Final Report Summary - RELMIN (The legal status of religious minorities in the Euro-mediterranean world (5th-16th centuries)) RELMIN, based at the University of Nantes (France), is devoted to the study of the legal status of religious minorities in the middle ages (www.relmin.eu). The issues of religious diversity and of the regulation of pluralistic European societies are not new. On the contrary, religious diversity in Europe is grounded in the practice of Christian and Muslim states of the European Middle Ages. In the Christian Roman Empire of the fifth and sixth centuries, emperors banned paganism yet allowed Jews limited freedoms, creating a protected but subordinate status for the empire’s Jewish subjects. In the wake of the Muslim conquests of much of the former Roman/Byzantine Empire, Muslim rulers accorded to Jews and Christians the status of dhimmīs, protected minorities that enjoyed broad religious freedoms and judicial autonomy, but whose social and political status was inferior to that of Muslims. In Christian kingdoms of medieval Europe, Jews (and in some cases Muslims) were accepted as subordinate minorities who could maintain their synagogues and mosques and openly practice their religions. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the status of these religious minorities became increasingly precarious in many European states: minorities faced violence and often expulsion: this is the case for Christians and Jews in Almohad Spain (12th & 13th centuries), for Jews in many medieval and early modern states, and for Muslims in Sicily (13th century) and Spain (15th-16th centuries).The legal status of these minorities in European societies, precarious as it at times proved to be, was grounded in fundamental legal and sacred texts and in the traditions of learned commentaries to those texts. There is thus a rich and varied corpus of texts dealing with the legal status of religious minorities in pre-modern Europe. These texts, in Latin, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic (and also in Medieval Spanish, Portuguese, and other European vernaculars), are dispersed in libraries and archives across Europe. The RELMIN database of legal sources (http://www.cn-telma.fr/relmin/index/) along with the project publications and other online resources, provides a unique and valuable tool for researchers in the history of minority law and in the history of interreligious relations. It serves as an eloquent testimony to the permanence and ubiquity of interreligious cohabitation in Europe.We have undertaken a comparative approach to the study of these sources in order to bring together the expertise of several disciplines that do not frequently collaborate. The database has been used in various universities in Europe and North America as a teaching tool for courses in religious studies, history and law. Over the course of five years (2010-2015), RELMIN has organized international conferences, workshops and seminars. RELMIN’s doctoral students are writing dissertations on various aspects of the legal status of religious minorities in the medieval Iberian Peninsula. RELMIN has produced a number of innovative publications in the field, available online (http://relmin.eu/index.php/fr/ressources/publications). It has also inaugurated a new book collection with Brepols publishers in Belgium, “Religion and Law in Medieval Christian and Muslim Societies” (http://www.brepols.net/). Thanks to a major grant from the Pays de la Loire region in France, a new institute, the Institut du Pluralisme Religieux et de l’Athéisme (IPRA: www.ipra.eu) has been created in Nantes : its mission is to continue the work of RELMIN and to broaden its scope by including the study of more recent periods in European history.
