ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, in response to an ill-omened event, the Ottoman authorities decided to eliminate all dogs. They, therefore, required all Christians to bring one, kill it in their presence, and pay a sum of cash; the Jews were assigned the task of burying the carcasses of those slain animals. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, all of Spain’s Muslim subjects were obliged to make a choice between converting to Christianity and abandoning their native land. Even the ones who converted were nevertheless expelled some hundred years later. Between the second half of the eleventh century and the beginning of the early modern era, the Seljuq Turks and, later, the Ottoman Turks occupied Anatolia, much of the Balkan peninsula, and certain areas in Eastern Europe. Between the end of the eleventh century and the fifteenth century, the Christians took back possession of certain of those territories, whose population had in the meantime largely become Muslim.
