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STUDY MATERIAL FOR B.A HISTORY OF 476 - 1453 AD SEMESTER - IV, ACADEMIC YEAR 2020-21

UNIT CONTENT PAGE Nr

I RISE AND FALL OF 02

II EASTERN ROMAN EMPIRE 10

III THE 21

IV THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN EMPIRE AND PAPACY 31

V ENLIGHTENMENT AND 40

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UNIT - I RISE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

Constantine the Great, 306-337 C.E., divided the Roman Empire in two and made the dominant in the region. The invading army reached the outskirts of , which had been left totally undefended. In 410 C.E., the , led by Alaric, breached the walls of Rome and sacked the capital of the Roman Empire. The Visigoths looted, burned, and pillaged their way through the city, leaving a wake of destruction wherever they went. The plundering continued for three days. For the first time in nearly a millennium, the city of Rome was in the hands of someone other than the Romans. This was the first time that the city of Rome was sacked, but by no means the last.

CONSTANTINE AND THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY: One of the many factors that contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire was the rise of a new religion, Christianity. The Christian religion, which was monotheistic ran counter to the traditional Roman religion, which was polytheistic (many gods). At different times, the Romans persecuted the because of their beliefs, which were popular among the poor. In 313 C.E., Roman ended all persecution and declared toleration for Christianity. Later that century, Christianity became the official religion of the Empire. This drastic change in policy spread this relatively new religion to every corner of the Empire. By approving Christianity, the Roman state directly undermined its religious traditions. Finally, by this time, Romans considered their emperor a god. But the Christian belief in one god — who was not the emperor — weakened the authority and credibility of the emperor. Constantine enacted another change that helped accelerate the fall of the Roman Empire. In 330 C.E., he split the empire into two parts: the western half centered in Rome and the eastern half centered in , a city he named after himself.

The western Empire spoke and was Roman Catholic. The eastern Empire spoke Greek and worshipped under the Eastern Orthodox branch of the Christian . Over time, the east thrived, while the west declined. In fact, after the western part of the Roman Empire fell, the eastern half continued to exist as the for hundreds of years. Therefore, the "fall of Rome" really refers only to the fall of the western half of the Empire. Other fundamental problems contributed to the fall. In the economically ailing west, a decrease in agricultural production led to higher food prices. The western half of the empire had a large trade deficit with the eastern half. The west purchased luxury goods from the east but had nothing to offer in exchange. To make up for the lack of money, the began producing more coins with less silver content. This led to inflation. Finally, and attacks from Germanic tribes disrupted the flow of trade, especially in the west. There were political and military difficulties, as well. It didn't help matters that political amateurs were in control of Rome in the years leading up to its fall. Army generals dominated the emperorship, and corruption was rampant. Over time, the military was transformed into a mercenary army with no real loyalty to Rome. As money grew tight, the government hired the cheaper and less reliable Germanic soldiers to fight in Roman armies. By the end, these armies were defending Rome against their fellow Germanic tribesmen. Under these circumstances, the sack of Rome came as no surprise.

GOTH ROCKERS Wave after wave of Germanic tribes swept through the Roman Empire. Groups such as the Visigoths, , , , , , and took turns

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ravaging the Empire, eventually carving out areas in which to settle down. The Angles and Saxons populated the , and the Franks ended up in . In 476 C.E. , the last of the Roman in the west, was overthrown by the Germanic leader , who became the first Barbarian to rule in Rome. The order that the Roman Empire had brought to for 1000 years was no more.

CAUSES FOR THE DOWNFALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE: 1. by Barbarian tribes: The most straightforward theory for Western Rome’s collapse pins the fall on a string of military losses sustained against outside forces. Rome had tangled with Germanic tribes for centuries, but by the “barbarian” groups like the had encroached beyond the Empire’s borders. The Romans weathered a Germanic uprising in the late fourth century, but in 410 the Visigoth Alaric successfully sacked the city of Rome. The Empire spent the next several decades under constant threat before “the Eternal City” was raided again in 455, this time by the Vandals. Finally, in 476, the Germanic leader Odoacer staged a revolt and deposed the Emperor . From then on, no would ever again rule from a post in , leading many to cite 476 as the year the Western Empire suffered its deathblow.

2. Economic troubles and overreliance on slave labor Even as Rome was under attack from outside forces, it was also crumbling from within thanks to a severe financial crisis. Constant wars and overspending had significantly lightened imperial coffers, and oppressive taxation and inflation had widened the gap between rich and poor. In the hope of avoiding the taxman, many members of the wealthy classes had even fled to the countryside and set up independent fiefdoms. At the same time, the empire was rocked by a labor deficit. Rome’s economy depended on slaves to till its fields and work as craftsmen, and its military might had traditionally provided a fresh influx of conquered peoples to put to work. But when expansion ground to a halt in the second century, Rome’s supply of slaves and other war treasures began to dry up. A further blow came in the fifth century, when the Vandals claimed North and began disrupting the empire’s trade by prowling the Mediterranean as pirates. With its economy faltering and its commercial and agricultural production in decline, the Empire began to lose its grip on Europe.

3. The rise of the Eastern Empire: The fate of Western Rome was partially sealed in the late third century, when the Emperor divided the Empire into two halves—the Western Empire seated in the city of , and the Eastern Empire in , later known as Constantinople. The division made the empire more easily governable in the short term, but over time the two halves drifted apart. East and West failed to adequately work together to combat outside threats, and the two often squabbled over resources and military aid. As the gulf widened, the largely Greek-speaking Eastern Empire grew in wealth while the Latin-speaking West descended into economic crisis. Most importantly, the strength of the Eastern Empire served to divert Barbarian invasions to the West. Emperors like Constantine ensured that the city of Constantinople was fortified and well guarded, but Italy and the city of Rome -which only had symbolic value for many in the East—were left vulnerable. The Western political structure would finally disintegrate in the fifth century, but the Eastern Empire endured in some form for another thousand years before overwhelmed by the in the 1400s.

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4. Overexpansion and military overspending At its height, the Roman Empire stretched from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the Euphrates River in the , but its grandeur may have also been its downfall. With such a vast territory to govern, the empire faced an administrative and logistical nightmare. Even with their excellent road systems, the Romans were unable to communicate quickly or effectively enough to manage their holdings. Rome struggled to marshal enough troops and resources to defend its frontiers from local rebellions and outside attacks, and by the second century the Emperor Hadrian was forced to build his famous wall in Britain just to keep the enemy at bay. As more and more funds were funneled into the military upkeep of the empire, technological advancement slowed and Rome’s civil infrastructure fell into disrepair.

5. Government corruption and political instability If Rome’s sheer size made it difficult to govern, ineffective and inconsistent leadership only served to magnify the problem. Being the Roman emperor had always been a particularly dangerous job, but during the tumultuous second and third centuries it nearly became a death sentence. Civil war thrust the empire into chaos, and more than 20 men took the in the span of only 75 years, usually after the murder of their predecessor. The —the emperor’s personal bodyguards—assassinated and installed new sovereigns at will, and once even auctioned the spot off to the highest bidder. The political rot also extended to the , which failed to temper the excesses of the emperors due to its own widespread corruption and incompetence. As the situation worsened, civic pride waned and many Roman citizens lost trust in their leadership.

6. The arrival of the and the migration of the Barbarian tribes: The Barbarian attacks on Rome partially stemmed from a migration caused by the Huns’ of Europe in the late fourth century. When these Eurasian warriors rampaged through , they drove many Germanic tribes to the borders of the Roman Empire. The Romans grudgingly allowed members of the Visigoth tribe to cross south of the and into the safety of Roman territory, but they treated them with extreme cruelty. According to , Roman officials even forced the starving Goths to trade their children into in exchange for dog meat. In brutalizing the Goths, the Romans created a dangerous enemy within their own borders. When the oppression became too much to bear, the Goths rose up in revolt and eventually routed a and killed the Eastern Emperor Valens during the in A.D. 378. The shocked Romans negotiated a flimsy with the , but the truce unraveled in 410, when the Goth King Alaric moved west and sacked Rome. With the Western Empire weakened, Germanic tribes like the Vandals and the Saxons were able to surge across its borders and occupy Britain, and North Africa.

7. Christianity and the loss of traditional values The decline of Rome dovetailed with the , and some have argued that the rise of a new faith helped contribute to the empire’s fall. The legalized Christianity in 313, and it later became the state religion in 380. These decrees ended centuries of persecution, but they may have also eroded the traditional Roman values system. Christianity displaced the polytheistic Roman religion, which viewed the emperor as having a divine status, and also shifted focus away from the glory of the state and onto a sole deity. Meanwhile, and other church leaders took an increased role in political affairs, further complicating governance. The 18th-century historian was the most famous proponent of this theory, but his take has since been widely criticized. While the spread of

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Christianity may have played a small role in curbing Roman civic virtue, most scholars now argue that its influence paled in comparison to military, economic and administrative factors.

8. Weakening of the Roman legions For most of its history, Rome’s military was the envy of the ancient world. But during the decline, the makeup of the once mighty legions began to change. Unable to recruit enough soldiers from the Roman citizenry, emperors like Diocletian and Constantine began hiring foreign mercenaries to prop up their armies. The ranks of the legions eventually swelled with Germanic Goths and other barbarians, so much so that Romans began using the Latin word “barbarus” in place of “soldier.” While these Germanic soldiers of fortune proved to be fierce warriors, they also had little or no loyalty to the empire, and their power-hungry officers often turned against their Roman employers. In fact, many of the barbarians who sacked the city of Rome and brought down the Western Empire had earned their military stripes while serving in the Roman legions.

LEGACY OF ROME The legacy of the Roman Empire has been varied and significant, comparable to that of other hegemonic polities of world history (e.g. Persian Empire, ancient or imperial ). The Roman Empire itself, built upon the legacy of other such as Ancient , has had long-lasting influence with broad geographical reach on a great range of cultural aspects, including state institutions, law, cultural values, religious beliefs, technological advances, engineering and language. This legacy survived the demise of the empire itself ( AD in the West, and AD in the East) and went on to shape other civilizations, a process which continues to this day. The city of Rome was the civitas (reflected in the etymology of the word "civilization") and connected with the actual western civilization on which subsequent cultures built.

One main legacy is the Latin language of , epitomized by the used in Latin , evolved during the and remains in use in the Roman as . , the common tongue used for regular social interactions, evolved simultaneously into the various that exist today (notably Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.). Although the fell in the 5th century AD, the Eastern Roman Empire continued until its conquest by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century AD and cemented the in many parts of the Eastern Mediterranean even after the Early Muslim conquests of the 7th century AD. Although there has been a small modern revival of the Hellenistic religion with Hellenism, ancient Roman paganism was largely displaced by Roman Catholic Christianity after the AD and the Christian conversion of Roman emperor Constantine I (r. 306-337 AD). The Christian faith of the late Roman Empire continued to evolve during the middle Ages and remains a major facet of the religion and the psyche of the modern .

Ancient Roman , largely indebted to ancient Greek architecture of the , has influenced the architecture of the Western world, particularly during the of the 15th century. and republican (from the age of the ) have left an enduring legacy, influencing the Italian city-state republics of the medieval period as well as the early United States and other modern democratic republics. The calendar of ancient Rome formed the basis of the standard modern , while Roman inventions and engineering, such as the construction of concrete domes, continued to influence various peoples after the fall of Rome. Roman models of and

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of warfare also became influential.

ESTABLISHMENT OF According to tradition Venice was founded in 421 AD. At that time a Celtic people called the Veneti lived along the coast of what is now Northeast Italy. Since 49 BC they had been Roman citizens. However, in 453 the Hun invaded Italy. In terror, some Veneti fled to islands in the lagoon and built a village there. They soon formed a loose federation. Then in 568 AD a people called the Lombards invaded the mainland and many Veneti fled to the islands swelling the population. At first Venice was controlled by the Byzantine Empire (the Eastern half of the Roman Empire, which survived the fall of Rome). However, in 726 the Venetians partly gained their independence and elected Orso Ipato as doge (their word for ). In 810 the Franks tried but failed to conquer the Venetians. Meanwhile, Venice flourished as a trading center and ships sailed to and from its ports. Its population grew steadily. In 828 the body of St Mark was smuggled from Egypt to Venice. St Mark then became the patron of the city.

In the Middle Ages Venice continued to flourish as a port and trading center. Meanwhile, in 1199 a fourth crusade was proposed. The Venetians agreed to build a fleet of ships to ferry the Crusaders. However when the Crusader army assembled they were unable to pay for the ships. So the Venetians persuaded them to join an expedition to raid Constantinople. Venetians and Crusaders captured the city in 1204 and they looted it. Venice was also involved in other wars at that time. The Italian city of Genoa was a powerful rival to Venice and during the 13th and 14th centuries the Genoese and Venetians fought 5 wars. Furthermore in 1348 the devastated the population of Venice. Therefore in 1403 Venice introduced quarantine. Ships arriving from infected areas had to stop at an island called Lazaretto and the passengers had to wait for 40 days before they were permitted to enter the city. In the 15th century Venice faced a new threat - the Turks. In 1453 they captured Constantinople and afterward they advanced into . In 1489 Venice came to rule . However, in 1571 the Turks conquered the island.

Furthermore in 1508 several European countries formed the League of and went to war against Venice. However, after 8 years of war, the map was largely unchanged.

OCCUPATION OF WESTERN EUROPE BY BARBARIANS: The purpose of this document is to summarize the period of barbarian invasion of the Western Roman Empire over the period from the third century A.D. to the fifth century. The primary source material is a series of lectures by J.B. Bury of the University of Cambridge which were published as The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians. Professor Bury presented a coherent view of the invasions but his work was published in 1928 and some historical items, particularly in the early background material, may have been superseded by more recent findings. His book was reissued in 1963 without revision so any shortcomings of his work are not likely to be essential to his presentation. The barbarians that were most significant in the invasions were the with a brief interlude of Hunnic penetration. The Slavic and Magyar migrations came after the period under consideration.

BACKGROUND OF THE In the period before 1000 B.C. the Germanic tribes lived in and the land between the and Rivers. To the west of the Elbe River the land was occupied by Celtic people. To the east of the Oder River there were Baltic people such as the Letts and Lithuanians. Over the centuries the German tribes between the Elbe and the Oder pushed west

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driving the Celts out. By 200 B.C. the border between the Germans and the Celts was pushed to the River. The German tribes also pushed from the lowere Elbe region to the upper Elbe region occupying what is now southern . Some of the German tribes in Scandinavia migrated across the Baltic to the land between the Oder and the Vistula Rivers. This migration took place after the expansion of the western Germanic tribes from the Elbe-Oder region. These Germanic migrants from Scandinavia were different from the Germans of the Elbe-Oder region in language and customs but both had an economy originally based upon hunting and herding. Population growth was forcing migratory expansion. When the western Germanic tribes, those originally from the Elbe-Oder region, ran out of territory that could easily be acquired their social and economic structure had to be modified. The area of north at that time was largely covered by . The herder-hunters needed areas relatively clear of . In the face of population growth there were only a few things that could be done:

1. Conquest of new territories on the border of the old territory 2. Adoption of agriculture in order to feed more people from the existing territory 3. Clearance of forest to provide more pasture for the tribal livestock

These are listed in their order of difficulty. The western Germanic tribes ran out of territory because they impinged upon the Roman Empire on the west and the south. In the east they faced the descendants of the migrants from Scandinavia (who hereafter will be called the eastern Germanic tribes). The western Germanic tribes adopted agriculture. In contrast the eastern Germanic tribes still had a migratory expansion option. They faced not the equally tough German people but Slavic and Baltic people who could not match their military prowess. Thus the eastern Germanic people continued their herding economy for centuries after the western Germanic people took up the practice of agriculture.

The most notable of the eastern Germanic tribes was the Goths. There is considerable historical evidence of the origin of the Goths in Scandinavia, possibly the Baltic island of Gotland, but in the second century A.D. the Goth moved from the lower Vistula River region to the area north of the Black Sea. In the Black Sea region the Gothic tribes divided into two divisions, the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths. The name Ostrogoths means roughly the eastern Goths. Visigoth did not mean western Goths but, in effect, that is what they became. Besides the Goths the other eastern Germanic tribes were the Vandals, the , the and the Lombards, names that appear in the later history of Western Europe far from their original homelands. The western Germanic tribes were also undergoing political amalgamation and alignment. Tribal confederation names that are familiar from history are the Franks (meaning free as opposed to tribes settled in Roman territory), the Saxons, the Thuringians and the Alamanni. The Alamani were made up of Suevian tribes. The name for Germans in some is derived from the name Alamani. The German tribes had political systems that were virtually or republics. The assemblies of freemen of the tribe were sovreign. Some tribes were ruled by leaders who functioned as , but there was a difference even among tribal groups having kings as to the nature of the kingship. First of all the king was in effect the executive officer of the assembly of freemen of the tribe. Some tribes had leaders called grafs who were elected by their assemblies of freemen. A could be anyone the assembly wished to elect. The monarchical tribes had kings, who were also elected by the assemblies, but in contrast in the monarchical tribes or states the king had to be selected from certain royal families. Thus the kingship was to a degree hereditary whereas the Grafship was not.

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THE ATTACKS OF THE GOTHS ON THE ROMAN EMPIRE It is ironic that the most serious threats to the Roman Empire began not with the western Germanic tribes of the Roman frontier but the eastern Germanic tribes, particularly the Goths. The Roman Empire during the early third century had a series of weak emperors and a strong challenge from the Parthian Empire of Persia. The resources of the Empire were debilitated and the Goths challenged the Romans for control of the area at the mouth of the Danube River at the Black Sea. The Goths controlled the area north of the Black Sea and the Romans had conquered a territory north of the Danube, which they called . This is the region of . The attacks of the Goths began in 247 A.D. and in 251 A.D. They lured the Roman army under the command of the Emperor Decius into a swampy region and defeated it. The Emperor Decius was killed in the battle. Emboldened by this victory the Goths built boats and ships and raided the cities of the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean. The Romans under Claudius I finally were able to defeat the Goths decisively in 269 A.D. and brought peace to the region. The Emperor Claudius was thereafter known as Claudius Gothicus. But Claudius Gothicus' rule did not last long and he was succeeded by the Emperor Aurelian.

The Emperor Aurelian recognized the realities of the military situation in Dacia and in 270 A.D. withdrew Roman troops from Dacia leaving it to the Goths. The Danube once again became the northern frontier of the Roman Empire in . In 324 A.D. the Emperor Constantine concluded a treaty with the Visigoths that made them confederates of the Empire which meant that in return for annual subsidy the Visigoths agreed to help defend the Empire. Nominally Dacia was again counted as part of the Empire but controlled and defended by the Visigoths, confederates of the Roman Empire. The Ostrogoths were located to the east of the Visigoths in the region beyond the Dniester River. There were significant differences between the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths; generally the Ostrogoths represented a more archaic form of Gothic .

THE NUMBERS OF THE INVADING TRIBES It is difficult to estimate the number of barbarians involved in the invasisons but roughly there were one hundred thousand Ostrogoths in Italy and about the same number of Visigoths in Spain. The Burgundians in southeastern France probably numbered about twenty five thousand. The estimated size of the Vandal army which crossed the Strait of Gilbraltar is eighty thousand. Thus the invasion forces constituted only a few percent of the population of the territories being invaded. This was enough to conquer a non-military population but not enough to surplant the of the people being conquered. There were also the non- Germanic people known as the Sarmatians or . The Alans were the principal tribe of the Sarmatians. The Sarmations spoke a language in the Iranian language family. A Roman emperor brought Alans into southwest France to help control Celtic tribes and protect against Germanic invaders. For more on the Sarmatians see Sarmatians. The challenges of the barbarians to the Empire imposed a heavy burden on its finances and it’s military. The burden of raising the troops and the funds to defend the Empire was threatening to bring about its collapse. The Emperor Diocletian undertook a major reorganization of the Empire. Later the Emperor Constantine undertook further political and economic reorganization.

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UNIT - II EASTERN ROMAN EMPIRE

SURVIVAL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE IN THE EAST The Roman Empire in the West moved rapidly to its "fall" in 476 A.D., at the hands of the Germanic invaders. The Roman Empire in the East, though threatened by enemies from without and weakened by civil conflicts from within, endured for more than a thousand years. Until the middle of the eleventh century it was the strongest state in Europe, except during the reign of , when the Frankish kingdom eclipsed it. Until the middle of the fifteenth century it preserved the name, the civilization, and some part of the dominions, of ancient Rome.

CAUSES OF THE SURVIVAL The long life of the Roman Empire in the East is one of the marvels of history. Its great and constant vitality appears the more remarkable, when one considers that it had no easily defensible frontiers, contained many different races with little in common, and on all sides faced hostile States. The empire survived so long, because of its vast wealth and resources, its despotic, centralized government, the strength of its army, and the almost impregnable position occupied by Constantinople, the capital city.

CHARACTER OF THE EMPIRE The changing fortunes of the empire during the middle Ages are reflected in some of the names by which it is often known. The term "Greek Empire" expresses the fact that the state became more and more Greek in character, owing to the loss, first of the western provinces in the fifth century, and then of and Egypt in the seventh century. Another term-- "Byzantine Empire"-- appropriately describes the condition of the state in still later times, when its possessions were reduced to Constantinople (ancient Byzantium) and the territory in the neighborhood of that city. But through all this period the rulers at Constantinople regarded themselves as the true successors of , Diocletian, and Constantine. They never admitted the right of Charlemagne and Otto the Great to establish a rival Roman Empire in Western Europe. They claimed to be the only legitimate heirs of Old Rome.

THE REIGN OF JUSTINIAN, 527-565 A.D. SUCCESSORS OF THEODOSIUS, 395-527 A.D. The history of the Roman Empire in the East, for more than one hundred years after the death of Theodosius, is uneventful. His successors, though unable to prevent the Germans from seizing Italy and the other western provinces, managed to keep their own dominions intact. The eastern provinces escaped the fate of those in the West, because they were more populous and offered greater obstacles to the barbarian invaders, who followed the line of least resistance. The gradual recovery of the empire in strength and warlike energy prepared the way for a really eminent ruler--Justinian.

JUSTINIAN AND THEODORA Justinian is described as a man of noble bearing, simple in his habits, affable in speech, and easy of approach to all his subjects. Historians have often drawn attention to his wonderful activity of mind and power of steady industry. So great was his zeal for work that one of his courtiers called him "the emperor who never sleeps." Possessed of large ideas and inspired by

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the majesty of Rome, Justinian aimed to be a great conqueror, a great lawgiver, and a great restorer of civilization. His success in whatever he undertook must be ascribed in part to his wife, Theodora, whom he associated with himself on the throne. Theodora, strong of mind and wise in counsel, made a worthy helpmate for Justinian, who more than once declared that in affairs of state he had consulted his "revered wife."

CONQUESTS OF JUSTINIAN It was the ambition of Justinian to conquer the Germanic kingdoms which had been formed out of the Mediterranean provinces. In this task he relied chiefly on the military genius of Belisarius, one of the world's foremost commanders. Belisarius was able in one short campaign to destroy the Vandal kingdom in North Africa. The Vandals by this time had lost their early vigor; they made but a feeble resistance; and their Roman subjects welcomed Belisarius as a deliverer. Justinian awarded a triumph to his victorious general, an honor which for five centuries emperors alone had enjoyed. The conquest of North Africa, together with the islands of and Corsica, was followed by the overthrow of the in and Italy. Justinian also recovered from the Visigoths the southeastern part of Spain. He could now say with truth that the Mediterranean was once more a Roman sea.

A MOSAIC OF JUSTINIAN A mosaic dating from 547 A.D., in the church of San Vitale, . It shows the emperor (in the center) with a , his suite and imperial guards. The picture probably gives us a fair idea of Justinian's appearance, though it represents him as somewhat younger than he was at the time.

CODIFICATION OF ROMAN LAW The conquests of Justinian proved to be less enduring than his work as a lawgiver. Until his reign the sources of Roman law, including the legislation of the popular assemblies, the decrees of the Senate, the edicts of the of Roman and emperors, and the decisions of learned lawyers, had never been completely collected and arranged in scientific form. Justinian appointed a commission of legal scholars to perform this task. The result of their labors, in which the emperor himself assisted, was the publication of the _Corpus Juris Civilis_, the "Body of ." Under this form the Roman principles of have become the foundation of the legal systems of modern Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and other European countries. These principles even influenced the Common law of , which has been adopted by the United States. The _Corpus Juris Civilis_, because of this widespread influence, is justly regarded as one of Rome's most important gifts to the world.

CIVILIZING WORK OF JUSTINIAN Justinian's claim to the title of "Great" rests also on his civilizing work. He wished to restore the prosperity, as well as the provinces, of the empire. During his reign roads, bridges, and aqueducts were repaired, and commerce and agriculture were encouraged. It was at this time that two Christian brought from China the eggs of the silkworm, and introduced the manufacture of silk in Europe. As a builder Justinian gained special fame. The edifices which he caused to be raised throughout his dominions included massive fortifications on the exposed frontiers, splendid palaces, and many and churches. The most noteworthy monument to his piety is the church of Sancta Sophia at Constantinople, now used as a Mohammedan mosque. By his conquests, his laws, and his buildings, Justinian revived for a time the waning glory of imperial Rome.

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RISE AND SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY The concerns the Christian religion, , and the Church with its various denominations, from the 1st century to the present. Christianity originated with the ministry of in the 1st century of Judea. According to the Gospels, Jesus was a Jewish teacher and healer who proclaimed the imminent kingdom of God and was crucified c. AD 30–33. His followers believed that he was then raised from the dead and exalted by God, and would return soon at the inception of God's kingdom. The earliest followers of Jesus were apocalyptic Jewish Christians. The inclusion of gentiles in the developing early Christian Church caused a schism between Judaism and Jewish Christianity during the first two centuries of the Christian era. In 313, Emperor Constantine I issued the Edict of Milan legalizing Christian worship. In 380, with the Edict of Thessalonica put forth under , the Roman Empire officially adopted Trinitarian Christianity as its state religion, and Christianity established itself as a predominantly gentile religion in the state church of the Roman Empire. Christological debates about the human and divine nature of Jesus consumed the Christian Church for a couple of centuries, and seven ecumenical councils were called to resolve these debates. was condemned at the First Council of Nicea (325), which supported the Trinitarian doctrine as expounded in the .

In the , activities spread Christianity towards the west among German peoples. During the , eastern and grew apart, leading to the East–West Schism of 1054. Growing criticism of the Roman Catholic ecclesiological structure and its behaviour led to the Protestant movement of the 16th century and the split of western Christianity. Since the Renaissance era, with colonialism inspired by the Church, Christianity has expanded throughout the world. Today there are more than two billion Christians worldwide, and Christianity has become the world's largest religion. Within the last century, as the influence of Christianity has waned in the West, it has rapidly grown in the East and the Global South in China, South and much of sub-Saharan Africa.

PAPACY Papacy, the office and jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome, the (Latin papa, from Greek pappas, “father”), who presides over the central government of the Roman Catholic Church, the largest of the three major branches of Christianity. The term pope was originally applied to all the in the West and also used to describe the patriarch of , who still retains the title. In 1073, however, Pope Gregory VII restricted its use to the bishop of Rome, confirming a practice that had existed since the 9th century. According to the Annuario Pontificio, the papal annual, there have been more than 260 popes since St. Peter, traditionally considered the first pope. Among these, 82 have been proclaimed , as have some antipopes (rival claimants to the papal throne who were appointed or elected in opposition to the legitimate pope).

Most holders of the office have been Roman or Italian, with a sprinkling of other Europeans, including one Pole, and one Latin American pope. All have been male, though the legend of a female Pope Joan appeared in the 13th century. During the course of the 2,000 years in which the papal system and the practice of electing popes in the conclave have evolved, the papacy has played a crucial role in both Western and world history. The history of the papacy can be divided into five major periods: the early papacy, from St. Peter through Pelagius II (until 590); the medieval papacy, from St. Gregory I through Boniface VIII (590– 1303); the Renaissance and papacy, from Benedict XI through Pius IV (1303–1565); the early modern papacy, from St. Pius V through Clement XIV (1566–1774); and the modern

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papacy, from Pius VI (1775–99).

MEDIEVAL EUROPE: Although much about the early popes remains shrouded in darkness, scholars agree that the bishops of Rome were selected in the same manner as other bishops—that is, elected by the and people of the area (though there is some evidence that some of the early bishops attempted to appoint their successors). Elections were not always peaceful, however, and rival candidates and factions often prompted imperial intervention; eventually the emperors presided over elections. After the collapse of the Western Empire in 476, the involvement of the Eastern emperor in papal affairs was gradually replaced by that of Germanic rulers and leading Roman families. As political instability plagued the old Western Empire in the early Middle Ages, popes were often forced to make concessions to temporal authorities in exchange for protection. After the demise of effective Byzantine control of Italy in the 8th century, the papacy appealed to the new Germanic rulers for support, serving as a symbol of imperial glory for them.

Pope Gregory I (590–604), the first of the medieval popes and the second pope deemed “great,” faced numerous challenges during his reign, including plague, , and threats from the Byzantines and the Lombards (a Germanic people who invaded Italy in the ). Although he believed that he was part of a Christian commonwealth headed by the Byzantine emperor, Gregory turned the papacy’s attention to the Germanic peoples who succeeded the Romans as rulers of the Western Empire. In this fashion he opened up the West to the papacy. Among the many important accomplishments of Gregory’s reign were his efforts to stop the Lombard advance and to convert the invaders from Arian Christianity to Catholic Christianity; his reorganization of the vast estates of the papacy; his contribution to the development of medieval spirituality; his numerous , such as the Moralia in Job, a moral commentary on The Book of Job; and his evangelistic mission to England. He also upheld ’s thesis that, because the papacy inherited the fullness of Peter’s power, there could be no appeal of a ruling by the pope.

Despite Gregory’s successful pontificate, the papacy’s situation remained uncertain as Byzantine power in Italy receded and the Lombards continued to endanger Rome’s security. The situation worsened in the 8th century after a new emperor, Leo III, restored sagging Byzantine fortunes by turning back an Arab assault from the east. Leo reorganized the empire and imposed new burdens on his Italian subjects. He also intervened in doctrinal matters by pronouncing, without papal approval, a policy of iconoclasm. The new imperial fiscal and religious policies and limited imperial support against the Lombards drove the papacy to find a new protector.

In 739 Pope Gregory III (731–741) sent an unsuccessful appeal for aid to the Frankish of the palace (the effective political power in the kingdom), Martel. When the Lombards again threatened Rome, Pope Stephen II (or III; 752–757) fled to the Frankish kingdom and appealed to Pippin III, who in 751 had become the first Carolingian king of the Franks. In 754 Stephen formally crowned Pippin, and the king marched south with his army in that year and again in 756 to restore papal authority in central Italy. The king also issued the Donation of Pippin (756) to establish the , which endured until 1870. These events probably also inspired the compilation of the (later proved to be a forgery), which asserted that the first Christian emperor, Constantine, granted control of the Western Empire to Pope Sylvester I, who had baptized the emperor and cured him of leprosy. It

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was later cited in support of papal claims of sovereignty in Western Europe.

MONASTRIES A medieval was an enclosed and sometimes remote community of led by an who shunned worldly goods to live a simple life of and devotion. Christian monasteries had first developed in the 4th century CE in Egypt and Syria and by the 5th century CE the idea had spread to Western Europe. Such figures as Saint Benedict of Nursia (d. c. 543 CE), the founder of the Benedictine order, established rules by which the monks should live and these were, to various degrees, imitated and followed in subsequent centuries, including in those monasteries which survive today. Although their members were poor, the monasteries themselves were rich and powerful institutions, gathering wealth from land and property donated to them. Monasteries were also important centers of learning which educated the young, and, perhaps most significantly for today’s historians, laboriously produced books and preserved ancient texts which have greatly enhanced our knowledge of not only the medieval world but also .

ORIGINS & DEVELOPMENT From the 3rd century CE there developed a trend in Egypt and Syria which saw some Christians decide to live the life of a solitary or ascetic. They did this because they thought that without any material or worldly distractions they would achieve a greater understanding of and closeness to God. In addition, whenever early Christians were persecuted they were sometimes forced by necessity to live in remote mountain areas where the essentials of life were lacking. As these individualists grew in number some of them began to live together in communities, continuing, though, to cut themselves off from the rest of society and devoting themselves entirely to prayer and the study of scriptures. Initially, members of these communities lived together in a place known as a lavra where they continued their solitary lives and only gathered together for religious services. Their leader, an abba (hence the later ‘abbot’) presided over these individualists – they were called monachos in Greek for that , which derived from mono meaning ‘one’, and which is the origin of the word ‘’.

One of the earliest ascetics to begin organizing monasteries where monks lived more communally was Pachomios (c. 290-346 CE), an Egyptian and former soldier who, perhaps inspired by the efficiency of Roman army camps, founded nine monasteries for men and two for women at Tabennisi in Egypt. These first communal (cenobitic) monasteries were administered following a list of rules compiled by Pachomios, and this style of communal living (koinobion), where monks lived, worked, and worshipped together in a daily routine, with all property held in common, and an abbot administering them, became the common model in the Byzantine period.

The next step on the road to the type of monastery that became standard during the middle Ages was made by Basil of Caesarea (aka Saint Basil or Basil the Great, c. 330-c. 379 CE) in the 4th century CE. Basil had seen for himself the monasteries in Egypt and Syria and he sought to reproduce them across the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire. Basil added an extra dimension with his belief that monks should not only work together for common goals but also contribute to the wider community. Byzantine monasteries were independent organizations with their own set of rules and regulations for brother monks.

THE FRANKISH KINGDOM The Franks (Latin: Franci or Francorum) were a group of Germanic peoples whose

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name was first mentioned in 3rd century Roman sources, and associated with tribes between the Lower Rhine and the Ems River, on the edge of the Roman Empire. Later the term was associated with Romanized Germanic within the collapsing Western Roman Empire, who eventually commanded the whole region between the rivers and Rhine. They imposed power over many other post-Roman kingdoms and Germanic peoples. Still later, Frankish rulers were given recognition by the Catholic Church as successors to the old rulers of the Western Roman Empire.

Although the Frankish name does not appear until the 3rd century, at least some of the original Frankish tribes had long been known to the Romans under their own names, both as allies providing soldiers, and as enemies. The new name first appears when the Romans and their allies were losing control of the Rhine region. The Franks were first reported as working together to raid Roman territory. However, from the beginning the Franks also suffered attacks upon them from outside their frontier area, by the Saxons, for example, and as frontier tribes they desired to move into Roman territory, with which they had had centuries of close contact.

The Germanic tribes which formed the Frankish federation in are associated with the Weser-Rhine Germanic/Istvaeonic cultural-linguistic grouping. Frankish peoples inside Rome's frontier on the Rhine river included the who from their first appearance were permitted to live in Roman territory, and the Ripuarian or Rhineland Franks who, after many attempts, eventually conquered the Roman frontier city of and took control of the left bank of the Rhine. Later, in a period of factional conflict in the and 460s, , a Frank, was one of several military leaders commanding Roman forces with various ethnic affiliations in Roman (roughly modern France). Childeric and his son faced competition from the Roman as competitor for the "kingship" of the Franks associated with the Roman Loire forces. (According to Gregory of , Aegidius held the kingship of the Franks for 8 years while Childeric was in exile.) This new type of kingship, perhaps inspired by Alaric I, represents the start of the Merovingian , which succeeded in conquering most of Gaul in the 6th century, as well as establishing its leadership over all the Frankish kingdoms on the Rhine frontier. It was on the basis of this Merovingian empire that the resurgent Carolingians eventually came to be seen as the new Emperors of Western Europe in 800.

In the middle Ages, the term Frank came to be used as a synonym for Western European, as the Carolingian Franks were rulers of most of Western Europe, and established a political order that was the basis of the European Ancient Régime that only ended with the French . Western Europeans shared their allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church and worked as allies in the beyond Europe in the , where they still referred to themselves and the Principalities they established as Frankish. For example, in 1099, the crusader population of Jerusalem mostly comprised French settlers who, at the time, called themselves Franks, and other Europeans such as Spaniards, Germans and . This has had a lasting impact on names for Western Europeans in many languages. Western Europe is known alternatively as "Frangistan" to the Persians, and Western Europeans as "franjī" to the .

From the beginning the Frankish kingdoms were politically and legally divided between an eastern Frankish, more Germanic part, and the western part that the Merovingians had founded on Roman soil. The eastern Frankish kingdom came to be seen as the new "", and was from early times occasionally called "Germany". Within "Frankish" Western Europe itself, it was the original Merovingian or "Salian" Western Frankish kingdom, founded in and speaking Romance languages, which has continued until today to

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be referred to as "France" – a name derived directly from the Franks.

CHARLEMAGNE Charlemagne numbered Charles I, was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and Emperor of the Romans from 800. During the Early Middle Ages, he united the majority of western and central Europe. He was the first recognized emperor to rule from western Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire three centuries earlier. The expanded Frankish state that Charlemagne founded is called the . He was later canonised by Antipope Paschal III.

Charlemagne was the eldest son of and Bertrada of , born before their canonical marriage. He became king in 768 following his father's death, initially as co-ruler with his brother Carloman I. Carloman's sudden death in 771 under unexplained circumstances left Charlemagne the sole ruler of the Frankish Kingdom. He continued his father's policy towards the papacy and became its protector, removing the Lombards from power in and leading an incursion into Muslim Spain. He campaigned against the Saxons to his east, Christianizing them upon penalty of death and leading to events such as the Massacre of Verden. He reached the height of his power in 800 when he was crowned "Emperor of the Romans" by Pope Leo III on Day at Old St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

Charlemagne has been called the "Father of Europe" (Pater Europae), as he united most of Western Europe for the first time since the classical era of the Roman Empire and united parts of Europe that had never been under Frankish or Roman rule. His rule spurred the Carolingian Renaissance, a period of energetic cultural and activity within the Western Church. The viewed Charlemagne less favorably due to his support of the and the Pope's having preferred him as Emperor over the Byzantine Empire's first female Irene of . These and other disputes led to the eventual later split of Rome and Constantinople in the Great Schism of 1054. Charlemagne died in 814 and was laid to rest in Cathedral in his imperial capital city of Aachen. He married at least four times and had three legitimate sons who lived to adulthood, but only the youngest of them, , survived to succeed him. He also had numerous illegitimate children with his concubines.

CAROLINGIAN RENAISSANCE The Germanic tribe known as the Franks established and ruled the Frankish Empire from the fifth through the tenth century in the ancient territory of Gaul (encompassing portions of modern-day France, , , Germany, and the ). The Carolingian Empire refers to the rule of the , which ruled the Frankish Empire during the Early Middle Ages from 800 to 888 CE. During its period of domination the Frankish Empire, spanning parts of present-day France and Germany, had two monastic dynasties, the Carolingian being the second and most influential one. The Carolingian Empire ruled the Frankish state in one form or another through the early tenth century. The Frankish Empire under the rule of the Carolingian dynasty was one of the most powerful empires in Western Europe during the Early Middle Ages. Today the Carolingian Empire is considered to be the precursor to the modern states of France and Germany, as well as the historical forerunner to the Holy Roman Empire. Pepin the Short’s ascendency to the Crown and appointment as king of the Franks in the middle of the eighth century launched the beginning of the Carolingian dynasty. The Carolingian family came to power following the in 732. The battle was fought between the Frankish and neighboring Burgundian forces against the . The Franks were victorious, successfully fending off the Muslims and preventing them from

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advancing further into Europe. The victory at the Battle of Tours was one of the integral factors leading to the rise of the Carolingian dynasty and the creation of Carolingian Empire. The Carolingians dominated the Frankish empire and expanded their power throughout Europe for the following century. The Carolingian Empire spanned from 750 to 987, under the rule of Charlemagne and his family. Today, scholars mark the beginning of the Carolingian Empire with the crowning of Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, and his by Pope Leo III (800). The collapse of the Carolingian and the Frankish Empire is usually associated with the death of (839–888).

THE REIGN OF CHARLEMAGNE Charlemagne was born in 742 and ruled the Frankish realms from 800 to 814. Charlemagne was the son of King Pepin the Short, who is considered the founding member of the Carolingian dynasty. Charlemagne’s reign in Western Europe is remembered today for its expansionary and unifying accomplishments throughout the region. Following the collapse of the western portion of the Holy Roman Empire, the Frankish Empire under Charlemagne was one of the first to follow in its footsteps as a major and influential powerhouse in Western Europe. Charlemagne extended his influence, and the power of the Frankish Empire, into a large portion of Western and Central Europe. He was responsible for successfully conquering portions of Italy as well. Charlemagne is referred to as Charles I in the , Germany, and the Holy Roman Empire.

This reflects his widespread influence throughout Western Europe. His reign shaped the course of history in Western Europe and, to a certain degree, the entire history of the Middle Ages in the West. Charlemagne was also responsible for spreading Christianity throughout large portions of Western and Central Europe. The spread of Christianity was accomplished peacefully during the flourishing of and culture known as the Carolingian Renaissance, but it was also forcefully imposed on peoples that Charlemagne conquered and ruled. For example, Charlemagne waged war on the Saxons to the east of the Frankish realms. After successfully conquering the Saxons he introduced Christianity and imposed a strict penalty against the practice of German paganism, which was the most popular form of religion among the Saxon peoples.

Throughout Charlemagne’s reign he successfully extended the influence and presence of the Frankish Empire to cover nearly as much territory as the Western Roman Empire had ruled over centuries earlier. During his lifetime Charlemagne divided the Carolingian Empire among his three sons: Pepin, Charles the Younger, and Louis the Pious. Although this potentially set the stage for significant divisions within the kingdom, Charles died without leaving any heirs to his holdings and Pepin died leaving only an illegitimate son, who would rule Italy. Following Charlemagne’s death in 814, Louis the Pious succeeded his father as emperor and king of the Franks.

CAROLINGIAN RENAISSANCE: Although there were developments in and architecture during the Merovingian period, the reign of Charlemagne and the Carolingian dynasty saw a flourishing of culture and innovation throughout the Frankish Empire. Today it is considered by scholars to be the first of three medieval . The entire period referred to as the Carolingian Renaissance spanned the eighth and ninth centuries; however, the main period of cultural activity occurred during the reigns of Charlemagne (r. 800–814) and his son Louis the Pious (r. 814–840). Elite

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scholars of Charlemagne’s court were largely responsible for spearheading the Carolingian Renaissance and, in a similar way to the later Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these scholars turned to ancient and classical texts for wisdom. During the Carolingian Renaissance, scholars looked to the Roman Empire of the fourth century for inspiration.

Overall, the Carolingian Renaissance was largely confined to elite intellectual members of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious’s court. Throughout the Carolingian Renaissance there was rapid growth in literature, the , architecture, and scriptural studies. This reflected the devoted interest in education, high culture, and moral revitalization among the Carolingian and court. The Carolingian Renaissance saw the preservation and duplication of ancient and classic texts and the creation of a new and more legible style of script—the . The early modern Italic script has its roots in the Carolingian minuscule. The Carolingian minuscule provided a common writing style and a more universal that improved communications throughout Europe for centuries to follow. Charlemagne’s Admonitio generalis (789) and Epistola are two of the most important works written by Charlemagne to have survived to the present day. The Admonitio generalis was a piece of legislation containing over eighty clauses, many of which related to religious reform and regulation. The Epistola de litteris colendis was a letter written by Charlemagne pertaining to the issue of language. Charlemagne brought scholars from all over Europe to his court and ordered the creation of schools to address the growing problem of the fragmentation of Latin into the different romance languages (Spanish, Italian, French, etc.). One of the primary objectives of these groups of scholars was to create a universal curriculum to be used at these new schools.

These scholars were responsible for creating textbooks and word lists, and for establishing the basic foundations for medieval education, such as the (grammar, , and ) followed by the (arithmetic, , music, and astronomy). A major theme throughout Charlemagne’s reign and the Carolingian Renaissance was an attempt to unite the diverse ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups within the kingdom. Scholars’ work in language and scripts attempted to do this in the field of education. Charlemagne also tried to create a universal style of church music by eliminating any regional differences in style. He also managed to standardize the system of currency throughout the kingdom by creating a new system based on a pound of silver. The Carolingian Renaissance ultimately worked toward fostering the creation of a common European identity.

THE TREATY OF VERDUN (843): One of the most substantial threats to the Carolingian dynasty and the Frankish Empire was the practice of gavelkind, which entailed the division of the empire among the king’s heirs. This would eventually be replaced throughout Western Europe by the practice of , which involved passing down the majority of a family’s property to the eldest son. Following his ascendancy to the throne, King Louis the Pious had a difficult time maintaining control over the Carolingian Empire. By 817, only three years after his father’s death, Louis the Pious had parceled out new kingships throughout the empire for his three sons from his first marriage. His eldest son Lothar became co-emperor with his father in addition to becoming the . Louis the Pious’s other sons, Pepin and , received similar titles and territories.

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In 1823, civil war broke out between Louis the Pious and his elder three sons following his attempt to incorporate , his fourth son from his second marriage, into his will. The Carolingian Civil War lasted from roughly 823 to 835 and involved a series of hostile infighting between Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald and his older sons Lothar, Pepin, and Louis the German. In 829 Louis the Pious stripped Lothar of his title as co-Emperor and banished him to Italy. The next year, in 830, his sons retaliated and invaded Louis the Pious’s empire and replaced him with Lothar. In 831, Louis the Pious once again attacked his sons and bestowed the to Charles the Bald. Over the course of the next two years Pepin, Louis the German, and Lothar revolted once again, resulting in the imprisonment of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald. Finally, in 835, peace was made within the family and Louis the Pious was ultimately restored to his position as emperor. After the death of Louis the Pious in 840, Lothar declared himself to be the sole successor to the entire Frankish Empire. This led to a second war between Lothar and his brothers Charles the Bald and Louis the German.

Lothar’s troops were ultimately unable to defeat Charles and Louis’s army, and finally, in 842, Louis the German and Charles the Bald agreed to an alliance referred to as the Oaths of Strasbourg. In addition to asserting Lothar’s inability to rule the kingdom, the Oaths of Strasbourg divided the empire between Charles the Bald and Louis the German. Today, the oaths signify the beginnings of the kingdoms of France and Germany. After Charles the Bald and Louis the German allied themselves in the Oaths of Strasbourg, Lothar was finally willing to explore peaceful negotiations with his two brothers. This resulted in the Treaty of Verdun (843), which was the final step in the partition of Charlemagne’s empire. The Treaty of Verdun (843) in many ways marked the beginning of the end of the Carolingian Empire. Although the treaty successfully ended the civil war, it established an official division of the empire into three separate kingdoms to be ruled by Lothar I, Charles the Bald, and Louis the German, the territories that would one day lead to the modern-day nations Italy, France, and Germany, respectively. The legacy of the Treaty of Verdun would prove to have lasting consequences for over a millennium.

The partition of Charlemagne’s empire by his three grandsons was carried out without any consideration of the complex social and cultural differences that existed within the three territories. This led to hostility and conflict in Western Europe that lasted in some form or another up through World War II. Lothar’s kingdom, referred to as the Middle Frankish Kingdom (comprising parts of modern-day Italy), proved very difficult to keep unified because of its natural geographical division by the . This region would become fragmented, and its smaller territorial entities led to the disunity of the , which continued to pose problems until Italy’s unification in the mid-nineteenth century. The other two kingdoms of West (modern-day France) and (modern-day Germany) continued to be more powerful than the Middle Frankish Kingdom; however, East Francia would continue as a series of Germanic states until its unification at the end of the nineteenth century.

DECLINE AND COLLAPSE OF THE CAROLINGIAN DYNASTY AND EMPIRE: Infighting between Louis the Pious’s sons and external threats from different civilizations, such as the Hungarians and the Muslims, both contributed to the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. However, another internal conflict increasingly threatened the of the Carolingian dynasty over the course of the second half of the ninth century. The noble class throughout the Frankish realm had grown increasingly powerful during the rule of the Carolingian dynasty. It derived its power from nobles’ ability to collect and extract labor from the peasants who lived and worked on their land. Traditionally, the Frankish monarchs

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granted this land to the in return for supporting the empire. The population of the nobility was steadily increasing at the same time that the Frankish kings stopped conquering new lands to be able to grant to the nobility.

This led to a shortage of land to distribute to the nobility and a growing frustration among the nobility as a result. The nobles continued to demand land for support, particularly during the period of civil wars. When members of the Carolingian could no longer provide land in exchange for noble support, members of the nobility started to seize religious properties, such as churches and monasteries. This weakened the power of the monarchies and increased the local power of the throughout the Frankish Empire, and later throughout parts of Western and Central Europe. The Carolingian Empire itself continued to be further fragmented and divided following the Treaty of Verdun. After the death of Charles the Bald in 877, the kingdom of was passed on to his son Louis the Stammerer, who died only two years later. The realm of West Francia was divided between his two older sons, Louis II and Carloman. Carloman died shortly after and his holdings were passed on to his brother Charles the Fat. In 881, Charles the Fat was crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

The kingdoms previously held by his brother and other members of the went to Charles after their death, increasing the size of his kingdom, and essentially reviving Charlemagne’s empire. Charles faced threats from the and was unable to defend his kingdom against their invasion. Instead, Charles paid the Vikings to leave in 886. The court viewed this action by Charles as weak and cowardly. As a result, his nephew raised an army and revolted against Charles, who fled, leaving an empire fragmented and fraught with confusion over the future course of succession. Following Charles’s death in 888, the Carolingian Empire essentially collapsed, ending the powerful reign of the Carolingian dynasty and the entire Frankish Empire.

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UNIT - III THE SPREAD OF ISLAM GROWTH OF ISLAM: When Islam first emerged in Arabia during the mid-seventh century, there was little indication that within 150 years the movement would come to the entire Middle East, as well as northern Africa and Spain. The early spread of Islam was directly linked to the revelations and work of the Prophet who preached religious and moral reform throughout Arabia between 610 and 632 c.e. However, the origins of the movement were fraught with struggle. Acceptance of the faith in the polytheistic city of Mecca along with much of the rest of Arabia was gradually accomplished after a series of military campaigns, treaties, and non-violent undertaken by the newly formed Ummah (the gathered community of believers). The earliest Muslims were scorned in the major trade center of Mecca and began assembling their community under the leadership of Muhammad at the more northerly city of Yathrib in the Arabian Peninsula.

Several generations of the Prophet's successors (known as caliphs) during the eighth century spread the faith through both religious and political programs into North Africa, the Middle East, and even as far as Spain. Still, despite its widespread geographic success, until about the year 1000 Islam was more of an administrative presence than an ideology that had won over the majority of the populace. In many areas, the growth of converts was gradual, perhaps because (at least until the twelfth century) the Muslim conquerors seemed quite tolerant of other faiths. It has also been suggested that political, economic, and military control of strategic geographic locations was more important than converting entire populations. Forced conversion to Islam was not practiced in many non-pagan areas, especially where and Christians were living in newly occupied Muslim territories. In fact, they were often referred to as the "People of the Book," since all three traditions shared common elements in their sacred scriptures and traced their heritage back to the figure of Abraham. While members of other faiths were often tolerated, they usually were not allowed to participate in government and had to pay special but not exorbitant taxes. The cultures and faiths affected by the early growth of Islam were quite diverse: not only the formerly polytheistic people of Arabia, but the Coptic Christians in North Africa, Eastern Orthodox in Palestine and Asia Minor, Roman Christians in Spain, Nestorian and Arian Christians in the , polytheistic Berber tribes in North Africa, and Jews of various kinds throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East all became subjects of Muslim . By the year 1000 it is believed that nearly eighty percent of the population in the Dar-al-Islam (Islamic territory) had converted to faith in Allah as it had been revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century and handed down through succeeding generations by way of the holy Koran (Qur'an).

ELEMENTS OF ISLAMIC BELIEF: Requirements for participation in the religion of Islam were not extreme compared to some Jewish and Christian practices. The Muslim theological notion that people tended to be "forgetful" of Allah (God) seemed to be reinforced by directives for prayer five times a day (salat) and a month-long season of fasting (sawm) during the season of Ramadan. However, the most important religious act was that of simple belief, reciting the creed or confession of faith (shahadah), that "there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet." Almsgiving (zakat) was also expected of Muslims, charity both to the poor and in support of religious institutions. Although these were not practices all people readily desired to embrace, the potential for reward seemed not to be fraught with as many of the complex and confusing doctrines or laws as existed in Christianity and Judaism. Those who followed without question the teaching of the

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Prophet and the will of Allah were assured eternal paradise. As time passed, the Islamic holy book, the Koran, began to be seen as an infallible scripture, the mother of all books, the literal word of Allah, sealed as the final revelation that humans will ever need. Islamic law (or shari'a) seems not to have been divided between separate religious and civil realms. By the ninth century, law began to be viewed as descending not only from the authority of God's scripture but also from the practices and sayings of the Prophet (sunna), which were handed down orally and eventually written into the Hadith. Added to this law was the ijma or traditions of historic Islamic communities. Later works like the ninth-century Tasfsir became important commentaries on the Koran and formed the basis for Islamic theology.

DYNASTIES AND RELIGIOUS DIVISIONS Islamic presence in Spain appeared at a very early juncture during the evolution of the major Muslim dynasties. The presence of the Umayyad Dynasty, which began in Damascus in the middle eighth century and continued in Spain until the eleventh century, put Muslim Spain (known as al-Andalus or Andalusia) into commercial contact with the North African coast, Palestine, and Syria. This led to the development of flourishing trade centers and a period of artistic and intellectual growth. Under the Umayyads, Jewish merchants enjoyed more tolerance than in Christian states, although persecution increased with the arrival of the Almoravids in the eleventh century and the Almohads in the twelfth, each of whom brought their own cultures and customs to the interpretation of Islam. There were also major religious divisions within Islam that began to emerge after 1000. The Sunni and Shi'ite positions, which go back to seventh-century disputes over the requirements for who might succeed the prophet Muhammad as caliph and still divide Islam today, became strongly linked to ideological and political separations dictating the way Islam would be practiced and perceived. The Sunni, who were in the majority, most often preferred to be directed by teachers, scholars, preachers, and government officials. They subscribed to interpretations of an eternal and uncreated Koran, the word of Allah, which was to be obeyed without question, but expressed concepts of an Allah that could not be completely known to humankind. The Shi'ites, making up roughly a fifth of medieval Muslims, had migrated toward stricter and even more literal interpretations of Islamic law and ideology, as well as relying upon religious leadership that was more charismatic. The mystical branch of Islam called , which began as more of a monastic movement in the eighth and ninth centuries, became popular among individuals who rejected the formalized trappings of Islamic religious life and were looking for more inward and personal expressions concerning their relationship with Allah.

LAW AND : There were no with sacramental powers in Islam, as individuals were considered accountable directly to Allah and needed no spiritual intermediaries. Any devout Muslim could lead prayer, so that all were regarded as equal in the eyes of Allah. However, certain dynasties subscribed to the notion of a mahdi (that is, a divinely guided savior or messiah) who might bring and righteousness to the earth, restoring the true and proper message of Allah, if one would only follow his lead. The observance of religious law became most important, particularly as a variety of dynasties began to compete with each other for political control of Arabia, Persia, North Africa, Spain, and Asia Minor. As early as the eighth century, Muslim schools sprang up which were devoted to examining the roots of Muslim law. This process was called ijtihad, meaning a strenuous examination. Sunni schools of religious law called madhhabs began to emerge which would establish norms for Muslim practice. Four distinct schools came into being at the major centers of Damascus, Medina, Baghdad, and al-Andalus. The growth of learning centers and formalized education as well as interest in , astronomy, and philosophy began to create divisions in Islam and give rise to a

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host of theological debates. Unlike the Christian scholars, the organization of knowledge for medieval Muslims took in separate religious and non-religious categories. However, like Christian scholastics, there were prominent Muslim philosophers, such as Al-Ghazali (b. 1058) in Baghdad, Averroës (1126–1198) in Spain, and (980–1037) in Persia, who struggled to reconcile the notions of faith and human reason. The numerous advances of Muslim thinkers had important influence on philosophers in the Christian West. Based upon the works of the Greek philosopher , Islamic examination of natural and metaphysical truths attempted to link everything in the universe to Allah.

CONFLICTS WITH CHRISTIANITY: During the first several centuries of Muslim control over the Holy Land, Christian pilgrims were able to visit the sacred sites with relative freedom. Their overland route usually took them across southeastern Europe, through Hungarian territory, Greece, (), and Syria. Those who traveled by sea landed in Egypt or directly in Palestine. The growing threat of the Muslim presence on the border of the Byzantine (Eastern Christian) Empire and the loss of Byzantine control over the Holy Land served as a pretext for the Christians initiating the Crusades, which were in part due to religious ideological differences (Pope Urban II characterized the as the will of God), but not completely driven by a desire to eradicate Islam. The factor most likely responsible for the early successes of the Christian invasions of the Holy Land was the internal disorder among the various Muslim dynasties, several of which were on the brink of controlling the area. Since the concept of the "Crusades" is something that developed from a European mindset, Muslims did not write their history about the wars for the Holy Land in the same way as Christians. These conflicts are more or less seen as any other wars with an invading enemy (most particularly in this case the French or "Franks").

The idea of jihad, struggling or fighting to maintain excellence (or striving for an society in which Islam might flourish), is present almost from the beginning of Muslim thought, but not in terms of physical battle as much as a spiritual and a collective duty expected of all Muslims. Emphasis was upon the "greater jihad," that is the struggle within oneself. The "lesser jihad" was connected to the idea of the physical struggles on the path to God. Endeavors connected to the "lesser jihad," such as mission effort, good works, building mosques, even ideas such as physically overcoming the enemies of the faith, would not become significant to Muslim theology and ideology until the twelfth century. Those who lived in the part of the Islamic world that was spreading the faith were, for example, linked to the ongoing missionary activity in the Dar al-harb (the abode of conquest or expansion). Throughout its early history, Islam did carry out large-scale military conquest, but the term jihad as specifically connected to holy war only began to appear much later, at the time of the (1146–1148), in response to the Christian military threats.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE The Holy Roman Empire, often unofficially referred to as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, was a multi-ethnic complex of territories in Western and Central Europe that developed during the Early Middle Ages and continued until its dissolution in 1806 during the . The largest territory of the empire after 962 was the , though it also included the neighboring Kingdom of and Kingdom of Italy, plus numerous other territories, and soon after the Kingdom of was added. However, while by the 15th century the Empire was still in theory composed of three major blocks – Italy, Germany and Burgundy – in practice, the links between these blocks had become so

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unsubstantial that only the Kingdom of Germany remained, nearly all the Italian territories for instance having become in effect part of a narrowly-defined Habsburg dynastic patrimony, unconnected to the Empire. The external borders of the Empire did not change noticeably from the Peace of – which acknowledged the exclusion of Switzerland and the Northern Netherlands, and the French protectorate over – to the dissolution of the Empire. By then, it largely contained only German-speaking territories, plus the . At the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, most of the Holy Roman Empire was included in the .

On 25 December 800, Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne as Emperor, reviving the title in Western Europe, more than three centuries after the fall of the earlier ancient Western Roman Empire in 476. The title continued in the Carolingian family until 888 and from 896 to 899, after which it was contested by the rulers of Italy in a series of civil wars until the death of the last Italian claimant, Berengar I, in 924. The title was revived again in 962 when Otto I was crowned emperor, fashioning himself as the successor of Charlemagne and beginning a continuous of the empire for over eight centuries. Some historians refer to the coronation of Charlemagne as the origin of the empire, while others prefer the coronation of Otto I as its beginning. Scholars generally concur, however, in relating an evolution of the institutions and principles constituting the empire, describing a gradual assumption of the imperial title and role.

The exact term "Holy Roman Empire" was not used until the 13th century, but the concept of , the notion that he – the sovereign ruler – held supreme power inherited from the ancient emperors of Rome, was fundamental to the prestige of the emperor. The office of was traditionally elective, although frequently controlled by dynasties. The mostly German -electors, the highest-ranking noblemen of the empire, usually elected one of their peers as "", and he would later be crowned emperor by the Pope; the tradition of papal was discontinued in the 16th century.

The empire never achieved the extent of political unification as was formed to the west in France, evolving instead into a decentralized, limited composed of hundreds of sub-units: kingdoms, principalities, , counties, prince-bishoprics, Free Imperial Cities, and other domains. The power of the emperor was limited, and while the various , lords, bishops, and cities of the empire were who owed the emperor their allegiance, they also possessed an extent of privileges that gave them de facto independence within their territories. Emperor Francis II dissolved the empire on 6 August 1806 following the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine by Emperor I the month before.

HENRY THE FOWLER Henry the was the Duke of from 912 and the King of East Francia from 919 until his death in 936. As the first non-Frankish king of East Francia, he established the of kings and emperors, and he is generally considered to be the founder of the medieval German state, known until then as East Francia. An avid hunter, he obtained the epithet "the Fowler" because he was allegedly fixing his birding nets when messengers arrived to inform him that he was to be king.

He was born into the Liudolfing line of Saxon . His father Otto I of Saxony died in 912 and was succeeded by Henry. The new duke launched a rebellion against the king of East

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Francia, Conrad I of Germany, over the to lands in the of . They reconciled in 915 and on his deathbed in 918, Conrad recommended Henry as the next king, considering the duke the only one who could hold the kingdom together in the face of internal revolts and external Magyar raids.

Henry was elected and crowned king in 919. He went on to defeat the rebellious dukes of and , consolidating his rule. Through successful warfare and a dynastic marriage, Henry acquired as a in 925. Unlike his Carolingian predecessors, Henry did not seek to create a centralized monarchy, ruling through federated autonomous stem duchies instead. Henry built an extensive system of fortifications and mobile across Germany to neutralize the Magyar threat and in 933 routed them at the Battle of Riade, ending Magyar attacks for the next 21 years and giving rise to a sense of German nationhood. Henry greatly expanded German in Europe with his defeat of the in 929 at the Battle of Lenzen along the Elbe River, by compelling the submission of Duke Wenceslaus I of Bohemia through an invasion of the the same year and by conquering Danish realms in Schleswig in 934.

Henry's hegemonic status north of the Alps was acknowledged by King Rudolph of West Francia and King Rudolph II of Upper Burgundy, who both accepted a place of subordination as allies in 935. Henry planned an expedition to Rome to be crowned emperor by the pope, but the design was thwarted by his death. Henry prevented a collapse of royal power, as had happened in West Francia, and left a much stronger kingdom to his successor Otto I. He was buried at , established by his wife Matilda in his honor.

OTTO THE GREAT Nostalgia for the vanished Roman Empire in the West lasted for centuries after Romulus Augustulus, the final emperor, was deposed in 476. It eventually created one of history’s oddest institutions. The Holy Roman Empire, as sardonically remarked, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Ironically, in view of future developments, the papacy took the lead in the attempt to create an overall secular authority in Europe when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, King of the Franks, Romanorum (Emperor of the Romans) in Rome in the year 800.

After Charlemagne’s death in 814 his empire split apart and the last Carolingian so- called emperors were confined to northern and central Italy. The last of them, Berengar of Friuli, was murdered in 924. The title became more of a reality after it passed to the kings of the East Franks in what became Germany. Duke of Saxony was elected king by other German dukes in 919 and held back the Magyars, Slavs and . He made no claim to the imperial title but his formidable son, Otto I, who succeeded him in 936, was far more ambitious. He had himself crowned king in Aachen, which had been Charlemagne’s capital. It looks as if he already had imperial ambitions and, according to one report, the other German dukes served him at his coronation banquet as his vassals.

Otto was now in his middle twenties. A ferocious warrior and shrewd politician, he crushed all opposition, including two rebellions by his brother Henry, who planned to murder him. Otto shrewdly forgave him and, when Henry behaved loyally, installed him as Duke of Bavaria. He also contrived to put other German dukedoms in the hands of his own relatives. He intervened effectively in French politics, subdued the and promoted German settlement of Slavic territory east of the Elbe and the Oder. He smashed the Magyars of

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Hungary and put an end to their years of pillaging incursions, held the Danes back in the north, made loyal allies of the German bishops (whom he turned into feudal lords as well as ecclesiastics) and created something approaching a German state.

In 951, meanwhile, Otto invaded Italy, where an Italian lord, Berengar of Ivrea, had seized the throne and abducted Adelaide, the previous king’s widow. He tried to force her to marry his son but she escaped and pleaded for German aid. Otto crossed the Alps, took the title of King of the Lombards and married Adelaide. He allowed Berengar to go on ruling Italy, but only as his vassal. In 961 Pope John XII (who was best known for his debauchery) desperately needed help against Berengar, who had seized part of the Papal States. He appealed to Otto, who readily came to his rescue and in return was crowned Emperor of the Romans by the pope. He then defeated and imprisoned Berengar, but the pope was soon uneasy with Otto’s dominance and started manoeuvring against him. Otto returned to Rome in 963 and had Pope John deposed by an obedient synod of bishops that he summoned for the purpose. He then had him replaced by a Roman of his own choice as Pope Leo VIII.

Otto intervened in Rome again the following year when a rebellion broke out against Pope Leo and an alternative pope was chosen. The emperor put a stop to that state of affairs and when Leo died in 965 he returned to Rome yet again to place another candidate of his choosing on the papal throne as Pope John XIII. When there was a revolt against him in turn, Otto suppressed it. He had taken control of the papacy in a way that Pope John XII had certainly not intended. Otto went on to interfere in the territory of the eastern Roman Empire in to such effect that in 972 the Byzantines concluded a treaty with him in which they formally recognized his own imperial title. They also bestowed a Byzantine princess, Theophano, on him as bride for his son and heir, another Otto. The word Holy was not used for another two centuries, but Otto the Great has been recognized by historians as in effect the first of the Holy Roman Emperors and the most powerful European ruler of his time. He died in 973 and was succeeded by his only son as Otto II. The fact that Otto II had no surviving brothers as rivals was a considerable advantage and the Ottoman line of emperors continued until 1024. The revived Western Roman Empire became Holy in the and from the early 1500s it was the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The name was not finally dropped until 1806, a thousand years after Charlemagne.

FEUDALISM IN EUROPE was the system in European medieval of the 10th to 13th centuries CE whereby a social hierarchy was established based on local administrative control and the distribution of land into units (fiefs). A landowner (lord) gave a , along with a promise of military and legal protection, in return for a payment of some kind from the person who received it (vassal). Such payment came in the form of feudal service which could mean military service or the regular payment of produce or money. Both lord and vassal were freemen and the term feudalism is not generally applied to the relationship between the un free peasantry (serfs or villeins) and the person of higher social rank on whose land they labored.

PROBLEMS OF DEFINITION Although the term ‘feudalism’ and ‘feudal society’ are commonly used in history texts, scholars have never agreed on precisely what those terms mean. The terms were applied to European medieval society from the 16th century CE onwards and subsequently to societies elsewhere, notably in the Zhou period of China (1046-256 BCE) and Edo period of (1603-

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1868 CE). The term feudalism was not used by the people who lived in the Middle Ages. Neither can the feudal system, once defined, be applied uniformly across different European states as there were variations in laws and customs in different geographical areas and in different centuries. As a consequence, many historians believe that the term feudalism is only of limited use in understanding medieval societies. The dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord's land and give him homage, labour, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection.

ORIGINS OF FEUDALISM The word ‘feudalism’ derives from the medieval Latin terms feudalis, meaning fee, and feodum, meaning fief. The fee signified the land given (the fief) as a payment for regular military service. The system had its roots in the Roman manorial system (in which workers were compensated with protection while living on large estates) and in the 8th century CE kingdom of the Franks where a king gave out land for life () to reward loyal nobles and receive service in return. The feudal system proper became widespread in Western Europe from the CE onwards, largely thanks to the as their rulers carved up and dished out lands wherever their armies conquered.

LORDS&VASSALS Starting from the top of society’s pyramid, the monarch – a good example is (r. 1066-1087 CE) who considered all the lands of England as his personal property – could give a parcel of land (of no fixed size) to a noble who, in return, would be that monarch’s vassal, that is he would promise loyalty and service when required. The most common and needed service was military service, which entailed fighting in that monarch’s army or protecting assets of the Crown such as castles. In some cases, a money payment (known as scutage), which the monarch then used to pay mercenary soldiers, might be offered instead of military service. The vassal received any income from the land, had authority over its inhabitants and could pass the same rights on to his heirs. The nobles who had received land, often called suzerain vassals, could have much more than they either needed or could manage themselves and so they often sub-let parts of it to tenant vassals. Once again, the person was given the right to use and profit from this land and in return, in one form or another, then owed a service to the landowner. This service could again take the form of military service (typical in the case of a ) or, as tenants might be of a lower social class (but still be freemen) and they might not have had the necessary military skills or equipment, more usually they offered a percentage of their revenue from the land they rented (either in money or produce) or, later in the Middle Ages, made a fixed payment of rent. There were also irregular special fees to be paid to the lord such as when his eldest daughter married or his son was knighted.

The arrangement which created a vassal was known as ‘homage’ as they often knelt before their particular lord and swore an oath of loyalty, for which, in return, they not only received the land but also their lord’s protection if and when required. The promise of protection was no small matter in times of war, when there were frequent raids from hostile neighboring states, and when there was a perpetual danger of general banditry. Protection also came in the form of legal support and representation if a vassal found himself in a civil or church court. A tenant usually handed down their tenancy to their heir although it was sometimes possible to sell the right of tenancy to a third party, provided the lord who owned the land agreed. Another type of relationship in feudal societies, especially in medieval

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Germany and France, involved the allod, an inalienable property, i.e. one that could not be taken back. Holders of an allod still owed some form of allegiance to a superior local lord but the relationship was not based on land ownership and so that allegiance was harder to enforce. The feudal system perpetuated itself as a status quo because the control of land required the ability to perform military service and, because of the costs involved (of weapons, armor and horses), land was required to fund military service. Thus there was a perpetual divide between the landed aristocracy (monarchs, lords, and some tenants) and those who worked the land for them who could be free or Un free laborers. Un free laborers were serfs, also known as villeins, who were at the bottom of the social pyramid and who made up the vast majority of the population. The peasantry worked, without pay, on the land owned or rented by others to produce food for themselves and, just as importantly, food and profit for their masters. They were often treated as little more than slaves and could not leave the estate on which they lived and worked. The term feudalism, however, is generally applied by modern historians only to the relationship between lords and vassals, and not the peasantry. Rather, the relationship between serf and landowner or tenant is referred to as the manorial system after the most common unit of land, the ‘manor’.

CONSEQUENCES & EFFECTS The consequence of the feudal system was the creation of much localized groups of communities which owed loyalty to a specific local lord who exercised absolute authority in his domain. As fiefs were often hereditary, a permanent class divide was established between those who had land and those who rented it. The system was often weighted in favor of the sovereign as when a noble died without an heir, his estate went back to the monarch to either keep for themselves or to redistribute to another noble. Monarchs could distribute land for political purposes, fragmenting a noble’s holdings or distancing him from the court. It also became difficult to keep track of who owned what which led to such controls as Domes day Book of 1087 CE.

Additional effects were the presence of vassals in the local courts which deliberated on cases involving the estates of their lords. Thus, there could be a clear conflict of interest and lack of impartiality, even if the more serious criminal cases were referred to the courts of the Crown. In addition, the system could create serious unrest. Sometimes a monarch might insist on active military service because of a war but nobles might also refuse, as happened to King John of England in 1215 CE and the ' Revolt which led to the signing of the Magna Carta. In 1215 CE, and in subsequent revolts in the 13th century CE, the barons were acting collectively for their own interests which were a direct threat to the entire system of feudalism, based as it was upon single lords and vassals working out their own private arrangements. Military service was reduced to fixed terms, typically 40 days in England, in an effort to reduce the burden on nobles so that they did not leave their lands unattended for too long. However, 40 days was not usually enough to see out a campaign and so a monarch was obliged to pay mercenaries, dealing another blow to the tradition of feudalism and vassalage.

DECLINE OF FEUDALISM The feudal system was essentially based on the relationship of reciprocal aid between lord and vassal but as that system became more complex over time, so this relationship weakened. Lords came to own multiple estates and vassals could be tenants of various parcels of land so that loyalties became confused and even conflicting with people choosing to honour the relationship that suited their own needs best.

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Another blow to the system came from sudden population declines caused by wars and plagues, particularly the Black Death (which peaked between 1347-1352 CE), and by peasant revolts (most famously in England in 1381 CE). Such crises caused a chronic shortage of labour and the abandonment of estates because there was no one to work them. The growth of large towns and cities also saw labour leave the countryside to find a better future and the new jobs available there. By the 13th century CE, the increase in commerce and the greater use of coinage changed the way the feudal system worked. Money allowed lords to pay their sovereign instead of performing military service; the monarch’s use of mercenaries then meant military service, and thus the barons themselves became less important to the defence of the realm. Conversely, a monarch could now distribute money instead of land in his system of rewards. A rich merchant class developed with no ties of loyalty to anyone except their sovereign, their suppliers and their customers. Even serfs could sometimes buy their freedom and escape the circumstances into which they were born. All of these factors conspired to weaken the feudal system based on land ownership and service even if feudalism would continue beyond the medieval period in some forms and in some places.

CAPETIAN DYNASTY , ruling from 987 to 1328, during the feudal period of the Middle Ages. By extending and consolidating their power, the Capetian kings laid the foundation of the French nation-state.The Capetians all descended from Robert the Strong (died 866), of and of Blois, whose two sons, usually styled Robertian rather than Capetian, were both crowned king of the Franks: Eudes in 888, Robert I in 922. Though Robert I’s son restored the Carolingian dynasty in 936, his son was elected king in 987, thus removing the Carolingians forever. The 13 kings from Hugh Capet to the infant John I, who succeeded one another from father to son, and John I’s two uncles, Philip V and Charles IV (d. 1328), are designated as the Capetians “of the direct line.” They were followed by the 13 Capetian kings of the (see Valois dynasty). Of these, seven kings (from Philip VI to Charles VIII) succeeded from father to son. Thereafter came the Valois-Orléans branch (represented by Louis XII) and the Valois-Angoulême branch (five kings from Francis I to Henry III) until 1589. Then the Capetians of Bourbon succeeded (see Bourbon, house of). Hugh Capet’s rule was limited to his own domain around Paris, while the rest of the French kingdom was in the hands of powerful local lords. His direct successors gradually increased the territory over which they had control through conquest and inheritance and also by skillfully exploiting their rights as suzerains in areas not under their direct authority. Under the Capetians, many of the basic administrative institutions of the French monarchy, including Parlements (royal law courts), the States General (representative assembly), and the baillis (royal local officials), began to develop.

Among the most notable of the Capetians was Philip II (reigned 1180–1223), who wrested from the Angevin rulers of England much of the empire that they had built up in western France. Another notable Capetian was Louis IX, or Saint Louis (reigned 1226–70), whose devotion to justice and saintly life greatly enhanced the prestige of the monarchy. Many other sovereign princes of medieval Europe descended in the male line from the Capetian kings of France. There were two lines of Capetian dukes of Burgundy (1032–1361 and 1363–1477); the Capetian house of Dreux, a line of dukes of (1213–1488); three Capetian emperors of Constantinople (1216–61), of the ; various of Artois (from 1237), with controversial succession; the first , with kings and queens of (1266–1435) and kings of (1310–82); the house of Évreux, with three kings of (1328–1425); the second Capetian house of Anjou, with five counts of (1382–

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1481); and other lesser branches. Social, economic, and cultural change

SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND CULTURAL CHANGE The population expanded rapidly in the 13th century, reaching a level of about five million. Great landlords prospered with the system of high farming, but the average size of small peasant holdings fell, with no compensating rise in productivity. There has been debate about the fate of the knightly class: some historians have argued that lesser landowners suffered a decline in wealth and numbers, while others have pointed to their increased political importance as evidence of their prosperity. Although there were probably both gainers and losers, the overall number of in England almost certainly fell to less than 2,000. Ties between magnates and their feudal tenants slackened as the relationship became increasingly a legal rather than a personal one. Lords began to adopt new methods of recruiting their retinues, using contracts demanding service either for life or for a short term, in exchange for fees, robes, and wages. Towns continued to grow, with many new ones being founded, but the weaving industry suffered a decline, in part because of competition from rural areas and in part as a result of restrictive practices. In trade, England became increasingly dependent on exports of raw wool.

The advent of the friars introduced a new element to the church. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were developing rapidly, and in Robert Grosseteste and , England produced two major, if somewhat eccentric, intellectual figures. Ecclesiastical architecture flourished, showing a strong French influence: Henry III’s patronage of the New Westminster Abbey was particularly notable. Edward I’s castles in North rank high among the finest examples of medieval military architecture.

THE : The 14th century, despite some gains, was a bleak age. At its beginning and close were kings whose reigns ended in failure. In between, however, came the 50-year reign of the popular and successful Edward III. During the century the importance of the Commons in Parliament continued to grow. But dominant factors of the age were war and plague. The increased scale, cost, and frequency of wars from the 1290s onward imposed heavy burdens on state and society. Conflicts between England and France continued intermittently throughout the century, those from 1337 onward being called the Hundred Years’ War. The Black Death struck in 1348–49; it became endemic, recurring several times in the second half of the century, and brought with it profound economic and social change.

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UNIT - IV THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN EMPIRE AND PAPACY

From the middle of the 11th century the situation began to change. One cause was the rapid progress of European economic recovery, which brought shifts of power detrimental to Germany. More immediately important was the revival of the papacy, which the emperors had done so much to further. After Henry III’s death in 1056 the initiative passed into papal hands. It was favoured by the long minority—until 1065—of Henry IV (crowned 1084; died 1106), which enabled the papacy to act without fear of intervention from north of the Alps, and by the appearance of allies—particularly the Normans of the , who for their own purposes supported the papacy against the empire. As they reached maturity the peoples of Europe turned to the pope as leader of Christendom. Even within the imperial frontiers the emperor’s power meant more to the Germans than to the inhabitants of Burgundy or of Italy, for whom it betokened subjection to German rule. Furthermore, only Otto III—and he for less than four years—made Rome the seat of empire; all the rest, from Charlemagne onward, concentrated their efforts north of the Alps. In practice, therefore, the empire was a very imperfect realization of the ideal of an Christianum; and as soon as it was in a position to vindicate its independence, the papacy found many adherents.

Under Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) the papal theory of the empire, as formulated in the 9th century, was revived, but on broader and firmer foundations. The result was the conflict, from 1076 until 1122, known as the , ostensibly centring on the question of whether lay overlords had the authority to “invest” bishops and within their domains—that is, to appoint them and formally give them the symbols of their office. The real issue, however, was not the investiture of bishoprics and abbacies but the place of the emperor in Christian society and his relations with the papacy. Only the pope, Gregory VII asserted, might use the imperial insignia; he might lawfully depose emperors but should himself be judged by none (these lapidary statements are among the 27 included in the Dictatus papae of 1075 and were set down in Gregory’s register). Thus the claim to independence turned rapidly into a claim to superiority. In particular, the sacred character of the emperor was challenged, as was his claim to be responsible directly to God. Instead, on the basis of the Donation of Constantine and a papal interpretation of the coronation of 800, it was argued that it was for the pope to convey the imperial dignity and, if he thought fit, to withhold or withdraw it. The Investiture Controversy was brought to a close by compromise in the Concordat of Worms of 1122 between Pope Calixtus II and the emperor Henry V; but Gregory VII’s claims were taken up again by popes Alexander III, Innocent III, Innocent IV, and Boniface VIII, in a series of conflicts that shook the empire to its foundations.

THE EMPERORS The challenge thrown out by Gregory VII forced the emperors to seek new foundations for their position. Gregory’s great opponent, the emperor Henry IV, had still asserted the traditional rights of his father. His successors in the 12th century, Henry V (1106–25; crowned 1111), Lothar II (1125–37; crowned 1133), Frederick I Barbarossa (1152–90; crowned 1155), and Henry VI (1190–97; crowned 1191), shifted their ground. To counter the arguments of church lawyers they grasped the weapons provided by the revival of Roman law. A new and more exalted conception of the empire was the result. Best known was the addition by Frederick I Barbarossa, in 1157, of the word sacrum to the name of the empire, which then became the Sacrum Imperium (Holy Empire) as a counterbalance to the Sancta Ecclesia (Holy Church). Equally characteristic was the of Charlemagne by Frederick’s antipope Paschal III in 1165. In this way Frederick emphasized continuity with the Frankish past and

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asserted his rights as Charlemagne’s successor. They derived, he argued, not from conferment by the pope or by the but from Frankish conquest.

Unlike earlier emperors, who had based their position on their special relation with the church, the Hohenstaufen emperors emphasized its secular foundations. Against Pope Innocent III’s claims to confer the imperial crown, imperial lawyers asserted that “he who is chosen by the election of the princes alone is the true emperor, even before he has been confirmed by the pope.” Nor is it surprising that, confronted with the universal claims of the papacy, the Hohenstaufen emperors asserted rights no less universal. Though in day-to-day politics, in their relations with the kings of France or of England, for example, there is no sign that they were seeking world dominion, nevertheless the soon called forth protests from all sides—from England and France, from and Hungary. “Who,” asked , “appointed the Germans to be judges over the nations?”

Meanwhile, the conflict with the papacy and the desire to restore the territorial basis of imperial power, which the Investiture Controversy had shattered, drew the emperors more and more into Italy, where they encountered the same national reaction. Unable to defeat the Lombard League, a northern Italian urban coalition, Frederick I patched up the Peace of Constance in 1183. His ultimate sovereignty was recognized, but his power in Italy was fatally compromised. After his son, Henry VI, had through marriage inherited the kingdom of southern Italy and Sicily, the power of the Norman kingdom was used to restore the imperial position in Italy. It was a grandiose policy but overstrained. The papacy, fearing that Rome would be engulfed, reacted violently.

Pope Innocent III, profiting from German dissensions after the early death of Henry VI (1197), played upon the German factions (Otto IV, not established as king until 1208, was crowned emperor in 1209). Henry VI’s son Frederick II (1212–50; crowned 1220), by the Privilegium in favorem principum ecclesiasticorum (1220) and by the Statutum in favorem principum (1232), made far-reaching concessions to the German princes in order to ensure their support for his Italian policy, but in vain. In spite of his striking victory at Cortenuova in 1237, Frederick II failed to crush the Lombards and was excommunicated in 1239 and deposed in 1245. His death in 1250 marked the effective end of the medieval empire. In Germany a long (from 1250 to 1273) brought down the imperial structure. In Italy, to ensure that there could be no restoration, the papacy called in Charles of Anjou, a younger son from the French royal house, who conquered the south and became King Charles I of Naples and Sicily (1266–85). When Rudolf I of Habsburg succeeded as German king in 1273, he was only the head of a federation of princes, while in Italy he abandoned all claims over the centre and south, and he retained only titular rights in Lombard.

THE EMPIRE AFTER FREDERICK II It is characteristic of the new situation that Rudolf I of Habsburg, though he made a number of attempts, never formally achieved the imperial dignity. Henceforward the title of emperor, though it continued, usually did not have the sanction of personal crowning by a pope or papal legate. For a century after Frederick II’s death the only “true” emperor was Henry VII (king from 1308 to 1313), who was crowned in Rome in 1312 by legates of the pope. Thereafter until the end of the empire there were in all only four emperors who were duly crowned: Charles IV, crowned by a legate in 1355; Sigismund, by the pope in 1433; Frederick III, in 1452; and Charles V, by the pope but at , in 1530. If the empire and imperial title continued to exist, it resulted partly from the force of tradition, partly from the exigencies of German politics, and partly from fear of the dangerous conflict of interests that any plan for its

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abolition would necessarily involve.

The Germans, naturally, were unwilling to surrender hope of regaining something of the empire’s former power: both Henry VII and Louis IV (king from 1314 to 1347; his Roman coronation in 1327 was by representatives of the people) sought to revive the Italian policies of the Hohenstaufen. But the balance had swung against them. France was already striving for the imperial position that Napoleon was ultimately to secure, and France determined that the Germans should not recover the imperial prerogatives.

Moreover, in Germany itself, civil war had undermined the power of the kingship, and the elective monarchy was effectively controlled by the princes through the college of electors definitely established soon after 1250. French pretensions to leadership in Europe provoked a last tardy revival of imperialist sentiment both in Germany (Alexander of Roes at the end of the 13th century, Engelbert of Admont at the beginning of the 14th) and in Italy ( and Dante), but the emperor Charles IV, a sober realist, drew the necessary conclusions. By then the axiom that “the king is emperor in his kingdom” was firmly established; it marked the end of any Universalist dream. Charles set out accordingly to make the empire a specifically German institution. By agreement with Pope Clement V, he formally abandoned Italy; he would enter Rome only on the day fixed for his coronation and leave again the same day. This he did on 5, 1355. Then he turned to the definition of the German constitution, particularly the rights of the electors, in the Golden Bull of 1356. The change was reflected in the final evolution of the empire’s title: Sacrum Romanum Imperium Nationis Germanicae (Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation). This title, which appears under Frederick III (king from 1440, emperor from 1452 to 1493), indicates that the emperor’s powers were limited to his German lands. In 1508 Frederick’s successor Maximilian I, unable to go to Rome, assumed with papal consent the style “elected emperor” or “chosen emperor” (Latin imperator electus; German erwählter Kaiser).

THE EMPIRE IN MODERN TIMES The history of the empire after the promulgation of the Golden Bull may be treated briefly, because from that time it is essentially a part of German history. It is true that memories of an imperial past continued to have an influence on German thinking and that in the Habsburg lands there was a sense of belonging to a multinational empire. A few emperors—Sigismund in the 15th century, Charles V in the 16th—may even have thought to recover part of the old imperial prerogative. It was also possible to make something of the empire’s leadership of Christendom against the Turks. But institutionally the role of the empire was almost continuously whittled away. After the failure of the project of imperial reform sponsored in 1495 by the elector of , Berthold of Henneberg, the hope vanished of endowing the empire with permanent institutions effective beyond the limits of the different principalities. The Reformation entrenched the princes firmly in their rights and accentuated their autonomy.

When Charles V, opening the Diet of Worms in 1521, declared that “the empire from of old had not many masters, but one, and it is our intention to be that one,” he was shutting his eyes to the realities. The extent of his dominions was imposing, but they were a weak dynastic agglomeration; and though Charles championed the Roman Catholic Church against the Reformation, his empire was neither in spirit nor in fact a revival of the medieval empire. When he accepted the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and abdicated in 1556, the change that was begun with the accession of Rudolf I of Habsburg was completed. With Germany split into two religious camps, the emperor was little more than the head of a religious faction. Furthermore,

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after Sigismund’s death (1437), with one short intermission for Charles VII from 1742 to 1745, the imperial crown, though in theory elective, was hereditary in the Habsburg dynasty of Austria; and this fact produced a cleavage of interests between emperor and empire.

THE END OF THE EMPIRE From 1556 until its end under Francis II in 1806 the empire meant little more than a loose federation of the different princes of Germany, lay and ecclesiastical, under the presidency of the . After the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), no emperor again attempted, as Charles V had done, to reestablish a strengthened central authority; and the in 1648 marked the empire’s final organization on federal lines. Yet, even at the end, the empire had loyal adherents, particularly among the small knights and noblemen of western Germany, who regarded it as their safeguard against princely absolutism; and its role was not so entirely negative as is sometimes thought. Its loose structure still suited to some degree the cosmopolitan spirit of the 18th century. But with the , and the intensified that followed, it became an anachronism.

THE RISE UNIVERSITIES Paris and Bologna were the earliest seats of advanced study - the one in theology, the other in law. They were the foundations of the modern universities, Oxford and the universities in Spain, Germany and northern France being modeled after the University of Paris, and those in Italy and southern France after the University of Bologna. Originally they were not universities, in the modern sense of the term. The nucleus of the modern university was merely a gathering of pupils around a teacher of eminence and repute, whom they supported by fees. The teacher, who was called "doctor" or "magister artum," had no power of conferring degrees. If he was a lecturer of great repute pupils flocked around him, and then, finding he unable to do the necessary work, he chose a colleague or favorite pupil as a co-worker, and from this arose what was called a university. The University of Bologna was started in this way, beginning with the study of Roman law; but other departments were soon added, each one of these departments being called a university. There were soon four of these universities at Bologna, and the number was continually increased. In Bologna the two great divisions were the Ultramontane (foreigners) and the Citramontane (natives). The universities were divided into "nations," who received the new-comers according to their extraction, dividing them off according to the number that came from a particular district. Universities modeled after those at Paris and Bologna began with charters defining their powers. Most of them received peculiar political rights, even though within a municipal corporation, and they guarded these rights most jealously. The story is told that two students of Paris, having murdered a man, were hanged by the officers of the law. The university officers and students demanded full reparation. If this should be refused, they vowed they would leave the town. This could easily be done, as they owned no libraries or buildings. Upon hearing this terrible threat, the provosts kissed the corpses on the mouth, asking their forgiveness, and with great pomp delivered the bodies to the university. Another story is vouched for that in 1229 A.D. 20,000 students and professors emigrated from Paris to Oxford, on account of a quarrel with the city of Paris, thereby materially aiding the struggling English university.

At Bologna, the ruling power was at first entirely in the hands of the students, they choosing the professors, while at Paris the lecturers alone had authority. The officers were originally a rector and a counselor, with civil officers, such as beadles, notaries, etc. The rector held his place for a year and the retiring rector chose his successor. Degrees of "doctor" and "magister" were given, though these titles were not originally used. The degree was given after an examination and bestowed the right of teaching upon the holder. It took six to eight years to

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get a degree at law in Bologna. Brilliant students, however, after a term of five years were allowed to teach, upon the recommendation of their respective lecturers, and were then called "Bachalarins." The lecturers were either ordinary or extraordinary. The former lectured on the most important books in the morning and the latter in the afternoon. As before remarked, fees at first supported the lecturers, but gradually lectureships were founded by the cities, and the gradually gained their present power over the universities, and professors were no longer chosen by the students. The age of the students was various, but they were usually older than at the present day, it being reported that men of fifty years of age turned their steps towards Bologna upon the news of a new study, as Roman Law.

The University of Paris was the first to introduce the system of colleges. The main object in the universities being lectures, there was no need of any buildings, except for lecture rooms. There was no library, as had not yet been invented. The system of colleges, on the other hand, was entirely different. It demanded the closest intimacy between professor and student, both of whom lived in the same house for of economy. It could but react to the benefit of the students, while the lecture system gave no chance for any intimacy which might arise between student and professor. This system arose at Paris, but was imported to England and almost did away with the original lecture system at Oxford. About this time, the revival of classical learning drove out the study of Commercial Law, though lectures were still given on these subjects. The invention of printing also gave an impetus to learning, through the study of cheap books instead of valuable . Little by little, the university lecturers made way for the "fellows," and these have, in their turn, made way for the present tutors of Oxford and Cambridge.

THE GROWTH OF TOWNS After the lapse of several centuries since the break-up of the Roman empire, the eleventh was the first to witness positive signs of economic recovery in Western Europe. We hear of enhanced commercial activities, of new com-mercial settlements along highways and water-routes, of draining of vast swamps and projected expansion in agriculture and all that, in the eleventh century. The history of the cities during the first ten centuries of the Christian era is obscure. The old Gallic and Roman towns suffered much during the barbarian invasions. But as the barbarians began to settle clown to quieter life, the towns and cities began to assume their former importance and activities. During and after the barbarian inva-sions the control of the towns and cities lost their municipal form of government and passed into the hands of bishops or nobles, or sometimes control was divided between bishops and nobles. It was Charles the Great who introduced some uniformity into the government of the cities by placing each of these under an officer with the title of Count. These counts were either churchmen or laymen, and were responsible for their government to Charles. They ruled the cities in the name of the emperor. But after the dismemberment of the empire when feu-dalism was established, these counts assumed a feudal proprietorship over these cities.

Throughout the twelfth century towns and cities steadily grew in increasing numbers and were of diverse origin, and varied greatly in legal status, size and importance; each different from the other yet all had some family resemblance. The violence of the times, specially the invasions of the Huns and , compelled people to live together in walled enclosures, and these in course of time became cities. Growth of trade and commerce also encouraged establishment of towns and cities. Towns on trade-routes by land and water grew up in this way. Inside the towns everything was crammed into their narrow space surrounded by walls and closely guarded gates. Churches, chapels, monasteries, counting houses, town halls, guild and fraternity houses, dwelling houses of the leading citizens of the towns, schools,

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colleges and universities were all to be found in eminent towns and cities.

The most noteworthy characteristics of the town life were the organizations of people of common interests into . The chief land-owners and traders formed the merchants’ guild while the manufacturers of the same article or commodity would form into separate guilds of their own, called craft guilds. Weavers’ guild, spinners’ guild, shoe-makers’ guild, millers’ guild, carpenters’ guild, bakers’ guild, etc., were the illustrations of craft guilds. It may be noted that cities of different parts of Europe had different causes behind their growth. The Italian cities had the advantage of taking share in the trade that passed through the Mediterranean between the European and the Asiatic continents. Acquisition of wealth led to the acquisition of power. The main causes of the growth and development of the Italian towns were their trade with the East and the fillip that it received as a result of the crusades. Towns also grew up once the itinerant traders settled down in one or other place and became merchants. Walled Episcopal centers and monasteries also served as nucleus of towns. With the coming of wealth came power and the chief Italian towns became self-governing states with only a seeming dependence upon the pope or the emperor. In the course of time some of the more important cities became entirely independent Italian towns republics. There was also a competition among the large and the small cities. For instance, the comparatively small cities of Amalfi, Siena and a dozen other towns were laid low by cities like Venice, Milan, , Genoa, etc. France had her cities and St. Louis’ grandiose settlement in Provence, Aigues- Mertes, and towns of Champagne which were proudest in Europe during the twelfth century, but lost their importance. They attracted no trade or commerce. In many of them grass grew again and they reverted to their former agricultural states. In France not a single city became independent republic. French cities did not even succeed in ridding themselves entirely of the feudal lords. After much struggle the cities acquired some measure of liberties and in many cases liberties were purchased on payment to the lords. The cities of France may be divided into three categories according to the measure of liberties they succeeded in acquiring. In the first category were the cities called villes de bourgeosie besides personal liberties of the citizens some remission of feudal dues was allowed. The second category called the consular cities acquired all rights of administration except the administration of justice. The courts remained in the hands of the lords. The consuls were respon-sible to the lords for the administration of the cities. The institution of the consuls was, needless to point out, was an imitation of the Roman system.

The third category of cities was communes proper. The lords’ rights over the cities were recognized in two ways, namely, the city paid the lord certain tolls and taxes and could hear appeals from the cities but the lord was excluded from the admi-nistration of the cities. At the head of the adminis-tration was the mayor assisted by a council. The violence in the communes and the mismanagement of their administration led to the destruction of the French communes and gradually the power of admi-nistration was assumed by the king. In Germany the traders and later in history with the coming of the Vikings, their Viking successors were itinerant traders. The tendency of these traders to colonies one or the other place or to settle in some convenient places gave rise to many towns and cities. The Rhenish towns particularly acquir-ed eminence as towns and cities in the twelfth century. The medieval English towns were small like most of their continental sisters, with population varying between one and six thousand. Only York and were exceptions. The importance of the city of London would be noticed even in the Anglo- Saxon period. The towns of medieval Europe differed radically from those of the near east, Arab world and also of Russia. These non-European towns and cities were often far more advanced than the European in technology, hygiene, industrialization and the general level of civilization.

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Between the ninth and the twelfth centuries even the Russian towns were superior to many towns of Northern Europe. Everywhere in Europe the object of the towns and cities was freedom from and its annoying entanglements. The townsman wanted freedom of movement, freedom of trade, freedom to marry, freedom for his children to inherit his property without any interference from his lord. The struggle for such liberties succeeded in a large measure and charters were granted guaranteeing privileges to the towns. The towns could offer shelter to anybody even the runaway slaves and serfs who after a period of continuous stay in the cities or towns would become free. Hence arose the fiction “city air makes man free”. If there were some fully independent towns as the republican cities of Italy, most towns never secured more than elementary urban liberties.

These towns were under the control of municipal magistrates; supreme judicial authority, powers of taxation, military command regularly remained with the lord or the suzerain. While the secular lords agreed more easily to the status of partial autonomy of the towns, the ecclesiastical lords were slow in coming to terms. In Northern Italy and along the Rhine the towns had to wrest privileges from their ecclesiastical lords through violence. The towns had their problems of defending their liberties and for that purpose maintain militia, pay both for defence and administration by taxation. As it was well neigh impossible for any town to defend itself alone, there arose union of towns such as the Lombard League of North Italy, Spanish League, Rhenish League, Swabian League, and the . In the autonomous towns the representatives of the different guilds in which the population was organized carried on the adminis-tration. No foreigner was allowed to trade in the town without becoming a member of any guild. Equality of status was the chief characteristic of the guilds and hence of the towns. All had to serve for the defence of the country and pay for it. This was necessary clue to the smallness of the population of the town.

CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE MEDIEVAL TOWNS OF EUROPE: The urban revolution in the eleventh and the twelfth centuries had far-reaching economic, social, political and cultural effects. The contributions of the medieval towns have to be discussed with reference to these diverse aspects. a) To the society the medieval towns introduced two new classes, I. The bourgeoisie of merchants, Introduction bankers, capitalists, industrialists, etc., and II. The working classes of both skilled and unskilled laborers

With the introduction of these two classes the major part of the economic, social and even political history of the west was dominated by these two classes.

In the working classes of skilled and un-skilled laborers we see the beginning of the proletariat class of the future and in the bourgeoisie we the proletariat notice the beginnings of a new order, i.e. the thud class estate or the commons destined to play so important part in modern history. The towns played an important part in under mining the feudal and manorial systems. Possession of land was no longer the only title to rank and status. Fortunes earned through industry and trade made the capitalists equally, if not more, important than the former. The towns and the cities became haven of freedom for the serfs. Serfdom received its burial ground in towns where they were no longer bound by feudal ties and could sell their agricultural pro-duce in open market for money. Runaway serfs could get easy shelters in towns and cities where a continuous stay for ninety days would make them free citizens. From this

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practice emerged the fiction ‘city air makes man free’.

b) In their political effects, the towns may be said to have contributed to the emergence of absolute national monarchy. The kings relied on the middle class, i.e. the bourgeoisie and drew the burghers with the Parliaments and States Generals or the Cortes. In the bourgeoisie, i.e. the third estate the kings found a natural ally against the feudal anarchy and recalcitrance. The middle class paid for the maintenance of the standing army which freed the kings from dependence on feudal military services. Without the middle class the political development of the later Middle Ages and of the modern times is inconceivable.

c) Economically the medieval towns may be regarded as a transitional structure bridging the medieval with the modern economic systems. Medieval towns and cities formed into independent economic units with their respective customs barriers. It worked as an intermediate stage between the natural economy of modern states and the medieval manor. which began with the medie-val towns was one of the major economic weapons in the hands of the absolute monarchs of Europe. Medieval towns and cities were centers of indus-trial and commercial life and it was from the medie-val towns that the system of international exchange and traffic emerged, which forms one of the most characteristic features of modern European civilization.

d) Culturally speaking, the development of towns and cities meant an acceleration of all the social processes of growth and change. New ideas followed the merchants and goods and travelled from town to town.

The moneyed burghers contributed liberally for the improvements of the towns and cities. With the growth of urban population new experiments in municipal life were undertaken to solve the problems that emerged. The wealth of the burghers, i.e. merchants, brought liberal patronage of arts, archi-tecture, painting, etc. The ruined high-gabled houses, sculptured guild halls, artistic gateways, superb palaces, imposing cathedrals even today bear testimony to the fact that the medieval towns and cities were the foster home of culture. The urban life with all its amenities made life worth living and the luxury that came in the wake of wealth made monastic life or asceticism naturally monasticism less attractive.

HUNDRED YEARS WAR The name the Hundred Years’ War has been used by historians since the beginning of the nineteenth century to describe the long conflict that pitted the kings and kingdoms of France and England against each other from 1337 to 1453. Two factors lay at the origin of the conflict: first, the status of the duchy of Guyenne (or )-though it belonged to the kings of England, it remained a fief of the French crown, and the kings of England wanted independent possession; second, as the closest relatives of the last direct Capetian king (Charles IV, who had died in 1328), the kings of England from 1337 claimed the crown of France. Theoretically, the French kings, possessing the financial and military resources of the most populous and powerful state in Western Europe, held the advantage over the smaller, more sparsely populated English kingdom. However, the expeditionary English army, well disciplined and successfully using their longbows to stop cavalry charges, proved repeatedly victorious over much larger French forces: significant victories occurred by sea at Sluys (1340),

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and by land at Crecy (1346) and (1356). In 1360, King John of France, in order to save his title, was forced to accept the Treaty of Calais, which granted complete independence to the duchy of Guyenne, now considerably enlarged to include almost a third of France. However, his son Charles V, with the help of his commander in chief Bertrand du Guesclin, by 1380 had succeeded in reconquering almost all the ceded territory, notably by a series of .

After a hiatus, Henry V of England renewed the war and proved victorious at Agincourt (1415), conquered (1417-1418), and then attempted to have himself crowned as the future king of France by the Treaty of (1420). But his military successes were not matched by political successes: although allied with the dukes of Burgundy, the majority of the French refused English domination. Thanks to Joan of Arc, the of Orleans was lifted (1429). Then Paris and the lle-de-France were liberated (1436-1441), and after the French army had been reorganized and reformed (1445-1448), Charles VII recaptured the (the Battle of Formigny, 1450), and then seized Guyenne (the Battle of Castillon, 1453). The end of the conflict was never marked by a peace treaty but died out because the English recognized that the French troops were too strong to be directly confronted. English territory in France, which had been extensive since 1066 (see Hastings, Battle of) now remained confined to the Channel port of Calais (lost in 1558). France, at last free of the English invaders, resumed its place as the dominant state of Western Europe.

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UNIT - V ENLIGHTENMENT AND RENAISSANCE

Enlightenment, French siècle des Lumières (literally “century of the Enlightened”), German Aufklärung, a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and humanity were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide assent in the West and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics. Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and celebration of reason, the power by which humans understand the universe and improve their own condition. The goals of rational humanity were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness. The powers and uses of reason had first been explored by the philosophers of . The Romans adopted and preserved much of Greek culture, notably including the ideas of a rational natural order and natural law. Amid the turmoil of empire, however, a new concern arose for personal salvation, and the way was paved for the triumph of the Christian religion. Christian thinkers gradually found uses for their Greco-Roman heritage. The system of thought known as , culminating in the work of , resurrected reason as a tool of understanding but subordinated it to spiritual revelation and the revealed truths of Christianity. The intellectual and political edifice of Christianity, seemingly impregnable in the Middle Ages, fell in turn to the assaults made on it by , the Renaissance, and the Protestant Reformation. Humanism bred the experimental of , , and Galileo and the mathematical investigations of René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Sir . The Renaissance rediscovered much of Classical culture and revived the notion of humans as creative , and the Reformation, more directly but in the long run no less effectively, challenged the monolithic authority of the Roman Catholic Church. For as for Bacon or Descartes, the way to truth lay in the application of human reason. Received authority, whether of Ptolemy in the or of the church in matters of the spirit, was to be subject to the probings of unfettered minds.

The successful application of reason to any question depended on its correct application—on the development of a methodology of reasoning that would serve as its own guarantee of validity. Such a methodology was most spectacularly achieved in the sciences and mathematics, where the of induction and deduction made possible the creation of a sweeping new cosmology. The success of Newton, in particular, in capturing in a few mathematical equations the laws that govern the motions of the planets, gave great impetus to a growing faith in the human capacity to attain knowledge. At the same time, the idea of the universe as a mechanism governed by a few simple—and discoverable—laws had a subversive effect on the concepts of a personal God and individual salvation that were central to Christianity.

Inevitably, the method of reason was applied to religion itself. The product of a search for a natural—rational—religion was Deism, which, although never an organized cult or movement, conflicted with Christianity for two centuries, especially in England and France. For the Deist, a very few religious truths sufficed, and they were truths felt to be manifest to all rational beings: the existence of one God, often conceived of as architect or mechanician, the existence of a system of rewards and punishments administered by that God, and the obligation of humans to virtue and piety. Beyond the natural religion of the Deists lay the more radical products of the application of reason to religion: skepticism, atheism, and materialism. The Enlightenment produced the first modern secularized theories of psychology and

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. conceived of the human mind as being at birth a tabula rasa, a blank slate on which experience wrote freely and boldly, creating the individual character according to the individual experience of the world. Supposed innate qualities, such as goodness or original sin, had no reality. In a darker vein, portrayed humans as moved solely by considerations of their own pleasure and pain. The notion of humans as neither good nor bad but interested principally in survival and the maximization of their own pleasure led to radical political theories. Where the state had once been viewed as an earthly approximation of an eternal order, with the City of Man modeled on the City of God, now it came to be seen as a mutually beneficial arrangement among humans aimed at protecting the natural rights and self- interest of each.

The idea of society as a , however, contrasted sharply with the realities of actual societies. Thus, the Enlightenment became critical, reforming, and eventually revolutionary. Locke and in England, , Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, , and Condorcet in France, and and in colonial America all contributed to an evolving critique of the arbitrary, authoritarian state and to sketching the outline of a higher form of social organization, based on natural rights and functioning as a political . Such powerful ideas found expression as reform in England and as revolution in France and America. The Enlightenment expired as the victim of its own excesses. The more rarefied the religion of the Deists became, the less it offered those who sought solace or salvation. The celebration of abstract reason provoked contrary spirits to begin exploring the world of sensation and emotion in the cultural movement known as . The that followed the French Revolution severely tested the belief that an egalitarian society could govern itself. The high optimism that marked much of Enlightenment thought, however, survived for the next two centuries as one of the movement’s most-enduring legacies: the belief that is a record of general progress that will continue into the future. That faith in and commitment to human progress, as well as other Enlightenment values, were questioned beginning in the late 20th century within some currents of European philosophy, particularly postmodernism.

FRANCE AND GERMANY DURING LATER MEDIEVAL PERIOD The breakdown of royal authority in the coincided with the beginning of a long era of population growth and economic expansion. Population had fallen sharply after the end of the Roman Empire, not only because of the period’s political disruptions but because of a series of epidemics and other disasters. Farming methods in the Merovingian and Carolingian periods were primitive and crop yields too low to permit any recovery. As early as 800 and more dramatically after 950, improved climatic conditions, the disappearance of deadly diseases, and the development of improved agricultural techniques set the stage for the development of a new, more prosperous civilization. All indicators suggest growth—e.g., expansion of old towns, founding of new villages, the rising price of land—but no exact measurements are possible. A register of hearths, tallied for tax purposes, dating from 1328 has been estimated variously to point to a total population of 15 million to 22 million; the total, not much below the figure for the end of Louis XIV’s reign in 1715, was probably slightly reduced after a crest toward the end of the 13th century. By the large portions of France had enjoyed many years of relative security and prosperity, even though private warfare had not disappeared, despite royal prohibitions. Brigandage seems actually to have worsened in the south about 1200. The ravages and massacres of the Albigensian Crusade, the 13th-century war against the “Good Men,” or Cathar heretics, made an insecure southern frontier for still another generation. Though it eventually stamped out this heresy, the harsh response of the , beginning in the 1230s, apparently did not seriously disrupt urban or rural

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prosperity.

The broad tendencies of social change were in keeping with political and institutional progress. The conjugal family gained in importance: Roman and especially canon law favoured its authority over the wider solidarities of clan or kin (extended family); rulers made the hearth a basis of fiscal responsibility. The growing population remained overwhelmingly agrarian, but changes in farming practices made their efforts more efficient. The clearing of new lands and more flexible schemes of crop rotation and improved technology, such as better yokes and horse collars that allowed draft animals to pull plows that could effectively till the heavy soils of northern France, led to better harvests. The spread of water-powered mills to grind grain allowed an improvement in diet, as bread replaced gruel. The diet was further improved by the greater cultivation of private gardens, which produced protein-rich legumes and green leafy vegetables. The social condition of the peasantry also changed. Outright slavery, common in earlier periods, tended to disappear. Some peasants retained their independence, as in the Massif Central and the , although they were not necessarily better off than serfs in more prosperous regions. Most peasants were organized in subjection to lords—bishops, abbots, counts, barons, or knights—whose estates assumed diverse forms. In northern France lords typically reserved the proceeds of a domain worked by tenants, who had their own parcels of land to live on. Lords were not simply landowners, however. They were also able to extract a variety of dues and labor services from their tenants, to compel them to use the lord’s mill, oven, and winepress, and to bring their legal disputes to the lord’s court. The income from these dues and services was often more important to local lords than the rents they collected.

URBAN PROSPERITY Increasing productivity stimulated trade, the improvement of roads and bridges, and the growth of towns, as well as competition for the profits of agrarian lordship. After about 1050, townspeople, especially merchants, sought to free themselves from the arbitrary lordship of counts and bishops, usually peaceably, as at Saint-Omer, but occasionally in violent uprisings, as at Le Mans and Laon. Town life continued to flourish. A few places, favored by political, ecclesiastical, and economic circumstances, grew far larger than the rest. Paris could probably count close to 200,000 inhabitants by the late 13th century and some great provincial centres— e.g., , , , —may have surpassed 25,000, but most of the older cities grew more modestly. Jewish communities, which existed almost everywhere, were especially important in the towns of Champagne and Languedoc. Emigration from the countryside probably increased as peasants sought better opportunities and independence, yet the towns remained somewhat indistinct in appearance and activity from their rural surroundings. Many urban properties had agrarian attachments, often within the walls; Paris itself was, to a surprising extent, an aggregation of expanded villages. Nevertheless, the progress of commerce, together with an important ancillary development of industry, chiefly accounts for medieval urban prosperity. The trades not only grew in volume but also became more diversified and specialized. New markets, often regional in nature, arose to supplement the older centers that had developed on the basis of the long-distance exchange of relatively high-priced imperishable. Regional markets featured agrarian staples such as grains and wines as well as animals, cloth, weapons, and tools, and they facilitated the introduction of foreign goods, such as glassware and spices. An increasing reliance on coinage or on monetary values may be connected with these provincial trades; sensitivity to the intrinsic values of the many French coinages was increasing everywhere toward 1200, even in the hinterlands away from main trading routes. In the late 13th century the need for money in denominations larger than the age-old ()—primarily for use in the great commercial centers—caused Louis IX (reigned 1226–

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70) to issue the gros tournois (worth 12 ) and the coin (which, however, had little importance before the 14th century). A gradual long-term inflation tended to favor commercial activity.

The towns of northern France, notably in Artois, Burgundy, the Île-de-France, and especially Champagne, prospered not only from regional exchange but also from the great overland trade flows connecting Normandy, England, the Baltic, and the with the cities of Italy. The fairs of Champagne, becoming the leading entrepôt of European merchants, reached their apogee in the 13th century. Favored by the count’s privilege, the traders operated at Lagny, Bar-sur-Aube, or—in greater numbers—Provins and at the “warm fair” of Troyes in June; the “cold fair” of Troyes ended the yearly cycle in October. The fairs were designated as occasions for payment and repayment, contributing significantly to the progress of banking and business accounting. Enlarged and more diversified demand encouraged urban growth and prosperity. Townsmen were eating better: in the north, at least, the per capita consumption of meat, butter, and cheese, as well as of spices, seems to have increased by the 13th century. As for wine, not only was more being drunk but the taste for vins de qualité became more acute, and the great regional vintages, notably that of Gascony, were established. Townspeople furnished their houses more amply than in the past (lamps, wooden chests, and draperies came into common use), and they produced more articles themselves. The progress of industry, in fact, was a remarkable feature of the period. Crafts in metal, wood, leather, and glass expanded in such large towns as Paris. Cloth work—weaving, dyeing, felling— prospered in regional centers such as Toulouse, with specialties in fine cloths concentrated in Artois and Flanders. In most places, however, the crafts remained in the shadow of commercial enterprise, in which greater fortunes continued to be made. Artisanal associations proliferated everywhere; often termed brotherhoods (confratria, confraternitas), they fostered new urban and suburban solidarities for charitable and ceremonial purposes as well as for the promotion of economic interests. Urban society became more competitive and more stratified. At , Bordeaux, and elsewhere, some fortunes were established enough, usually from commerce, to enable their possessors to live as landlords, build stone houses, buy rural property, and aspire to titles of nobility. This participate—despite occasional setbacks at the hands of “new men,” a rising class of administrators chosen over men of high birth for their expertise in politics— dominated municipal governments, acting as and magistrates (échevins) in the north or as consuls in the south. While not altogether self-serving—they supported civic projects such as the building or decorating of churches—they were disinclined to share power. Below them, often as their tenants or debtors, were small entrepreneurs, middlemen in trade (or between local industry and regional trade), master craftsmen, and bankers; and below all—and increasingly restive—was a swelling class of impoverished artisans, servants, vagabonds, and beggars.

RURAL SOCIETY Rural life changed more gradually. The expanding markets favored well-endowed or efficient lords or peasants who could produce a surplus of goods for sale. Such conditions were less common in the south than in the north, although they could be found in most wine- producing areas. But, while rising prices benefited producers, they contributed to certain difficulties in the countryside. Fixed revenues in coin proved an unsatisfactory alternative to payments in kind, which landlords specified when new land was put under cultivation. Moreover, needs and tastes became more expensive and tended to exceed aristocratic resources; lavish generosity continued to be an admired and practiced virtue, and costly Crusades—occasionally lapsing into speculative adventures—regularly attracted noblemen after the end of the 11th century. Larger lordships began to employ salaried estate managers,

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while in the south the division of landed fortunes among numerous heirs resulted in a multiplied and impoverished petty nobility. Many rural landlords fell into debt in the 13th century. And, as wealth and nobility became less correlated, some nobles, especially those who were financially hard-pressed, sought to close ranks against the intrusion of new men or creditors. They insisted on noble birth as a condition for knighthood, reserving the designation of “squire” (or donzel, in the south) for those of noble birth awaiting or postponing the expensive dubbing (adoubement). At the upper extreme, noble elite, the barons, achieved recognition in administration and law.

Peasant societies also became stratified. Men unable to set aside a surplus against times of famine and those who had to borrow or rent their tools or teams found it difficult to avoid dependence on other men. In some areas serfdom was renewed, or confirmed, as jurists interpreted the more stringent types of peasant obligation in the light of the revived Roman law of slavery. But here again economic and legal status did not necessarily coincide. Rich peasants who employed other men to drive their teams could be found in any village; such people as the mayor, the lord’s , and the peasant creditor established themselves as a rural elite, whose resources insured them against calamity and opened up diverse opportunities in prospering regional economies. Where enfranchisement occurred, the lord usually received a good payment; even when servility persisted, there was a tendency to commute the arbitrary tallage into fixed common sums. New villages continued to be established, especially in the south, where many previously existent communities of peasants also received charters of elementary liberties in the 13th and early 14th centuries.

These conditions notwithstanding, the manor, or seigneurie, resisted fragmentation. The favorable market for grain and the psychological attachment of lords to their fathers’ possessions preserved demesne land (for use by leasehold, not freehold, tenants) as the chief source of seigneurial income through the 13th century. The lords also continued to require the services of laborers, although the shortfall increased between work owed and work needed. Accordingly, lords resorted to paid seasonal labor, so that the margin between profit and loss became a more critical calculation than in the past. A new alternative was to lease the demesne to paid managers or sharecroppers, but this practice spread more slowly in France than in neighboring countries. Whether lords had demesnes and servile tenants or not, the association between land lordship and power remained close. Tenancies or properties smaller than the grand old residences known as manses appeared everywhere but especially in the north, where horsepower and three-field crop rotations were making possible more productive agriculture. The burgeoning viticulture’s of Burgundy and Gascony proved incompatible with traditional demesne lordship and encouraged sharecropping and peasant initiative. Innovation was less common in the uplands of the centre and south, where the manse tended to retain its identity and fiscal utility.

RELIGIOUS AND CULTURAL LIFE The Christian church was badly disrupted by the invasions of the and early as well as by the rise of the local strongmen that accompanied the invasions. In Normandy five successive bishops of Coutances resided at Rouen, far from their war-torn district, which had converted to paganism under the Vikings. Elsewhere standards of clerical deportment declined, threatening the moral leadership with which Carolingian prelates had supported public order.

Renewal came in two influential forms: First, monks in Burgundy and Lorraine were independently inspired to return to a strict

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observance of the Benedictine rule and thereby to win the adherence of laypeople anxious to be saved. The monastery of Cluny, one centre of reform, was founded in 910 by William I (the Pious), a with a bad conscience; dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, it thus came under the protection of the pope. The Cluniac reform, whose influence gradually radiated beyond Cluny and encouraged reforms in other monastic houses, stressed independence from lay control, opposed simony and clerical marriage, and practiced an elaborate routine of liturgical prayer. In the 11th century Cluny came to direct an order of affiliated monasteries that extended throughout France and beyond. Cluny’s religious hegemony was challenged only in the 12th century with the rise of a yet more ascetic Benedictine observance, of which St. (1090–1153) was the great proponent. Centred at Cîteaux (Latin Cistercium, whence the appellation Cistercian) in Burgundy, this movement combined ascetic severity with introspective spirituality and economic self-sufficiency. A newly personal devotionalism was diffused from monastic cloisters into lay society.

Second, the bishops, in the absence of royal leadership, renewed Carolingian sanctions against violence. The Peace of God was instituted in synods of southern France in the late 10th and early 11th centuries. Solemnized in relic processions and oaths and supported by large crowds of the laity, it was an effort to restrain the increasing number of knights from violating the traditional rights of peasants and churches. It was supplemented from the by the Truce of God, which forbade fighting on certain days or during particular seasons of the year and which helped to mold a new conception of the knight as a Christian warrior prohibited from shedding the blood of other Christians. These movements were warmly embraced by the Cluniac pope Urban II when he preached the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095, which resembled the Peace councils earlier in the century. The ideals and reforms of the Peace and Truce of God contributed to a new understanding of knighthood as an honorable estate of Christian leadership. When young princes were dubbed to knighthood in the 12th century, they assumed a mode of respectability fashioned by the church; this eased the way for lesser knights to be recognized as nobles as well. Scholars such as Gerbert of Aurillac, the future pope Sylvester II, were forced to wander from city to city in the pursuit of learning (Gerbert had to travel to Spain to study advanced mathematics); nevertheless, the growing wealth and stability of regional societies, such as those in Burgundy, Flanders, and Normandy, encouraged new impulses in and letters. Cathedral schools revived the traditional curriculum of learning, stressing reading, writing, speaking, and computation. Fulbert of Chartres (c. 960–1028) was fondly remembered as a humane teacher by students who often became teachers themselves. A century later, famous masters could be found at Laon and Paris as well as (probably) at Chartres, attracting young clerics to their lectures in swelling numbers. The Breton (1079–1142) taught and wrote so brilliantly on logic, faith, and ethics that he established Paris’s reputation for academic excellence. His famous correspondence with his beloved Héloïse reveals the emerging humanism in 12th-century letters, demonstrating knowledge of Classical authors and depth of emotion characteristic of the age. Traditional pursuits of contemplative theology and history gave way to new interests in logic and law. Men trained in canon and Roman law found their way increasingly into the service of kings, princes, and bishops. Everywhere churches were built in Romanesque style, and they continued to be built in the south long after some architects, such as Suger at Saint-Denis in the , introduced the new aesthetic of Gothic style, a distinctive French innovation. Lay culture found expression in epics, such as La Chanson de (The Song of Roland) in , and in the Provencal lyrics of southern France. These poems are witness to diverse zones of linguistic evolution from spoken Latin; by the 12th century the langue d’oïl (Old French) north of the Loire was broadly differentiated from the langue d’oc (Occitan, or Provencal, language) to the south. The cultural cleavage so marked ran deeper than language

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and was not entirely overcome by the spread of modern French, descended from the langue d’oïl, into the south.

At the same time that society and the church underwent reform and expansion, they also faced the first expressions of popular heresy since late antiquity. In the early 11th century, episodes of heresy occurred in Aquitaine, Arras, Orléans, and Vertus. The heretics, possibly influenced by foreign missionaries and certainly reacting against the abuses of the church and failures of reform, rejected the church and its sacraments, abstained from sexual intercourse and eating meat, and lived pious lives. By the mid-11th century the church had successfully repressed the heretics, burning a dozen or so at Orléans under order of the king. Heresy disappeared until the early 12th century, when a number of heretical leaders, such as Peter of Bruys and Henry of Lausanne, developed large followings in various cities. These leaders, again reacting to the flaws of the church and inadequacies of reform, rejected the church, its ministers, and its sacraments and advocated lives of simple piety in imitation of the Apostles.

THE AGE OF CATHEDRALS AND SCHOLASTICISM Religious faith began to assume a new coloration after 1000 and evolved along those lines in the 11th and 12th centuries. Whether in the countryside or in town, a new, more evangelical Christianity emerged that emphasized the human Jesus over the transcendent Lord. The Crusading impulse was kept alive in France by the desire to vindicate the true faith against Muslim infidels and Byzantine schismatics. More intense Christian faith was also reflected in hostility toward France’s Jewish communities. As early as 1010 Jews had suffered persecution and were forced to choose between conversion or exile. Anti-Jewish sentiment grew during the next two centuries and led to further offenses. Expelled from royal territories by Philip II Augustus in 1182, Jews were readmitted in 1198 but suffered further persecutions, including a formal condemnation of the Talmud under Louis IX. Philip IV (the Fair) renewed the policy of expulsion in 1306.

The church was not always in a position to satisfy the religious demands of the population, however. The regular clergy could no longer be relied upon to set standards of piety and penitence; their observance was either too relaxed or too severe to suit the new conditions brought on by a rising population and the growth of towns. The canonical movement of the later 12th century produced a secular clergy that could respond to the needs of the laity in ways that the traditional monastic orders could not. The Cistercian order, even though it continued to expand, was incapable of sustaining its ascetic impulse completely; its houses, as well as those of the older , were often remote from the new population centres. Nor was the higher secular clergy much better situated to fulfill pastoral obligations. The bishop was by now remote from his flock, acting usually as diocesan supervisor, judge, or lord; his subordinates—the and cathedral canons—likewise functioned primarily as administrators. Archbishops were required by the fourth Lateran Council (1215) to hold annual synods of provincial clergy, a ruling that—although imperfectly observed—probably contributed to some strengthening of discipline. Failure to improve the standards of parish ministry or respond fully to changing social conditions left the door open for the spread of heretical sects. The critical reform was that of the parish ministry. When emphatic measures to improve the education and supervision of priests were adopted in the fourth Lateran Council, it was already too late in France. For most of the 12th century, the same evangelical impulses that led to the reforms of the orders of canons and monks also contributed to anticlericalism and doctrinal heresy, especially in the towns and villages of the east and south. There was a suspicion that sinning priests could not be trusted to mediate God’s grace effectively, and the

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virtue of poverty as an antidote to the worldly cupidity of a prospering society was attractive to many. The merchant Valdes (Peter Waldo), who gave up his property and family in the , took it upon himself to preach in the vernacular to his fellow townsfolk of Lyon. Although he gained the pope’s approval for his lifestyle, Valdes did not receive the right to preach. Nonetheless, he and his followers—“the Poor” or “Poor Men”—continued to do so and were condemned by the church, which drove them to more extreme positions on doctrine and practice. Despite strong opposition from the church, the Waldensian movement spread to southern towns, and small groups of adherents were found in Europe through modern times. Another heretical movement, that of the “Good Men,” or Cathars (Albigenses), posed an even stronger threat to religious orthodoxy. Flourishing in the hill towns and villages between Toulouse and Béziers, the Cathars were dualists. They taught, among other things, that the material world was created by the Devil, that Christ did not assume the flesh but only appeared to, and that the church and its sacraments were the Devil’s work. In stark contrast to the often ignorant and worldly Catholic clergy, the Cathar elite, the perfecti, lived rigorously ascetic lives.

For this challenge, the secular clergy of Languedoc were no match. To establish an effective counter ministry of learned and respectable men, the pope deputed to Languedoc; they were soon succeeded by St. Dominic, who spent a decade as mendicant preacher in Languedoc. In 1217, with his order of preachers recognized by the bishop of Toulouse and confirmed by the pope, Dominic set out with his fellow friars to work in the wider world “by word and example.”

Meanwhile, the murder of the legate Peter of Castelnau (1208) had stirred Innocent III to promote a Crusade against the heretics of Languedoc. Led by Simon de Montfort, northern barons attacked towns in the viscounty of Béziers and later in the county of Toulouse with singular fury. The Albigensian Crusade brought the south under northern subjection, as massacres and the establishment of a papal Inquisition (1233) eventually drove the Cathars into exile in Italy or back to Catholicism. The Inquisition, which spread to many parts of France, was usually entrusted to Dominicans; it relied on the active pursuit of suspects, secret testimony, and—in case of conviction and obstinacy—delivery of the heretic to the “secular arm” for capital punishment. Like the Dominicans, the Franciscans had spectacular success in a variety of endeavors. Highly organized, with provincial and international administrative institutions, both orders had houses in Paris by 1220, and their members were soon working everywhere in France. Becoming preachers and confessors, they also secured chaplaincies, inspectorships, and professorships as their initiatives in piety, probity, and learning were recognized. Conflict with the secular priesthood naturally resulted; the seculars attempted unsuccessfully to exclude the mendicants from the ministry of sacraments and inveighed against conventual endowments that seemed to contradict the friars’ professions of poverty. Despite this conflict, the friars, women’s orders such as the Poor Clares, and similar groups such as the Beguines stimulated a more active piety among laypeople, encouraging charitable works and foundations, private devotions, and penitential reading.

CULTURE AND LEARNING: Literacy and elementary learning became more widespread after 1000. Indeed, the growth in literacy was heralded by the heresy of Vilgard of Ravenna, who, according to Radulfus Glaber, was betrayed by demons in the guise of and other ancient writers in the late 10th century. By the later 11th and the 12th century, cathedral schools had emerged as centres of learning, and literacy had become an increasingly important tool of government. A form of Christian humanism took shape in the 12th century that was expressed in the letters of John of

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Salisbury and others. The courtly tastes of the 12th century, while not obliterated, were overtaken by a more flexible and ironic sensibility evident in vernacular ballads, fables, satires, and moralizing literature, most popular in the northern towns. The burgher or knight began to take a keen interest in the tangible world about him. The taste for clarity, proportion, and articulation reached mature expression in the great Gothic cathedrals of northern France, such as those in , Paris (Notre-Dame), and . Architectural innovations—the pointed arch and the flying buttress—allowed the construction of soaring naves and walls pierced by large windows filled with the exquisite stained glass that was a great technological achievement of the period. And the taste for order is illustrated by the reorganization of masters, students, and studies as studia generalia (or universities). Montpellier became a leading centre of medical learning, and Toulouse (founded in 1229 to prepare clerics to combat heresy) and Orléans were noted for law. Paris remained preeminent among the early universities; its famous schools became associated as the faculties of arts, canon law, medicine, and theology, gaining jurisdictional independence under papal protection by 1231.

During the same years, philosophical doctrines in conflict with Christian orthodoxy began to trouble the theologians as translations of the metaphysical and scientific works of Aristotle and his commentators reached Paris. For a time the teaching of Aristotle was prohibited there, but by midcentury, when some of the “artists” who had been most attracted to the new philosophy were advancing to theological degrees, efforts were made to incorporate Aristotelian learning in enlarged summaries of Christian knowledge. The Summa theologize (1266–72) by the Italian Thomas Aquinas was the greatest synthesis of this type. Its serene power breathes no hint of the controversies in which its author was involved. St. Thomas had taken his theological degree, together with St. , in 1257, when the secular masters were bitterly disputing the friars’ privileges within the university. In the end the Dominicans and Franciscans each retained a chair on condition of submitting to university regulations. Thomas’s work, however, came under suspicion. A reaction set in against the arts faculty’s increasing disposition to take a naturalistic view of all reality. When Étienne Tempier, the bishop of Paris, condemned some philosophical principles as “error” in 1270 and 1277, the repercussions were so sweeping as to render even Thomas suspect.

Thomas’s synthesis was to have no immediate imitators. Nevertheless, the social consequences of the emergence of academic learning in the 12th and 13th centuries were profound; it created new estates of professional men—lawyers, notaries, trained clerks, and , many of them laymen—who’s rational and legalist outlook became firmly rooted in French culture. The dogmatic condemnations of the 1270s were symptomatic. Prosperity and confidence were shaken in many ways in the late 13th century. The papacy, hitherto a support for progressive causes, found itself discredited after its fiasco in a Crusade against Aragon. While the removal of the papal court to Avignon in the time of Clement V created a new centre of patronage for arts and letters, it did little to arrest the waning prestige of the church. The burdens of renewed warfare increased social tensions in the towns and depressed civic enterprise; the Jews had their assets confiscated before being expelled in 1306, and the Lombard bankers suffered like treatment in 1311. Economic indicators—while few and difficult to interpret—are generally held to suggest growing difficulties in many parts of France. The business of the fairs of Champagne was falling off by 1300, if not before, while records of Normandy reveal declining agrarian revenues in the half-century after 1260. Some regions were “saturated” with people: their existent economic technology could no longer sustain growth. Probably the population was already leveling off, if not yet decreasing, when, from 1315 to 1317, crop failures and famine caused serious disruption.

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RISE AND GROWTH OF REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS Seen against the background of the millennia, the fall of the Roman Empire was so commonplace an event that it is almost surprising that so much ink has been spilled in the attempt to explain it. The Visigoths were merely one among the peoples who had been dislodged from the steppe in the usual fashion. They and others, unable to crack the defenses of Sāsānian Persia or of the Roman Empire in the East (though it was a near thing), probed farther west and at length found the point of weakness they were seeking on the Alps and the Rhine. What really needs explaining is the fact that the Western Empire was never restored. Elsewhere imperial were never vacant for long. Thus in China, after every time of troubles, a new dynasty received “the ,” and a new emperor, or “son of heaven,” rebuilt order. For instance, in 304 CE the nomadic Huns invaded China, and a long period of disruption followed, but at the beginning of the 7th century the Tang dynasty took charge and began 300 years of rule. Similar patterns mark the history of and Japan.

The Europeans failed to emulate that story. , the greatest of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) emperors, reconquered large portions of the West in the 6th century, though the destruction wreaked by his soldiers made things worse rather than better. In 800 Charlemagne, king of the Franks, was actually crowned emperor of the Romans by the pope. In later centuries the Hohenstaufen and Habsburg dynasties tried to restore the empire, and as late as the so did Napoleon I. None of those attempts succeeded. Probably the chance was only real in the earliest period, before Western Europe had become used to doing without an overlord. But at that time there was never enough breathing space for society to regain its stability and strength. Most of the , successor states to Rome, succumbed to later assailants. Britain fell away from the empire in the 5th century; the little kingdoms of the Angles and Saxons were just coming together as one kingdom, England, when the Viking invasions began. In the 7th century the Arabs conquered North Africa; in the 8th they took Spain and invaded Gaul. Lombards, Avars, Slavs, , and Magyars poured into Europe from the east. Not until German king Otto I’s victory over the Magyars at Lechfeld in 955 did those incursions cease, and not until the late 11th century was Latin Christendom more or less secure within its borders, and by then it had been without an effective emperor for more than 600 years.

OTTOMAN EMPIRE: Ottoman Empire, empire created by Turkish tribes in Anatolia (Asia Minor) that grew to be one of the most powerful states in the world during the 15th and 16th centuries. The Ottoman period spanned more than 600 years and came to an end only in 1922, when it was replaced by the Turkish Republic and various successor states in southeastern Europe and the Middle East. At its height the empire encompassed most of southeastern Europe to the gates of Vienna, including present-day Hungary, the Balkan region, Greece, and parts of ; portions of the Middle East now occupied by , Syria, Israel, and Egypt; North Africa as far west as Algeria; and large parts of the Arabian Peninsula. The term Ottoman is a dynastic appellation derived from (: ʿUthmān), the nomadic Turkmen chief who founded both the dynasty and the empire about 1300.

THE OTTOMAN STATE TO 1481: THE AGE OF EXPANSION The first period of Ottoman history was characterized by almost continuous territorial expansion, during which Ottoman dominion spread out from a small northwestern Anatolian

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principality to cover most of southeastern Europe and Anatolia. The political, economic, and social institutions of the classical Islamic empires were amalgamated with those inherited from Byzantium and the great Turkish empires of Central Asia and were reestablished in new forms that were to characterize the area into modern times.

ORIGINS AND EXPANSION OF THE OTTOMAN STATE, C. 1300–1402 In their initial stages of expansion, the Ottomans were leaders of the Turkish warriors for the faith of Islam, known by the honorific title ghāzī (Arabic: “raider”), who fought against the shrinking Christian Byzantine state. The ancestors of Osman I, the founder of the dynasty, were members of the Kayı tribe who had entered Anatolia along with a mass of Turkmen Oğuz nomads. Those nomads, migrating from Central Asia, established themselves as the Seljuq dynasty in and in the mid-11th century, overwhelmed Byzantium after the Battle of Manzikert (1071), and occupied eastern and central Anatolia during the 12th century. The ghazis fought against the Byzantines and then the Mongols, who invaded Anatolia following the establishment of the Il-Khanid (Ilhanid) empire in Iran and Mesopotamia in the last half of the 13th century. With the disintegration of Seljuq power and its replacement by Mongol suzerainty, enforced by direct military occupation of much of eastern Anatolia, independent Turkmen principalities—one of which was led by Osman—emerged in the remainder of Anatolia. The capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans caused many scholars to flee to Italy and bring with them knowledge that helped spark the Renaissance. Europeans have given Suleiman the moniker "The Magnificent", but he was called "The Lawgiver" by his own subjects.

OSMAN AND ORHAN Following the final Mongol defeat of the Seljuqs in 1293, Osman emerged as prince (bey) of the border principality that took over Byzantine Bithynia in northwestern Anatolia around Bursa, commanding the ghazis against the Byzantines in that area. Hemmed in on the east by the more powerful Turkmen principality of Germiyan, Osman and his immediate successors concentrated their attacks on Byzantine territories bordering the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara to the west. The Ottomans, left as the major Muslim rivals of Byzantium, attracted masses of nomads and urban unemployed who were roaming through the Middle East searching for means to gain their livelihoods and seeking to fulfill their religious desire to expand the territory of Islam. The Ottomans were able to take advantage of the decay of the Byzantine frontier defense system and the rise of economic, religious, and social discontent in the Byzantine Empire and, beginning under Osman and continuing under his successors Orhan (Orkhan, ruled 1324–60) and (1360–89), took over Byzantine territories, first in western Anatolia and then in southeastern Europe. It was only under Bayezid I (1389–1402) that the wealth and power gained by that initial expansion was used to assimilate the Anatolian Turkish principalities to the east. By 1300 Osman ruled an area in Anatolia stretching from Eskişehir (Dorylaeum) to the plains of İznik (Nicaea), having defeated several organized Byzantine efforts to curb his expansion. Byzantine attempts to secure Il-Khanid support against the Ottomans from the east were unsuccessful, and the Byzantine emperor’s use of mercenary troops from Western Europe caused more damage to his own territory than to that of the Turks. The Ottomans lacked effective siege equipment, however, and were unable to take the major cities of Bithynia. Nor could they move against their increasingly powerful Turkmen neighbours, the Aydın and Karası dynasties, which had taken over Byzantine territory in southwestern Anatolia. Orhan’s capture of Bursa in 1324 (some sources date the event to 1326) provided the first means for developing the administrative, economic, and military power necessary to make the principality into a real state and to create an army. Orhan began the military policy, expanded by his successors, of employing Christian mercenary troops, thus

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lessening his dependence on the nomads.

Orhan soon was able to capture the remaining Byzantine towns in northwestern Anatolia: İznik (1331), İzmit (1337), and Üsküdar (1338). He then moved against his major Turkmen neighbours to the south. Taking advantage of internal conflicts, Orhan annexed Karası in 1345 and gained control of the area between the Gulf of Edremit and Kapıdağı (Cyzicus), reaching the Sea of Marmara. He thus put himself in a position to end the lucrative monopoly enjoyed by the city of Aydın, that of providing mercenary troops to competing Byzantine factions in and at the Byzantine capital, Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). The expansion also enabled the Ottomans to replace Aydın as the principal ally of the Byzantine emperor John VI Cantacuzenus. The consequent entry of Ottoman troops into Europe gave them a direct opportunity to see the possibilities for conquest offered by Byzantine decadence. The collapse of Aydın following the death of its ruler, Umur Bey, left the Ottomans alone as the leaders of the ghazis against the Byzantines. Orhan helped Cantacuzenus take the throne of Byzantium from John V Palaeologus and as a reward secured the right to ravage Thrace and to marry the emperor’s daughter Theodora.

Ottoman raiding parties began to move regularly through Gallipoli into Thrace. Huge quantities of captured booty strengthened Ottoman power and attracted thousands from the uprooted Turkmen masses of Anatolia into Ottoman service. Starting in 1354, Orhan’s son Süleyman transformed Gallipoli, a peninsula on the European side of the Dardanelles, into a permanent base for expansion into Europe and refused to leave, despite the protests of Cantacuzenus and others. From Gallipoli Süleyman’s bands moved up the Maritsa River into southeastern Europe, raiding as far as Adrianople. Cantacuzenus soon fell from power, at least partially because of his cooperation with the Turks, and Europe began to be aware of the extent of the Turkish danger.

MURAD I: Orhan’s son Murad I was the first Ottoman emperor to use Gallipoli for permanent conquests in Europe. Constantinople itself was bypassed, despite the weakness and disorganization of its defenders, because its thick walls and well-placed defenses remained too strong for the nomadic Ottoman army, which continued to lack siege equipment. Murad’s initial conquests extended northward into Thrace, culminating with the capture in 1361 of Adrianople, the second city of the Byzantine Empire. Renamed Edirne, the city became the new Ottoman capital, providing the Ottomans with a centre for the administrative and military control of Thrace. As the main fortress between Constantinople and the Danube River, it controlled the principal invasion road through the Balkan Mountains, assured Ottoman retention of their European conquests, and facilitated further expansion to the north.

Murad then moved through the Maritsa River valley and captured Philippopolis (Philibé or Filibe; modern Plovdiv) in 1363. Control of the main sources of Constantinople’s grain and tax revenues enabled him to force the Byzantine emperor to accept Ottoman suzerainty. The death of the Serbian emperor Stefan Dušan in 1355 left his successors too divided and weak to defeat the Ottomans, despite an alliance with and Shishman of in the first European Crusade against the Ottomans. The Byzantine emperor John V Palaeologus tried to mobilize European assistance by uniting the churches of Constantinople and Rome, but that effort only further divided Byzantium without assuring any concrete help from the West. Murad was thus able in 1371 to rout the allies at Chernomen (Çirmen), on the Maritsa,

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increasing his own confidence and demoralizing his smaller enemies, who rapidly accepted his suzerainty without further resistance.

Murad next incorporated into the rapidly expanding empire many European vassals. He retained local native rulers, who in return accepted his suzerainty, paid annual , and provided contingents for his army when required. That policy enabled the Ottomans generally to avoid local resistance by assuring rulers and subjects that their lives, properties, traditions, and positions would be preserved if they peacefully accepted Ottoman rule. It also enabled the Ottomans to govern the newly conquered areas without building up a vast administrative system of their own or maintaining substantial occupation garrisons. Moving rapidly to consolidate his empire south of the Danube, Murad captured (1371), central Bulgaria (including Monastir [1382], Sofia [1385], and Niš [1386]), and , all culminating in the climactic defeat of the Balkan allies at the Battle of in 1389. South of the Danube only Walachia, Bosnia, , Greece, and the Serbian fort of Belgrade remained outside Ottoman rule, and to the north Hungary alone was in a position to resist further Muslim advances.

BAYEZID I Murad was killed during the Battle of Kosovo. His son and successor, Bayezid I, was unable to take advantage of his father’s victory to achieve further European conquest. In fact, he was compelled to restore the defeated vassals and return to Anatolia. That return was precipitated by the rising threat of the Turkmen principality of Karaman, created on the ruins of the Seljuq Empire of Anatolia with its capital at Konya. Bayezid’s predecessors had avoided forceful annexation of Turkmen territory in order to concentrate on Europe. They had, however, expanded peacefully through marriage alliances and the purchase of territories. The acquisition of territory in central Anatolia from the emirates of Hamid and Germiyan had brought the Ottomans into direct contact with Karaman for the first time. Murad had been compelled to take some military action to prevent it from occupying his newly acquired Anatolian territories but then had turned back to Europe, leaving the unsolved problem to his successor son. Karaman willingly cooperated with Serbia in inciting opposition to Ottoman rule among Murad’s vassals in both Europe and Anatolia. That opposition strengthened the Balkan Union that was routed by the Ottomans at Kosovo and stimulated a general revolt in Anatolia that Bayezid was forced to meet by an open attack as soon as he was able. By 1390 Bayezid had overwhelmed and annexed all the remaining Turkmen principalities in western Anatolia. He attacked and defeated Karaman in 1391, annexed several Turkmen states in eastern Anatolia, and was preparing to complete his conquest in the area when he was forced to turn back to Europe to deal with a revolt of some of his Balkan vassals, encouraged and assisted by Hungary and Byzantium. Bayezid quickly smashed the rebels (1390–93), occupied Bulgaria and installed direct Ottoman administration for the first time, and besieged Constantinople. In response, Hungary organized a major European Crusade against the Ottomans. The effort was beaten back by Bayezid at the Battle of Nicopolis (Niğbolu) on the Danube in 1396. Europe was terrorized, and Ottoman rule south of the Danube was assured; Bayezid’s prestige in the Islamic world was so enhanced that he was given the title of sultan by the shadow ʿAbbāsid caliph of Cairo, despite the opposition of the caliph’s Mamlūk masters (the rulers of Egypt, Syria, and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina), who wanted to retain the title only for themselves.

Turning back to Anatolia to complete the conquests aborted by his move against the Crusaders, Bayezid overran Karaman, the last Turkmen principality, in 1397. His advances, however, attracted the attention of Timur (Tamerlane), who had been building a powerful Tatar

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empire in Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Mesopotamia and whose invasion of India in 1398 had been halted by his fear of the rising Ottoman power on his western flank. Encouraged by several Turkmen princes who had fled to his court when their territories were taken by Bayezid, Timur decided to destroy Bayezid’s empire before turning his attentions back to the east and thus invaded Anatolia. As Bayezid and Timur moved toward battle, the former’s Turkmen vassals and Muslim followers deserted him because he had abandoned the old Ottoman ghazi tradition of advancing against the infidel. Left only with forces provided by his Christian vassals, Bayezid was decisively overwhelmed by Timur at the Battle of Ankara in 1402. Taken captive, Bayezid died within a year. Timur’s objective in Anatolia had been not conquest but rather a secure western flank that would enable him to make further conquests in the east. He thus followed his victory by retiring from Anatolia after restoring to power the Turkmen princes who had joined him; evidently Timur assumed that a divided Anatolia would constitute no threat to his ambitions. Even Bayezid’s sons were able to assume control over the family’s former possessions in western Anatolia, and the Ottoman Empire in Europe was left largely untouched. At that time a strong European Crusade might have pushed the Ottomans out of Europe altogether, but weakness and division south of the Danube and diversion to other matters to the north left an opportunity for the Ottomans to restore what had been torn asunder without significant loss.

WORLD DISTRIBUTION OF ISLAM: It was not from the Rūm Seljuqs, however, that lasting Muslim power in Anatolia was to come, but rather from one of the warrior states on…Internal divisions, however, were to hinder Ottoman efforts to restore their power during a period that has come to be known as the Interregnum (1402–13), during which four of Bayezid’s sons competed for the right to rule the entire empire. His eldest son, Süleyman, assumed control in Europe, establishing a capital at Edirne, and gained the support of the Christian vassals and those who had stimulated Bayezid to turn toward conquest in the East. The descendants of the Turkmen notables who had assisted the early Ottoman conquests in Europe supported the claims of Mehmed. With the additional support of the Anatolian Muslim religious orders and artisan guilds, Mehmed was able to defeat and kill his brothers Mûsa Bey, who had established his capital at Bursa, and İsa Bey of Balıkesir in southwestern Anatolia, as well as Süleyman, and so assume undisputed possession of the entire empire as Sultan Mehmed (Muḥammad) I.

MEHMED I AND MURAD II Under Mehmed I (ruled 1413–20) and Murad II (ruled 1421–51), there was a new period of expansion in which Bayezid’s empire was restored and new territories were added. Mehmed restored the vassal system in Bulgaria and Serbia, promising that he would not undertake new European adventures. Murad II was also compelled to devote most of the early years of his reign to internal problems, particularly to the efforts of the ghazi commanders and Balkan vassal princes in Europe, as well as the Turkmen vassals and princes in Anatolia, to retain the autonomy and—in some areas—independence that had been gained during the Interregnum. In 1422–23 Murad suppressed the Balkan resistance and put Constantinople under a new siege that ended only after the Byzantines provided him with huge amounts of . He then restored Ottoman rule in Anatolia and eliminated all Turkmen principalities left by Timur, with the exceptions of Karaman and Candar (Jandar), which he left autonomous though tributary so as not to excite the renewed fears of Timur’s successors in the East.

Murad then inaugurated the first Ottoman war with the city-state of Venice (1423–30), which had maintained friendly relations with the sultans in order to develop a strong trade

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position in the Ottoman dominions but had accepted Salonika (present-day Thessaloníki, Greece) from Byzantium in order to prevent Ottoman expansion across Macedonia to the , its lifeline for trade with the rest of the world. The war was indecisive for some time. Venice was diverted by conflicts in Italy and in any case lacked the force to meet the Ottomans on land, while the Ottomans needed time to build a naval force sufficient to compete with that of the Venetians. In addition, Murad was diverted by an effort of Hungary to establish its rule in Walachia, between the Danube and the Transylvanian Alps, a move that inaugurated a series of Ottoman-Hungarian conflicts which were to occupy much of the remainder of his reign. Murad finally built a fleet strong enough to blockade Salonika and enable his army to conquer it in 1430. Subsequent Ottoman naval raids against Venetian ports in the Adriatic and the Aegean seas compelled Venice in 1432 to make a peace in which it abandoned its efforts to prevent the Ottoman advance to the Adriatic but was allowed to become the leading commercial power in the sultan’s dominions. Murad, who had been put on the throne by Turkish notables who had joined the Ottoman state during the first century of its existence, soon began to resent the power they had gained in return; the power of those notables was also enhanced by the great new estates they had built up in the conquered areas of Europe and Anatolia. To counteract their power, he began to build up the power of various non-Turkish groups in his service, particularly those composed of Christian slaves and converts to Islam, whose military arm was organized into a new infantry organization called the Janissary (Yeniçeri; “New Force”) corps. To strengthen that group, Murad began to distribute most of his new conquests to its members, and, to add new supporters of that sort, he developed the famous devşirme system, by which Christian youths were drafted from the Balkan provinces for conversion to Islam and life service to the sultan. With their revenues and numbers increasing, the devşirme men and their supporters achieved considerable political power. Because the new European conquests were being used by the sultan to build up the devşirme, they wanted the conquests to continue and expand, while the Turkish notables, whose power was diminished by the increasing status of the devşirme, opposed further conquest. Murad, wanting to return to aggressive policies of European expansion in order to help the devşirme reduce the power of the Turkish notables, renewed the struggle with Hungary in Serbia and Walachia in 1434. He took advantage of the death in 1437 of the Hungarian king Sigismund to reoccupy Serbia (except Belgrade) and to ravage much of Hungary. He then annexed Serbia in 1439, beginning a policy of replacing the vassals with direct Ottoman rule throughout the empire. Hungarian control of Belgrade became the primary obstacle to large-scale advances north of the Danube. Ottoman attacks on Belgrade and raids on Transylvania failed to move the Hungarians, largely because of the leadership of János Hunyadi, originally a leader of the Walachian border resistance to the ghazis in 1440–42. Although Murad finally defeated Hunyadi at the Battle of Zlatica (İzladi) in 1443, the increased influence of the Turkish notables at Murad’s court led the sultan to agree to the Peace of Edirne in 1444. By its terms Serbia regained its autonomy, Hungary kept Walachia and Belgrade, and the Ottomans promised to end their raids north of the Danube. In 1444 Murad also made peace with his main Anatolian enemy, Karaman, and retired to a life of religious contemplation, voluntarily passing the throne to his young son Mehmed II. Mehmed already showed the leadership qualities that were to distinguish his long reign, though at that time he relied primarily on devşirme supporters for advice and assistance.

The Byzantines and Pope Eugenius IV sought to use the opportunity created by the rule of a youthful and inexperienced sultan to expel the Ottomans from Europe, organizing a new Crusade—joined by Hungary and Venice—after the pope assured them that they were not bound to honor the peace treaty they had signed with Muslim infidels. A Crusader army moved through Serbia across the Balkan Mountains to the Black Sea at Varna, Bulgaria, where it was to be supplied and transported to Constantinople by a Venetian fleet that would sail through the

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straits, while using its power to prevent Murad from returning from Anatolia with the bulk of the Ottoman army. Though the Crusaders reached Varna, they were left stranded by a Serbian decision to remain loyal to the sultan and by Venetian reluctance to fulfill its part of the agreement for fear of losing its trade position in the event of an Ottoman victory. Further quarrels among the Crusade leaders gave Murad time to return from Anatolia and organize a new army. The Turkish victory at the Battle of Varna on 10, 1444, ended the last important European Crusading effort against the Ottomans.

Murad reassumed the throne and restored the power of the devşirme party, whose insistent demands for conquest led him to spend the remainder of his reign eliminating the vassals and establishing direct rule in much of Thrace, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Greece. In the process he divided the newly acquired lands into estates, the revenues of which further increased the power of the devşirme at the expense of the Turkish notables. Only Albania was able to resist, because of the leadership of its national hero, Skanderbeg (George Kastrioti), who finally was routed by the sultan at the second Battle of Kosovo (1448). By the time of Murad’s death in 1451, the Danube frontier was secure, and it appeared that the Ottoman Empire was permanently established in Europe. Whereas the victory at Varna brought new power to the devşirme party, the grand (chief adviser to the sultan) Candarlı Halil Paşa was able to retain a dominant position for the Turkish notables, whom he led by retaining the confidence of the sultan and by successfully dividing his opponents. Prince Mehmed therefore became the candidate of the devşirme, and it was only with his accession that they were able to achieve the political and military power made possible by the financial base built up during the previous two decades.

MEHMED II Under Sultan Mehmed II (ruled 1451–81) the devşirme increasingly came to dominate and pressed their desire for new conquests in order to take advantage of the European weakness created at Varna. Constantinople became their first objective. To Mehmed and his supporters, the Ottoman dominions in Europe could never reach their full extent or be molded into a real empire as long as their natural administrative and cultural centre remained outside their hands. The grand vizier and other Turkish notables bitterly opposed the attack, ostensibly because it might draw a new Crusade but in fact because of their fear that the capture of the Byzantine capital might bring about the final triumph of the devşirme. Mehmed built Rumeli Fortress on the European side of the Bosporus, from which he conducted the siege (April 6– May 29, 1453) and conquest of Constantinople. The transformation of that city into the Ottoman capital of Istanbul marked an important new stage in Ottoman history. Internally, it meant the end of power and influence for the old Turkish nobility, whose leaders were executed or exiled to Anatolia and whose European properties were confiscated, and the triumph of the devşirme and their supporters in Istanbul and the West. Externally, the conquest made Mehmed II the most famous ruler in the Muslim world, even though the lands of the old still remained in the hands of the Mamlūks of Egypt and Timur’s successors in Iran. Moreover, the possession of Constantinople stimulated in Mehmed a desire to place under his dominion not merely the Islamic and Turkic worlds but also a re-created Byzantine Empire and, perhaps, the entire world of Christendom.

To pursue those objectives, Mehmed II developed various bases of power. Domestically, his primary objective was to restore Istanbul, which he had spared from devastation during the conquest, as the political, economic, and social centre of the area that it formerly had dominated. He worked to repopulate the city not only with its former inhabitants but also with

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elements of all the conquered peoples of the empire, whose residence and intermingling there would provide a model for a powerful and integrated empire. Special attention was paid to restoring Istanbul’s industry and trade, with substantial tax concessions made to attract merchants and artisans. While thousands of Christians and Muslims were brought to the city, Greeks and Armenians were disinclined to accept Muslim Ottoman rule and sought to secure new European Crusades. Mehmed thus gave special attention to attracting Jews from central and Western Europe, where they were being subjected to increasing persecution. The loyalty of those Jews to the Ottomans was induced by that of their coreligionists in Byzantium, who had supported and assisted the Ottoman conquests after the long-standing persecution to which they had been subjected by the and its followers.

Under Ottoman rule the major religious groups were allowed to establish their own self- governing communities, called millets, each retaining its own religious laws, traditions, and language under the general protection of the sultan. Millets were led by religious chiefs, who served as secular as well as religious leaders and thus had a substantial interest in the continuation of Ottoman rule. Mehmed used the conquering army to restore the physical structure of the city. Old buildings were repaired, streets, aqueducts, and bridges were constructed, sanitary facilities were modernized, and a vast supply system was established to provide for the city’s inhabitants.

Mehmed also devoted much time to expanding his dominions in Europe and Asia in order to establish his claim to world leadership. To that end he eliminated the last vassal princes who might have disputed his claims to be legitimate successor to the Byzantine and Seljuq dynasties, establishing direct Ottoman administration in most of the provinces throughout the empire. In addition, he extended Ottoman rule far beyond the territories inherited from Murad II. From 1454 to 1463 he concentrated mainly on southeastern Europe, annexing Serbia (1454–55) and conquering the Morea (1458–60), in the process eliminating the last major claimants to the Byzantine throne. When Venice refused to surrender its important ports along the Aegean coast of the Morea, Mehmed inaugurated the second Ottoman- Venetian war (1463–79). In 1461 he annexed Trebizond and the Genoese commercial colonies that had survived along the Black Sea coast of Anatolia, including Sinop and Kafa, and began the process by which the Crimean Tatar khans were compelled to accept Ottoman suzerainty. In 1463 he occupied and annexed Bosnia. When Albania continued to hold out, helped by supplies sent by sea from Venice, Mehmed sent in large numbers of Turkmen irregulars, who in the process of conquering Albania settled there and formed the nucleus of a Muslim community that has remained to the present day. Since the papacy and Venice were unable to raise a new Crusade in Europe, they diverted Mehmed by encouraging attacks by his enemies in the east, the Turkmen principality of Karaman and the Tatar Ak Koyunlu (“White Sheep”) dynasty, which under the leadership of Uzun Ḥasan had replaced Timur’s descendants in western Iran. Mehmed, however, skillfully used dynastic divisions to conquer Karaman in 1468, thereby extending direct Ottoman rule in Anatolia to the Euphrates. When Uzun Ḥasan responded by invading Anatolia with the support of many Turkmen princes who had been dispossessed by Mehmed, Venice intensified its attacks in the Morea, Hungary moved into Serbia, and Skanderbeg attacked Bosnia. Mehmed, however, was able to defeat each of those enemies. In 1473 he routed Uzun Ḥasan, who acknowledged Ottoman rule in all of Anatolia and returned to Iran. That brought the Ottomans into conflict with the Mamlūk empire of Syria and Egypt, which sought to expand into southeastern Anatolia. Mehmed neutralized Mamlūk forces, though he could not defeat them. He then turned to Venice, initiating several naval raids along the Adriatic coast that finally led to a peace in 1479, whereby Venice surrendered its bases in Albania and the Morea and agreed to pay a regular annual tribute in return for restoration of its

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commercial privileges. Mehmed then used his new naval power to attack the island of Rhodes and to send a large force that landed at Otranto in southern Italy in 1480. Success appeared imminent, but his premature death in 1481 brought the effort to an end. Nevertheless, Mehmed had laid the foundations for Ottoman rule in Anatolia and southeastern Europe that was to survive for the next four centuries. In addition to conquering a large empire, Mehmed worked to consolidate it and to codify the political, administrative, religious, and legal institutions developed during the previous century by promulgating a series of secular laws (kanun) compiled by subject into law codes called kanunnames. The immensity of the task, however, and his diversion in numerous campaigns delayed the process to such an extent that it was completed only during the mid-16th century. Mehmed also had only limited success in building the economic and social bases of his empire. His most important problem was securing enough money to finance his military expeditions and the new apparatus of government and society. The tax systems inherited from his predecessors did not provide the required resources, particularly because most of the conquered lands were turned into estates (timars) whose taxes went entirely to their holders in return for military and administrative services.

Mehmed therefore turned to a number of financial expedients that achieved their immediate objectives, but at the cost of grave economic and social difficulties. He regularly withdrew all coins from circulation and issued new ones with a larger proportion of base metal alloys. To enforce acceptance of the new issues, he sent armed bands around the empire with the right to confiscate without compensation all the older and more valuable coins that were not being voluntarily exchanged for the new. The debasement of the coinage soon caused inflation, which greatly disturbed the industry and trade that the sultan had hoped to promote. In addition, in his search for revenues, Mehmed created monopolies over the production and use of essential goods, distributing them among the highest bidders, who in turn charged excessive prices and created artificial scarcities to secure their profits. Finally, Mehmed established the principle that all revenue-producing property belonged to the sultan. In pursuance of that idea, he confiscated much private property and religious foundation lands, creating tremendous resentment and opposition among those who lost their revenues, including members of the religious ulama (theologian) class, the Turkish notables, and even some devşirme men, whose discontent threatened to undermine both state and sultan. It was only by playing those groups off against each other that Mehmed was able to maintain his own position and power and to continue his conquests.

OTTOMAN INSTITUTIONS IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES Changing status of the Ottoman rulers Ottoman dynasts were transformed from simple tribal leaders to border princes (uc beys) and ghazi leaders under Seljuq and then II-Khanid suzerainty in the 13th and early 14th centuries. With the capture of Bursa, Orhan had been able to declare himself independent of his suzerains and assume the title of bey, which was retained by his successors until Bayezid I was named sultan by the shadow ʿAbbāsid caliph of Cairo following his victory over the Christian Crusaders at the Battle of Nicopolis (1396). Those title changes reflected changes in the position of the Ottoman ruler within the state and in the organization of the state itself. Squadron of soldiers of the Ertugrul Cavalry Regiment of the Imperial Guard of Abdul hamid II of the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey.

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE What was the name of the secret 1916 agreement that divided the Arab provinces of

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the Ottoman Empire between and France? As uc bey and even as bey, the Ottoman leader remained little more than a tribal chief, sharing administrative and military leadership with the Turkmen tribal chiefs surrounding him. Like them, he was owed the loyalty and obedience of his followers only so long as he led them to victory and only in relation to his military functions. Beyond that, he was only one among equals in the councils that decided general internal policies; the tribes and clans remained autonomous in their internal affairs. The bey was accessible to the tribe and clan leaders as well as to their followers. He could intervene in disputes among the clans, but jurisdiction was temporary and restricted. Muslim law and jurists had little influence, whereas Turkish tribal law and custom prevailed. In such a situation the idea of rule was very limited. Administration was conceived mainly in financial terms, with each clan or family or tribe accepting Ottoman military leadership largely for the financial rewards it could bring. Ottoman chiefs collected the booty in conquered lands and had the right to collect taxes from lands left in their possession after conquests. The only advantage that the bey, as tribal war leader, had over the chiefs surrounding him was the pençik (“fifth”), or right to collect an extra fifth of the booty taken by his followers. Because the bey was dependent for his power and revenues on the assent of his followers, his authority was limited in scope and in time. As the territory of the Ottoman principality expanded, however, and the Ottomans inherited the administrative apparatus left by the Byzantines, that simple tribal organization was replaced by a more complex form of government. By the time the Ottoman rulers became sultans, they already had far more extensive power and authority than had been the case a half century earlier. The simple tribal organization of the Ottoman bey could suffice only while the state was small enough for the individual tribal leaders to remain on their lands to collect their revenues and fight the nearby enemy at the same time. As the empire expanded and the frontiers and enemies became further removed from previously conquered territory, the financial and administrative functions at home had to be separated from the military. Taxes had to be collected to exploit the conquered territories and support the officers and soldiers while they were away. The treasury of the sultan had to be separated from that of the state so that each would have an independent income and organization.

INSTITUTIONAL EVOLUTION Throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, therefore, the Ottoman state gradually reshaped its government and military institutions to meet the needs of administering and defending an expanding empire. That process naturally was influenced by those states that had preceded the Ottoman Empire, not only in the areas it came to rule but also in the lands of its ancestors. So it was that the developing Ottoman state was influenced by the traditions of the nomadic Turkic empires of Central Asia, particularly in military organization and tactics. It was also heavily influenced by the classical high Islamic civilization of the ʿAbbāsids, as passed through the hands of the Seljuqs, particularly in the development of orthodox Islam as the basis of its administrative, religious, legal, and educational institutions and in the organization of its financial systems. In the court hierarchy, the central financial structure, and the tax and administrative organizations developed in the European provinces, the Ottomans were influenced by the Byzantines and, to a lesser extent, by the Serbian and Bulgarian empires. Although conversion to Islām was not demanded of the conquered, many Christians and a few Jews voluntarily converted to secure full status in the new empire. Most, however, continued to practice their old without restriction.

A particularly important source of Christian influence during the 14th century came from the close marriage ties between the Ottoman and Christian courts. Orhan was married to

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the Byzantine princess Nilüfer, mother of Murad I. Murad married Byzantine and Bulgarian princesses, and Bayezid I married Despina, daughter of the Serbian prince Lazar. Each of those marriages brought Christian followers and advisers into the Ottoman court, and it was under their influence that Bayezid I abandoned the simple nomadic courts and practices of his predecessors and isolated himself behind elaborate court hierarchies and ceremonies borrowed primarily from the Byzantines, setting a pattern that was continued by his successors. The triumph of Sultan Mehmed I in 1413 was at least in part because of the support of the Turkish notables and Muslim religious orders of Anatolia, who strongly resented the Christian predominance in Bayezid’s court and attributed his abandonment of the ghazi tradition and attacks in Turkish Muslim Anatolia—as well as the defeat at the hands of Timur—to Christian influence. As a result, Turkish and Muslim influences dominated the Ottoman court during the 15th century, although the hierarchies, institutions, and ceremonies introduced in the previous century remained largely unchanged. The same process that isolated the sultans from their subjects also removed them from the daily administration of government. Formal institutions of administration therefore evolved to take their place, with the rulers delegating more and more of their duties to executive ministers, to whom the Seljuq title vezir (vizier) was given. The continued close connections of the Ottoman ruling family with the urban guilds and orders of Anatolia, many of the members of which were descendants of officials of the Great Seljuq and Il-Khanid empires, as well as the empire of the Seljuqs of Konya, provided continuity with the Islamic Turkish traditions of government. With them came the basic unit of Islamic administrative and financial organization, the mukâṭaʾa, which associated each office with a source of revenues and made each official the collector of his own salary. At the same time it circumscribed his administrative powers to those tasks directly involved with the financial function. It was relatively simple for the Ottomans to preserve previous methods of local taxation in different parts of the empire while weaving them into a united whole through the veneer provided by the mukâṭaʿa financial units, whose tax revenues were assigned to Ottoman officials. As the central administration was divided into functional departments, a vizier was appointed to direct each. Most of the early were former Turkmen princes who had entered Ottoman service, though some, particularly under Bayezid I, were Christians and Christian converts. State policy was discussed and decided in a council (divan) of those viziers, who were joined by religious, judicial, and military leaders under the direction and chairmanship of the sultan. As the duties of the state became more extensive and complex, the individual viziers gained increased financial and political power, and, as the Byzantine influence caused the sultan to isolate himself, it was inevitable that the viziers would come to dominate the administration. As if to emphasize his removal from the daily affairs of state, the sultan began to appoint one of his viziers as his chief minister, or grand vizier (sadr-ı azem). From 1360 until the conquest of Constantinople, that powerful position was reserved for members of the Candarlı family, which came to lead and represent the powerful and assertive Turkmen notable families; those families thus benefited most from the 14th-century expansion of the empire. The first Ottoman army had been composed entirely of Turkmen nomads, who had remained largely under the command of the religious orders that had converted most of them to Islam. Armed with bows and arrows and spears, those nomadic cavalrymen had lived mostly on booty, although those assigned as ghazis to border areas or sent to conquer and raid Christian lands also had been given more permanent revenues in the form of taxes levied on the lands they garrisoned. Those revenue holdings were formalized as mukâṭaʿas, held by tribal leaders and ghazi commanders who used their revenues to feed, supply, and arm their followers. It was that type of mukâṭaʿa that developed into the Ooman form of fief, the mar, which was the basis of Ottoman military and administrative organization as the European portions of the empire were conquered from the vassals in the 15th century and placed under direct Ottoman administration. Those nomadic troops had predominated through Orhan’s reign, until he saw

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that such undisciplined cavalrymen were of limited use in besieging and taking large cities. In addition, once he had established his state, he had found it difficult to maintain order with such an army because the nomads still preferred to maintain themselves by looting, in the lands of their commander as well as in those of the enemy.

To replace the nomads, Orhan organized a separate standing army of hired mercenaries paid by salary rather than booty or by timar estates. Those mercenaries organized as infantry were called yayas; those organized as cavalry, müsellems. Although the new force included some Turkmens who were content to accept salaries in place of booty, most of its men were Christian soldiers from the who were not required to convert to Islam as long as they obeyed their Ottoman commanders. As Murad I conquered more and more of southeastern Europe, those forces became mainly Christian, and, as they came to dominate the Ottoman army, the older Turkmen cavalry forces were maintained along the frontiers as irregular shock troops, called akıncis, who were compensated only by booty. As the yayas and müsellems expanded in numbers, their salaries became too burdensome for the Ottoman treasury, so in most cases the newly conquered lands were assigned to their commanders in the form of timurs. That new regular army developed the techniques of battle and siege that were used to achieve most of the 14th-century Ottoman conquests, but, because it was commanded by members of the Turkish notable class, it became the major vehicle for their rise to predominance over the sultans, whose direct military supporters were limited to the vassal contingents.

Only late in the 14th century did Murad I and Bayezid I attempt to build up their own personal power by building a military slave force for the sultan under the name kapıkulu. Murad based the new force on his right to a fifth of the war booty, which he interpreted to include captives taken in battle. As those men entered his service, they were converted to Islam and trained as Ottomans, gaining the knowledge and experience required for service in the government as well as the army, while remaining in the sultan’s personal service. During the late 14th century that force—particularly its infantry branch, the Janissary corps—became the most important element of the Ottoman army. The provincial forces maintained and provided by the timar holders constituted the Ottoman cavalry and were called sipahis, while the irregular akıncis and salaried yayas and müsellems were relegated to rear-line duties and lost their military and political importance. But, when Bayezid I abandoned the ghazi tradition and moved into Anatolia, he lost the support of the Turkish notables and their sipahis before his new kapıkulu army was fully established. He therefore had to rely only on the Christian vassal forces at the Battle of Ankara (1402), and, although they demonstrated considerable valour and fighting ability, they were overwhelmed by Timur’s powerful army.

When the Ottoman Empire was restored under Sultan Mehmed I, the Turkish notables, in order to deprive the sultan of the only military force he could use to resist their control, required him to abandon the kapıkulu, justifying the action on the basis of the Islamic tradition that Muslims could not be kept in slavery. The European and Anatolian revolts that arose early in the reign of Murad II were at least partly stimulated and supported by members of the kapıkulu, as well as the Christian slaves and vassals who had been losing their power to the Turkish notables. As soon as Murad II came to power, however, he resumed earlier efforts to make the sultanate more independent, building up the strength of the Janissaries and their associates and playing them off against the notables. He distributed most of his conquests to members of the kapıkulu force, occasionally as timars but more often as tax farms (iltizāms), so that the treasury could obtain the money it needed to maintain the Janissary army entirely on a

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salaried basis. In addition, in order to man the new force, Murad developed the devşirme system of recruiting the best Christian youths from southeastern Europe.

Whereas Mehmed II used the conquest of Constantinople to destroy the major Turkish notable families and build up the power of the devşirme, Murad sought only to establish a balance of power and function between the two groups so that he could use and control both for the benefit of the empire. Thus he enlarged the concept of kapıkulu to include members of the Turkish nobility and their Turkmen sipahis as well as the products of the devşirme. Now only persons accepting the status of slaves of the sultan could hold positions in the Ottoman government and army. Persons of Muslim and non-Muslim origin could achieve that status as long as they accepted the limitations involved: absolute obedience to their master and the devotion of their lives, properties, and families to his service. From then on, all important ministers, military officers, judges, , timar holders, tax farmers, Janissaries, sipahis, and the like were made members of that class and attached to the will and service of the sultan. The salaried Janissary corps remained the primary source of strength of the devşirme class, whereas the sipahis and the timar system remained the bases of power of the Turkish notables. Mehmed II thus avoided the fate of the great Middle Eastern empires that had preceded that of the Ottomans, in which rule had been shared among members of the ruling dynasty and with others and rapid disintegration had resulted. The Ottomans established the principle of indivisibility of rule, with all members of the ruling class subjected to the absolute will of the sultan

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