. 

BRIEF BACKGROUND
Religious wars, in general, date back as far as oral and written history allows and geographically include essentially the entire world.   A mention of a few of the major conflicts serve to illustrate their scope and breath and provide some background for a discussion of the medals included in this section. Some of these conflicts will be exemplified by the historical and commemorative medals discussed below.

Arab Muslim conquests
One of the earliest religious wars in the modern period are the Arab Muslim conquests (632–732), also termed the Islamic conquests, which  began after the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and spread from the Arabian peninsula to an area stretching from northwest India, across Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, southern Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula, to the Pyrenees. Its general purpose was to supplant Christianity with Islam. In some form or other these objectives continued through the 18th century and beyond.

An example of a medal illustrating one result of the conquest of Muslims over Christians is illustrated by the architectural medal of St Sophia at Constantinople by the Belgian engraver Jacques Wiener (Figure 3).



While this medal does not overtly promote religious bigotry, it does tell the story of how a religious building changes depending upon the religious practices of the different power structures, and implies that the conquering group does not tolerate the religious practices of those it conquered.

The Crusades
Another major religious or Holy war were the Crusades,  a series of religion-driven political and military campaigns waged by much of Christian Europe.  Their scope and duration are astounding. The Crusades were concentrated mainly against Muslims,  though campaigns were also directed against pagan Slavs, Jews, Russian and Greek Orthodox Christians, Mongols, and many others who were considered political enemies of the popes.  The following  description of the Crusades, taken from the website www.religioustolerance.org   describes some of the atrocities perpetrated against these people in the name of religion:

Emperor Alexius asked Pope Urban II for assistance. On 1095-NOV-27, the Pope called on Europeans to go on a crusade to liberate Jerusalem from its Muslim rulers. "The first and second wave of Crusaders murdered, raped and plundered their way up the Rhine and down the Danube as they headed for Jerusalem."  The "army" was primarily composed of untrained peasants with their families, with a core of trained soldiers. On the way to the Middle East, they decided that only one of their goals was to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Muslims. A secondary task was to rid the world of as many non-Christians as possible - both Muslims and Jews. The Crusaders gave the Jews two choices in their slogan: "Christ-killers, embrace the Cross or die!" 12,000 Jews in the Rhine Valley alone were killed as the first Crusade passed through. Some Jewish writers refer to these events as the "first holocaust." Once the army reached Jerusalem and broke through the city walls, they slaughtered all the inhabitants that they could find (men, women, children, newborns). After locating about 6,000 Jews holed up in the synagogue, they set the building on fire; the Jews were burned alive. The Crusaders found that about 30,000 Muslims had fled to the al Aqsa Mosque. The Muslims were also slaughtered without mercy.

The Roman Catholic church taught that going to war against the "Infidels" was an act of Christian penance. If a believer was killed during a crusade, he would bypass purgatory, and be taken directly to heaven.

These particular wars of religion, which began with the First Crusade in 1095 and ended with the Ninth Crusade in 1272, actually continued through subsequent centuries in varying forms throughout Europe, the Middle east and Northern Africa.  In fact, the Crusades may be looked upon as forerunners of other related persecutions which occurred  mainly in Europe in efforts to establish political and religious homogeneity, in particular the practice of proselytizing those with differing beliefs to adhere to the Christian faith.  Some of the most notorious of these include the Spanish Inquisition of the 15th century, which targeted primarily the Jewish population but later involved some of the Protestant and Muslim community as well. The slaughter of millions of Jews by Nazi Germans and their corresponding anti-Semitic adherents throughout Europe in the mid 20th century during the Holocaust also can be thought of as a continuation of bigoted practices dating back to centuries before.

Obviously, Christians of today should not be held responsible for actions promulgated by some of their spiritual ancestors of past centuries, any more than modern-day Italians should be held responsible for the ancient Romans’ killing of Jesus of Nazareth, or the Jews of today held responsible for actions promulgated against Jesus by the ancient Hebrews.  However, many Muslims and Jews alike note that attempts to convert them to Christianity, either by words or by force, continue up to this day, and that these efforts, at least in part, formed one of the bases for the persecutions of the past.

Though barbaric in their execution and though they led to the slaughter of countless thousands of individuals, the Crusades are still nevertheless celebrated by the issuance of commemorative medals.  One such medal is that of the Inauguration of the Statue of Godefroy De Bouillon, the leader of the First Crusade, by the Belgian medallist Laurent Joseph Hart (Figure 4).