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One of the key qualities of being human is that we’re all of us capable of thinking for ourselves. On the one hand that’s a blessed freedom, on the other it has the potential to result in serious disagreement and tension.

This week in A History of the World in 100 objects you’ll hear about how tolerance, or intolerance of the beliefs and faith of others affected the world some 400 years ago.
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British Museum curator Barrie Cook, one of the studious minds responsible for the series, sets the scene:

The early modern world, by and large, was not a tolerant place and little value was placed on the eccentric, the uncooperative, the misfit and the outcast. The rulers of the world - monarchs, aristocrats or patricians - generally had a straightforward view about conformity: my way or the highway.

From their perspective, division was a threat to the vital unity of the state; difference was disloyalty and thinking for yourself practically sedition. This is a bit of a caricature, but not much of one.

Yet it was also a world that tested the limits of intolerance and the objects this week all make this point in their different ways.

So what are these objects?

From Iran, the parade standard allows us to examine how the Safavid dynasty created the world’s first major Shi’i Islam state. A miniature painting of a Mughal prince paying a visit to a holy man in India, allows Neil MacGregor to tell the story of how the subcontinent’s largely non-Islamic population were allowed to worship as they pleased by its Islamic rulers.

This was also a period when Islam and Christianity were still spreading and winning new converts. Through two of our objects we’ll hear how this wasn’t always just a one-way deal as local, older beliefs persisted, in different ways, among the new.

A stunning shadow puppet shows how elements of Hindu stories continued to be told in Muslim Indonesia, and a codex map from newly-conquered Mexico shows how the Catholic faith met indigenous customs.

Yet, our final object tells of a less tolerant approach within Christianity. The mass-media of its day, our broadsheet was made to celebrate the rebellious acts of German monk Martin Luther that led to the Protestant Reformation and to the splitting of Christian Europe into two rival factions.

As Barrie explains, the divisions originally ignited by Luther’s ideas triggered Europe’s final major religious conflict: the Thirty Years War. But eventually, with no outright winner emerging, a greater willingness to accept diversity did so instead:

This war would demonstrate that reality has a habit of beating down the most fervent enthusiast and, after 30 years of devastation, Europe began to learn to live with religious diversity. The never wholly absent voices of toleration began to lay down the beginnings of a consensus that a variety of faiths is not necessarily a threat to the state and diversity can bring strength, rather than weakness. Sometimes.

Looking at the world around us now, I can see his point very clearly. Now, just as then, the line between tolerance and intolerance is a fine one, but the effects of either are always food for fascinating debate.

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