Western Civilization A Concise History
Western Civilization A Concise History
Western Civilization A Concise History
Christopher Brooks
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Table of Contents
First Part
Introduction 3
Chapter 2: Egypt 36
3
Chapter 10: The Late Empire and Christianity 190
Second Part
Introduction 3
4
Chapter 8: Absolutism 147
Third Part
Introduction 3
Chapter 1: Napoleon 16
5
Chapter 6: Imperialism 115
Chapter 12: The Soviet Union and the Cold War 222
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The Idea of Western Civilization
Introduction
it? Like all ideas, the concept of Western Civilization itself has a history, one
that coalesced in college textbooks and curriculums for the first time in the
United States in the 1920s. In many ways, the very idea of Western
others as if they were distinct, even unrelated. Thus, before examining the
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Where is the West?
attitudes. The obvious answer is that “the West” has something to do with
Europe. If the area including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Israel -
Palestine, and Egypt is somewhere called the “Middle” or “Near” East, doesn't
In fact, we get the original term from Greece. Greece is the center-point,
east of the Balkan Peninsula was east, west of the Balkans was west, and the
Greeks were at the center of their self-understood world. Likewise, the sea
that both separated and united the Greeks and their neighbors, including the
Egyptians and the Persians, is still called the Mediterranean, which means “sea
in the middle of the earth” (albeit in Latin, not Greek - we get the word from a
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around the Mediterranean treated it as the center of the world itself, their
major trade route to one another and a major source of their food as well.
To the Greeks, there were two kinds of people: Greeks and barbarians
(the Greek word is barbaros). Supposedly, the word barbarian came from
Greeks traded with all of their neighbors and knew perfectly well that the
Persians and the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, among others, were not their
inferiors in learning, art, or political organization, but the fact remains that
they were not Greek, either. Thus, one of the core themes of Western
Civilization is that right from its inception, of the east being east of Greece and
the west being west of Greece, and of the world being divided between Greeks
and barbarians, there was an idea of who is central and superior, and who is
out on the edges and inferior (or at least not part of the best version of
culture).
In a sense, then, the Greeks invented the idea of west and east, but they
did not extend the idea to anyone but themselves, certainly including the
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“barbarians” who inhabited the rest of Europe. In other words, the Greeks did
barbarian. Likewise, the Greeks did not invent “civilization” itself; they
inherited things like agriculture and writing from their neighbors. Neither
was there ever a united Greek empire: there was a great Greek civilization
when Alexander the Great conquered what he thought was most of the world,
stretching from Greece itself through Egypt, the Middle East, as far as western
India, but it collapsed into feuding kingdoms after he died. Thus, while later
cultures came to look to the Greeks as their intellectual and cultural ancestors,
the Greeks themselves did not set out to found “Western Civilization” itself.
Mesopotamia
Greece, this one does not. That is because civilization is not Greek in its
origins. The most ancient human civilizations arose in the Fertile Crescent, an
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and into Iraq. Closely related, and lying within the Fertile Crescent, is the
region of Mesopotamia, which is the area between the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers in present-day Iraq. In these areas, people invented the most crucial
including:
Cities: note that in English, the very word “civilization” is closely related
some people concentrate all of their time and energy on tasks like art,
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grew larger and lasted longer than those that neglected
Large-scale warfare: even before large cities existed, the first towns
were built with fortifications to stave off attackers. It is very likely that
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Astronomy: just as math is necessary for engineering, astronomy is
the stars and other heavenly bodies because they needed to be able to
track when to plant crops, when to harvest, and when religious rituals
had to be carried out. Among other things, the Mesopotamians were the
first to discover the 365 (and a quarter) days of the year and set those
ethnically. The Mesopotamians were the first to conquer and rule over
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considering Western Civilization, it would be misleading to start with the
Greeks and skip places like Mesopotamia, because those areas were the
their importance. Alexander the Great was one of the most famous and
world” when he was eighteen years old. When he died his empire fell apart, in
part because he did not say which of his generals was to take over after his
their buildings, putting on plays in the Greek style, and of course, trading with
one another. This period in history was called the Hellenistic Age. The people
who were part of that age were European, Middle Eastern, and North African,
people who worshiped both Greeks gods and the gods of their own regions,
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spoke all kinds of different languages, and lived as part of a hybrid
Civilization was ancient Rome. Over the course of roughly five centuries, the
Romans expanded from the city of Rome in the middle of the Italian peninsula
to rule an empire that stretched from Britain to Spain and from North Africa
work of Roman citizens and Roman subjects, and the massive use of slave
labor, they built remarkable buildings and created infrastructure like roads
The Romans are the ones who give us the idea of Western Civilization
being something ongoing – something that had started in the past and
continued into the future. In the case of the Romans, they (sometimes
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used Greek shapes and forms, the Roman gods were really just the Greek gods
given new names (Zeus became Jupiter, Hades became Pluto, etc.), and
educated Romans spoke and read Greek so that they could read the works of
the great Greek poets, playwrights, and philosophers. Thus, the Romans
an ongoing civilization that blended Greek and Roman values. Like the Greeks
before them, they also divided civilization itself in a stark binary: there was
Greco-Roman culture on the one hand and barbarism on the other, although
conquered. They united their provinces with the Latin language, which is the
(French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc.), Roman Law, which is the ancestor of
most forms of law still in use today in Europe, and the Roman form of
government. Along with those factors, the Romans brought Greek and Roman
science, learning, and literature. In many ways, the Romans believed that they
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were bringing civilization itself everywhere they went, and because they
made the connection between Greek civilization and their own, they played a
was ongoing.
That noted, the Romans did not use the term “Western Civilization” and
as their empire expanded, even the connection between Roman identity and
Italy itself weakened. During the period that the empire was at its height the
bulk of the population and wealth was in the east, concentrated in Egypt,
the Levant. This shift to the east culminated in the move of the capital of the
empire from the city of Rome to the Greek town of Byzantium, renamed
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The Middle Ages and Christianity
came about after Rome ceased to exist as a united empire, during the era
known as the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were the period between the fall
of Rome, which happened around 476 CE, and the Renaissance, which started
around 1300 CE. During the Middle Ages, another concept of what lay at the
religion. The Roman Empire had started to become Christian in the early
Christianity. Many Europeans in the Middle Ages came to believe that, despite
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the fact that they spoke different languages and had different rulers, they
Western Civilization. It inspired amazing art and music. It was at the heart of
other religions were infidels (meaning "those who are unfaithful," those who
worshipped the correct God, but in the wrong way, including Jews and
Muslims, but also Christians who deviated from official orthodoxy) or pagans
exterminated. For instance, despite the fact that Muslims and Jews worshiped
the same God and shared much of the same sacred literature, medieval
eventually drove many Jews from Europe itself to take shelter in the kingdoms
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and empires of the Middle East and North Africa. Historically it was much
safer and more comfortable for Jews in places like the predominantly Muslim
both Judaism and Christianity. Its holy writings are also closely aligned to
Jewish and Christian values and thought. Perhaps most importantly, Islamic
kingdoms and empires were part of the networks of trade, scholarship, and
exchange that linked together the entire greater Mediterranean region. Thus,
to separate Islamic states and cultures from the rest of Western Civilization.
Civilization in the pre-modern period was the Renaissance. The idea of the
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“Middle Ages” was invented by thinkers during the Renaissance, which started
around 1300 CE. The great thinkers and artists of the Renaissance claimed to
be moving away from the ignorance and darkness of the Middle Ages – which
they also described as the “dark ages” - and returning to the greatness of the
de Pizan, and Petrarch proudly connected their work to the work of the
Romans and Greeks, claiming that there was an unbroken chain of ideas,
virtues, and accomplishments stretching all the way back thousands of years
thousand years after the life of the Greek philosopher Plato based their own
in Roman and Greek art. The scientific discoveries of the Renaissance were
inspired by the same spirit of inquiry that Greek scientists and Roman
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proudly linked together their own era to that of the Greeks and Romans, thus
rhetoric (among other subjects) with the cultivation of an ethical code the
program of education remained intact into the twentieth century, with the
university system that was born near the end of the nineteenth century.
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It was not Renaissance ideas, however, that had the greatest impact on
the globe at the time. Instead, it was European soldiers, colonists, and most
consequentially, diseases. The first people from the Eastern Hemisphere since
Viking colony did not survive) were European explorers who, entirely by
accident, “discovered” the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century CE. It
people already lived there, as their ancestors had for thousands of years, but
geography had left them ill-prepared for the arrival of the newcomers. With
peoples of the Americas had no resistance, and within a few generations the
descendents was thus made vastly easier. Europeans suddenly had access to
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Thanks largely to the European conquest of the Americas and the
exploitation of its resources and its people, Europe went from a region of little
economic and military power and importance to one of the most formidable in
Central and South America, the other major European states embarked on
emerged over the course of the seventeenth century, first and foremost those
of the Dutch and English, which established the precedent that profit and
and growing, global empires. By 1800, roughly 35% of the surface of the
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many regions of Africa, but (in an ironic reversal of the impact of European
explorers and conquerors were unable to penetrate beyond the coasts of most
empires and kingdoms of China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and South Asia (i.e.
little importance. The Middle East was dominated by two powerful and
The explosion of European power, one that coincided with the fruition
of the idea that Western Civilization was both distinct from and better than
of the eighteenth century, Europeans learned how to exploit fossil fuels in the
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wealth, and military power, this time built on the backs not of outright slaves,
roughly 85% of the globe. Europeans either forced foreign states to concede
South Asia (i.e. India) and Africa. None of this would have been possible
To Europeans and North Americans, however, the reason that they had
come to enjoy such wealth and power was not because of a (temporary)
their inherent biological and cultural superiority. The idea that the human
species was divided into biologically distinct races was not entirely invented
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in the nineteenth century, but it became the predominant outlook and
acquired all the trappings of a “science” over the course of the 1800s. By the
year 1900, almost any person of European descent would have claimed to be
part of a distinct, superior “race” whose global dominance was simply part of
That conceit arrived at its zenith in the first half of the twentieth
century. The European powers themselves fell upon one another in the First
global dominance. Soon after, the new (related) ideologies of fascism and
Nazism put racial superiority at the very center of their worldviews. The
Second World War was the direct result of those ideologies, when racial
warfare was unleashed for the first time not just on members of races
that fascists and Nazis now considered inferior races in their own right, most
million deaths, including the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and at
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least 25 million citizens of the Soviet Union, another “racial” enemy from the
It was against the backdrop of this descent into what Europeans and
civilization that started with the Greeks - that the history of Western
Civilization first came into being as a textbook topic and, soon, a mainstay of
historians, came to believe that the best way to defend the elements of
that may not have strictly speaking started in Europe, but which enjoyed its
greatest success there. The early proponents of the “Western Civ” concept
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ideas, technologies, and cultural achievements that led to the present. Along
the way, of course, they included the United States as both a product of those
crafting what was to be the core of history curriculums for most of the
schools. The narrative in the introduction in this book follows its basic
contours, without all of the qualifying remarks: it starts with Greece, goes
through Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, then on to the growth in
European power leading up to the recent past. The traditional story made a
hard and fast distinction between Western Civilization as the site of progress,
and the rest of the world (usually referred to as the “Orient,” simply meaning
“east,” all the way up until textbooks started changing their terms in the
1980s) which invariably lagged behind. Outside of the West, went the
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narrative, there was despotism, stagnation, and corruption, so it was almost
“civilized” culture had imploded with the world wars, but the inventors of
legacy from that implosion, but to celebrate it as the only major historical
legacy of relevance to the present. In doing so, they reinforced many of the
intellectual dividing lines created centuries earlier: there was true civilization
achievement and progress, and most importantly, only people who were born
role. The entire history of most of humankind was not just irrelevant to the
the modern world for everyone. In other words, even Africans and Asians, to
say nothing of the people of the Pacific or Native Americans, could have little
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of relevance to learn from their own history that was not somehow “obsolete”
in the modern era. And yet, this astonishing conclusion was born from a
textbooks, focusing in many cases on the critical historical role of the Middle
East, not just Europe. It also abandons the pretense that the history of
Western Civilization was generally progressive, with the conditions of life and
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understanding of the natural world of most people improving over time (as a
in “the West.” Technologies as diverse and important as the steam engine and
movements calling for religious toleration, equality before the law, and
feminism all came into being in the West. For better and for worse, the West
was also the point of origin of true globalization (starting with the European
events that occurred in the West over approximately the last 10,000
years. “Balance” is in the eye of the reader, however, so the account will not
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the background and the framework that informed the writing of the book, and
knowledge that many others will have the opportunity to modify it as they see
fit.
Finally, a note on the kind of history this textbook covers is in order. For
social, and so on. Historians have made enormous strides in the last sixty
importantly in considering the histories of the people who were not in power,
including the common people of various epochs, of women for almost all of
history, and of slaves and servants. The old adage that “history is written by
the winners” is simply untrue - history has left behind mountains of evidence
about the lives of those who had access to less personal autonomy than did
social elites. Those elites did much to author some of the most familiar
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historical narratives, but those traditional narratives have been under
This textbook tries to address at least some of those histories, but here
it will be found wanting by many. Given the vast breadth of history covered in
its chapters, the bulk of the consideration is on “high level” political history,
political changes. There are two reasons for that approach. First, the history
of political history (one that infuriates many professional historians, who are
trained to identify and study complexity). Political history can thus serve as
The other, related, reason for the political framing of this textbook is
that history has long since declined as a subject central to education from the
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elementary through high school levels in many parts of the United States. It is
no longer possible to assume that anyone who has completed high school
already has some idea of major (measured by their impact at the time and
since) events of the past. This textbook attempts to use political history as,
that changed the world at the time and continue to exert an influence in the
present.
an extent, religious history. Social and cultural history are covered in less
detail, both for reasons of space and the simple fact that the author was
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The second edition of this textbook attempts to redress some of the
greater emphasis is placed on the history of the Middle East, especially in the
period after the collapse of the political authority of the Abbasid Caliphate in
the ninth century CE. The textbook now addresses the histories of Persia
(Iran) and the Ottoman Empire in considerable detail, emphasizing both their
relationships with other cultures. Second, much greater focus is given to the
From the perspective of the author, the new material on the Middle East
political history. The material on gender and women’s history requires a shift
in the overall approach of the textbook in that women were almost entirely
few women were ever in positions of political authority until the recent
past. The shift in focus to include more women’s history necessarily entails
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greater emphasis not just on gender roles, but on the social history of
everyday life, stepping away at times from the political history framework of
the volumes as a whole. The result is a broader and more robust historical
account than that of the earlier edition, although the overarching narrative is
proper nouns. For example, terms like “the Church” when referring to the
Europe,” and historical eras like “the Middle Ages” and “the Enlightenment”
are all capitalized. When possible, the names of individuals are kept as close
“Nikolai I” instead of “Nicholas I.” Some exceptions have been made to avoid
instead of the more accurate “Iosif Stalin.” Diacritical marks are kept when
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possible in original spellings, as in the term “Führer” when discussing Adolf
Hitler. Herculean efforts have gone into reducing the number of semicolons
Introduction
civilization and its opposite, barbarism, with “civilized” people often eager to
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foundational technologies, most significantly agriculture, combined with a
slow kind in the case of the pre-modern world), and cultural sophistication as
In turn, the study of civilization has been the traditional focus of history,
fields became specialized over the course of the 1800s CE, history identified
itself as the study of the past based on written artifacts. A sister field,
tools). Thus, for practical reasons, the subject of “history” as a field of study
begins with the invention of writing, something that began with the earliest
civilization itself, that of the Fertile Crescent (described below). That being
few written records remain from the remote past that most historians of the
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ancient world also perform archeological research, and all archeologists are
also at least conversant with the relevant histories of their areas of study.
Hominids
biological classification that includes the advanced apes like chimpanzees. The
examples of biological “species” within that family) that evolved about 3.9
loping across the ground on all fours rather than standing upright, with brains
about one-third the size of the modern human brain. They were the first to
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building on the genetic advantages of having a large brain and being able to
which gets its name from the fact that it was the first hominid to walk upright.
It also benefited from a brain three-fourths the size of the modern human
had Australopithecus, and survived until about 200,000 years ago, by which
time the earliest Homo sapiens – humans – had long since evolved alongside
them.
sophisticated bone and stone implements, including weapons and tools, and
also mastered the use of fire. They were thus able to hunt and protect
themselves from animals that had far better natural weapons, and (through
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cooking) eat meat that would have been indigestible raw. Likewise, animal
skins served as clothes and shelter, allowing them to exist in climates that
Homo sapiens was split between two distinct types, physically different
but able to interbreed, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sapiens (the latter
term means “the wisest man” in Greek). Neanderthals enjoyed a long period
of existence between about 400,000 and 70,000 years ago, spreading from
Africa to the Middle East and Europe. They were physically larger and
stronger than Homo sapiens sapiens and were able to survive in colder
conditions, which was a key asset during the long ice age that began around
how these exchanges were negotiated - the evidence of their lifestyle is drawn
Homo sapiens sapiens were weaker and less able to deal with harsh
42
years after Neanderthals had spread to other regions. They did enjoy some
2019) demonstrated that Homo sapiens sapiens reached Europe and the Near
Homo sapiens sapiens spread to the Middle East and Europe and started both
interbreeding with and - probably - slowly killing off the Neanderthals, who
vanished soon after. By that time, Homo sapiens sapiens was already in the
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Of the advanced hominids, only homo sapiens spread around the entire globe.
ago (with the exception of the Americas, which took until about 15,000 years
ago). During an ice age, humans traveled overland on the Bering Land Bridge,
a chunk of land that used to connect eastern Russia to Alaska, and arrived in
the Americas. Later, very enterprising ancient humans built seagoing canoes
and settled in many of the Pacific Islands. Thus, well before ancient humans
had developed the essential technologies that are normally connotated with
sapiens’ brain power was the creation of both art and spirituality. Early Homo
southern France, and at some point they also began the practice of burying the
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dead in prepared grave sites, indicating that they believed that the spirit
prehistory clearly indicate that Homo sapiens was not only creating physical
tools to prosper, but creating art and belief systems in an attempt to make
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Thus, human beings have existed all over the world for many thousands
of years. Human civilization, however, has not. The word civilization is tied to
the Greek word for city, along with words like “civil” and “civic.” The key
element of the definition is the idea that a large number of people come
group. Once that occurred other discoveries and developments, from writing
Up until that point in history, however, cities had not been possible
because there was never enough food to sustain a large group that stayed in a
single place for long. Ancient humans were hunter-gatherers. They followed
herds of animals on the hunt and they gathered edible plants as well. This
the basis of life for the very people who populated the world as described
that is, of food, and thus population levels among hunting-gathering people
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were generally static. There just was not enough food to sustain significant
population growth.
plants. People discovered that certain seeds could be planted and crops could
be reliably grown. Sometimes after that, people in the same regions began to
controlled conditions, defending them from predators, and eating them and
were. Even fairly primitive agriculture can produce fifty times more caloric
energy than hunting and gathering does. The very basis of human life is how
much energy we can derive from food; with agriculture and animal
domestication, it was possible for families to grow much larger and overall
gathering people actually had much more leisure time than farmers did (and
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were also healthier and longer-lived). Archaeologists and anthropologists
few hours a day, and spent the rest of their time in leisure
activities. Meanwhile, farmers have always worked incredibly hard for very
long hours; in many places in the ancient world, there were groups of people
quite possible they did that because they saw no particular advantage in
adopting agriculture. There were also many areas that practiced both – right
up until the modern era, many farmers also foraged in areas of semi-
in one place and then spread; it started in a few distinct areas and then spread
from those areas, sometimes meeting in the middle. For example, agriculture
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the Americas (starting in western South America) had nothing to do with its
were Mesopotamia and Egypt, because it was from those regions that the
Europe; it was in the Middle East and North Africa. Many of the different
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The earliest sites of agriculture emerged in the Fertile Crescent, the region encompassing Egypt
50
Early agriculture, the kind of agriculture that made later advances in
with shovels and picks. There were some important technological discoveries
that took place over time that allowed much greater crop yields,
field each year, then “rotating” to the next field in the next year. Every
and animals can graze on it. This process serves to return nutrients to
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2. The metal plow, which people invented around 5000 BCE. Plows are
together in order to coordinate the need for irrigation systems; the Tigris and
human effort to create the dikes and canals necessary to divert floodwaters
and irrigate the farmlands near the rivers. Recent archaeological evidence
suggests other motives, however, including the need for protection from rival
area.
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Of the areas in which agriculture developed, the Fertile Crescent
enjoyed significant advantages. Many nutritious staple crops like wheat and
barley grew naturally in the region. Several of the key animal species that
were first domesticated by humans were also native to the region, including
goats, sheep, and cows. The region was also much more temperate and fertile
than it is today, and the transition from hunting and gathering to large-scale
farming was possible in Mesopotamia in a way that it was not in most other
The food surplus that agriculture made possible in the Fertile Crescent
eventually led to the emergence of the first large settlements. Some of the
earliest that were large enough to quality as towns or even small cities were
Jericho in Palestine, which existed by about 8000 BCE, and Çatal Höyük in
Turkey, which existed by about 7500 BCE. There were certainly many others
in the Fertile Crescent, but due to their antiquity the remains of only a few -
archaeologists.
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From their remains it becomes possible to piece together certain facts
about ancient societies on the cusp of civilization. First, it is clear that the
gatherer societies have very few social divisions; there may be chiefs and
shamans, but all members of the group are roughly equal in social power. One
with them, of social hierarchy. In Çatal Höyük, tombs have revealed that some
people were buried with jewelry and wealth, while others were buried with
practically nothing. It is very clear that even at such an ancient time, there
That wealth was based on access to natural resources. Çatal Höyük was
built on a site that had a large deposit of obsidian (also called volcanic
weapons. Tools made from Çatal Höyük's obsidian have been discovered by
archaeologists hundreds of miles from Çatal Höyük itself; thus, it is clear that
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obsidian for other goods with other towns and villages. In essence, Çatal
Höyük's trade in obsidian proves that specialized manufacturing (in this case,
of obsidian tools) and trade networks have been around since the dawn of
civilization itself.
are only possible when there is a food surplus. If everyone has to work all the
time to get enough food, there is little time left over for anyone to specialize in
other activities. The reason that hunter-gatherer societies produce little in the
way of scholarship or technology is that they do not have the resources for
possible for the first time in history, however, not everyone had to work on
getting enough food, and soon, certain people managed to lay claim to new
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the settlement archaeologists have found dozens of shrines to ancient gods
understand how the world worked. In turn, priests were probably the world's
first intellectuals, people who use their minds for a living. Priests probably
directed the efforts to build irrigation systems and made the decisions about
building and rebuilding the town since they had a monopoly on explaining the
larger forces at work in human life. Especially in a period like the ancient past
when natural forces – forces like floods and disease - were vastly more
powerful than the ability of humans to control them, priests were the only
Not just in Mesopotamia, but all around the ancient world, there is
fertility and death. One example of this are the “Venus figurines” depicting
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seen from all over the ancient Middle East and Europe, demonstrating that
ancient peoples hoped to shape the forces that were most important to
them. Early religions hoped to ensure fertility and stave off the many natural
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The earliest surviving work of literature in the world, the
Mesopotamian story known as The Epic of Gilgamesh, was obsessed with the
theme of human mortality. Ancient peoples already sensed that human beings
were in the process of accomplishing things that had never been accomplished
technologies, and the invention of organized religions, and yet they also
sensed that the human experience could be fraught with misery, despair, and
what seemed like totally unfair and arbitrary disasters. And, as the Epic of
Gilgamesh demonstrates, ancient peoples were well aware that no matter how
human condition,” and it is one that ancient peoples grappled with in their
religious systems.
Mesopotamia
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Mesopotamia, on the eastern end of the Fertile Crescent, was the cradle
of Western Civilization. It has the distinction of being the very first place on
Greek, meaning “between the rivers,” and it refers to the area between the
Tigris and Euphrates, two of the most important waterways in the ancient
world. It is no coincidence that it was here that civilization was born: like
nearby Egypt and the Nile river, early agriculture relied on a regular supply of
they needed for agriculture, they just had to figure out how to cultivate cereals
and grains (natural varieties of which naturally occurred in the area, as noted
in the last chapter) and how to manage the sudden floods of both rivers.
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Mesopotamia’s climate was much more temperate and fertile than it is
grassland that could support both large herds of animals and abundant crops.
Thus, between the water provided by the rivers and their tributaries, the
temperate climate, and the prevalence of the plant and animal species in the
area that were candidates for domestication, Mesopotamia was better suited
While the Tigris and Euphrates provided abundant water, they were
500 kilometers of distance, meaning the riverbeds of both rivers would have
shifted and spread out over the plains in the annual floods. Over time, the
larger-scale levees, canals, and dikes to protect against the floods. One theory
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got together to work on these hydrological systems, they needed some kind of
administration. Thus, the earliest cities in the world may have been born not
just out of agriculture, but out of the need to manage the natural resource of
water.
The first settlements that straddled the line between “towns” and real
“cities” existed around 4000 BCE, but a truly urban society in Mesopotamia
was in place closer 3000 BCE, wherein a few dozen city-states managed the
waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. A note on the chronology: the town of
Çatal Höyük discussed above existed over four thousand years before the first
textbook), it can seem like it all happened quite rapidly, that people
discovered agriculture and soon they were building massive cities and
developing advanced technology. That simply was not the case: compared to
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things moved “quickly,” but from a modern perspective, it took a very long
agriculture and the emergence of large cities (again, between about 8,000 BCE
and 4000 BCE) is that a hybrid lifestyle of farming and gathering appears to
have been very common in the large wetlands along the banks of the
Euphrates and Tigris. Given the richness of dietary options in the region at
the time, people lived in small communities for millenia without feeling
(i.e. both slavery and forms of indentured labor). In turn, this appears to have
occurred in the areas that grew cereal grains like wheat and barley
extensively, because cereal grains were easy to collect and store, making them
easy to tax.
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The result of these new hierarchies were the first true cities emerged in
the southern region of Sumer. There, the two rivers join in a large delta that
flows into the Persian Gulf. Farther up the rivers, the northern region of
lingual: ancient Sumerian is not related to any modern language, but the
One early Sumerian city was Uruk, which was a large city by 3500
BCE. Uruk had about 50,000 people in the city itself and the surrounding
region. It was a major center for long-distance trade, with its trade networks
stretching all across the Middle East and as far east as the Indus river valley of
India, with merchants relying on caravans of donkeys and the use of wheeled
call “redistributive,” in which a central authority has the right to control all
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economic activity, essentially taxing all of it, and then re-distributing it as that
“pay” (sometimes in daily allotments of food and beer) workers tasked with
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The influence of Sumerian civilization was felt all over the Mesopotamian region. The above
map depicts the “Urukean expansion,” a period in the fourth millennium BCE in which Sumerian
material culture (and presumably Sumerian people) spread hundreds of miles from Sumer itself.
from both priesthoods and the warrior elite, with the two classes working
closely together in governing the cities. Each Mesopotamian city was believed
and sacrifices. The priests of Uruk predicted the future and explained the
present in terms of the will of the gods, and they claimed to be able to
influence the gods through their rituals. They claimed all of the economic
output of Uruk and its trade network because the city’s patron god “owned”
the city, which justified the priesthood's control. They did not only tax the
wealth, the crops, and the goods of the subjects of Uruk, but they also had a
right to demand labor, requiring the common people (i.e. almost everyone) to
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work on the irrigation systems, the temples, and the other major public
buildings.
Meanwhile, the first kings were almost certainly war leaders who led
their city-states against rival city-states and against foreign invaders. They
soon ascended to positions of political power in their cities, working with the
priesthood endorsed the idea that the gods had chosen the kings to rule, a
belief that quickly bled over into the idea that the kings were at least in part
divine themselves. Kings had superseded priests as the rulers by about 3000
BCE, although in all cases kings were closely linked to the power of the
priesthood. In fact, one of the earliest terms for “king” was ensis, meaning the
representative of the god who “really” ruled the city. Thus, the typical early
in long-distance trade, ruled by a king who worked closely with the city's
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Belief, Thought and Learning
capricious, and easily offended. Humans had been created by the gods not to
enjoy life, but to toil, and the gods would inflict pain and suffering on humans
whenever they (the gods) were offended. A major element of the power of the
priesthood in the Mesopotamian cities was the fact that the priests claimed to
be able to soothe and assuage the gods, to prevent the gods from sending yet
another devastating flood, epidemic, or plague of locusts. It is not too far off to
say that the most important duty of Mesopotamian priests was to beg the gods
for mercy.
above, each city had its own specific patron deity who “owned” and took
particular interest in the affairs of that city. In the center of each city was a
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today. Unlike the Egyptian pyramids that came later, Mesopotamian ziggurats
were not tombs, but temples, and as such they were the centerpieces of the
great cities. They were not just the centers of worship, but were also banks
and workshops, with the priests overseeing the exchange of wealth and the
production of crafts.
them in star charts. They invented functional wagons and chariots and, as
seen in the case of both ziggurats and irrigation systems, they were excellent
engineers. They also invented the 360 degrees used to measure angles in
geometry and they were the first to divide a system of timekeeping that used a
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At the same time, however, the Mesopotamians employed “magical”
practices. The priests did not just conduct sacrifices to the gods, they
practiced the art of divination: the practice of trying to predict the future. To
them, magic and science were all aspects of the same pursuit, namely trying to
learn about how the universe functioned so that human beings could influence
was little that distinguished religious and magical practices from “real”
science in the modern sense. Their goals were the same, and the
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used just for record-keeping, writing soon evolved into the creation of true
forms of literature.
An example of cuneiform script, carved into a stone tablet, dating from c. 2400 BCE.
The first known author in history whose name and some of whose
the high priestess of the goddess Innana and the god of the moon, Nanna, in
the city of Ur after its conquest by Sargon’s forces. Enheduanna wrote a series
of hymns to the gods that established her as the earliest poet in recorded
history, praising Innana and, at one point, asking for the aid of the gods during
Gilgamesh, the earliest surviving work of literature, it is the best known of the
partly-divine king of the city of Uruk, Gilgamesh, who is joined by his friend
Enkidu as they fight monsters, build great works, and celebrate their own
power and greatness. Enkidu is punished by the gods for their arrogance and
realizes that he, too, will someday die. In the end, immortality is taken from
very sophisticated and recognizable set of issues: the qualities that make a
good leader, human failings and frailty, the power and importance of
friendship, and the unfairness of fate. Likewise, a central focus of the epic is
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death. Death’s seeming unfairness is a distinctly philosophical concern that
law code is that of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, dating from about 1780
BCE. Hammurabi's law code went into great detail about the rights and
or aristocratic citizens, commoners, and slaves, treating the same crimes very
differently. The laws speak to a deep concern with fairness – the code tried to
protect people from unfair terms on loans, it provided redress for damaged
property, it even held city officials responsible for catching criminals. It also
included legal protections for women in various ways. While women were
unquestionably secondary to men in their legal status, the Code still afforded
them more rights and protections than did many codes of law that emerged
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War and Empire
warfare. Mesopotamian cities always had walls – some of which were 30 feet
that most soldiers were peasant conscripts with little or no armor and light
offense, making the actual conquest of foreign cities very difficult if not
impossible, and hence while cities were around for thousands of years (again,
from about 3500 BCE), there were no empires yet. Cities warred on one
another for territory, captives, and riches, but they rarely succeeded in
conquering other cities outright. War was instead primarily about territorial
raids and perhaps noble combats meant to demonstrate strength and power.
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were clumsy and hard to maneuver. They were still very effective against
massed groups of chariots carrying archers who shot at each other. Noble
charioteers and archers could win glory for their skill, even though these
battles were probably not very lethal (compared to later forms of war, at any
rate).
The first time that a single military leader managed to conquer and
unite many of the Mesopotamian cities was in about 2340 BCE, when the king
described above), conquered almost all of the major Mesopotamian cities and
forged the world's first true empire, in the process uniting the regions of
Akkad and Sumer. His empire appears to have held together for about
another century, until somewhere around 2200 BCE. Sargon also created the
world's first standing army, a group of soldiers employed by the state who did
not have other jobs or duties. One inscription claims that “5,400 soldiers ate
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daily in his palace,” and there are pictures not only of soldiers, but of siege
weapons and mining (digging under the walls of enemy fortifications to cause
them to collapse).
The expansion of Sargon’s empire, which eventually stretched from present-day Lebanon to
Sumer.
Sargon himself was born an illegitimate child and was, at one point, a
royal gardener who worked his way up in the palace, eventually seizing power
in a coup. He boasted about his lowly origins and claimed to protect and
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governors in his conquered cities, and his whole empire was designed to
extract wealth from all of its cities and farmlands and pump it back to the
his descendents did their best to hold on to power, the resentment of the
The next major Mesopotamian empire was the “Ur III” dynasty, named
after the city-state of Ur which served as its capital and founded in about 2112
BCE. Just as Sargon had, the king Ur-Nammu conquered and united most of
III dynasty was its complex system of bureaucracy, which was more effective
particularly exciting to most people. The fact remains that there is no more
efficient way yet invented to manage large groups of people: it was viable to
coordinate small groups through the personal control and influence of a few
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individuals, but as cities grew and empires formed, it became untenable to
bureaucracy, one in which the individual people who were part of it were less
important than the system itself (i.e. its rules, its records, and its chain of
empire. Historians have more records of this dynasty than any other from this
regulations. The kings of Ur III were very adept at playing off their civic and
other cities and making sure that each governor's power relied on his loyalty
to the king. The administration of the Ur III dynasty divided the empire into
three distinct tax regions, and its tax bureaucracy collected wealth without
alienating the conquered peoples as much as Sargon and his descendants had
(despite its relative success, Ur III, too, eventually collapsed, although it was
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Finally, there was the great empire of Hammurabi (which lasted from
1792 – 1595 BCE), the author of the code of laws noted above. By about 1780
BCE, Hammurabi conquered many of the city-states near Babylon in the heart
of Mesopotamia. He was not only concerned with laws, but also with ensuring
dictator who looked after his subjects. The Babylonian empire re-centered
culture was that they were very precarious. Their bureaucracies were not
rebellions were frequent. There was also the constant threat of what the
surviving texts refer to as “bandits,” which in this context means the same
great steppes of Central Asia, the source of limitless and almost nonstop
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invasions throughout ancient history. Nomads from the steppe regions were
the first to domesticate horses, and for thousands of years only steppe peoples
knew how to fight directly from horseback instead of using chariots. Thus, the
rulers of the Mesopotamian city-states and empires all had to contend with
policing their borders against a foe they could not pursue, while still
This precarity was responsible for the fact that these early empires
were not especially long-lasting, and were unable to conquer territory outside
of Mesopotamia itself. What came afterwards were the first early empires
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Venus figurine - Nevit Dilmen
Cuneiform - Salvor
Chapter 2: Egypt
cruel and arbitrary and thought that human existence was not a very pleasant
experience. This attitude was not only shaped by all of the things that ancient
people did not understand, like disease, weather, and death itself, but by the
simple fact that it was often difficult to live next to the Tigris and Euphrates
to be useful for irrigation. Likewise, the threat of invasion from both rival
cities and from foreigners (both “barbarians” and more organized groups)
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threatened to disrupt whatever stability existed. Life for most
Mesopotamians, especially the vast majority who were common farmers, was
not easy.
Things were a bit different in the other great ancient civilization of the
of the Nile river. The Nile is the world's longest river, stretching over 4,000
miles from its mouth in the Mediterranean to its origin in Lake Victoria in
Central Africa. Because of consistent weather patterns, the Nile floods every
year at just about the same time (late summer), depositing enormous amounts
of mud and silt along its banks and making it one of the most fertile regions in
the world. The essential source of energy for the Egyptians was thus
something that could be predicted and planned for in a way that was
(despite new kings and new dynasties and the occasional foreign invasion)
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The Egyptians themselves called the Nile valley “Kemet,” the Black Land,
because of the annually-renewed black soil that arrived with the flood. For
the most part, this was ancient Egypt: a swath of land between 10 and 20
incredibly fertile soil that relied on the floods of the Nile. This land was so
created an enormous surplus of wealth for the royal government, which had
the right to tax and redistribute it (as did the Mesopotamian states to the
east). Beyond that strip of land were deserts populated by people the
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Ancient Egypt’s Old Kingdom came into being with the unification of Lower Egypt, where the
Nile empties into the Mediterranean, and Upper Egypt, where the Nile leads into Nubia (present-
day Sudan).
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There were three major periods in ancient Egyptian history, the time
during which Egypt was not subject to foreign powers and during which it
monumental architecture: the Old Kingdom (2680 – 2200 BCE), the Middle
Kingdom (2040 – 1720 BCE), and the New Kingdom (1550 – 1150
BCE). There were also two “intermediate periods” between the Old and
Middle Kingdoms (The First Intermediate Period, 2200 – 2040 BCE) and
Middle and New Kingdoms (The Second Intermediate Period, 1720 – 1550
BCE). These were periods during which the political control of the ruling
dynasty broke down and rival groups fought for control. The very large
major kingdoms was quite stable and relatively peaceful, while the
thing about the history overall is the simple fact of its longevity; even
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The concept of these different periods was created by Manetho, an
Egyptian priest who, in about 300 BCE, recorded the “definitive” history of the
ancient kings and created the very notion of the old, middle, and new
Egyptian history, it is still the preferred method for dating ancient Egypt to
the term used for the royal palace and its vast supporting bureaucracy. It
came to be used to refer to the king himself starting in the New Kingdom
period; it would be as if the American president was called “the White House”
in everyday language. This chapter will use the term “king” for the kings of
Egypt leading up to the New Kingdom, then “pharaoh” for the New Kingdom
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Egypt was divided between “Upper Egypt,” the southern stretch of the
Nile Valley that relied on the Nile floods for irrigation, and “Lower Egypt,” the
enormous delta region where the Nile meets the Mediterranean. The two
regions had been politically distinct for centuries, but (according to both
archeology and the dating system created by Manetho) in roughly 3100 BCE
Narmer, a king of Upper Egypt, conquered Lower Egypt and united the
country for the first time. The date used for the founding of the Old Kingdom
of Egypt, 2680 BCE, is when the third royal dynasty to rule all of Egypt
established itself. Its king, Djoser, was the first to commission an enormous
tomb to house his remains when he died: the first pyramid. The Old Kingdom
represented a long, unbroken line of kings that presided over the first full
The Old Kingdom united Egypt under a single ruling house, developed
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especially the idea that the king was actually a god and that his rule ensured
that the world itself would continue – the Egyptians thought that if there was
no king or the proper prayers were not recited by the priests, terrible chaos
The Old Kingdom was stable and powerful, although its kings did not
use that power to expand their borders beyond Egypt itself. Instead, all of Old
from the Nile, efficiently cataloged and taxed by the royal bureaucracy and
Egypt were all built during the Old Kingdom, and their purpose was to house
the bodies of the kings so that their spirits could travel to the land of the dead
and join their fellow gods in the afterlife (thereby maintaining ma’at - sacred
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A present-day picture of the Great Pyramid, outside of Cairo.
The pyramids are justly famous as the ultimate example of Egyptian prosperity and
ingenuity. The Great Pyramid of Khufu, the single largest pyramid of the period, contained
over 2.5 million stone blocks, each weighing approximately 2.5 tons. The sheer amount of
energy expended on the construction of the pyramids is thus staggering; it was only the
incredible bounty of the Nile and its harvests that enabled the construction of the pyramids
by providing the calories consumed by the workers and draught animals, the wealth used
to employ the supporting bureaucracy, and the size of the population that sustained the
entire enterprise. Likewise, while the details are now lost, the Old Kingdom’s government
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must have been highly effective at tax collection and the distribution of food, supplies, and
work teams. Pyramids on the scale of the Old Kingdom would have been all but impossible
A major factor in the stability of Old Kingdom Egypt was that it was very
isolated. Despite its geographical proximity to Mesopotamia and Anatolia, Egypt at the
time was largely separated from the civilizations of those regions. The Sinai Peninsula,
which divides Egypt from present-day Palestine and Israel, is about 120 miles of desert.
With a few violent exceptions, no major incursions were able to cross over Sinai, and
contact with the cultures of Mesopotamia and the Near East was limited as a
result. Likewise, even though Egypt is on the Mediterranean, sailing technology was so
primitive that there was little contact with other cultures via the sea.
Around 2200 BCE, two hundred years after the last pyramids were built, the Old
Kingdom collapsed, leading to the First Intermediate Period. The reason for the collapse is
not clear, but it probably had to do with the very infrequent occurrence of drought. There
are written records from this period of instability, known as the First Intermediate Period,
that make it clear that Egyptians knew very well that things had been fundamentally upset
and imbalanced, and they did not know what to do about it. The kings were supposed to
oversee the harmony of life and yet the royal dynasty had collapsed without a
religion of the Old Kingdom had emphasized life on earth; even though the pyramids were
tombs built to house the kings and the things they would need on their journey to the
afterlife, there are no records with details about how most people would fare after they
died. This changed during the First Intermediate Period, when the Egyptians invented the
idea that the suffering of the present life might be overcome in a more perfect world to
come. After death, the soul would be brought before a judge of the gods, who would weigh
the heart on scales against the ideals of harmony and order. At this point, the heart might
betray the soul, telling the god all of the sins its owner had committed in life. The lucky and
virtuous person, though, would see their heart balance against the ideal of order and the
soul would be rewarded with eternal life. Otherwise, their heart would be tossed to a
Monumental building ceased during the Intermediate Period – there were no more
pyramids, palaces, or temples being built. A major social change that occurred was that
royal officials away from the capital started to inherit titles, and thus it was the first time
there was a real noble class with its own inherited power and land. Some historians have
argued that a major cause of the collapse of royal authority was the growth in power of the
nobility: in other words, royal authority did not fall apart first and lead to elites seizing
more power, elites seized power and thereby weakened royal authority. The irony of the
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period is that the economy of Egypt actually diversified and expanded. It seems to have
been a time in which a new elite commissioned royal-inspired goods and hence supported
emerging craftspeople.
The Middle Kingdom was the next great Egyptian kingdom of the ancient
world. The governor of the city of Thebes reunified the kingdom and established himself as
the new king (Mentuhotep II, r. 2060 – 2010 BCE). One major change in Egyptian belief is
that the Middle Kingdom rulers still claimed to be at least partly divine, but they also
emphasized their humanity. They wrote about themselves as shepherds trying to maintain
the balance of harmony in Egypt and to protect their people, rather than just as lords over
an immortal kingdom. Their nobles had more power than had the nobility of the Old
Starting during the Middle Kingdom, the kings made a major effort to extend
Egyptian power and influence beyond the traditional “core” of the kingdom in Egypt
itself. Egypt exerted military power and extracted wealth from the northern part of the
kingdom of Nubia (in present-day Sudan) to the south, and also established at least limited
ongoing contact with Mesopotamia as well. The kings actively encouraged immigration
from outside of Egypt, but insisted that immigrants settle among Egyptians. They had the
same policy with war captives, often settling them as farmers in the midst of
Egyptians. This ensured speedy acculturation and helped bring foreign talent into Egypt.
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While no more pyramids were ever built - it appears that the nearly obsessive focus
on the spirit of the king after death was confined to the Old Kingdom - the Middle Kingdom
was definitely a period of stability and prosperity for Egypt as a whole. A fairly diverse
body of literature survived in the form of writings on papyrus, the form of paper made
from Nile reeds monopolized by Egypt for centuries, that suggests that commerce was
extensive, Egyptian religion celebrated the spiritual importance of ordinary people, and
Things spun out of control for the Middle Kingdom starting in about 1720 BCE,
roughly 300 years after it had been founded, leading in turn to the Second Intermediate
Period. Settlers from Canaan (present-day Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, and parts of Syria) had
been streaming into Egypt for generations, initially settling and assimilating into Egyptian
society. By about 1650 BCE, however, a group of Canaanites founded what was known as
the “Hyksos” dynasty, an Egyptian term which simply means “leaders of foreigners,” after
they overthrew the king and seized power in Lower Egypt. While they started as
“foreigners,” the Hyksos quickly adopted the practices of the Egyptian kings they had
overthrown, using Egyptian scribes to keep records in hieroglyphics, worshiping the local
The most significant innovation introduced by the Hyksos was the use of bronze (it
should be noted that they introduced horses and chariots as well). There was very limited
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use of bronze in Egypt until the Second Intermediate Period, with both weapons and tools
being crafted from copper or stone. Bronze, an alloy of copper and zinc or nickel, required
technical skill and access to its component minerals to craft. The finished product was far
harder and more durable than was copper alone, however, and with the advent of large-
scale bronze use in Egypt thanks to the Hyksos, the possibilities for the growth of Egyptian
power increased greatly. Bronze had already been in use for over a thousand years by the
time it became common in Egypt, but when it finally arrived with Canaanite craftsmen it
radically altered the balance of power. Up to that point, Egyptian technology, especially in
terms of metallurgy, was quite primitive. Egyptian soldiers were often nothing more than
peasants armed with copper knives, spears with copper heads, or even just clubs. Egypt's
relative isolation meant that it had never needed to develop more advanced weapons, a fact
that the Hyksos were able to take advantage of, belatedly bringing the large-scale use of
In 1550 BCE, the Second Intermediate Period ended when another Egyptian king,
Ahmose I, expelled the Hyksos from Egypt. Thus began the New Kingdom, the most
powerful to date. This was also when the Egyptian kings started calling themselves
pharaohs, which means “great house,” lord over all things. Using the new bronze military
technology, the New Kingdom was (at times) able to expand Egyptian control all the way
into Mesopotamia. Bronze was the key factor, but also important was the adoption of
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composite bows: bows that are made from strips of animal bone and sinew, glued
together. A composite bow was much more powerful than a wooden one, and they greatly
enhanced the power of the Egyptian military. Likewise, again thanks to the Hyksos, the
New Kingdom was able to employ chariots in war for the first time. One in ten men was
impressed into military service, supplemented with auxiliaries from conquered lands as
While the Egyptians had always considered themselves to be the favored people of
the gods, dwelling in the home of spiritual harmony in the universe, it was really during the
New Kingdom that they actively campaigned to take over foreign lands. The idea was that
divine harmony existed only in Egypt and had to be brought to the rest of the world, by
force if necessary. By 1500 BCE, only 50 years after the founding of the new kingdom,
Egypt had conquered Canaan and much of Syria. It then conquered northern Nubia. The
those lands and to exploit natural resources in order to increase royal revenue.
The New Kingdom pharaohs enlisted the leaders of the lands they had conquered as
puppet kings, surrounded by Egyptian advisors. The pharaohs adopted the practice of
bringing many foreign princes of the lands they had conquered back to Egypt. There, a
prince would be raised as an Egyptian and educated to think of Egyptian civilization as both
superior to others and their own. Thus, when they returned to rule after their fathers died,
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these princes would often be thoroughly assimilated to Egyptian culture and would
naturally be more loyal to the pharaoh; using this technique, the New
Kingdom was able to create several “puppet states,” places with their own
rulers who were loyal to Egypt, in the Near and Middle East.
The New Kingdom was also the great bureaucratic empire of Egypt. The
pharaohs divided Egypt into two administrative regions: Upper Egypt, up the
Nile and governed from the city of Thebes, and Lower Egypt, near the Nile
delta where it drained into the Mediterranean and ruled from the city of
laborers, extracting taxation, and making sure that agriculture was on track. A
single royal official of vast personal power, the vizier, supervised the whole
system and personally decided when to open the locks on the Nile to allow the
While royal officials and the priesthoods of the gods held significant
power and influence during the New Kingdom, the king (now known as the
pharaoh) still ruled as a living god. The pharaohs were still thought to be
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divine, but that did not mean they simply bullied their subjects. Many letters
pharaohs and other kings in foreign lands. They played tax breaks, gifts, and
pyramids never occurred after the Old Kingdom, Egyptian kings remained
tombs, but those were usually built into hillsides or in more conventional
Kingdom consisted of huge temples and statues, most notably the Great
Temple at Abu Simbel in northern Nubia, built under the direction of the
pharaoh Ramses II at some point around 1250 BCE. There, gigantic statues of
the gods sit, and twice a year, the rising sun shines through the entrance and
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directly illuminates three of them, while the god of the underworld remains in
shadow.
Kingdom. The New Kingdom saw the only known female pharaoh, a woman
who ruled from 1479 to 1458 BCE. Her name was Hatshepsut; she originally
ruled as a regent (i.e. someone who is supposed to rule until the young king
comes of age) for her stepson, but then claimed the title of pharaoh and ruled
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outright. She ruled for 20 years, waged war, and oversaw a period of ongoing
and it was also under her reign that large quantities of sub-Saharan African
panther skins, and other forms of wealth. When she died, however, her
stepson Thutmose III took the throne. Decades after he became pharaoh, for
reasons that are unclear, he tried to erase the memory of his mother’s reign,
perhaps driven by simple resentment over how long she had held power.
BCE). Amenhotep was infamous in his own lifetime for attempting an ill-
Egyptian people on an aspect of the sun god, Ra, called Aten. He went so far as
to claim that Aten was the only god, something that seemed absurd to the
means “the one useful to Aten,” moved the capital to a new city he had built,
sacked the temples of other gods, and even had agents chisel off references to
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the other gods from buildings and walls. All the while, he insisted that he and
this religious revolution, but one reasonable theory is that he was trying to
reduce the power of the priests, who had steadily become richer and more
very stability of Egypt. In the eyes of his subjects, the royal person was no
the great protector of the religious and social order, but instead one had tried
to completely destroy it. This was the beginning of the end of the central
position the pharaoh had enjoyed in the life of all Egyptians up until that
point.
Akhenaten’s son restored all of the old religious traditions. This was the
young king Tutankhamun ("King Tut") (r. 1336 – 1326), who is important for
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restoring the religion and, arguably, for the simple fact that his tomb was
artifacts from the New Kingdom yet found when it was discovered, sparking
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A new dynasty of pharaohs ruled the New Kingdom in the aftermath of
empire in the north called the Hittites, one of the major empires of the Bronze
Age period (considered in more detail in the next chapter). He ruled for an
astonishingly long time and reputedly sired some 160 children with wives and
Simbel noted above. Ramses was, however, the last of the great pharaohs,
with all of those who followed working to stave off disaster more so than
The New Kingdom collapsed in about 1150 BCE. This collapse was part
of a much larger pattern across the ancient Middle East and North Africa: the
collapse of the Bronze Age itself. In the case of Egypt, this took the form of the
first of a series of foreign invasions, that of the “Sea People,” whose origins
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question. Later, invaders referred to as “gangs of bandits” from what is today
Libya, to the west of Egypt, further undermined the kingdom, and it finally fell
into a long period of political fragmentation. A long period of civil war and
conflict engulfed Egypt, and from that point on Egypt proved vulnerable to
foreign conquest. In the course of the centuries that followed Assyria, Persia,
the Greeks, and the Romans would, one after the other, add Egypt to their
respective empires.
disasters. Throughout the entire period, however, there were many cultural,
spiritual, and intellectual traditions that stayed the same. In terms of the
spiritual beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, those traditions most often focused
on the identity and the role of the king in relation to the gods. In prosaic
politics and social organization, they revolved around the role of the
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scribes. In terms of foreign relations, they evolved over time as Egypt
The most important figure in Egyptian spiritual life was the king; he (or
sometimes she) was believed to form a direct connection between the gods
and the Egyptian people. Each king had five names – his birth name, three
having to do with his divine status, and one having to do with rulership of the
two unified kingdoms. One of the divine names referred to the divine
kingship itself, temporarily linked to the current holder of that title: whoever
The Egyptians had a colorful and memorable set of religious beliefs, one
that dominated the lives of the kings, who claimed to be not just reflections of
or servants of the gods, but gods themselves on earth. The central theme
among the great epic stories of Egyptian religion was that there was a certain
order and harmony in the universe that the gods had created, but that it was
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making sure that Egyptian society was stable. For Egyptians the world was
divided between themselves and everyone else. This was not just a function
of arrogance, however, but instead reflected a belief that the gods had
One peculiar aspect of the obsessive focus on the person of the king was
the fact that the kings often married their sisters and daughters; the idea was
that if one was a god, one did not want to pollute the sacred bloodline by
having children with mere humans. An unfortunate side effect was, not
surprisingly, that there were a lot of fairly deranged and unhealthy Egyptian
royalty over the years, since the royal lines were, by definition,
inbred. Fortunately for the Egyptian state, however, the backbone of day-to-
day politics was the enormous bureaucracy staffed by the scribal class, a class
More writing survives from ancient Egypt than any other ancient
civilization of the Mediterranean region. There are two major reasons for that
survival. First, Egypt’s dry climate ensured that records kept on papyrus had
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a decent chance of surviving since they were unlikely to rot away. Thousands
of papyri documents have been discovered that were simply dumped into
holes in the desert and left there; the sand and the climate conspired to
whose whole vocation was mastering the complex Egyptian writing systems
and keeping extensive records of almost every aspect of life, from religious
An example of hieroglyphics - the above depicts the sacred style used in temple and tomb
carvings, as opposed to the “cursive” form used for everyday record keeping.
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The writing of ancient Egypt was in hieroglyphics, which are symbols
that were adapted over time from pictures. There were several different
covered in this chapter, all of which were very difficult to master. It took
mercantile transactions, to the sacred prayers for the dead on the walls of the
tombs of kings and nobles. They served as an essential piece of the continuity
because they used the same language and the same alphabets of symbols, and
because they recorded the rituals and transactions of Egyptian society, scribes
were a kind of cultural glue that kept things going from generation to
generation. In all three of the great dynasties and during the Intermediate
sheer amount of it that survived carved in stone in tombs and palaces, was the
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creation of monumental architecture by the Egyptian state, first exemplified
by the pyramids. Sometime around 2660 BCE the first pyramid was built for
the king Djoser. Djoser was renowned in the Egyptian sources for his wisdom,
Egyptians. The architect who designed the pyramid, Imhotep, was later
deified as a son of Ptah, the god who created the universe. Unlike
always tombs. The purpose of the pyramids was to house the king with all of
the luxuries and equipment he would need in his journey to the afterlife, as
The pyramids were constructed over a period of about 250 years, from
2660 to 2400 BCE. For a long time, historians thought that they were built by
slaves, but it now seems very likely that they were built by free laborers
employed by the king and paid by royal agents. Each building block weighed
about 2.5 tons and had to be hauled up ramps with ropes and pulleys. As
noted above, only Egypt’s unique access to the bounty of the Nile provided
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enough energy for this to be viable. Egypt was the envy of the ancient world
because of its incredible wealth, wealth that was the direct result of its huge
surplus of grain, all fed by the Nile's floods. The pyramids were built year-
round, but work was most intense in September, when the floods of the Nile
were at their height and farmers were not able to work the fields. In short,
nowhere else on earth could the pyramids have been built. There had to be a
Pyramid building itself was the impetus behind the massive expansion
of bureaucracy in the Old Kingdom, since the state became synonymous with
mobilize anyone, and generally exercise total control, although practical limits
“payment” to scribes usually took the form of fiefs (i.e. grants of land) that
returned to the royal holdings after the official's death, a practice that
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Like their neighbors in Mesopotamia, the Egyptians lived in a
scribes. Peasants in Egypt were tied to the land they lived on and were thus
serfs rather than free peasants. A serf is a farmer who is legally tied to the
land he or she works on – they cannot leave the land to look for a better job
elsewhere, living in a state very near to slavery. The peasants lived in “closed”
villages in which people were not allowed to move in, nor were existing
nearly the legal equals of men. They had the legal right to own property, sue,
and essentially exist as independent legal entities. This is all the more striking
in that many of the legal rights that Egyptian women possessed were not
available to women in Europe (or the United States) until the late 1800s CE,
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over three thousand years later. Likewise, Egyptian women enjoyed much
more legal autonomy than did women in many other ancient societies,
change over time. One important neighbor of Egypt was the kingdom of Nubia
to the south, in present-day Sudan. Nubia was rich in gold, ivory, and slaves,
seized from neighboring lands, making it a wealthy and powerful place in its
own right. Egypt traded with Nubia, but also suffered from raids by warlike
Nubian kingdoms. One of the key political posts in Egypt was the Keeper of
the Gateway of the South, a military governor who tried to protect trade from
not only reunite Egypt, but to conquer the northern portion of Nubia as
Nubian wealth. (Much later, a Nubian king, Piankhy, returned the favor by
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conquering Egypt - he claimed to be restoring a purer form of Egyptian rule
Trade contact was not limited to Nubia, of course. Despite the fact that
civilizations, they actively traded with not only Nubia but the various
civilizations and peoples of the Near and Middle East. Starting in earnest with
the Middle Kingdom, trade caravans linked Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt
(and, later, Greece as well). There was a rich diplomatic exchange between
the Egyptian kings and the kings of their neighboring lands – overall, they
spent far more time trading with their neighbors and sending one another
gifts than waging war. Likewise, as noted above in the section on the New
That being said, by the time of the Middle Kingdom, there was an
particular attention to Nubia and “Asia” (i.e. everything east of the Sinai
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Peninsula). One king described himself as the “throat-slitter of Asia,” and all
the way through the New Kingdom, Egyptians tended to regard themselves as
Conclusion
This chapter concludes its detailed consideration of Egypt with the fall
of the New Kingdom not because Egyptian civilization vanished, but because it
did not enjoy lasting stability under a native Egyptian dynasty again for most
of the rest of ancient history. Instead, after the New Kingdom, Egypt was often
torn between rival claimants to the title of pharaoh, and beginning with a
civilization discussed in the next chapter, the Assyrians, Egypt itself was often
Egypt remained the richest place in the ancient world because of the
incredible abundance of the Nile, and whether it was the Assyrians, the
Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, or the Arabs doing the conquering, Egypt
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conquest. Likewise, Egypt contributed not just wealth but its unique culture
Hieroglyphics - Sherif217
The Bronze Age is a term used to describe a period in the ancient world
from about 3000 BCE to 1100 BCE. That period saw the emergence and
into real empires. It was a period in which long-distance trade networks and
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economic, and cultural life in the eastern Mediterranean region. It was, in
short, the period during which civilization itself spread and prospered across
the area.
The period is named after one of its key technological bases: the crafting
metals created when the metals bond at the molecular level to create a new
material entirely. Needless to say, historical peoples had no idea why, when
they took tin and copper, heated them up, and beat them together on an anvil
they created something much harder and more durable than either of their
starting metals. Some innovative smith did figure it out, and in the process
extent, agriculture. The harder the metal, the deadlier the weapons created
from it and the more effective the tools. Agriculturally, bronze plows allowed
greater crop yields. Militarily, bronze weapons completely shifted the balance
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and bronze armor was much more effective than one wielding wooden,
more territory than any earlier Egyptian empire. It was able to do this in part
meaning that only the larger and richer empires could afford it on a large
scale. Bronze tended to stack the odds in conflicts against smaller city-states
and kingdoms, because it was harder for them to afford to field whole armies
the creation of a whole series of powerful empires in North Africa and the
Middle East, all of which were linked together by diplomacy, trade, and (at
times) war.
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The Bronze Age States
There were four major regions along the shores of, or near to, the
eastern Mediterranean that hosted the major states of the Bronze Age: Greece,
Anatolia, Canaan and Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Those regions were close
Mesopotamia, the furthest distance between any of the regions) that ongoing
long-distance trade was possible. While wars were relatively frequent, most
interactions between the states and cultures of the time were peaceful,
revolving around trade and diplomacy. Each state, large and small, oversaw
One state whose very existence coincided with the Bronze Age,
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1700 BCE, the Hittites established a large empire in Anatolia, the landmass
against the Egyptians, after which they reached a diplomatic accord to hold on
Unlike the Egyptians, the Hittites had the practice of adopting the
customs, technologies, and religions of the people they conquered and the
people they came in contact with. They did not seek to impose their own
customs on others, instead gathering the literature, stories, and beliefs of their
subjects. Their pantheon of gods grew every time they conquered a new city-
state or tribe, and they translated various tales and legends into their own
language. There is some evidence that it was the Hittites who formed the
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Mesopotamian technologies (including math, astronomy, and engineering) as
well as Mesopotamian legends like the Epic of Gilgamesh, the latter of which
become the Greek story of Hercules. Simply put, the Hittites were the
prosperous, and connected through diplomacy and war with the other
The Hittite state is depicted in pink and New Kingdom Egyptian territory in green on the map
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To the east of the Hittite Empire, Mesopotamia was not ruled by a single
state or empire during most of the Bronze Age. The Babylonian empire
unknown) in 1595 BCE, the conquest following a Hittite invasion that sacked
Babylon but did not stay to rule over it. Over the following centuries, the
Kassites successfully ruled over Babylon and the surrounding territories, with
Mesopotamia (the land between the rivers) itself, a rival state known as
conquest that conquered Babylon and the Kassites, going on to rule over a
wider collapse of the political and commercial network of the Bronze Age
(described below).
Both the Kassites and the Assyrians were proud members of the
diplomatic network of rulers that included New Kingdom Egypt and the
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Hittites (as well as smaller and less significant kingdoms in Canaan and
Anatolia). Likewise, both states encouraged trade, and goods were exchanged
across the entire region of the Middle East. Compared to some later periods, it
To the west, it was during the Bronze Age that the first distinctly Greek
civilizations arose: the Minoans of the island of Crete and the Mycenaeans of
Greece itself. Their civilizations, which likely merged together due to invasion
after a long period of coexistence, were the basis of later Greek civilization
Middle East in the centuries to come, just as the civilizations of the Middle
East unquestionably influenced them. At the time, however, the Minoans and
raiders, rather than representing states on par with those of the Hittites,
Assyrians, or Egyptians.
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Both the Minoans and Mycenaeans were seafarers. Whereas almost all
albeit ones who traded and traveled via waterways, the Greek civilizations
were very closely tied to the sea itself. The Minoans ruled the island of Crete
purpose is primarily trade, not war) to trade with the Egyptians, Hittites, and
other peoples of the area. One of the noteworthy archaeological traits of the
cities, unlike those of other ancient peoples, indicating that they were much
less concerned about foreign invasion than were the neighboring land
people. The Greek legend of the labyrinth, the great maze in which a bull-
headed monster called the minotaur roamed, was probably based on the size
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and the confusion of these Minoan complexes. Frescoes painted on the walls
of the palaces depicted elaborate athletic events featuring naked men leaping
over charging bulls. Minoan frescoes have even been found in the ruins of an
Egyptian (New Kingdom) palace, indicating that Minoan art was valued
The Minoans traded actively with their neighbors and developed their
civilization was very rich and powerful by about 1700 BCE and it continued to
prosper for centuries. Starting in the early 1400s BCE, however, a wave of
Minoan independence. By that time, the Minoans had already shared artistic
techniques, trade, and their writing system with the Mycenaeans, the latter of
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Bronze-Age Greek culture as a whole became a blend of Minoan and
Mycenaean influences.
relatively peaceful. They traded with their neighbors, and while there is
were extremely warlike. They traded with their neighbors but they also
plundered them when the opportunity arose. Centuries later, the culture of
the poet Homer, although it is likely “Homer” is a mythical figure himself) The
Iliad and The Odyssey, describing the exploits of great Mycenaeans heroes like
Troy, a city in western Anatolia whose ruins were discovered in the late
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From their ships, the Mycenaeans operated as both trading partners and
evidence that they traded with Egypt and the Near East (i.e. Lebanon and
Palestine), but equally clear that they raided and warred against both
vulnerable foreign territories and against one another. There is even evidence
that the Hittites enacted the world’s first embargo of shipping and goods
affairs.
The Mycenaeans relied on the sea so heavily because Greece was a very
rivers feeding fertile soil, just mountains, hills, and scrubland with poor, rocky
soil. There were few mineral deposits or other natural resources that could
be used or traded with other lands. As it happens, there are iron deposits in
Greece but its use was not yet known by the Mycenaeans. They thus learned
to cultivate olives to make olive oil and grapes to make wine, two products in
great demand all over the ancient world that were profitable enough to
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sustain seagoing trade. It is also likely that the difficult conditions in Greece
helped lead the Mycenaeans to be so warlike, as they raided each other and
depicted in the Iliad, battles consisted of the elite noble warriors of each side
squaring off against each other and fighting one-on-one, with the rank-and-file
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of poorer soldiers providing support but usually not engaging in actual
combat. In turn, Mycenaean ruins (and tombs) make it abundantly clear that
wealth. Foreign trade was in service to providing luxury goods to this elite
social class, a class that was never politically united but instead shared a
artifacts and amazing myths and poems have survived from this civilization,
but it was also one of the most predatory civilizations we know about from
ancient history.
The Bronze Age at its height witnessed several large empires and
peoples in regular contact with one another through both trade and war. The
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pharaohs of the New Kingdom corresponded with the kings and queens of the
Hittite Empire and the rulers of the Kassites and Assyrians; it was normal for
with its rivals at times, but it also worked with them to protect trade
network of exchange.
That said, most of the states involved in this network fell into ruin
between 1200 - 1100 BCE. The great empires collapsed, a collapse that it took
about 100 years to recover from, with new empires arising in the
occurred, not least because the states that had been keeping records stopped
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to indicate that some combination of events - some caused by humans and
some environmental - probably combined to spell the end to the Bronze Age.
Around 1050 BCE, two of the victims of the collapse, the New Kingdom
of Egypt and the Hittite Empire, left clear indications in their records that
drought had undermined their grain stores and their social stability. In recent
climate of the entire region became warmer and more arid, supporting the
idea of a series of debilitating droughts. Even the greatest of the Bronze Age
order to not just feed their population, but sustain the governments, armies,
could have played a key role in undermining the political stability of whole
Even earlier, starting in 1207 BCE, there are indications that a series of
invasions swept through the entire eastern Mediterranean region. The New
Kingdom of Egypt survived the invasion of the “sea people,” some of whom
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historians are now certain went on to settle in Canaan (they are remembered
in the Hebrew Bible as the Philistines against whom the early Hebrews
struggled), but the state was badly weakened in the process. In the following
have sacked the Mycenaean palace complexes and various cities across the
lost its territories in the south to Elan, a warlike kingdom based in present-
The identity of the foreign invaders is not clear from the scant surviving
displaced by drought and social chaos who joined the invasions out of
foreign invasion, and peasant rebellion ultimately destroying the Bronze Age
states. What is clear is that the invasions took place over the course of
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decades - from roughly 1180 to 1130 BCE - and that they must have played a
major role in the collapse of the Bronze Age political and economic system.
While the precise details are impossible to pin down, the above map depicts likely invasion
routes during the Bronze Age Collapse. More important than those details is the result: the fall
For roughly 100 years, from 1200 BCE to 1100 BCE, the networks of
able to recapture some of the glory of the past Egyptian kingdoms in their
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building projects and the power of their armies, but in the long run Egypt
civilization collapsed utterly, leading to a Greek “dark age” that lasted some
state - went on to become the greatest power the region had yet seen.
The decline of the Bronze Age led to the beginning of the Iron
Age. Bronze was dependent on functioning trade networks: tin was only
however, is a useful metal by itself without the need of alloys (although early
everywhere - were around almost from the start of the Iron Age
itself). Without copper and tin available, some innovative smiths figured out
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that it was possible, through a complicated process of forging, to create iron
implements that were hard and durable. Iron was available in various places
throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean regions, so it did not require
long-distance trade as bronze had. The Iron Age thus began around 1100 BCE,
One cautionary note in discussing this shift: iron was very difficult to
work with compared to bronze, and its use spread slowly. For example, while
iron use became increasingly common starting in about 1100 BCE, the later
Egyptian kingdoms did not use large amounts of iron tools until the seventh
century BCE, a full five centuries after the Iron Age itself began. Likewise, it
took a long time for “weaponized” iron to be available, since making iron
weapons and armor that were hard enough to endure battle conditions took a
long time. Once trade networks recovered, bronze weapons were still the
norm in societies that used iron tools in other ways for many centuries.
Outside of Greece, which suffered its long “dark age” following the
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emerged relatively quickly at the start of the Iron Age. They re-established
trade routes and initiated a new phase of Middle Eastern politics that
eventually led to the largest empires the world had yet seen.
and Lebanon, had long been a site of prosperity and innovation. Merchants
from Canaan traded throughout the Middle East, its craftsmen were renowned
for their work, and it was even a group of Canaanites - the Hyksos - who
briefly ruled Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period. Along with their
neighbors the Hebrews, the most significant of the ancient Canaanites were
are remembered for being travelers and merchants, particularly by sea. They
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traveled farther than any other ancient people; sometime around 600 BCE,
sailed around Africa over the course of three years (if that actually happened,
it was an achievement that would not be accomplished again for almost 2,000
network that eventually replaced the one destroyed with the fall of the Bronze
Age. Likewise, Phoenician cities served as the crossroads of trade for goods
that originated as far away as England (metals were mined in England and
shipped all the way to the Near East via overland routes). The most
prominent Phoenician city was Carthage in North Africa, which centuries later
Phoenician trade was not, however, the most important legacy of their
lasting influence than that of their writing system. As early as 1300 BCE,
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syllabic alphabet that formed the basis of Greek and Roman writing much
later. A syllabic alphabet has characters that represent sounds, rather than
smaller and less complex than symbolic ones. It is possible for a non-
specialist to learn to read and write using a syllabic alphabet much more
characters). Thus, in societies like that of the Phoenicians, there was no need
literate. Ultimately, the Greeks and then the Romans adopted Phoenician
writing, and the alphabets used in most European languages in the present is
a direct descendant of the Phoenician one as a result. To this day, the English
The Phoenician mastery of sailing and the use of the syllabic alphabet
were both boons to trade. Another was a practice - the use of currency -
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Anatolia, controlled significant sources of gold (giving rise to the Greek legend
of King Midas, who turned everything he touched into gold). In roughly 650
BCE, the Lydians came up with the idea of using lumps of gold and silver that
had a standard weight. Soon, they formalized the system by stamping marks
into the lumps to create the first true (albeit crude) coins, called
ability of merchants to travel far afield and buy foreign goods, because they no
longer had to travel with huge amounts of goods with them to trade. It also
empires.
trade after the collapse of the Bronze Age, they did not create a strong united
state. Such a state emerged farther east, however: alone of the major states of
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the Bronze Age, the Assyrian kingdom in northern Mesopotamia
Assyrians were able to hold on to their core cities while the states around
them collapsed. During the Iron Age, the Assyrians became the most powerful
empire the world had ever seen. The Assyrians were the first empire in world
historians of the ancient world distinguish between the Bronze Age and Iron
however, so for the sake of simplicity this chapter will refer to both as the
Assyrians.)
northern Mesopotamia, Ashur, has no natural borders, and thus they needed a
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strong military to survive; they were constantly forced to fight other civilized
peoples from the west and south, and barbarians from the north. The
Assyrians held that their patron god, a god of war also called Ashur,
demanded the subservience of other peoples and their respective gods. Thus,
armies of native Assyrian soldiers who marched out every year to conquer
more territory.
collapse of the Bronze Age ended in about 880 BCE when the Assyrian king
Canaan. Over the next century, the (Neo-)Assyrians became the mightiest
empire yet seen in the Middle East. They combined terror tactics with various
towns or even small cities when they defied the will of the Assyrian kings,
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resettling conquered peoples as indentured workers far from their
them alive, when faced with any threat of resistance or rebellion. The
The Assyrians were the most effective military force of the ancient
world up to that point. They outfitted their large armies with well-made iron
annual tributes of wealth in precious metals and trade goods which funded
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The Assyrians introduced two innovations in military technology and
any state in the world, and a large standing army of trained infantry. It took
until the middle of the eighth century BCE for selective breeding of horses to
produce real “war horses” large enough to carry a heavily armed and armored
man into and through an entire battle. The Assyrians adopted horse archery
from the barbarians they fought from the north, which along with swords and
obsolete. The major focus of Assyrian taxation and bureaucracy was to keep
the army funded and trained, which allowed them to completely dominate
By the time of the reign of Assyrian king Tiglath-Pilezer III (r. 745 – 727
BCE), the Assyrians had pushed their borders to the Mediterranean in the
west and to Persia (present-day Iran) in the east. Their conquests culminated
in 671 BCE when king Esarhaddon (r. 681 – 668 BCE) invaded Egypt and
conquered not only the entire Egyptian kingdom, but northern Nubia as
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well. This is the first time in history that both of the founding river valleys of
ancient civilization, those of the Nile and of Mesopotamia, were under the
peoples. They demanded constant tribute and taxation and funneled luxury
goods back to their main cities. They did not try to set up sustainable
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economies or assimilate conquered peoples into a shared culture, instead
skimming off the top of the entire range of conquered lands. Their style of
rule is well known because their kings built huge monuments to themselves in
which they boasted about the lands they conquered and the tribute they
tyranny, Assyrian kings were proud of the cultural and intellectual heritage of
city in their empire that was allowed a significant degree of autonomy was
culture. Assyrian scribes collected and copied the learning and literature of
the entire Middle East. Sometime after 660 BCE, the king Asshurbanipal
ordered the collection of all of the texts of all of his kingdom, including the
house them. Parts of this library survived and provide one of the most
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important sources of information that scholars have on the beliefs, languages,
end when the puppet pharaoh put in place by the Assyrians rebelled and
Persia called the Medes, and between them the Assyrian state was destroyed
which became the most important power in Mesopotamia for the next few
generations.
slaves. Where they differed, however, was in their focus on trade. They built
new roads and canals and encouraged long-distance trade throughout their
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lands. They were often at war with Egypt, which also tried to take advantage
of the fall of the Assyrians to seize new land, but even when the two powers
were at war Egyptian merchants were still welcome throughout the Neo-
Babylonian empire.
A combination of flourishing trade and high taxes led to huge wealth for
the king and court, and among other things led to the construction of
predict eclipses and keep highly detailed calendars. They also created the
both science and “magic” that were united in the minds of Mesopotamians. In
the end, however, they were the last of the great ancient Mesopotamian
empires that existed independently. Less than 100 years after their successful
rebellion against the Assyrians, they were conquered by what became the
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greatest empire in the ancient world to date: the Persians, described in a
following chapter.
The Hebrews
Of the Bronze and Iron-Age cultures, one played perhaps the most vital
people who first created a kingdom in the ancient land of Canaan, were among
the most important cultures of the western world, comparable to the ancient
Greeks or Romans. Unlike the Greeks and Romans, the ancient Hebrews were
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both for its own sake and for being the religious root of Christianity and Islam.
Together, these three religions are referred to as the “Religions of the Book” in
Islam, because they share a set of beliefs first written down in the Hebrew
holy texts and they all venerate the same God. (Note: it should be emphasized
that the approach taken here is that of secular historical scholarship: what is
known about the historical origins of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam based
important source we have about it is the Hebrew Bible itself, which describes
in detail the travails of the Hebrews, their enslavement, battles, triumphs, and
source is that it is written in a mythic mode – like the literature of every other
Iron Age civilization, many events affecting the Hebrews are explained by
Also, the Hebrew Bible was written some 400 – 600 years after the events it
describes. Thus, what is known about the ancient Hebrews consists of the
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stories of the Hebrew Bible supplemented by the archaeological record and
the information about the Hebrews available from other historical sources.
According to the Hebrew Bible, the first patriarch (male clan leader) of
the Hebrews was Abraham, a man who led the Hebrews away from
Mesopotamia in about 1900 BCE. The Hebrews left the Mesopotamian city of
Ur and became wandering herders; in fact, the word Hebrew originally meant
“wanderer” or “nomad.” Abraham had a son, Isaac, and Isaac had a son, Jacob,
origins of the Hebrews are unclear from sources outside of the Hebrew Bible
itself; archaeological evidence indicates that the Hebrews may have actually
been from the Levant, with trade contact with the Mesopotamians, rather than
According to Jewish belief, by far the most important thing Abraham did
was agree to the Covenant, the promise made between the God Yahweh (the
“name” of God is derived from the Hebrew characters for the phrase “I am
who I am,” the enigmatic response of God when asked for His name by the
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prophet Moses) and the Hebrews. The Covenant stated that in return for their
devotion and worship, and the circumcision of all Hebrew males, the Hebrews
would receive from Yahweh a “land of milk and honey,” a place of peace and
Then, in about 1600 BCE, the Hebrews went to Egypt to escape famine
and were welcomed by the Hyksos dynasty (during the Second Intermediate
Period of ancient Egypt). The Hyksos were fellow Canaanites, after all, and
Hebrew Bible, with the rise of the New Kingdom the Hebrews were enslaved,
with their leader Moses leading them away sometime around 1300 – 1200
1207 BCE, which is the strongest evidence of the Hebrews’ presence in Canaan
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According to the Hebrew Bible, Moses was not only responsible for
leading the Hebrews from Egypt, but for modifying the Covenant. In addition
to the exclusive worship of Yahweh and the circumcision of all male Hebrews,
Commandments, the Hebrews then arrived in the region that was to become
As noted above, the tales present in the Hebrew Bible cannot generally
be verified with empirical evidence. They also bear the imprint of earlier
traditions: many stories in the Hebrew Bible are taken from earlier
Sargon the Great's rise from obscurity in Akkadian tradition, and the flood
legend (described in the Bible’s first book, Genesis) is taken directly from the
that of Yahweh in those two stories is very different: the Mesopotamian gods
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are cruel and capricious, while the flood of Yahweh is sent as a punishment for
started settling in Canaan by about 1200 BCE. The Egyptian record from 1207
BCE noted above consists of the pharaoh boasting about his conquests in
Canaan, including Israel. The story of Moses leading the Hebrews out of
slavery in Egypt could also have been based on the events associated with the
nomadic raiders joined forces with oppressed peasants and slaves to topple
the great empires of the Bronze Age. Some of those people, probably
Canaanites who had been subjects of the pharaohs, did seize freedom, and
While the early Hebrews were communalists, meaning they shared most
goods in common within their clans (referred to as the twelve “tribes” in the
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Hebrew Bible), conflicts with the Philistines, another Canaanite people on the
coast, led them to appoint a king, Saul, in about 1020 BCE. The Philistines
were one of the groups of “Sea People” who had attacked the New Kingdom of
Egypt. The Philistines were a small but powerful kingdom. They were armed
with iron and they fought the Hebrews to a standstill initially – at one point
they captured the Ark of the Covenant, containing the stone tablets on which
the Ten Commandments were written. Under the leadership of their kings,
however, the Hebrews pushed back the Philistines and eventually defeated
them completely.
Saul's successor was David, one of his former lieutenants, and David's
was his son Solomon, renowned for his wisdom. The Hebrew kings founded a
capital at Jerusalem, which had been a Philistine town. The kings created a
noted, the kingdom itself was not particularly large or powerful; Jerusalem at
the time was a hill town of about 5,000 people. Israel emerged as one of the
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many smaller kingdoms surrounded by powerful neighbors, engaging in trade
manner consistent with other Iron Age kings, with many wives and a whole
the Hebrew kingdom and his own subjects. His demands for free labor from
the Hebrew people amounted to one day in every three spent working on
to resent aspects of his rule, neither was it markedly more exploitative than
The most important building project under Solomon was the great
priests carried out rituals and worship of Yahweh. Members of the religion
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believed that God’s attention was centered on the Temple. Likewise, the
God. David and Solomon supported the priesthood, and there was thus a
direct link between the growing Yahwist faith and the political structure of
Israel.
As noted above, the kingdom itself was fairly rich, thanks to its good
spot on trade routes and the existence of gold mines, but Solomon's ongoing
taxation and labor demands were such that resentment developed among the
Hebrews over time. After his death, fully ten out of the twelve tribes broke off
to form their own kingdom, retaining the name Israel, while the smaller
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Israel and Judah in the ninth century BCE, approximately a century before Israel was invaded
cosmopolitan. Israel’s capital was the city of Samaria, and its people became
worship more than one god) despite the growing movement to focus worship
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and more conservative; it was in Judah that the Prophetic Movement (see
below) came into being. It is from Judah that we get the word Jew: the Jews
With its riches, Israel was more attractive to invaders. When the
then eventually destroyed it outright when the Israelites rose up against them
(this occurred in 722 BCE). The inhabitants of Israel either fled to Judah or
were absorbed into the Assyrian Empire, losing their cultural identity in the
process. This tragedy was later remembered as the origin of the “lost tribes”
of Israel – Hebrews who lost their identity and their religion because of the
leave, and instead became a satellite kingdom dominated by the Assyrians but
still ruled by a Hebrew king. (Judah was saved in part due to a plague that
struck the Assyrian army, but it still ended up a tributary of the Assyrians,
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In Judah, there were two prevailing patterns: vassalage and rebellion.
Judah was simply too small to avoid paying tribute to various neighboring
powers, but its people were proud and defensive of their independence, so
every generation or so there were uprisings. The worst case was in 586 BCE,
when the Jews rose up against the Neo-Babylonian Empire that succeeded the
to the ground, and they enslaved tens of thousands of Jews. The Jews were
territory about 150 years earlier – this event is referred to as the “Babylonian
Two generations later, when the Neo-Babylonian empire itself fell to the
Persians, the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great allowed all of the enslaved
Captivity came to an end and the Jews returned to Judah, where they rebuilt
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538 BCE, because many Jews chose to remain in Babylon and, soon, other
cities in the Persian Empire. Since they continued to practice Judaism and
lands but still united by culture and religion came into being.
After being freed by Cyrus, the Jews were still part of the Persian
Empire, ruled by a Persian governor (called a “satrap”). For most of the rest of
their history, the Jews were able to maintain their distinct cultural identity
and their religion, but rarely their political independence. The Jews went
from being ruled by the Persians to the Greeks to the Romans (although they
did occasionally seize independence for a time), and were then eventually
scattered across the Roman Empire. The real hammer-blow of the Diaspora
was in the 130s CE, when the Romans destroyed much of Jerusalem and
forced almost all of the Jews into exile – the word diaspora itself means
“scattering,” and with the destruction of the Jewish kingdom by Rome there
would be no Jewish state again until the foundation of the modern nation of
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The Yahwist Religion and Judaism
The Hebrew Bible claims that the Jews as a people worshipped Yahweh
exclusively from the time of the Covenant, albeit with the worship of “false”
gods from neighboring lands sometimes undermining their unity (and inviting
in Israel or Judah during the period of the united Hebrew monarchy or post-
Solomon split between Israel and Judah, however (the Hebrew Bible itself was
written down centuries later). A more likely scenario is that the Hebrews, like
every other culture in the ancient world, worshipped a variety of deities, with
would be that of the Assyrians, who emphasized the worship of Ashur but
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Movement, arose among certain people who sought to represent the poorer
and more beleaguered members of the community, calling for a return to the
more communal and egalitarian society of the past. The Prophetic Movement
claimed that the Hebrews should worship Yahweh exclusively, and that
Yahweh had a special relationship with the Hebrews that set Him apart as a
God and them apart as a people. The Prophetic Movement lasted from the
period before the Assyrian invasion of Israel through the Babylonian Captivity
This new set of beliefs, regarding the special relationship of a single God
yet "Judaism," since it did not yet disavow the belief that other gods might
exist, nor did it include all of the rituals and traditions associated with later
existence of other gods – this phenomenon is called henotheism, the term for
the worship of only one god in the context of believing in the existence of
more than one god (i.e. many gods exist, but we only worship one of them).
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Over time, this changed into true monotheism: the belief that there is only one
for ignoring the plight of the common people and the poor). The prophets
were hostile to both the political power structure and to deviation from the
enunciating the idea that Yahweh was the only god, in part in reaction to the
demands of Assyria that all subjects acknowledge the Assyrian god Ashur as
the supreme god. In other words, the claim of the Prophetic Movement was
not only that Yahweh was superior to Ashur, but that Ashur was not really a
This is, so far as historians know, the first instance in world history in
which the idea of a single all-powerful deity emerged among any people,
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that there were many gods or spirits and that they had some kind of direct,
prayers were recited and rituals performed. Ethical conduct did not have
greatly from culture to culture), what mattered was that the gods were
adequately appeased.
In contrast, early Judaism developed the belief that Yahweh was deeply
which Yahweh judged people, even the kings like David and Solomon, making
it clear that all people were known to Yahweh and no one could escape His
judgment. The key difference between this belief and the idea of divine anger
in other ancient religions was that Yahweh only punished those who deserved
it. He was not capricious and cruel like the Mesopotamian gods, for instance,
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The early vision of Yahweh present in the Yahwist faith was of a
powerful but not all-powerful being whose authority and power was focused
on the Hebrew people and the territory of the Hebrew kingdom only. In other
words, the priests of Yahweh did not claim that he ruled over all people,
everywhere, only that he was the God of the Hebrews and their land. That
Israel in 722 BCE. Many of the Hebrews regarded this disaster as proof of the
corruption of the rich and powerful and the righteousness of the Prophetic
Movement. Even though the loss of Israel was an obvious blow against the
worship of Yahweh grew in importance among the Jews (now sundered from
the other Hebrews, who had been enslaved), the concept of Yahweh’s
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monotheism and the compilation of the first books of the Hebrew Bible, the
Torah, in 621 BCE. In the process, the Yahwist priesthood added the book of
Deuteronomy, but almost all historians of ancient religion believe that it was
simply written at the time). When many Jews left the religion after Josiah's
death, the prophet Jeremiah warned them that disaster would ensue, and
his warning. Likewise, during the Babylonian Captivity, the prophet Ezekiel
predicted the liberation of the Hebrews if they stuck to their faith, and they
were indeed freed thanks to Cyrus (who admired older cultures like the
The sacred writings compiled during these events were all in the mode
of the new monotheism. In these writings, Yahweh had always been there as
the exclusive god of the Hebrew people and had promised them a land of
abundance and peace (i.e. Israel) in return for their exclusive worship of Him.
In these histories, the various defeats of the Hebrew people were explained by
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corruption from within, often the result of Hebrews straying from the
Judah in 586 BCE and enslaved tens of thousands of the Hebrews. The impact
of this event was enormous, because it led to the belief that Yahweh could not
be bound to a single place. He was no longer just the god of a single people in a
God, omnipotent and omnipresent. The special relationship between Him and
the Hebrews remained, as did the promise of a kingdom of peace, but the
Hebrews now held that He was available to them wherever they went and no
this idea, but developed the strict set of religious customs, of marriage laws
and ceremonies, of dietary laws (i.e. keeping a kosher diet), and the duty of all
Hebrew men to study the sacred books, all in order to preserve their identity.
Once the Torah was compiled as a single sacred text by the prophet Ezra, one
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of the official duties of the scholarly leaders of the Jewish community, the
would stay the same no matter where the Jews went. The result was a “mobile
tradition” of Judaism in which the Jews could travel anywhere and take their
religion with them. This would become important in the future, when they
were forcibly taken from Judah by the Romans and scattered across Europe
and North Africa. The ability of the Jews to bring their religious tradition with
The radical element of Jewish religion, as well as the Jewish legal system that
arose from it, the Talmud, was the idea that all Jews were equal before God,
rather than certain among them having a closer relationship to God. This is
the first time a truly egalitarian element enters into ethics; no other people
had proposed the idea of the essential equality of all human beings (although
some aspects of Egyptian religion came close). Of all the legacies of Judaism,
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this may be the most important, although it would take until the modern era
for political movements to take up the idea of essential equality and translate
Conclusion
that they were more dynamic and, in the case of the empires, more powerful
empires of the Bronze Age and, especially, the Iron Age represented different
political units than had been possible earlier. The other major change is that it
now becomes possible to discuss and examine the interactions between the
various kingdoms and empires, not just what happened with them internally,
since the entire region from Greece to Mesopotamia was now in sustained
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Likewise, some of the ideas and beliefs that originated in the Bronze and
shaping the subsequent history of not just Western Civilization, but much of
world history. Monotheism and the concept of the essential spiritual equality
long run.
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Chapter 4: The Archaic Age of Greece
Overview
noted in the introduction of this book, however, there are some problems with
taking that approach, most importantly the fact that starting with the Greeks
overlooks the fact that the Greeks did not invent the essential elements of
civilization itself.
important and influential. They can be justly credited with creating forms of
hugely influential. Among other things, the Greeks carried out the first
of drama like comedy and tragedy, and devised the method of researching and
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writing history itself. It is thus useful and productive to consider the history
of ancient Greece even if the conceit that other forms of ancient history are
During the Bronze Age, as described in the last chapter, the Minoans and
Mycenaeans were two of the civilizations that were part of the international
trade and diplomacy network of the Mediterranean and Middle East. The
Minoans were a major seafaring civilization based on the island of Crete. They
created huge palace complexes, magnificent artwork, and great wealth. They
and the islands of the Aegean Sea and were known primarily as sea-going
merchants and raiders. They were extremely warlike, attacking each other,
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their neighbors, and the people they also traded with whenever the
opportunity existed to loot and sack. The Mycenaeans were the protagonists
of the famous epic poems written by the (possibly mythical) Homer, The Iliad
Age. The cause was probably a combination of foreign invasions and local
rebellions and wars. One strong possibility is that there was a sustained civil
disruption to the economic setting that was essential to their very existence. A
bad enough war in Greece itself could have easily undermined harvests,
already near a subsistence level, and when they were destroyed by these
conflicts, towns, fortresses and palaces could not be rebuilt. Whatever the
cause, the decline of the Mycenaeans occurred around 1100 BCE, marking the
Of all the regions and cultures affected by the collapse of the Bronze
Age, Greece was among those hit hardest. First and foremost, foreign trade
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declined dramatically. Whereas the Mycenaeans had been seafaring traders,
areas all but vanished. In turn, this reversion to local subsistence economies
cut them off from important sources of nutrition and materials for daily life, as
well as foreign ideas and cultural influences. The Greeks went from being a
great traveling and trading culture to one largely isolated from its
neighbors. The results were devastating: some scholarly estimates are that
The Greek Dark Age started to end around 800 BCE. The subsequent
period of Greek history, from around 800 BCE - 490 BCE, is referred to as the
“Archaic” (meaning “old”) Age. The Archaic Age saw the re-emergence of
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Greek colonies on the Greek islands and on the western coast of Anatolia; this
region is called Ionia, with its Greek inhabitants speaking a dialect of Greek
importantly with the Phoenicians, the great traders and merchants of the Iron
Phoenicians, none was more important than their alphabet. Working from the
Phoenician version, the Ionian Greeks developed their own syllabic alphabet
(the earlier Greek writing system, Linear B, vanished during the Greek Dark
Age). This system of writing proved flexible, nuanced, and relatively easy to
learn. Soon, the Greeks started recording not just tax records and mercantile
transactions, but their own literature, poetry, and drama. The earliest
surviving Greek literature dates from around 800 - 750 BCE thanks to the use
of this new alphabet (which, in turn, served as the basis of the Roman
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alphabet and from there to the alphabets used in all Latinate European
Homer's epic poems - The Iliad and The Odyssey - were written down in
this period after being recited in oral form by traveling singers for
centuries. They purported to recount the deeds of great heroes from the
ancient Greek values, beliefs, and practices to later cultures. Both poems
fulfilling one’s potential, which was almost always the highest goal espoused
overcome both one another and their own limitations, while grappling with
the limitations imposed by nature, chance, and the will of the gods.
The values on display in the Homeric poems spoke to the Greeks of the
Archaic Age in how they determined what was good and desirable in human
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behavior in general. The focus of the Greeks was on the two ways that a man
(and it was always a man in Greek philosophy – a theme that will be explored
strength of arms and through skill at words. The two major areas a man had to
master were thus war and rhetoric: the ability to defeat enemies in battle and
excellence, not private virtue or good intentions. What mattered was how a
The fear of shame was a built-in part of the pursuit of excellence; Greek
winners, and the losers were openly mocked in the aftermath of the
contests. This idea of public debate and competition was to have an enormous
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Greek values translated directly into Greece’s unique political
order. The Archaic Age was the era when major Greek political innovations
took place. Of these, the most important was the creation of the polis (plural:
lands. The English word “political” derives from “polis” – the polis was the
center of Greek politics in each city-state, and Greek innovations in the realm
of political theory would have an enormous historical legacy. From the Greek
poleis of the Archaic and subsequent Classical Age, the notion of legal
concept of political pride now referred to as patriotism all first took shape.
citizens could only be members of a single polis, and citizens had some kind of
area that was used as a market and a public square, and discuss matters of
importance to the polis as a whole. The richest and most powerful citizens
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became hereditary. Other free citizens could vote in many cases on either
electing officials or approving laws, the latter of which were usually created
by a council of elders (all of whom were aristocrats) – the elders were called
archons. At this early stage, commoners had little real political power; the
Even in poleis in which citizens did not directly vote on laws, however,
there was a strong sense of community, out of which developed the concept of
civic virtue: the idea that the highest moral calling was to place the good of the
community above one's own selfish desires. This concept was almost
lineages of kings rather than the abstract idea of a community in most cases.
Also, all Greek citizens were equal before the law, which was a radical break
since most other civilizations had different sets of laws based on class identity
the later chapter on classical Greece). Civic virtue, very closely related to the
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modern concept of patriotism, was power and influential idea because it
the Great's conquests, and eventually become one of, if not the single most
One area of Archaic Greek culture bears additional focus: gender. Greek
society was explicitly patriarcal, with men holding all official positions of
political power. Likewise, both the Greek myths and epic tales are both rife
instead women who dutifully served their husbands or fathers (Penelope, wife
of the Greek hero Odysseus, is described as waiting faithfully for twenty years
for Odysseus to return from the invasion of Troy despite a legion of suitors
trying to win her and Odysseus’s lands). Women were expected to be sexually
monogamous with their husbands while men’s sexual liaisons with female
slaves as well as other men of their own social rank were perfectly acceptable
behaviors.
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That being noted, it is clear that women in the Archaic Age did enjoy
both social influence and some access to economic power, being able to
inherit property and receiving social approval for the skillful management of
normal social discourse, with various Greek tales including moments of casual
invaluable to the Greek economy, providing almost all of the domestic labor
would grow more fraught over time: as the Archaic Age evolved into the
lives and freedoms would increase, especially in key poleis like Athens,
world.
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Greek Culture and Trade
The Greek poleis were each distinct, fiercely proud of their own identity
and independence, and they frequently fought small-scale wars against one
another. Even as they did so, they recognized each other as fellow Greeks and
the Greek language. All Greeks worshiped the same pantheon of gods. All
Greeks shared political traditions of citizenship. Finally, the Greeks took part
recited the Iliad and Odyssey from memory to holding drawn-out drinking
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The poleis also invented institutions that united the cities culturally,
despite their political independence, the most important of which was the
Panhellenic games. “Panhellenic” literally means “all Greece,” and the games
were meant to unite all of the Greek poleis, including those founded by
colonists and located far from Greece itself. The games were a combination of
The most significant of these games was the Olympics, named after
Olympia, the site in southern Greece where they were held every four years.
They started in 776 BCE and ended in 393 CE – in other words, they lasted for
over 1,000 years. Thanks to the Olympics, the date 776 BCE is usually used as
the definitive break between the Dark and Archaic ages of Greek civilization.
The Olympics were extraordinary not just in their longevity, but because
Greeks from the entire world of Greek settlements came to them, traveling
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from as far away as Sicily and the Black Sea. Wars were temporarily
suspended and all Greek poleis agreed to let athletes travel with safe passage
to take part in the games, in part because the Olympics were dedicated to
Zeus, the chief Greek god. As noted above, there were no second prizes. Greek
culture was hugely competitive; the defeated were humiliated and the
winners totally triumphant. In the games, they sought, in the words of one
Greek poet, “either the wreath of victory or death” (granted, that poet was
With the end of the Dark Age, population levels in Greece recovered.
This led to emigration as the population outstripped the poor, rocky soil of
Greece itself and forced people to move elsewhere. Eventually, Greek colonies
stretched across the Mediterranean as far as Spain in the west and the coasts
of the Black Sea in the north. Greeks founded colonies on the North African
Greeks set up trading posts in the areas they settled, even in Egypt. The
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colonies continued the mainland practice of growing olives and grapes for oil
and wine, but they also took advantage of much more fertile areas away from
all young men. In other cases, however, colonists found relatively isolated
areas appropriate for shipping and set up shop, maintaining close connections
with their home polis as an economic outpost. The one factor that was
common to all Greek colonies was that they were rarely far from the sea. They
were so closely tied to the idea of a shared Greek civilization and the need for
the sea for trade routes was so strong that colonists were not generally
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Greek colonization during the Archaic period - note how Greek colonies were always near the
sea.
As trade recovered following the end of the Dark Age, the Greeks re-
with their colonies soon playing a vital role. Greek merchants eagerly traded
with everyone from the Celts of Western Europe to the Egyptians, Lydians,
and Babylonians. When Julius Caesar was busy conquering Gaul about 700
years later, he found the Celts there writing in the Greek alphabet, long since
learned from the Greek colonies along the coast. Likewise, archaeologists
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have discovered beautiful examples of Greek metalwork as far from Greece as
northern France.
Greek colonies far from Greece were as important as the older poleis in
Greece itself, since they created a common Greek civilization across the entire
spearmen standing in a dense formation, with each using his shield to protect
the man to his left. Each soldier in a phalanx was called a hoplite. Each hoplite
had to be a free Greek citizen of his polis and had to be able to pay for his own
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weapons and armor. He also had to be able to train and drill regularly with his
politically because they were not always aristocrats, despite the fact that they
had to be free citizens capable of paying for their own arms. Because they
defended the poleis and proved extremely effective on the battlefield, the
Depiction of a battle between phalanxes of hoplites from rival poleis, dating from c. 560
BCE. The clay vessel is an amphora, a container used for wine or olive oil.
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The most noteworthy military innovation represented by the hoplites
was that their form of organization provided one solution to the age-old
problem of how to pay for highly-trained and motivated soldiers: rather than
a state paying for a standing army, the hoplites paid for themselves and were
motivated by civic virtue. When rival poleis fought, the phalanxes of each side
would square off and stab away at each other until one side broke, threw
down their shields, and ran away (by far the deadliest part of the
confrontation). The victors would then allow the losers time to gather their
By the seventh century BCE, the hoplites in many poleis were clamoring
for better political representation, since they were excluded by the traditional
aristocrats from meaningful political power. In many cases, the result was the
rise of tyrannies: a government led by a man, the tyrant, who had no legal
right to power, but had been appointed by the citizens of a polis in order to
stave off civil conflict (tyrants were generally aristocrats, but they answered
to the needs of the hoplites as well). To the Greeks, the term tyrant did not
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originally mean an unjust or cruel ruler, since many tyrants succeeded in
solving major political crises on behalf of the hoplites while still managing to
The tyrants, lacking official political status, had to play to the interests
them built public works and provided jobs, while others went out of their way
to promote trade. The period between 650 – 500 BCE is sometimes called the
stave off civil war between aristocrats and less wealthy citizens during this
money could hold office, the laws were written down and known to all free
citizens, and even poorer citizens could vote (albeit only yes or no) on the
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Sparta and Athens
Two of the most memorable poleis of the Archaic Age were Sparta and
Athens. The two poleis were in many ways a study in contrasts: an obsessively
political innovation.
Sparta
approximately 600 BCE – 450 BCE, the Spartans were unique in the ancient
warriors. Starting in about 700 BCE, the Spartans conquered a large swath of
territory in their home region of Greece, the southern Greek peninsula called
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the Peloponnesus. Sparta at the time was an aristocratic monarchy, with two
kings ruling over councils of citizens. Under the two kings were a smaller
council that issued laws and a large council made up of all Spartan males over
30 who approved or rejected the laws proposed by the council. Over time,
citizenship was limited to men who had undergone the arduous military
Spartan culture was among the most extreme forms of militarism the
world has ever seen. Spartan boys were taken from their parents when they
were seven to live in barracks. They were regularly beaten, both as a form of
discipline and to make them unafraid of pain. Children with deformities of any
kind were left in the elements to die, as were children maimed by the training
physical endurance. Spartan girls were allowed to stay with their parents, but
were trained in martial skills as children as well, along with the knowledge
they would need to run a household. When a man reached the age of twenty,
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a full Spartan citizen - and receive a land grant that ensured that he could
concentrate on military discipline for the rest of his life without having to
to test Spartans. When it was time for young Spartan to marry, the young man
would brawl his way into the family home of his bride-to-be, fighting her
relatives until he could “kidnap” her – this was as close to courtship as the
Spartans got. Married couples were not allowed to live together before the age
of 30; up till then, the man was expected to sneak out of his bunker to see his
training were often forced to steal food (from their own slave-run farms); they
were punished if caught, but the infraction was being caught, not the theft -
the idea was that the future warrior had failed to live up to the required level
of skill at stealth.
The reason for all of this militaristic mania was simple: Sparta was a
slave society. Approximately 90% of the population of the area under Sparta's
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control were helots, serfs descended from the population conquered by Sparta
in the eighth century. Early Spartan conquests of their region of Greece had
resulted in a very large area under their control, populated by people who
were not Spartan. Rather than extend any kind of political representation to
these subjects, the Spartans instead maintained absolute control over them,
Every year, the Spartans would “declare war” on the helots, rampaging
through their river valley, and part of the training of young Spartans was
serving on the Krypteia, the Spartan secret police that infiltrated Helot villages
dispatched to simply murder any helots they encountered. All of this was to
ensure that the helots would be too terrified and broken-spirited to resist
Spartan domination. There were never more than 8,000 Spartan soldiers,
Sparta who were not considered helots, but instead free but subservient
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society was a military hierarchy that arose out of the fear a massive slave
uprising.
were loathe to be drawn into wars, especially ones that involved going more
than a few days’ march from Sparta. They were so preoccupied with
maintaining control over the helots that they were very hesitant to engage in
military campaigns of any kind, and hence rarely engaged in battles against
other poleis before the outbreak of war against Athens in the fourth century
BCE.
The only area in which Spartan society was actually less repressive than
the rest of the Greek poleis was in gender roles. According to Greeks from
outside of Sparta, free Spartan women were much less restricted than women
elsewhere in Greece. They were trained in war, they could speak publicly, and
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freedom than women anywhere else in Greece - of course, this would have
been a social necessity since the men of Sparta lived in barracks until they
Athens
In many ways, Athens was the opposite of Sparta. Whereas the Spartans
were militaristic and austere (the word “spartan” in English today means
“severe and unadorned”), the Athenians celebrated art, music, and drama.
the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, rivals for the position of the most powerful
polis in Greece.
Athens was rich and populous – the population of Attica, its 1,000-
square-mile region of Greece, was about 600,000 by 600 BCE, and Athens was
a major force in Mediterranean trade. That wealth led to conflicts over its
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distribution among the citizens, in turn prompting some unprecedented
owning families who controlled most of the land and most of the political
power – and everyone else, particularly the free citizens and farmers of
Athens who were not aristocrats. One key development in Athenian politics
arose from the fact that merchants and prosperous farmers could afford arms
and armor but were shut out of political decision-making. This was a classic
the aristocracy.
when there was a real possibility of civil war between the common citizens
and the aristocrats. The major problem was that the aristocrats owned most
of the land that other farmers worked on, many of those farmers were
could not pay off his or her debts could be legally enslaved. An increasing
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number of formerly-free Athenian citizens thus found themselves enslaved to
To prevent civil war, the Athenians appointed Solon (638 – 558 BCE), an
institutions. His most important step in restoring order was to cancel debts
slaves who had been enslaved abroad and bring them back to Athens. He
enacted other legal reforms that reduced the overall power of the aristocracy,
and in a savvy move, he had the laws written down on wooden panels and
posted around the city so that anyone who could read could examine them (up
to that point, the only people who actually knew the laws were the aristocratic
judges, which made it all too easy for them to abuse their power).
however. He mitigated the worst of the social divides between rich and poor
in Athens, but he still reserved the highest offices for members of the richest
families. On the other hand, the poorer free citizens were completely exempt
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from taxes, which made it easier for them to stay out of debt and to contribute
to Athenian society (and the military). Perhaps the most innovative and
obeying written laws; this is in contrast to “the state” as just the ruling cabal of
collection of new tyrants, some of whom seized more land from aristocrats
but none of whom definitively broke the power of the old families. Social
In 508 BCE, however, a new tyrant named Cleisthenes was appointed by the
Athenian assembly who finally took the radical step of allowing all male
office. This included free but poor citizens, the ones too poor to afford
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randomly) and created new “tribes” mixing men of different backgrounds
That being noted, by modern standards Athens was still highly unequal
were free non-citizens (including many prosperous Greeks who had not been
born in Athens) and, of course, slaves. The voting age was set at 20. Overall,
about 40% of the population were native-born Athenians, of which half were
men, and half were under 20, so only 10% of the actual population had
political rights. This is still a very large percentage by the standards of the
ancient world, but it should be considered as an antidote to the idea that the
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Conclusion
alongside many of the other civilizations of the Iron Age. For centuries,
Greece itself was too remote, geographically, and too poor, in terms of natural
sixth century BCE, however, some Greek colonies fell under the sway of the
greatest empire the world had seen to date, and a series of events culminated
Symposium - PD-1923
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Chapter 5: Persia and the Greek Wars
empire that was at the time the largest the world had ever seen. It
incorporated all of the ancient civilizations of the Middle East, and at its height
it even included Egypt. In other words, the entire expanse of land stretching
from the borders of India to Greece, including nearly all of the cultures
described in the chapters above, were all conquered and controlled by the
Persians.
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closely-related set of clans known as the Persians, who would go on to rule
clan of a given royal dynasty. The empire described in this chapter is referred
to as the Achaemenid Persian Empire after its first ruling clan. Later periods
Persian Expansion
The Medes were allies of Babylon, and in 612 BCE they took part in the
huge rebellion that resulted in the downfall of the Assyrian Empire. For just
over fifty years, the Medes continued to dominate the Iranian plateau. Then,
in 550 BCE a Persian leader, Cyrus II the Great, led the Persians against the
Medes and conquered them (practically speaking, there was little distinction
between the two groups since they were so closely related and similar; the
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Greeks regularly confused the two when writing about them). He assimilated
the Medes into his own military force and then embarked on an incredible
campaign of conquest that lasted twenty years, forging Persia into a gigantic
empire.
the kingdom of Lydia in the process. His principal further west were the Greek
colonies of Ionia, along the coast of the Aegean Sea. Cyrus swiftly defeated the
Greek poleis, but instead of punishing the Greeks for opposing him he allowed
them to keep their language, religion, and culture, simply insisting they give
him loyal warriors and offer tribute. He found Greek leaders willing to work
with the Persians and he appointed them as governors of the colonies. Thus,
even though they had been beaten, most of the Greeks in the colonies did not
Cyrus next turned south and conquered the city-states and kingdoms of
conquest was surprisingly peaceful; Babylon was torn between the priests of
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Marduk (the patron deity of the city) and the king, who was trying to favor the
worship of a different goddess. After he defeated the forces of the king in one
Part of the inscription reads: “I am Cyrus, king of the world, great king, mighty king, king
of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters, the son of Cambyses, great
king, king of Anšan, grandson of Cyrus, great king, king of Anšan, descendant of Teispes, great
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king, king of Anšan, of an eternal line of kingship, whose rule Bêl and Nabu love, whose
kingship they desire for their hearts' pleasure. When I entered Babylon in a peaceful manner, I
took up my lordly abode in the royal palace amidst rejoicing and happiness. Marduk, the great
lord, established as his fate for me a magnanimous heart of one who loves Babylon, and I daily
principles: descent from other great kings and the favor of the gods. He was
the living representative of a supreme royal line of descent and an ensis in the
Mesopomian sense: the agent of the patron god on earth. Over time the
identity of the god in question became Ahura Mazda, the supreme god of the
Zoroastrian religion (described below) rather than Marduk, but the principle
remained the same. All subsequent Persian kings would cite these two
principles, which when combined elevated them in authority above all other
rulers.
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Cyrus continued the practice of finding loyal leaders and treating his
what constituted the “known world” in that region. To the northeast were the
whom the Persians would go on to fight for centuries (Cyrus himself died in
battle against the Scythians in 530 BCE - he was 70 years old at the time).
Cyrus was followed by his son Cambyses II. Cambyses led the Persian
armies west, conquering both the rich Phoenician cities of the eastern
demonstrating Persian respect for local traditions. Thus, in less than thirty
years, Persia had gone from an obscure kingdom in the middle of the Iranian
plateau to the largest land empire in the entire world, bigger even than China
(under the Eastern Zhou dynasty) at the time. Cambyses died not long after, in
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In 522, following Cambyses’ death, Darius I became king (r. 521 – 486
BCE). Darius came to power after leading a conspiracy that may have
the midst of the political chaos at the top, a series of revolts briefly shook the
empire, but Darius swiftly crushed the uprisings and reasserted Persian
wall (the “Bisitun Inscription”) which depicts his victory over lesser kings and
traces his royal lineage back to a shared ancestor with Cyrus the Great.
By the time Darius came to power, the Persian Empire was already too
large to rule effectively; it was bigger than any empire in the world to date but
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over the entire empire to standardize taxation and make it clear what was
oversaw the conquest of the northern part of the Indus river valley in
northwestern India, thus marking the first time in world history when one
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state ruled over three of the major river systems of ancient history (i.e. the
Nile, Mesopotamia, and the Indus). In 513 BCE he led a gigantic invasion of
Central Asia to try to end the raids of the Scythians once and for all; he was
forced to retreat without winning a decisive victory, but his army was still
conquering the remaining Greek colonies on the coast of Anatolia. In 499 BCE
several Ionian Greek poleis rose against the Persians and successfully secured
Athenian aid. Several years of fighting followed, with the Persians eventually
crushing the rebellion in 494 BCE (the Persians deported many of the Greek
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The Persian Government
Persians may have had relatively loyal subjects, after all, but if it took months
for messages to reach them, even loyal subjects could make decisions that the
kings would disagree with. To help address this issue, Darius undertook a
building highways and setting up supply posts for their messengers. The most
important of these highways was called the Royal Road, linking up the empire
all the way from western Anatolia to the Persian capital of Susa, just east of
the Tigris. A messenger on the Royal Road could cover 1,600 miles in a week
on horseback, trading out horses at posts along the way. The Persians
standardized laws and issued regular coinage in both silver and gold. The
state used several languages to communicate with its subjects, and the
cuneiform alphabet.
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As described above, the key to Persian rule was the novel innovation of
treating conquered people with a degree of leniency (in stark contrast to the
long as they were loyal, paid taxes, and sent troops when called, the Persian
kings had no problem with letting their subjects practice their own religions,
use their own languages, and carry on their own trading practices and
customs. For example, it was Cyrus who allowed the exiled Jews to return to
Judah from Babylon in the name of a kind of royal generosity. It seems that the
linking their power to sympathy for their subjects, rather than trying to
to gather intelligence and maintain control over such a vast area relatively
successfully. The empire was divided into twenty satrapies (provinces), ruled
by officials called satraps. In each satrapy, the satrap was the political
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directly to the king; in this way, the two most powerful leaders in each satrapy
could keep an eye on each other. In addition, roaming officials called the “eyes
and ears of the king” traveled around the empire checking that the king’s
edicts were being enforced and that conquered people were not being abused,
then reporting back to the Persian capitals of Susa and Persepolis (both cities
balances,” the satraps appointed the new king from the royal family when the
the royal family so that the satraps might enjoy more personal freedom.
The kings themselves adopted the title of “King of Kings.” They were
happy to acknowledge the authority of the rulers of the lands they had
receiving tribute from other, lesser kings who had come to Susa or Persepolis
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in a show of loyalty and support. In this way, the political authority of the
empire was tied together by both the formal bureaucratic structure of the
satrapies as well as the bonds of loyalty between the King of Kings and his
subject rulers.
taxation. In order to keep taxes moderate, the Persian kings only called up
armies (of both Persians and conquered peoples) when there was a war;
otherwise the only permanent army was the 10,000-strong elite bodyguard of
the king that the Greeks called the “Immortals.” When the Persians did go to
Phoenicians formed the navy, the Medes the cavalry, the Mesopotamians the
infantry, and so on. This system worked well on long campaigns, but its
weakness was that it took up to two years to mobilize the whole empire for
war, a serious issue in the conflicts between Persia and Greece in the long run.
centuries, from Cyrus’s victories in 550 BCE to its conquest by Alexander the
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Great, completed in 330 BCE. It is worth noting that despite the relatively
Egypt), most frequently during periods of transition or civil war between rival
claimants to the throne. In a sense, the empire both benefited from and was
made vulnerable by the autonomy of its subjects: each region maintained its
in moments of crisis that autonomy might also lead to the demand for actual
independence.
Zoroastrianism
prophet Zoroaster, taught that the world was being fought over by two great
(meaning “Lord Wisdom”) and an evil spirit, Ahriman. Ahura Mazda was
aided by lesser gods like Mithras, god of the sun and rebirth, and Anahita,
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goddess of water and the cosmos. Every time a person did something
righteous, honest, or brave, Ahura Mazda won a victory over Ahriman, while
pushed back against Ahura Mazda. Thus, humans had a major role to play in
bringing about the final victory of Ahura Mazda through their actions.
Zoroaster himself lived far earlier (sometime between 1300 BCE and
1000 BCE), long before the rise of the empire, and was responsible for
codifying the beliefs of the religion named after him. Zoroaster claimed that
Ahura Mazda was the primary god and would ultimately triumph in the battle
against evil, but explained the existence of evil in the world as a result of the
struggle against Ahriman. Thus, Ahura Mazda was not “all-powerful” in quite
the same way as the Jewish (and later Christian and Muslim) God was believed
to be. Human actions mattered in this scheme because everyone played a role,
about the afterlife: when the power of good finally triumphs definitively over
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evil, those who lived righteously would live forever in the glorious presence of
Ahura Mazda, while those who were evil would suffer forever in a black pit.
and Christian beliefs. Indeed, there is a direct link between the Zoroastrian
Ahriman and the Jewish and Christian figure of Satan, who was simply a dark
spirit in the early books of the Torah but later became a distinct presence, the
“nemesis” of God Himself and a threat to the order of the world, if not to God.
Likewise, the Christian idea of the final judgment is clearly indebted to the
expansion of the Persian Empire. Because the great kings believed that they
were the earthly representatives of Ahura Mazda, they claimed that the
expansion of the empire would bring the final triumph of good over evil
sooner. There was a parallel here to the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, who
had also (during their expansionist phase during the New Kingdom) claimed
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sponsored Zoroastrian temples and expanded the faith at least in part because
the faith supported them: the magi, or priests, preached in favor of the
below. The Greeks thought of the war as the defense of their glorious
was the Greeks who controlled a society that was heavily dependent on
slavery, whereas slavery was at least less prevalent in Persia than in Greece
(despite the religious ban, slavery was clearly still present in the Persian
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Zoroastrians by the rule of Darius I. The importance of Zoroastrianism is in
part the fact that it reveals much about what the Persians valued, not just what
they believed about the universe. Truth was the cardinal virtue of
Zoroastrianism, with lying being synonymous with evil. Each person had a
certain social role to play in the Zoroastrian worldview, with the kings
fought to extend righteousness, not just seize territory and loot. Clearly, there
was a sophisticated ethical code and set of social expectations present even in
Herodotus. According to him, the Persians taught their children three things:
When the Greek cities of Ionia rose up against Persian rule, Darius
vowed to make an example not just of them, but of the Greek poleis that had
aided them, including Athens. This led to the Persian War, one of the most
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famous conflicts in ancient history. It is remembered in part because it pitted
the superiority of “The West.” Because the Greeks saw the conflict in terms of
the triumph of true, Greek, civilization over barbaric tyranny, and the
surviving historical sources are told exclusively from the Greek perspective,
this bias has managed to last down until the present – consider the recent
movie adaptations of the most famous battles of the Persian War, 300 and 300:
monstrous, ruled over by a comically evil, eight-foot-tall king. The fact that
both Sparta and Athens were slave-based societies is not part of those movies'
narratives.
The war began in 490 BCE, when the Persians, with about 25,000 men,
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ask for help. The Spartans agreed, but said that they could only send
days. Pheidippides ran back to Athens with the bad news, but by then the
force,” not a large army, against which the Athenians fielded 10,000 hoplites.
The Athenians marched out to confront the Persians. The two armies camped
out and watched each other for a few days, then the Persians dispatched about
Athens to defend it. The ensuing battle was a decisive show of force for the
Greeks: the citizen-soldier hoplites proved far more effective than the
conscript infantry of the Persian forces. The core of the Persian army, its
Median and Persian cavalry, fought effectively against the Athenians, but once
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the Athenian wings closed in and forced back the infantry, the Persians were
routed.
very many – the Persians supposedly lost 33 men to every Athenian lost in the
statistic from Greek sources that it was more than that – as many as 60
Persians per Athenian. Whatever the real number, it was a crushing victory
aftermath of the battle claimed that Pheidippides was then sent back to
Athens, still running, to report the victory. He dropped dead of exhaustion, but
It is entirely possible that, despite this victory, the Greeks would have
still been overwhelmed by the Persians if not for setbacks in Persia and its
empire. A major revolt broke out in Egypt against Persian rule, drawing
attention away from Greece until the revolt was put down. Likewise, it took
years to fully “activate” the Persian military machine; preparation for a full-
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scale invasion took a full decade to reach completion. Darius died in 486 BCE,
in the middle of the preparations, which disrupted them further while his son
In the meantime, the Greeks were well aware that the Persians would
warships called triremes, rowed by those free Athenians too poor to afford
armor and weapons and serve as hoplites, but who now had an opportunity to
directly aid in battle as sailors. This was perhaps the first time in world
history that a fairly minor power transformed itself into a major power simply
The Persians had finally regrouped by 480 BCE, ten years after their
first attempt to invade. Xerxes I, the new king, dispatched a huge army (as
navy over twice as large as that of the Athenians. The Greek poleis were, for
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the most part, terrified into submission, with only about 6% of the Greek cities
joining into the defensive coalition created by Athens and Sparta (that being
said, within that 6% were some of the most powerful poleis in Greece). The
Spartans took leadership of the land army that would block the Persians in the
north while the Athenians attacked the Persian navy in the south.
The Spartan-led force was very small compared to the Persian army, but
for several days they held the Persians back at the Battle of Thermopylae, a
narrow pass in which the Persians were unable to deploy the full might of
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their (much larger) army against the Greeks. The Spartan king, Leonidas, and
his troops held the Persian forces in place until the Spartans were betrayed by
a Greek hired by the Persians into revealing a path that allowed the Persians
to surround the Greeks and, finally, overwhelm them. Despite the ultimate
defeat of the Spartan force, this delay gave the Athenians enough time to get
their navy into position, and they crushed the Persian navy in a single day.
Despite the Persian naval loss, Xerxes’ army was easily able to march
across Greece and ransack various poleis and farmlands; it even sacked
Athens itself, which had been evacuated earlier. Xerxes then personally
withdrew along with a significant portion of his army, while claiming victory
over the Greeks. Here, simple logistics were the issue: the Greek naval victory
The next year, in 479 BCE, a decisive battle was fought in central Greece
by a Greek coalition led by the Spartans, followed by a Greek naval battle led
by the Athenians. The latter then led an invasion of Ionia that defeated the
Persian army. Each time the Greeks were victorious, and the Persians finally
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decided to abandon the attempt to conquer Greece as being too costly. The
describe the Persian War, they do identify an essential reason for Greek
victories: thanks to the viability of the phalanx, each Greek soldier (from any
polis, not just Sparta) was a real, viable soldier. The immense majority of the
recruited from their homes and forced to fight for a king for whom they had
little personal loyalty. The core of the Persian army were excellent cavalry
from the Iranian plateau and Bactria (present-day Afghanistan), but those
479 BCE was the end of the Persian war and the beginning of the
“classical age” of Greece, the period during which the Greeks exhibited the
perhaps their most selfish and misguided political blunders in the form of a
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costly and ultimately pointless war between Sparta and Athens: the
Peloponnesian War.
When the Spartans and Athenians led the Greek poleis to victory against
the Persians in the Persian War, it was a shock to the entire region of the
Mediterranean and Middle East. Persia was the regional “superpower” at the
time, while the Greeks were just a group of disunited city-states on a rocky
peninsula to the northwest. After their success, the Greeks were filled with
confidence about the superiority of their own form of civilization and their
taste for inquiry and innovation. Greeks in this period, the Classical Age,
achievements.
The great contrast in the Classical Age was between the power and
splendor of the Greek poleis, especially Athens and Sparta, and the wars and
conflicts that broke out as they tried to expand their power and control. After
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the defeat of the Persians, the Athenians created the Delian League, in theory a
defensive coalition that existed to defend against Persia and to liberate the
Ionian colonies still under Persian control, but in reality a political tool
build and support a large navy, meant to protect all of Greece from any further
in the Delian League. Athens was able to control the League due to its
powerful navy; no other polis had a navy anywhere near as large or effective,
so the other members of the League had to contribute funds and supplies
while the Athenians fielded the ships. Thus, it was all too easy for Athens to
simply use the League to drain the other poleis of wealth while building up its
own power. The last remnants of Persian troops were driven from the Greek
islands by 469 BCE, about ten years after the great Greek victories of the
Persian War, but Athens refused to allow any of the League members to resign
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Soon, Athens moved from simply extracting money to actually imposing
cities and forced the cities to adopt new laws, regulations, and taxes, all
designed to keep the flow of money going to Athens. Some of the members of
the League rose up in armed revolts, but the Athenians were able to crush the
revolts with little difficulty. The final event that eliminated any pretense that
the League was anything but an Athenian empire was the failure of a naval
expedition sent in 460 BCE by Athens to help an Egyptian revolt against the
Persians. The Greek expedition was crushed, and the Athenians responded by
moving the treasury of the League, formerly kept on the Greek island of Delos
(hence “Delian League”), to Athens itself, arguing that the treasury was too
controlled empire, pumping money into Athenian coffers and allowing Athens
to build some of its most famous and beautiful buildings. Thus, the great irony
is that the most glorious age of Athenian democracy and philosophy was
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funded by the extraction of wealth from its fellow Greek cities. In the end, the
Persians simply made peace with Athens in 448 BCE, giving up the claim to
the Greek colonies entirely and in turn eliminating the very reason the League
Peloponnesian League, which was originally founded before the Persian War
Thebes. Like Athens, Sparta dominated its allies, although it did not take
advantage of them in quite the same ways that Athens did. Sparta was
resentful and, in a way, fearful of Athenian power. Open war finally broke out
between the two cities in 431 BCE after two of their respective allied poleis
Athenians had a seemingly unstoppable navy. The Spartans and their allies
repeatedly invaded Athenian territory, but the Athenians were smart enough
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to have built strong fortifications that held the Spartans off. The Athenians, in
turn, attacked Spartan settlements and positions overseas and used their navy
to bring in supplies. While Sparta could not take Athens itself, Athens was
essentially under siege for decades; life went on, but it was usually impossible
for the Athenians to travel over land in Greece outside of their home region of
Attica.
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Athens and its allies, including the poleis it dominated in the Delian League, are depicted in
Truces came and went, but the war continued for almost thirty years. In
415 BCE Athens suffered a disaster when a young general convinced the
looting it. The invasion turned into a nightmare for the Athenians, with every
ship captured or sunk and almost every soldier killed or captured and sold
slaves escaped from the Athenian silver mines that had originally paid for the
navy before the Persian War and were welcomed by the Spartans as recruits
(thus bolstering Spartan forces and cutting off Athens' main source of
revenue). Sparta finally struck a decisive blow in 405 BCE by surprising the
Athenian fleet in Anatolia and destroying it. Athens had to sue for peace.
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Sparta destroyed the Athenian defenses it had used during the war, but did
not destroy the city itself, and within a year the Athenians had created a new
government.
The Aftermath
Greece itself was transformed by the Peloponnesian War. Both sides had
sought out allies outside of Greece, with the Spartans ultimately allying with
the Persians – formerly their hated enemies – in the final stages of the war.
The Greeks as a whole were less isolated and more cosmopolitan by the time
the war ended, meaning that at least some of their prejudices about Greek
superiority were muted. Likewise, the war had inadvertently undermined the
Nowhere was this more true than in Sparta. Sparta had been greatly
altered by the war, out of necessity becoming both a naval power and a
diplomatic “player” and losing much of its former identity; some Spartans had
gotten rich and were buying their sons out of the formerly-obligatory life in
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the barracks, while others were too poor to train. Likewise, the war had
strength. Diplomacy required skill, culture, and education, not just force of
arms. Subsequently, the Greeks as a whole were shocked in 371 BCE when the
polis of Thebes defeated the Spartans three times in open battle, symbolically
marching to within sight of Sparta itself and destroying the myth of Spartan
invincibility.
standing armies for the first time, rather than volunteer citizen-soldiers.
went on to serve the Persians after the war wound down. Thus, between 405
BCE – 338 BCE, the old order of the hoplites and republics atrophied, replaced
states. The period of the war itself was thus both the high point and the
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exerted control over the Anatolian Greek cities by 387 BCE as Greece itself
was divided and weakened. Thus, even though the Persians had “lost” the
ancient Greece, however, it should be emphasized that not all of the poleis
were involved in the war, and there were years of truce and skirmishing
during which even the major antagonists were not actively campaigning. The
reason that this part of Greek history is referred to as the Classical Age is that
its lasting achievements had to do with culture and learning, not warfare. The
ambitions and causing the Greeks to broaden their outlook toward non-
Greeks; its effects were as much cultural as political. Those effects are the
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Map of Persia - Sumerophile
Quote:
Cyrus Cylinder
Introduction
Age,” the time between the triumph of the Greek coalition against Persia in
479 BCE and the conquest of Greece by the Macedonian king Philip II (the
father of Alexander the Great) in 338 BCE. This was the era in which the
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Greek poleis were at their most powerful economically and militarily and
opinions will vary, perhaps the single most memorable achievement of the
Classical Age was in philosophy, first and foremost because of the thought of
the most significant Greek philosophers of all time: Socrates, Plato, and
Aristotle. The Classical Age (like the European Renaissance about two
thousand years later) is best remembered for its artistic and intellectual
itself, “ancient Greece” in the Classical Age is often conflated with what
happened in Athens specifically. Athens was the richest and most influential
of all of the Greek poleis during this period, although its power waned once it
plunged into the Peloponnesian War against Sparta starting in 431 BCE. The
most famous Greek philosophers – Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – were either
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native Athenians (Socrates and Plato) or studied and taught in Athens
Cleisthenes, with about 10% of the overall population having a vote in public
The irony was not just that Athens reached its peak during the period of
the Delian League and the wealth it extracted from other poleis, it was that
empire on top of the other city-states, Athens was becoming the first great
in charge during the transition to this phase was Pericles (495 – 429 BCE), an
aristocrat who dominated Athenian politics but did not actually seize power
system remained in place that had been set up by Cleisthenes. All adult male
citizens had a vote in the public assembly, while a smaller council handled
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rhetorical skill, since everything hinged on the ability of public speakers to
also voted every year to appoint ten generals, who were in charge of both the
As the Delian League grew, which is to say as Athens took over control
accordingly. Under Pericles, there were about 1,500 officials who managed
the taxation of the league's cities, ran courts and administrative bodies, and
managed the League’s activities. Pericles instituted the policy of paying public
servants, who had worked for free in the past, a move that dramatically
decreased the potential for corruption through bribes and opened the
possibility of poorer citizens to serve in public office (i.e. before, a citizen had
almost all farmers and small merchants were cut off from direct political
power). He also issued a new law decreeing that only the children of Athenian
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Athenian women but also further entrenched the conceit of the Athenians in
relation to the other Greek cities; the Athenians wanted citizenship to be their
own, carefully protected, commodity. All of this suggests that Athens enjoyed
a tremendous period of growth and prosperity, along with what was among
the fairest and most impartial government in the ancient world at the time,
Greek society during the Classical Age. The Greeks were the first to carry out
same time, Greek society itself was profoundly divided and unequal. First and
could not be citizens, even though in certain cases like the Athens of Pericles,
could not hold public office, nor could they legally own property or defend
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children are in American society today) under the legal control and
For elite Greek women, social restrictions were stark: they were
family members or close female friends from families of the same social rank,
and when they did go out in public they had to do so in the company of
chaperones. There was never a time in which it was socially acceptable for an
elite woman to be alone in public. Just about the only social position in which
elite women had real, direct power was in the priesthoods of some of the
Greek gods, where women could serve as priestesses. These were a very
Non-elite women had more freedom in the sense that they had to work,
so they often sold goods in the marketplace or helped to run shops. Since the
large majority of the Greek population outside of the cities themselves were
did not have legal control over their own livelihoods, even if they did much of
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the actual work, with their husbands (or fathers or brothers) retaining
In almost all cases, Greek women were married off while extremely
young, usually soon after puberty, and almost always to men significantly
older than they were. Legal power over a woman passed from the father to
the husband, and in cases of divorce it passed back to the father. Even in the
case of widows, Greek tradition held that the husband's will should dictate
who his widow marry - most often another male member of his family, to keep
the family property intact. One important exception to the absence of legal
rights for women was that Greek women could initiate divorce, although the
divorce would be recognized only after a legal process proved that the
rare occurrence either way: there is only one known case from classical
In the domestic sphere, there were physical divides between the front,
public part of the house where men entertained their friends, and the back
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part of the house where women cared for the children and carried on
domestic tasks like sewing. There was little tradition of mixed-sex socializing,
outside of the all-male drinking parties called symposia that featured female
sang, and had sex with the guests. In these cases, the female “company” was
Depiction of a symposium from c. 420 BCE, featuring a female entertainer - most likely a slave
and obliged to provide sex as well as musical entertainment to the male guests.
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In turn, prostitution was very common, with the bulk of prostitutes
being slaves. Elite prostitutes were known as hetairai, who served as female
companions for elite men and were supposed to be able to contribute to witty,
learned discussion. One such hetairai, Aspasia, was the companion of Pericles
and was a full member of the elite circle of philosophers, scientists, and
special cases, however, is that they can gloss over the fact that the vast
once said “we have hetairai for the sake of pleasure, regular prostitutes to care
for our physical needs, and wives to bear legitimate children and be loyal
practiced, since all of the commentary that refers to it was written by elite
men, almost all of whom supported the idea of female subservience and the
separation of the sexes in public. What we know for sure is that almost no
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written works survive by women authors - the outstanding exception being
Sappho, a poet of the Archaic period whose works suggests that lesbianism
may have been relatively common (her home, the Greek island of Lesbos, is
the root of the English word lesbian itself). Likewise, Greek legal codes
certainly enforced a stark gender divide, and Greek homes were definitely
divided into male-dominated public spaces and the private sphere of the
family. There is at least some evidence, however, that gender divisions might
not have been quite as stark as the male commentators would have it - as
noted below, at least one Greek playwright celebrated the wit and fortitude of
women in his work. Finally, we should note that major differences in gender
roles were definitely present in different regions and between different poleis;
One product of the divide between men and women was the prevalence
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versus “homosexual” in Greek culture; sexual attraction was assumed to exist,
bisexuality appears to have been most common among men in the upper
social ranks. One common practice was for an adult man of the elite classes to
“adopt” a male adolescent of his social class and both mentor him in politics,
social conduct, and war, and carry on what we would now regard as a
statutory sexual relationship with him - this practice was especially common
example, in Homer’s Iliad, the one event that rouses the mighty warrior
Achilles to battle when he is busy sulking is the death of his (male) lover. In
Thebes, 150 male couples who led the army of Thebes and held the reputation
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of being completely fearless. Homosexual love in this case was linked directly
to the Greek virtues of honor and skill in battle, as the Sacred Band were
believed to fight all the harder in order to both honor and defend their
lovers. This certainly seemed to be true at times, as when the Theban army,
led by the Sacred Band, was the city that first defeated Sparta in open battle
(this occurred after the Peloponnesian War, when Sparta found itself warring
was the case of slavery. Slaves in Greece were in a legal position just about as
dire as any in history. Their masters could legally kill them, rape them, or
maim them if they saw fit. Normally, slaves were not murdered outright, but
this was because murder was seen as offensive to the gods, not because there
were any legal consequences. As Greece became more wealthy and powerful,
the demand for slaves increased dramatically as each poleis found itself in
need of more labor power, so a major goal for warfare became the capturing
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of slaves. By 450 BCE, one-third of the population of Athens and its territories
consisted of slaves.
Slaves in Greece came from many sources. While the practice was
their own people who were unable to pay debts. More common was the
practice of taking slaves in war, and one of the effects of the Greek victories in
the Persian War was that thousands of Persian captives were taken as
slaves. There was also a thriving slave trade between all of the major
civilizations of the ancient world; African slaves were captured and sold in
Egypt, Greek slaves to Persia (despite its nominal ban on slavery, it is clear
that at least some slavery existed in Persia), nomadic people from the steppes
in Black Sea ports, and so on. With demand so high, any neighboring
settlement was a potential source of slaves, and slavery was an integral part of
Slavery was so prevalent that what the slaves actually did varied
considerably. Some very lucky slaves who were educated ran businesses or
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served as bureaucrats, teachers, or accountants. In a small number of cases,
such elite slaves were able to keep some of the money they made, save it, and
buy their freedom. Much more common, however, were laborers or craftsmen
of all kinds, who made things and then sold them on behalf of their
police and guard forces in the cities. One exceptional case was a force of
archers used as city guards in Athens who were slaves from Scythia (present-
day Ukraine).
The worst positions for slaves were the jobs involving manual labor,
especially in mines. As noted in the last chapter, one of the events that lost the
Peloponnesian War for Athens was the fact that 20,000 of its publicly-owned
slaves were liberated by the Spartans from the horrendous conditions in the
Athenian silver mines. Likewise, there was no worse fate than being a slave in
meant that a slave would die horribly over time. The historical evidence
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suggests that slaves in mines were routinely worked to death, not unlike the
Culture
or equality, what about it led to this era being regarded as “classical”? The
answer is that it was during the Classical Age that the Greeks arrived at some
western world until the end of the eighteenth century CE. In contrast, the
remained living legacies even after the Classical Age itself was at an end.
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and phenomenon common to all of the most important Greek cultural
art. Humanism is the idea that, first and foremost, humankind is inherently
beautiful, capable, and creative. To the Greek humanists, human beings were
not put on the earth to suffer by cruel gods, but instead carried within the
daily life. The basic humanistic attitude is that if there are any gods, they do
simply focus on the tangible world of human life. The Greeks thus offered
sacrifices to keep the gods appeased, and sought out oracles for hints of what
the future held, but did not normally pursue a deeply spiritual connection
That being noted, one of the major cultural innovations of the Greeks,
the creation of drama, emerged from the worship of the gods. Specifically, the
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celebrations of the god Dionysus, god of wine and revelry, brought about the
was choruses of singing and chanting. Greek writers started scripting these
prominent feature of Greek drama left over from the Dionysian rituals
remained the chorus, a group of performers who chanted or sang together and
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Contemporary view of the remnants of the Greek theater of Lychnidos in present-day
Macedonia. The upper tiers are still marked with the names of the wealthy individuals who
mythological or ancient settings. Playwrights would set their plays in the past
or among the gods, but the experiences of the characters in the plays were
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most powerful were the tragedies: stories in which the frailty of humanity,
great success in his endeavors until a fatal flaw of his own personality and
this took the form of hubris, overweening pride and lack of self-control, which
the Greeks believed was offensive to the gods and could bring about divine
difference is that tragedy revolves around pathos, or suffering, from which the
playwrights hoped, lead the audience to relate to and sympathize with the
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contempt of the failings of others, rather than sympathy. The most prominent
whose plays are full of lying, hypocritical Athenian politicians and merchants
who reveal themselves as the frauds they are to the delight of audiences.
Peloponnesian War. The women of Athens are fed up with the pointless
conflict and use the one thing they have some power over, their bodies, to
force the men to stop the fighting by withholding sex. A Spartan contingent
appears begging to open peace negotiations because, it turns out, the Spartan
women have done the same thing. Here, Aristophanes not only indulged in
the ribald humor that was popular with the Greeks (even by present-day
awareness of, and sympathy for, the social position of Greek women. In fact,
in plays like Lysistrata we see evidence that Greek women were not in fact
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Greek drama, both tragedy and comedy, is of enormous historical
explanation for problems, it put human beings front and center in being
responsible for their own errors. It depicted human choice as being the
condition, while comedy offered the chance of laughing at it. In the surviving
plays of the ancient Greeks, there were very few happy endings, but plenty of
opportunities to relate to the fate of, or make fun of, the protagonists. In turn,
Greek drama. Greek drama was the first time human beings acted out stories
Science
a very recent one, in many ways dating to the eighteenth century CE (i.e. only
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about 300 years ago). The word "philosophy" literally means "love of
knowledge," and in the ancient world the people we might identify as Greek
who happened to be especially interested in how the world worked and what
things were made of. Unlike earlier thinkers, the Greek scientists sought to
understand the operation of the universe on its own terms, without simply
wrong most of the time. Instead, its importance is in its spirit of rational
inquiry, in the idea that the human mind can discover new things about the
world through examination and consideration. The world, thought the Greek
scientists, was not some sacred or impenetrable thing that could never be
forces. To that end, Greek scientists claimed that things like wind, fire,
lightning, and other natural forces, were not necessarily spirits or gods (or at
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least tools of spirits and gods), but might just be natural forces that did not
The first known Greek scientist was Thales of Miletus (i.e. Thales, and
were from the polis of Miletus in Ionia), who during the Archaic Age set out to
the height of the pyramids (already thousands of years old) by the length of
floating on water as his teacher had suggested, the earth was held suspended
known map of the world that attempted to accurately depict distances and
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relationships between places. Following Anaximander, a third scientist,
Anaximenes, created the theory of the four elements that, he argued, comprise
all things – earth, air, fire, and water. Many centuries later, Galen of
Pergamon, a Greek physician living under Roman rule, would explain human
health in terms of the balance of those four forces (the four “humors” of the
body), ultimately crafting a medical theory that would persist until the
modern era.
In all three cases, the significance of the Greek scientists is that they
explanation. Even though it was (at it turns out) inaccurate, the idea of the
the leading explanation for many centuries. Other Greek scientists came along
to refine these ideas, most importantly when two of them (Leucippus and
Democritus) came up with the idea that tiny particles they called atoms
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formed the elements that, in turn, formed everything else. It would take until
History
It was the Greeks that came up with history in the same sense that the
that tries to explain what happened and why it happened the way it did. In
other words, history as it was first written by the Greeks is not just about
events and phenomena. Likewise, the Greeks were the first to systematically
BCE), who wrote a history of the Persian War that was acclaimed by his fellow
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tend to react to the political and social pressures they experienced. He
applied his theory to various events in the ancient past, like the Trojan War, as
and read sources to serve as the basis of his conclusions. He did not simply sit
in his home city and theorize about things; he gathered a huge amount of
must seek out writings and artifacts from their areas of study and use them as
genuinely vexed by the issue of whether one set of beliefs and practices (i.e.
complex, and military more powerful, than was Greece. Nevertheless, his
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history of the Persian War continued the age-old Greek practice of referring to
The world as described by Herodotus (the map is a contemporary image based on Herodotus’s
work). Note the central position of Greece, just south of the region marked “Thracians.”
The other great Greek historian of the classical period was the Athenian
writer Thucydides (460 – 404 BCE), sometimes considered the real “father” of
remains the single most significant account of the war to this day. The work
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meticulously follows the events of the war while investigating the human
motivations and subsequent decisions that caused events. The war had been a
sacrificed its own greatness in the quest for more power and wealth. Thus, he
evidence, precisely the same thing historians and history students alike are
that they believed that Clio, one of the divine muses, the sources of inspiration
for thought and artistic creation, was the patron of history specifically.
Philosophy
philosophy. It was in philosophy that the Greeks most radically broke with
supernatural explanations for life and thought and instead sought to establish
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moral and ethical codes, investigate political theory, and understand human
motivations all in terms of the human mind and human capacities. As noted
above, the word "philosophy" literally means "love of knowledge," and Greek
philosophers did much more than just contemplate the meaning of life; they
"philosophers" in the sense that that the word is used in the present.
were those concerning politics and ethics. The key question that arose among
the early Greek philosophers was whether standards of ethics and political
dictated by nature or were instead merely social customs that had arisen over
time. The Classical Age saw the full flowering of Greek engagement with those
questions.
Some of the early philosophers of the Greek classical age were the
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thought. While they did not represented a truly unified body of thought, the
one common sophistic doctrine was that all human beliefs and customs were
just habits of a society, that there were no absolute truths, and that it was thus
issue with equal skill and rhetorical ability. Their focus was on training elite
Greeks to be successful – the Greek term for “virtue” was synonymous with
more successful, especially in the law courts and the public assemblies. They
did not have a shared philosophical doctrine besides this idea that truth was
The men who became the most famous Greek philosophers of all time
strongly disagreed with this view. These were a three-person line of teachers
and students. Socrates (469 – 399 BCE) taught Plato (428 – 347 BCE), who
taught Aristotle (384 – 322 BCE), who went on to be the personal tutor of
Alexander the Great for a time. It is one of the most remarkable intellectual
lineages in history - three of the greatest thinkers of Greek civilization and one
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of the greatest military and political leaders, all linked together as teachers
and students.
arguments were recorded by his student Plato, who committed them to prose
despite sharing Socrates’ disdain for the written word. Socrates challenged
the sophists and insisted that there are essential truths about morality and
ethical conduct, but that to arrive at those truths one must be willing to
relentlessly question oneself. He took issue with the fact that the sophists
seek out these fixed, unchanging rules of truth and ethics. In the Socratic
Method, the teacher asks a series of questions of the student, forcing the
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student to examine her own biases and gaps in logic, until finally arriving at a
more satisfying and reasonable belief than she started with. In Socrates's
case, his questions were meant to lead his interlocutors to arrive at real, stable
truths about justice, truth, and virtuous politics. Unlike with the sophists'
prove that nothing was true, but instead to force one to arrive at truths
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A Roman copy of an original Greek bust of Socrates - as with many Greek sculptures, only the
Roman copy survives. Most Greek statues were made of bronze, and over the centuries almost
Plato agreed with his teacher that there are essential truths, but he went
further: because the senses can be deceived and because our insight is
imperfect, only through the most serious contemplation and discussion can
we arrive at truth. Truth could only be apprehended with the mind, not with
Plato, ideas (which he called "Forms") were more "real" than actual
objects. The idea of a table, for instance, is fixed, permanent, and invulnerable,
while "real" tables are fragile, flawed, and impermanent. Plato claimed that
politics and ethics were like this as well, with the Form of Justice superseding
"real" laws and courts, but existing in the intellectual realm as something
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combining practical knowledge with a deep understanding of intellectual
paramount importance, perhaps even more important than that leader's skill
in leading armies. Of all his ideas, this concept of a philosopher-king was one
Greek philosophy would try to model their rule on Plato's concepts right up to
existence until the early Middle Ages as one of the greatest centers of thought
in the world. Philosophers would travel from across the Greek world to learn
Greece, the Hellenistic Age that followed, and the Roman Empire, only to be
century CE. It was, in short, both one of the most significant and one of the
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Plato's most gifted student was Aristotle, who founded his own
institution of learning, the Lyceum, after he was passed over to lead the
Academy following Plato's death. Aristotle broke sharply with his teacher
over the essential doctrine of his teaching. Aristotle argued that the senses,
while imperfect, are still reliable enough to provide genuine insights into the
workings of the world, and furthermore that the duty of the philosopher was
to try to understand the world in as great detail as possible. One of his major
areas of focus was an analysis of the real-life politics of the polis; his
conclusion was that humans are “political animals” and that it was possible to
contemplation.
astronomy and from mathematics to drama. His work was so influential that
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into the period of the Renaissance (thousands of years later) even though
Art
balance: the human body in its perfect state, perfect symmetry in buildings,
and balance in geometric forms. One well known instance of this was in
ratio” (also known as the “golden mean”) which, when applied to building,
creates forms that the Greeks, and many others afterwards, believed was
inherently pleasing to the eye. The most prominent surviving piece of Greek
Athena, was built to embody the golden ratio in terms of its height and
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width. Likewise, in its use of symmetrical columns and beautiful carvings, it is
perfection in the human form. The classical period saw a transition away
from symbolic statuary, most of which was used in grave decorations in the
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classical statues often celebrated the human potential for beauty, most
physical strength and development. Greek sculptors would often use several
live models for their inspiration, combining the most attractive features of
each subject to create the “perfected” version present in the finished sculpture
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One of the few original Greek bronze statues to survive, depicting either Zeus or Poseidon
Most Greek art was destroyed over time, not least because the dominant
medium for sculpture was bronze, which had allowed sculptors great
flexibility in crafting their work. As Greece fell under the domination of other
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civilizations and empires in the centuries that followed, almost all of those
bronzes were melted down for their metal. Fortunately, the Romans so
appreciated Greek art that they frequently made marble copies of Greek
looked like, albeit in the form of the Roman facsimiles. Likewise, the Romans
copied the Greek architectural style and, along with the Greek buildings like
the Parthenon that did survive, we are still able to appreciate the Greek
architectural aesthetic.
Exploration
knowledge, and so even great historians like Herodotus reported that India
was populated by magical beasts and by men with multiple heads. In turn, the
immediate knowledge Greeks actually had of the world extended to the coasts
of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, Egypt, and Persia, since those were the
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areas they had colonized or were in contact with through trade. Through the
Phoenician naval rivals of the Greeks, at the straits of Gibraltar (the narrow
gap between North Africa and southern Spain between the Mediterranean and
the Atlantic Ocean), which prevented Greek sailors from reaching the Atlantic
Pytheas. A sailor from the small Greek polis Massalia that was well-known for
producing ship captains and navigators, Pytheas undertook one of the most
knew the world was round and had devised a system for determining latitude
Massalia was only off by eight miles. Driven by a sense of how large the world
must be, he set off to sail past the Carthaginian sentries and reach the ocean
beyond.
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Sometime around 330 BCE, roughly the same time Alexander the Great
was heading off to conquer the Persian Empire, Pytheas evaded the
the coast of France, trading with and noting the cultures of the people he
a book about his account titled On the Ocean that was met with scorn from
most of its Greek audience since it did not have any fantastical creatures and
the way) with its narrative. Armchair critics claimed that it was impossible
that he had gone as far as north as he said, because north of Greece it was
quite cold enough and there was no way humans could live any farther north
than that. Practically speaking, despite Pytheas’s voyage, the Greek world
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Conclusion
thought as much as what they did. What the Greeks of the Classical Age
innovations: humanistic art, literature, and a new focus on the rational mind's
ability to learn about nature and to improve politics and social organization.
What the Greeks had never done, however, was spread that culture and those
superiority and their relative weakness in the face of great empires like
Persia. That would change with the rise of a dynasty from the most northern
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Herodotus map - Bibi Saint-Pol
Parthenon - Harrieta171
Quote:
Press (2003)
Introduction
The ancient Greek word for Greece is Hellas. The period after the
civilization spread across the entire Middle East, thanks to the tactical genius
and driving ambition of one man, Alexander the Great. Hellenistic history at
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its simplest is easy to summarize: a Macedonian king named Alexander
conquered all of the lands of the Persian Empire during twelve years of almost
dynasties would war and trade with each other for about three hundred years
before being conquered by the Romans (the rise of Rome happened against
poleis and, while they were recognized as Greeks because of their language
and culture, they were also thought of as being a bit like country bumpkins by
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the more “civilized” Greeks of the south. Macedon was a kingdom ruled by a
single monarch, but that monarch had to constantly deal with both his
conniving relatives and his disloyal nobles, all of whom frequently conspired
to get more power for themselves. Macedon was also bordered by nomadic
who repeatedly invaded and had to be repelled. The Macedonian army was
short, Macedon bred some of the toughest and most wily fighters and political
By the fifth century BCE, some of the larger villages of Macedon grew
civilize their country in the style of the southern Greeks. They competed in the
Olympics and patronized the arts and literature. They tended to stay out of the
political affairs of the other Greeks, however; they did not invade the Greek
peninsula itself in their constant wars, nor did they take sides in conflicts like
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the Peloponnesian War. This did nothing to improve the situation in Macedon
itself, of course, which remained split between the royal family and the
nobility. In 399 BCE, Macedon slid into an ongoing civil war, with the nobles
openly rejecting the authority of the king and the country sliding into
In 359 BCE, the Macedonian king, Philip II, re-unified the country. Philip
was the classic Macedonian leader: shrewd, clever, skilled in battle, and quick
and the surrounding areas to the north, defeating and usually killing his noble
rivals as well as hostile tribes. When men joined with him, he rewarded them
loyalty of his nobles by organizing them into elite cavalry units who swore
loyalty to him, and he proudly led his troops personally into battle. He also
reorganized the infantry into a new kind of phalanx that used longer spears
than did traditional hoplites; these new spearmen would hold the enemy in
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place and then the cavalry would charge them, a tactic that proved effective
against both “barbarian” tribes and traditional Greek phalanxes. Philip was
the first Macedonian king to insist on the drilling and training of his infantry,
and the combination of his updated phalanx and the cavalry proved
mines in the north of Greece, which paid his soldiers and paid to equip them
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The expansion of Macedon under Philip II, from the small region marked in the red border to the
larger blue region, along with the dependent regions surrounding it.
defensive league to resist Macedonian aggression. For about ten years, the
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them, and launched attacks in northern Greece while the larger poleis to the
invasion, the Macedonian army crushed the coalition armies. The key point of
the battle was when Philip's eighteen-year-old son Alexander led the noble
cities under his control and stationed troops throughout Greece. As of 338
been for over a thousand years; it was now united under an invader from the
north. The Greeks deeply resented this occupation. They only grudgingly
Greek civilization for centuries. Philip thus had his job cut out for him in
The more immediate problem facing Philip in the aftermath of the Greek
conquest was that his men demanded more loot – the only way he could pay
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them was to find new places to invade and sack. Thus, Philip ruled Greece but
he could not afford to sit idle with troops aching for more victories. Cleverly,
having just defeated the Greek poleis, Philip began behaving like a Greek
statesman and assuming a kind of symbolic leadership role for Greek culture
itself, not just Greek politics. He began agitating for a Greek invasion of Persia
under his leadership to “avenge” the Persian invasion of the prior century. All
things considered, this was a far-fetched scheme; Persia was by far the
“superpower” of its day, and since the end of the Persian War over a century
revenge.
336 BCE, just two years after conquering Greece. Family politics might have
may have ordered his murder, as well as the murder of his other wife and
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children. It is worth noting, however, that the theory of Olympias’
involvement in Philip’s murder was once accepted as fact but has faced
responsible for the assassination, Alexander ascended to the throne at the age
Alexander was one of the historical figures who truly deserves the
personally leading his armies in battle and fighting on despite being wounded
the loyalty not only of his Macedonian countrymen, but the Greeks and, most
also driven by incredible ambition; tutored by none other than Aristotle in his
youth, he modeled himself on the legendary Greek hero Achilles, hoping to not
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only match but to surpass Achilles' prowess in battle. He became a legend in
his own life, worshiped as a god by many of his subjects, and even his Greek
subjects came to venerate him as one of the greatest leaders of all time.
throne. He first ruthlessly killed off his rivals and enemies in Macedon and
back through Macedon, crushing the Thracian tribes of the north who
threatened to defect. Some of the Greek poleis rose up, hoping to end
reconquer the rebellious Greek cities. In the case of the city of Thebes, for
instance, Alexander let the Thebans know that, by rebelling, they had signed
their own death warrant and he refused to accept their surrender, sacking the
Greece.
By 334 BCE, two years after he became king, Alexander was thoroughly
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attack Persia, leading a relatively small army (of about 45,000 men) into
Persian territory - note how much smaller this army was than the Persian one
had been a century earlier, when Xerxes I had invaded with over 200,000
securing Anatolia and the rich Greek port cities in 333 BCE and Syria in 332
BCE. In almost every major battle, Alexander personally led the cavalry, a
A Roman mosaic depicting Alexander the Great in battle, possibly based on a Greek original.
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His success against the Persians can be explained in part by the fact that
the Persian technique of calling up their armies was too slow. Even though
Alexander had arrived in Anatolia with only 45,000 men, against a potential
Persian army of close to 300,000, far fewer troops were actually available to
the Persians at any one time during the first years of Alexander’s
campaign. Instead, the first two years of the invasion consisted of Macedonian
and Greek forces engaging with smaller Persian armies, some of which even
Persian territory piecemeal, taking key fortresses and cities, seizing supplies,
and fighting off Persian counter-attacks; even with its overall military
superiority, the Persian Empire could not focus its full might against the
Greeks until much of the western empire had already been lost. In addition,
who surrendered, sometimes even honoring with lands and positions those
who had fought against him and lost honorably. In sum, conquest by
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Alexander was not experienced as a disaster for most Persian subjects, merely
a shift in rulership.
In 332 BCE, the Persian king, Darius III, tried to make peace with
Alexander and (supposedly - there is reason to believe that this episode was
marriage, along with the entire western half of the Persian Empire. Alexander
refused and marched into Egypt, where he was welcomed as a divine figure
and liberator from Persia. Alexander made a point of visiting the key Egyptian
temples and paying his respects to the Egyptian gods (he identified the chief
Egyptian deity Amun-Ra with Zeus, father of the Greek gods), which certainly
eased his acceptance by the Egyptians. In the meantime, Darius III succeeded
in raising the entire strength of the Persian army, knowing that a final
From Egypt, the Greek armies headed east, defeating the Persians at two
more major battles, culminating in 330 BCE when they seized Persepolis, the
Persian capital city. There, the Greek armies looted the entire palace complex
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before burning it to the ground; historians have concluded that Alexander
ordered the burning to force the remaining Persians who were resistant to his
surrounding Persian cities paid for the entire Greek army for years to come
and inspired a renaissance of building back in Greece and Macedon, paid for
with Persian gold. Darius III fled to the east but was murdered by Persian
nobles, who hoped to hold on to their own independence (this did not work -
Alexander painstakingly hunted down the assassins over the next few years).
Alexander paused his campaign to pay off his men and allow some of his
troops to return to Greece. He then arranged for thousands of his Greek and
and permanently fuse together the Greek and Persian civilizations. His goal
was not to devastate the empire, but to become the next “Great King” to whom
all other leaders had to defer. He maintained the Persian bureaucracy (such as
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the organization of the Satrapies) and enlisted thousands of Persian soldiers
who joined his campaign as his armies moved even farther east. He also made
a show of treating Darius's family with respect and honor, demonstrating that
he wanted to win the Persians over rather than humiliate them. Alexander
declared that the ancient city of Babylon would be his new capital. Even
though he now ruled over the largest empire in the world, however, he was
unsatisfied, and he set off to conquer lands his new Persian subjects told him
Alexander headed east again with his armies, defeating the tribesmen of
present-day Afghanistan and then fighting a huge battle against the forces of
the Indian king Porus in the northern Indus River Valley in 327 BCE
(Alexander was so impressed by Porus that after the battle he appointed him
satrap of what had been Porus’s kingdom). He pressed on into India for
several months, following the Indus south, but finally his loyal but exhausted
troops refused to go on. Alexander had heard of Indian kingdoms even farther
east (i.e. toward the Ganges River Valley, completely unknown to the Greeks
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before this point) and, being Alexander, he wanted to conquer them too. His
men, however, were both weary and rich beyond their wildest dreams. Few of
them could see the point of further conquests and wanted instead to return
home and enjoy their hard-won loot. Some of his followers were now over 65
years old, having fought for both Philip II and then Alexander, and they
if he crossed the next river, so after sulking in his tent for a week, he finally
armies fight their way down the Indus river valley and then across the
reached the Indian Ocean, splitting his forces into a fleet and a land force that
would travel west separately. The fleet survived unscathed, but the army had
to cross the brutally difficult Makran desert (in the southern part of present-
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day Pakistan and Iran), which cost Alexander’s forces more lives than had the
Alexander’s conquests - the dark black lines trace his route from Macedon in the far northwest
through Egypt, across the Persian heartland, then to Afghanistan and India, and finally along the
The return journey was arduous, and it took years to get back to the
Alexander was exhausted and plagued by injuries from the many battles he
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had fought, but Macedonian and Greek tradition required him to drink to
excess with his generals. Some combination of his injuries, alcohol, and
deathbed, his generals asked who would follow him as Great King and he
replied “the strongest,” then died. The results were predictable: decades of
fighting as each general tried to take over the huge empire Alexander had
forged.
Alexander founded numerous new cities that were to be colonies for his
victorious Greek soldiers, all of which were named Alexandria except for ones
that he named after his horse, Bucephalus, and his dog, Peritas. For almost
Greeks became a new elite class, establishing Greek laws and Greek buildings
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and amenities. At the same time, the Greeks were always a small minority in
the lands of the east, a fact that Alexander had certainly recognized. To deal
with the situation, not only did he encourage inter-marriage, but he simply
took over the Persian system of governance, with its royal road, its regional
almost guaranteed that his empire would collapse as his generals turned on
each other. Indeed, within a year of his death the empire plunged into civil
war, and it took until 280 BCE for the fighting to cease and three major
Seleucus.
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The major Hellenistic kingdoms (here Anglicized as “Seleukos” rather than “Seleucid” and
“Ptolemaios” instead of “Ptolemaic.”) The Mauryan Empire was a loose confederacy of Indian
princes that swiftly achieved independence from Greek influence following Alexander’s death.
The Antigonids ruled over Macedon and Greece. Despite controlling the
Macedonian heartland and Greece itself, the Antigonids were the weakest of
the Hellenistic monarchies. Both areas were depopulated by the wars; many
base. Over time, the Antigonids had to fight to hold on to power in Greece
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alone and they ultimately saw many of the Greek poleis achieve independence
The Ptolemies ruled over Egypt. The Ptolemies were very powerful and,
perhaps more importantly, they had the benefit of ruling over a coherent,
unified state that had ancient traditions of kingship. Once they cemented their
control, the Ptolemies were able to simply act as pharaohs, despite remaining
ethnically and linguistically Macedonian Greek. In their state, the top levels of
rule and administration were Greek, but the bulk of the royal bureaucracy was
right up to the end the dynasty itself was fiercely proud of its Greek heritage,
with Greek soldier colonies providing the backbone of the Ptolemaic military.
Ptolemy had been a close friend and trusted general of Alexander, and he took
himself. In the end, the Ptolemies were the longest-lasting of the Hellenistic
dynasties.
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One of the most important artifacts of the Ptolemaic era: the Rosetta Stone, the object that
enabled the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Written during Ptolemaic rule, the stone
consists of a single royal proclamation in two hieroglyphic alphabets as well as ancient Greek.
The Seleucids ruled over Mesopotamia and Persia. Despite the vast
wealth of the Seleucid kingdom, it was the most difficult one to govern
populations, and it was thus also the most diverse. It proved impossible in the
long term for the Seleucid kings to hold on to the entire expanse of territories
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originally conquered by Alexander. Seleucus himself gave his Indian territory
Parthia destroyed Seleucid control in the old Persian heartland, in the process
founding a new Persian empire (remembered as the Parthian Empire for the
region its rulers originally governed). Nevertheless, the Seleucid kingdom held
on until its remnants were defeated in 63 BCE by Pompey the Great of Rome,
but the bureaucracies were staffed in large part by “natives” of the area. A
kingdoms. Greek remained the language of state and the language of the elites,
the Persian trade language of Aramaic was still used across most of the lands,
and then a host of local tongues existed as the vernacular. The kings often did
not speak a word of the local languages; as an example, Cleopatra VII (the
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famous Cleopatra and last ruler of Egypt before its conquest by Rome) was the
rewarding their inner circles with riches, founding new cities, and expanding
trade routes to foreign lands. They also warred with one another, however,
with the Ptolemies and the Seleucids emerging as particularly bitter rivals,
frequently fighting over the territories that divided their empires. The
Greek settlers who agreed to serve in the armies in return for permanent
Ptolemy himself, the existing Egyptian bureaucracy was expanded and its
middle and upper ranks staffed entirely by Greeks (and Macedonians), who
royal treasury. So much papyrus was used in keeping records that old copies
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new ones - quite a lot of information about the Ptolemaic economy survived in
Likewise, the abundance of the Nile was carefully managed to produce the
greatest yields in history, so large that even after numerous taxes were taken,
Egyptian wheat was still the cheapest available everywhere from Spain to
Mesopotamia (the same held true with papyrus, a royal monopoly used
everywhere in the Hellenistic world). Under the Ptolemies, Egypt was in many
rebellion and infighting. While the dynasty tried to model itself both on Greek
(Darius III was the last of that dynasty to rule), it never established legitimacy
in the eyes of many of its subjects. Instead, the Seleucid rulers were military
leaders first and foremost, often obliged to criss-cross their large empire
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suppressing rebellions, fighting off invasions of Central Asian nomads, and
That noted, where Seleucid rule left a lasting mark on the region it was
in consolidating long-distance trade. The Silk Road that linked China, India,
the Middle East, and Europe truly began during the Hellenstic period and the
merchants and derived much of their revenue from silk textiles. Even though
raw silk (from silkworms) was only available from China, subjects of the
Seleucids in Mesopotamia did master the production of textiles from the raw
west. Thus, even though Seleucid political control was somewhat haphazard
overall, it did at least play a role in encouraging the east/west trade that
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Culture and Gender
One of the remarkable aspects of the Hellenistic age was the extent to
which the people of Greece and the Middle East started exploring beyond the
confines of the ancient world as they had known it. The Ptolemies supported
trading posts along the Red Sea and as far south as present-day Eritrea and
Ethiopia, trading for ivory and gold from the African interior. Explorers tried,
and accounts of foreign lands written by the natives of those lands. Major
The core of the Hellenistic kingdoms were the new cities founded by
Alexander or, later, by the Hellenistic monarchs. The largest was Alexandria in
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Egypt, but there were equivalently grandiose cities in the other kingdoms.
Both the new cities founded by Alexander and his successors and the old
Greek settlements along the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean grew and
prospered. The new cities were built on grid-pattern streets with various
citizenship, which had been the basic unit of political currency in the ancient
Of note is the fact that the Seleucid cities represented the first major
experiment in what we now call the welfare state. Because of the obligations
the first monarchs felt toward their specifically Greek subjects, things like
education and garbage collection were funded by the state. Eventually, public
This practice had nothing to do with charity; it was simply a means for
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There were major ongoing problems for the Hellenistic ruling class,
kingdoms felt that they were the heirs to Alexander’s conquests and that they
were thus justified in occupying most, if not all, of the positions of political
power. Especially in places like Egypt and Mesopotamia that had enormous
prophecy claiming that the Greeks were in league with evil forces and would
eventually be deposed. The Jews also struggled with their Greek overlords, a
problem exacerbated by the fact that they were ruled first by the Ptolemies
and then by the Seleucids. While the Ptolemaic kingdom remained relatively
stable until its takeover by the Romans in 30 BCE, both the Antigonid and
Seleucid kingdoms lost ground over the years, ultimately ruling over a fraction
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of their former territories by the time the Romans began encroaching in the
Hellenistic period saw a significant shift in gender relations. Simply put, the
Greek obsession with maintaining not just a strict sexual hierarchy but an
attempt to separate men and women socially that reached its zenith in
praised for fulfilling social and familial duties, for carrying out religious
ceremonies, and even for their political savvy in the case of noteworthy
queens (like Alexander’s mother Olympias or, much later, the famous
Cleopatra VII).
and enjoyed much greater legal recognition than had women in earlier
the backing of a male guardian, women controlled property, could borrow and
lend money, and could manage the inheritances of their children. Some few
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women even served in political office - for example, a woman served as a
magistrate in the polis of Histria, on the shores of the Black Sea, in the first
century BCE.
greater legal restrictions than those living in Greek colonies elsewhere in the
Hellenistic world, which is unsurprising since the older Greek poleis had
centuries of both law and tradition in place enforcing sexual divisions. The
always been less restrictive, with women exercising much more autonomy
than in the Greek poleis to the south, and that cultural value was clearly
world. Back in Greece, meanwhile, Sparta stood apart as the one polis that
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As usual when discussing gender in the pre-modern period, however, it
autonomy for women. With very few exceptions (once again, Cleopatra VII is
the outstanding example), men continued to control politics. The laws of the
Hellenistic kingdoms did protect and recognize women in various ways, but
men were always given the greater legal role and identity. Analysis of birth
rates suggests that infanticide was common, with girl babies often left to die
both out of a general preference for boys and because the dowry the girl
would have to be provided for at marriage was a burdensome expense for the
female submission, and with a few great exceptions, the bulk of the literature
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from studying politics, as had Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, they turned
happy, even if a larger kind of social justice remained elusive. All of the major
ways: to live in pleasure and tranquility. Three are of particular note: the
humans ought to turn their backs on the pointless drama of politics and social
even if gods existed, they clearly had no interest in human affairs and thus did
not need to be feared. Death was final and total, representing release and
hangovers), but a refined enjoyment of food, drink, music, and sex, although
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one interesting aspect of this philosophy was the idea that sexual pleasure
was fine, but emotional love was to be avoided since it was too likely to result
someone who enjoys the finer things in life, especially in terms of good
cooking!
byproducts of history that distracted people from the true source of virtue
and happiness: nature. In turn, the only route to happiness was a more
aggressive rejection of social life than that espoused by the Epicureans (who,
Cynics were slightly more restrained, but most took great pleasure in mocking
people in positions of political authority, and they also belittled the members
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of other philosophical schools for their overly rigid systems of thought. One
story had it that Alexander sought out Diogenes and found him lying in the
street in a suburb of the polis of Corinth, asking him what he, the king, might
do for him, the philosopher. The Cynic replied “stop standing in my sunbeam.”
fate and rationality. Unlike the Epicureans, Stoics believed that humans had
something linked to both fate and nature. As participants in the natural order,
humans ought to learn to accept the trials and tribulations of life rationally,
discomfort). The Stoics accepted the necessity of being part of a society and of
fulfilling social obligations, but they warned against excesses of pride and
greed. Instead, a Stoic was to do his duty in his social roles without the
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larger scheme instead of resisting it, and they also celebrated the idea that the
accepting the (political) status quo. The Epicureans avoided politics, the
everything without offering positive suggestions for change. This was a far
rational (let alone democratic) political analysis were not a major component
of that influence.
While political theory did not enjoy a period of growth during the
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geometry. He was the first to use obvious starting points called axioms – for
instance, the idea that two parallel lines will never intersect – to be able to
relatively few ancient thinkers who really “got it right” in the sense that none
of his major claims were later proved to be inaccurate. His work on geometry,
the Elements, was still used as the standard textbook in many courses on
mathematics well into the twentieth century CE, thousands of years after it
using the displacement of water to calculate the specific gravity of objects, and
when his home city of Syracuse, in Sicily, was under attack (including,
according to some accounts, a giant mirror used to focus the sun's rays on
most notably the fact that certain astronomers determined that the sun was
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the center of the solar system. Hellenistic astronomers also refined the
calculations associated with the size of the Earth; one astronomer named
Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth that was only off by
200 miles. Another astronomer named Hipparchus created the first star
charts that included precise positions for stars over the course of the year, and
to help keep track of their positions he created the first system of longitudes
and latitudes.
period was the institutional form it took at the Library of Alexandria and its
Hellenistic world and played host to scholars who based their own work on its
although to this day there are competing versions of who was to blame for its
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destruction (ranging from the forces of Julius Caesar during his involvement
surprising in that the pace of technological change in the ancient world was
time was the spread of ideas and knowledge, much of which had no immediate
Conclusion
the Hellenistic period as a whole is not. The reason for that relative neglect
(in popular culture and in many history surveys, at least those at the pre-
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happening simultaneously to the west: the rise of Rome. In precisely the same
period in which Alexander and his successors first conquered then ruled the
territories of the former Persian Empire, Rome was in the process of evolving
from a town in central Italy to the center of what would eventually be one of
the greatest and longest-lasting empires in world history. That is the subject
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Chapter 8: The Roman Republic
Introduction
Greece, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire that followed created the
lasting intellectual and political legacy. Its boundaries, from what is today
England to Turkey and from Germany to Spain, mark out the heartland of
what its inhabitants would later consider itself to be “The West” in so many
words. The Greek intellectual legacy was eagerly taken up by the Romans and
Roman Origins
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Rome was originally a town built amidst seven hills surrounded by
swamps in central Italy. The Romans were just one group of “Latins,” central
Italians who spoke closely-related dialects of the Latin language. Rome itself
had a few key geographical advantages. Its hills were easily defensible,
making it difficult for invaders to carry out a successful attack. It was at the
shallow part of a river that can be crossed on foot) in the Tiber River, leading
for early expansion. It also lay on the route between the Greek colonies of
southern Italy and various Italian cultures in the central and northern part of
the peninsula.
The legend that the Romans themselves invented about their own
origins had to do with two brothers: Romulus and Remus. In the legend of
Romulus and Remus, two boys were born to a Latin king, but then kidnapped
and thrown into the Tiber River by the king’s jealous brother. They were
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exacting their revenge on their treacherous uncle. They then fought each
other, with Romulus killing Remus and founding the city of Rome. According
to the story, the city of Rome was founded on April 21, 753 BCE. This legend
is just that: a legend. Its importance is that it speaks to how the Romans
wanted to see themselves, as the descendants of a great man who seized his
Romans were proud to believe that their ancient heritage involved being
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Replica of an Etruscan-era statue of Romulus and Remus suckling from the wolf.
The Romans were a warrior people from very early on, feuding and
fighting with their neighbors and with raiders from the north. They were
allied with and, for a time, ruled by a neighboring people called the Etruscans
who lived to the northwest of Rome. The Etruscans were active trading
partners with the Greek poleis of the south, and Rome became a key link along
the Etruscan - Greek trade route. The Etruscans ruled a loose empire of allied
city-states that carried on a brisk trade with the Greeks, trading Italian iron
for various luxury goods. This mixing of cultures, Etruscan, Greek, and Latin,
included shared mythologies and stories. The Greek gods and myths were
shared by the Romans, with only the names of the gods being changed (e.g.
Zeus became Jupiter, Aphrodite became Venus, Hades became Pluto, etc.). In
this way, the Romans became part of the larger Mediterranean world of which
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According to Roman legends, the Etruscans ruled the Romans from
some time in the eighth century BCE until 509 BCE. During that time, the
Etruscans organized them to fight along Greek lines as a phalanx. From the
organization and tactics that would overwhelm the Greeks themselves (albeit
hundreds of years later). There is no actual evidence that the Etruscans ruled
Rome, but as with the legend of Romulus and Remus, the story of early
most obviously in utterly rejecting foreign rule of any kind, and even of
foreign cultural influence. Romans were always fiercely proud (to the point of
By 600 BCE the Romans had drained the swamp in the middle of their
territory and built the first of their large public buildings. As noted, they were
a monarchy at the time, ruled by (possibly) Etruscan kings, but with powerful
enough to afford weapons were allowed to vote, while native-born men who
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were poor were considered full Romans but had no vote. In 509 BCE
(according to their own legends), the Romans overthrew the last Etruscan
kings was so great that no Roman leader would ever call himself Rex - king -
While the Hellenistic world was flourishing in Greece and the Middle
East, and Rome was beginning its long climb from obscurity to power, most of
Western Europe was dominated by the Celts. The Celts provide background
context to the rise of Rome, since Roman expansion would eventually spell the
Much less is known about the Celts than about the contemporaneous cultures
of the Mediterranean because the Celts did not leave a written record. The
Celts were not a unified empire of any kind; they were a tribal people who
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shared a common culture and a set of beliefs, along with certain technologies
variation of what would later be known as feudal law, in which every offense
payment needed to atone for a crime and thereby prevent the escalation of
violence. The Celts were in contact with the people of the Mediterranean
world from as early as 800 BCE, mostly through trade. They lived in fortified
By about 450 BCE the Celts expanded dramatically across Europe. They
seem to have become more warlike and expansionist and they adopted a
and currency. By 400 BCE groups of Celts began to raid further into “civilized”
lands, sacking Rome itself in 387 BCE and pushing into the Hellenistic lands of
by about 200 BCE, often forming distinct smaller kingdoms within larger
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lands, such as the region called Galatia in Anatolia, and serving as mercenary
Eventually, when the Romans began to expand beyond Italy itself, it was
the Celts who were first conquered and then assimilated into the
Republic. The Romans regarded Celts as barbarians, but they were thought to
language, wearing togas, drinking wine, and serving in the Roman armies.
The Republic
representation, but it was one that would last about 500 years and preside
over the vast expansion of Roman power. An assembly, called the Centuriate
Assembly, was elected by the citizens and created laws. Each year, the
assembly elected two executives called consuls to oversee the laws and ensure
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their enforcement. The consuls had almost unlimited power, known as
imperium, including the right to inflict the death penalty on law-breakers, and
lictors. Consular authority was, however, limited by the fact that the terms
were only a year long and each consul was expected to hold the other in check
if necessary. Under the consuls there was the Senate, essentially a large body
finances. The whole system was tied closely to the priesthoods of the Roman
gods, who performed divinations and blessings on behalf of the city. While
take power themselves, several influential families worked behind the scenes
to ensure that they could control voting blocks in the Centuriate Assembly and
the Senate.
When Rome faced a major crisis, the Centuriate Assembly could vote to
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dictator, who was supposed to use his almost-unlimited power to save Rome
from whatever threatened it, then step down and return things to
normal. While the office of dictator could have easily led to an attempted
takeover, for hundreds of years very few dictators abused their powers and
Rome who occupied most of the positions of the senate and the judiciary in
the city. There were about one hundred patrician families, descending from
the men Romulus had, allegedly, appointed to the first senate. They were
allied with other rich and powerful people, owners of large tracts of land, in
trying to hold in check the plebeians, Roman citizens not from patrician
backgrounds.
While the Senate began as an advisory body, it later wrested real law-
making power from the consuls (who were, after all, almost always drawn
from its members). By 133 BCE, the Senate proposed legislation and could
veto the legislation of the consuls. An even more important power was its
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ability to designate funds for war and public building, giving it enormous
power over what the Roman government actually did, since the senate could
The Centuriate Assembly was divided into five different classes based
on wealth (a system that ensured that the wealthy could always outvote the
they could afford horses and thus form the Roman cavalry; the equestrian
class would go on to be a leading power bloc in Roman history well into the
Imperial period. The Centuriate Assembly voted on the consuls each year,
declared war and peace, and acted as a court of appeal in legal cases involving
the death penalty. It could also propose legislation, but the Senate had to
Class Struggle
the rich not only had a virtual monopoly on political power, but in many cases
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had the legal right to either enslave or at least extract labor from debtors. In
Rome's case, an ongoing class struggle called the Conflict of Orders took place
from about 500 BCE to 360 BCE (140 years!), in which the plebeians struggled
simply leave Rome, rendering it almost defenseless, and the Senate responded
by allowing the creation of two officials called Tribunes, men drawn from the
plebeians who had the legal power to veto certain decisions made by the
represent the needs of the plebeians, approved the right to marry between
patricians and plebeians, banned debt slavery, and finally, came to the
agreement that of the two consuls elected each year, one had to be a
plebeian. By 287 BCE, the Plebeian Assembly could pass legislation with the
for Rome in hopes of being rewarded with wealth taken from defeated
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when the Romans enacted a law that limited the amount of land that could be
of land to plebeian soldiers. This was a huge incentive to serve in the Roman
army, since any soldier now had the potential to become very rich if he
politics. Even after the plebeians gained legal concessions, the rich always
held the upper hand because wealthy plebeians would regularly join with
the richer classes had the legal right to out-vote the poorer classes –
the equestrians and patricians often worked together against the demands of
the poorer classes. Practically speaking, by the early third century BCE the
plebeians had won meaningful legal rights, namely the right to representation
and lawmaking, but those victories were often overshadowed by the fact that
something new: the Roman aristocracy. Most state offices did not pay
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salaries, so only those with substantial incomes from land (or from loot won
judges - that, too, fed into the political power of the aristocracy over common
citizens.
In the midst of this ongoing struggle, the Romans came up with the basis
of Roman law, the system of law that, through various iterations, would
become the basis for most systems of law still in use in Europe today (Britain
public law governed disputes between individuals and the government (e.g.
violent crimes that were seen as a threat to the social order as a whole). In
addition, the Romans established the Law of Nations to govern the territories
The plebeians had been concerned that legal decisions would always
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insisted that the laws be written down and made publicly available. Thus, in
451 BCE, members of the Roman government wrote the Twelve Tables, lists of
the laws available for everyone to see, which were then posted in the Roman
Forum in the center of Rome. Just as it was done in Athens a hundred years
corruption. In fact, according to a Roman legend, the ten men who were
charged with recording the laws were sent to Athens to study the laws of
Roman Expansion
cities, the Latin League. Rome led this coalition against nearby hill tribes that
had periodically raided the area, then against the Etruscans that had once
ruled Rome itself. Just as the Romans started to consider further territorial
expansion, a fierce raiding band of Celts swooped in and sacked Rome in 389
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BCE, a setback that took several decades to recover from. In the aftermath,
the Romans swore to never let the city fall victim to an attack again.
A key moment in the early period of Roman expansion was in 338 BCE
when Rome defeated its erstwhile allies in the Latin League. Rome did not
punish the cities after it defeated them, however. Instead, it offered them
citizenship in its republic (albeit without voting rights) in return for pledges
meant that with every victory, Rome could potentially expand its military
might. Soon, the elites of the Latin cities realized the benefits of playing along
with the Romans. They were dealt into the wealth distributed after military
victories and could play an active role in politics so long as they remained
loyal, whereas resisters were eventually ground down and defeated with only
their pride to show for it. While Rome would rarely extend actual citizenship
to whole communities in the future, the assimilation of the Latins into the
Roman state did set an important precedent: conquered peoples could be won
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over to Roman rule and contribute to Roman power, a key factor in Rome’s
Expansion of the Republic, from the region marked in dark red around Rome itself in Central
Italy north and south along the Italian Peninsula, culminating in the conquests of Northern Italy,
Sicily, and Sardinia (whose conquests are described in the section below).
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Rome rapidly expanded to encompass all of Italy except the
Pyrrhus to aid them against the Romans around 280 BCE (Pyrrhus was a
Greece from the Antigonid dynasty back in Greece). Pyrrhus won two major
battles against the Romans, but in the process he lost two-thirds of his
troops. After his victories, he made a comment that “one more such victory
will undo me” - this led to the phrase "pyrrhic victory," which means a
temporary victory that ultimately spells defeat, or winning the battle but
losing the war. He took his remaining troops and returned to Greece. After
he fled, the south was unable to mount much of a resistance, and all of Italy
Roman Militarism
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It is important to emphasize the extreme militarism and terrible
brutality of Rome during the republican period, very much including this early
phase in which it began to acquire its empire. Wars were annual: with very
few exceptions over the centuries the Roman legions would march forth to
conquer new territory every single year. The Romans swiftly acquired a
reputation for absolute ruthlessness and even wanton cruelty, raping and/or
and in some cases utterly wiping out whole populations (the neighboring city
of Veii was obliterated in roughly 393 BCE, for example, right at the start of
the conquest period). The Greek historian Polybius calmly noted at the time
in his sweeping history of the republic that insofar as there was a deliberate
intention behind all of this cruelty, it was easy to identify: causing terror.
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through military glory until late in the republic, and even then military glory
was all but required for a man to achieve any kind of political
importance. The greatest honor a Roman could win was a triumph, a military
parade displaying the spoils of war to the cheers of the people of Rome; many
people held important positions in Rome, but only the greatest generals were
The overall picture of Roman culture is of a society that was in its own
way as fanatical and obsessed with war as was Sparta during the height of its
barracks society. Unlike Sparta, however, Rome was able to mobilize gigantic
armies, partly because slaves came to perform most of the work on farms and
workshops over time, freeing up free Roman men to participate in the annual
of Rome, W.V. Harris, wisely warns against the temptation of “power worship”
violence.
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The Punic Wars
Rome's great rival in this early period of expansion was the North-
colonists. Carthage was one of the richest and most powerful trading empires
of the Hellenistic Age, a peer of the Alexandrian empires to the east, trading
with them and occasionally skirmishing with the Ptolemaic armies of Egypt
and with the Greek cities of Sicily. Rome and Carthage had long been trading
partners, and for centuries there was no real reason for them to be enemies
since they were separated by the Mediterranean. That being said, as Rome’s
increasingly concerned that Rome might pose a threat to its own dominance.
Conflict finally broke out in 264 BCE in Sicily. The island of Sicily was
one of the oldest and most important areas for Greek colonization. There, a
war broke out between the two most powerful poleis, Syracuse and
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Messina. The Carthaginians sent a fleet to intervene on behalf of Messinans,
but the Messinans then called for help from Rome as well (a betrayal of sorts
took the side of Syracuse and Rome saw an opportunity to expand Roman
military commitment since its members wanted the potential riches to be won
in war. This initiated the First Punic War, which lasted from 264 to 241 BCE.
(Note: “Punic” refers to the Roman term for Phoenician, and hence Carthage
The Romans suffered several defeats, but they were rich and powerful
enough at this point to persist in the war effort. Rome benefited greatly from
the fact that the Carthaginians did not realize that the war could grow to be
about more than just Sicily; even after winning victories there, the
Carthaginians never tried to invade Italy itself (which they could have done, at
least early on). The Romans eventually learned how to carry out effective
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Carthaginians sued for peace in 241 BCE and agreed to give up their claims to
Sicily and to pay a war indemnity. The Romans, however, betrayed them and
seized the islands of Corsica and Sardinia as well, territories that were still
From the aftermath of the First Punic War and the seizure of Sicily,
Sardinia, and Corsica emerged the Roman provincial system: the islands were
turned into “provinces” of the Republic, each of which was obligated to pay
tribute (the “tithe,” meaning tenth, of all grain) and follow the orders of
Roman governors appointed by the senate. That system would continue for
the rest of the republican and imperial periods of Roman history, with the
provinces.
Unsurprisingly, the Carthaginians wanted revenge, not just for their loss
in the war but for Rome’s seizure of Corsica and Sardinia. For twenty years,
the Carthaginians built up their forces and their resources, most notably by
invading and conquering a large section of Spain, containing rich mines of gold
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and copper and thousands of Spanish Celts who came to serve as mercenaries
Hannibal (son of the most successful general who had fought the Romans in
the First Punic War) launched a surprise attack in Spain against Roman allies
and then against Roman forces themselves. This led to the Second Punic War
Hannibal crossed the Alps into Italy from Spain with 60,000 men and a
few dozen war elephants (most of the elephants perished, but the survivors
proved very effective, and terrifying, against the Roman forces). For the next
two years, he crushed every Roman army sent against him, killing tens of
Rome. Hannibal never lost a single battle in Italy, yet neither did he force the
them across icy rivers and ambushed them, he concealed a whole army in the
fog one morning and then sprang on a Roman legion, and he led the Romans
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into narrow passes and slaughtered them. In one battle in 216 BCE,
though, by the fact that he did not have a siege train to attack Rome itself
(which was heavily fortified), and he failed to win over the southern Italian
cities which had been conquered by the Romans a century earlier. The
Romans kept losing to Hannibal, but they were largely successful in keeping
Hannibal from receiving reinforcements from Spain and Africa, slowly but
war against Hannibal within Italy, harrying his forces. This was totally
contrary to their usual tactics, and the dictator Fabius Maximus who insisted
the Roman government despite his evident success. The Romans vacillated on
this strategy, suffering the terrible defeat mentioned above in 216 BCE, but as
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Hannibal’s victories grew and some cities in Italy and Sicily started defecting
forces back in Spain in 207 BCE, cutting Hannibal off from both
then attacked Africa itself, forcing Carthage to recall Hannibal to protect the
city. Hannibal finally lost in 202 BCE after coming as close as anyone had to
defeating the Romans. The victorious Scipio, now easily the most powerful
man in Rome, became the first great general to add to his own name the name
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The Punic Wars over time - note how much Carthage’s empire was reduced by the end of the
Second Punic War, encompassing only the region marked in purple around Carthage itself.
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senator named Cato the Elder reputedly ended every speech in the Senate
with the statement “…and Carthage must be destroyed.” Rome finally forced
The third and last Punic War that ensued was utterly one-sided: it began in
149 BCE, and by 146 BCE Carthage was defeated. Not only were thousands of
the Carthaginian people killed or enslaved, but the city itself was brutally
claiming that they had “plowed the earth with salt” at Carthage so that nothing
would ever grow there again - that was not literally true, but it did serve as a
Greece
conquering all of Greece, the heartland of the culture the Romans so admired
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and emulated. While Hannibal was busy rampaging around Italy, the
decision at the time because it seemed likely that Rome was going to lose the
war. In 201 BCE, after the defeat of the Carthaginians, Rome sent an army
revenge. There, Philip and the king of the Seleucid empire (named Antiochus
III) had agreed to divide up the eastern Mediterranean, assuming they could
defeat and control all of the Greek poleis. An expansionist faction in the
war. The Roman legions defeated the Macedonian forces without much
trouble in 196 BCE and then, perhaps surprisingly, they left, having
continued to fight the Seleucids for several more years, however, finally
the Romans found that rival Greek poleis clamored for Roman help in their
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conflicts, and Roman influence in the region grew. Even given Rome’s long
standing admiration for Greek culture, the political and military developments
of this period, from 196 - 168 BCE, helped confirm the Roman belief that the
Greeks were artistic and philosophical geniuses but, at least in their present
Cato the Elder that emphatically emphasized Roman moral virtue over Greek
weakness.
Philip V’s son Perseus took the throne of Macedon in 179 BCE and, while
region. In 172 BCE Rome sent an army and Macedon was defeated in 168
BCE. Rome split Macedon into puppet republics, plundered Macedon’s allies,
and lorded over the remaining Greek poleis. Revolts in 150 and 146 against
Roman power served as the final pretext for the Roman subjugation of
Greece. This time, the Romans enacted harsh penalties for disloyalty among
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the Greek cities, utterly destroying the rich city of Corinth and butchering or
enslaving tens of thousands of Greeks for siding against Rome. The plunder
from Corinth specifically also sparked great interest in Greek art among elite
Italy.
almost the entire Mediterranean world, from Spain to Anatolia. They had not
Seleucids in the Near East and the Ptolemies in Egypt, but they controlled a
independent power in the region, acknowledged that Rome held all the real
The last great Hellenistic attempt to push back Roman control was in
the early first century BCE, with the rise of a Greek king, Mithridates VI, from
Pontus, a small kingdom on the southern shore of the Black Sea. Mithridates
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then in Greece itself starting in 88 BCE. Mithridates was seen by his followers
as a great liberator from Roman corruption (one Roman governor had molten
gold poured down his throat to symbolize the just punishment of Roman
greed). He went on to fight a total of three wars against Rome, but despite his
tenacity he was finally defeated and killed in 63 BCE, the same year that Rome
A Roman bust of Mithridates VI sculpted in the first century CE (i.e. over a century after
Mithridates was defeated) by a Roman sculptor. Here, he is depicted in the lion headdress of
Hercules - the implication is that the Romans respected his ferocity in historical hindsight, even
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Under the leadership of a general and politician, Pompey (“the Great”),
the control of the Republic. With that, almost the entire Mediterranean region
The Republic as of 40 BCE. The Republic itself is marked in dark green, with the other regions
consisting of other independent states. Many of those would subsequently fall under the sway
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Greco-Roman Culture
The Romans had been in contact with Greek culture for centuries, ever
since the Etruscans struck up their trading relationship with the Greek poleis
of southern Italy. Initially, the Etruscans formed a conduit for trade and
cultural exchange, but soon the Romans were trading directly with the Greeks
as well as the various Greek colonies all over the Mediterranean. By the time
the Romans finally conquered Greece itself, they had already spent hundreds
of years absorbing Greek ideas and culture, modeling their architecture on the
great buildings of the Greek Classical Age and studying Greek ideas.
Despite their admiration for Greek culture, there was a paradox in that
Roman elites had their own self-proclaimed “Roman” virtues, virtues that they
attributed to the Roman past, which were quite distinct from Greek
ideas. Roman virtues revolved around the idea that a Roman was strong,
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simple fact that the Greeks had been unable to forge an empire except during
the brief period of Alexander’s conquests seemed to the Romans as proof that
The Romans summed up their own virtues with the term Romanitas,
alliance with other civilized Romans. There was also a powerful theme of self-
sacrifice associated with Romanitas - the ideal Roman would sacrifice himself
for the greater good of Rome without hesitation. In some ways, Romanitas
was the Romans' spin on the old Greek combination of arete and civic virtue.
power. Since the Romans were convinced that anything resembling monarchy
was politically repulsive, a dictator was expected to serve for the greater good
of Rome and then step aside when peace was restored. Indeed, until the first
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century CE, dictators duly stepped down once their respective crises were
addressed.
the rejection of frivolous luxuries; these were all ideas that seemed laudable
to Romans. By the first century BCE, Stoicism was the Greek philosophy of
morale are obvious. One less obvious expression of Romanitas, however, was
in public building and celebrations. One way for elite (rich) Romans to
arenas, or practical public works like roads and aqueducts. Likewise, elite
Romans would often pay for huge games and contests with free food and
drink, sometimes for entire cities. This practice was not just in the name of
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showing off; it was an expression of one's loyalty to the Roman people and
BCE, Romans started taking an active interest in Greek literature. Some Greek
society. One status symbol in Rome was to have a Greek slave who could tutor
one’s children in the Greek language and Greek learning. In 220 BCE a Roman
senator, Quintus Fabius Pictor, wrote a history of Rome in Greek, the first
sources, it has not survived). Soon, Romans were imitating the Greeks,
writing in both Greek and Latin and creating poetry, drama, and literature.
That being noted, the interest in Greek culture was muted until the
Macedon. Rome’s Greek wars created a kind of “feeding frenzy” of Greek art
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and Greek slaves. Huge amounts of Greek statuary and art were shipped back
taste. The appeal of Greek art was undeniable. Greek artists, even those who
escaped slavery, soon started moving to Rome en masse because there was so
patron. Greek artists, and the Romans who learned from them, adapted the
Hellenistic Greek style. In many cases, classical statues were recreated exactly
the Classical Age usually idealized the subjects of art, the Romans came to
prefer more realistic and “honest” portrayals. We know precisely what many
Romans looked like because of the realistic busts made of their faces:
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The “Patrician Torlonia,” a bust of an unknown Roman politician from sometime in the first
century BCE.
import to arrive on Roman shores was rhetoric: the mastery of words and
language in order to persuade people and win arguments. The Greeks held
that the two ways a man could best his rivals and assert his virtue were battle
and public discussion and argumentation. This tradition was felt very keenly
by the Romans, because those were precisely the two major ways the Roman
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individual leaders had to be able to convince their peers and rivals of the
copy the Greeks, especially the Athenians, for their skill at oratory.
Not surprisingly, the Romans both admired and resented the Greeks for
the Greek mastery of words. The Romans came to pride themselves on a more
Greece. Part of Roman oratorical skill was the use of passionate appeals to
harness and control the emotions of the speaker himself. The Romans also
speakers and politicians of the past and of debating instructors and fellow
Roman Society
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and influence – and their “clients” – those who looked to the patrons for
support. A patron would do things like arrange for his or her (i.e. there were
piece of farmland, and so on. In return, the patron would expect political
rivals. Likewise, clients who shared a patron were expected to help one
another. These were open, publicly-known alliances rather than hidden deals
made behind closed doors; groups of clients would accompany their patron
The government of the late Republic was still in the form of the Plebeian
Assembly, the Centuriate Assembly, the Senate, ten tribunes, two consuls, and
a court system under formal rules of law. By the late Republic, however, a
network of patrons and clients had emerged that largely controlled the
government. Elite families of nobles, through their client networks, made all
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of the important decisions. Beneath this group were the equestrians: families
who did not have the ancient lineages of the patricians and who normally did
not serve in public office. The equestrians, however, were rich, and they
benefited from the fact that senators were formally banned from engaging in
commerce as of the late third century BCE. They constituted the business
class of Republican Rome who supported the elites while receiving various
Meanwhile, the average plebeian had long ago lost his or her
who were the clients of nobles. In other words, they served the interests of
the rich and had little interest in the plight of the class they were supposed to
represent. This created an ongoing problem for Rome, one that was exploited
many times by populist leaders: Rome relied on a free class of citizens to serve
in the army, but those same citizens often had to struggle to make ends meet
as farmers. As the rich grew richer, they bought up land and sometimes even
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forced poorer citizens off of their farms. Thus, there was an existential threat
conquered in war. Rome was happy to grant citizenship to local elites who
citizenship on the basis of their loyalty (or simply their perceived usefulness)
rights. Most Roman subjects, however, were just that: subjects, not
citizens. In the provinces they were subject to the goodwill of the Roman
governor, who might well look for opportunities to extract provincial wealth
At the bottom of the Roman social system were the slaves. Slaves were
one of the most lucrative forms of loot available to Roman soldiers, and so
many lands had been conquered by Rome that the population of the Republic
was swollen with slaves. Fully one-third of the population of Italy were slaves
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by the first century CE. Even freed slaves, called freedmen, had limited legal
clients. Roman slaves spanned the same range of jobs noted with other
slaveholding societies like the Greeks: elite slaves lived much more
comfortably than did most free Romans, but most were laborers or domestic
“loot” seized in Roman campaigns was made up of human beings, and Roman
was not necessary to seek out new and better ways of doing things in the form
effect of the growth of slavery in Rome was to undermine the social status of
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free Roman citizens, with farmers in particular struggling to survive as rich
There were many slave uprisings, the most significant of which was led
originally from Thrace. Spartacus led the revolt of his gladiatorial school in
the Italian city of Capua in 73 BCE. He set up a war camp on the slopes of the
“army” of about 70,000. He tried to convince them to flee over the Alps to
seek refuge in their (mostly Celtic) homelands, but was eventually convinced
to turn around to plunder Italy. The richest man in Italy, the senator Crassus,
the slave army and killing Spartacus in 71 BCE (and lining the road to Rome
than did some of its neighboring societies (like Greece): gender roles. While
Roman culture was explicitly patriarchal, with families organized under the
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authority of the eldest male of the household (the pater familias), there is a
great deal of textual evidence that suggests that women enjoyed considerable
inheritances. Widows, who were common thanks to the young marriage age
of women and the death of soldier husbands, were legally autonomous and
continued to run households after the death of the husband. Within families,
while men held all official positions, women exercised considerable influence
culture celebrated the devoted mother and wife as the female ideal, and
Roman traditionalists decried the loosening of strict gender roles that seems
to have taken place over time during the Republic. Women were expected to
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official decision-makers within the family unit. That being noted, however,
one of the reasons that we know that women did enjoy a higher degree of
autonomy than in many other societies is the number of surviving texts that
both described and, in many cases, celebrated the role of women. Those texts
were written by both men and women, and most Romans (men very much
included) felt that it was both appropriate and desirable for both boys and
The Roman Republic lasted for roughly five centuries. It was under the
Republic that Rome evolved from a single town to the heart of an enormous
empire. Despite the evident success of the republican system, however, there
were inexorable problems that plagued the Republic throughout its history,
most evidently the problem of wealth and power. Roman citizens were, by
law, supposed to have a stake in the Republic. They took pride in who they
were and it was the common patriotic desire to fight and expand the Republic
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among the citizen-soldiers of the Republic that created, at least in part, such
an effective army. At the same time, the vast amount of wealth captured in
the military campaigns was frequently siphoned off by elites, who found ways
to seize large portions of land and loot with each campaign. By around 100
BCE even the existence of the Plebeian Assembly did almost nothing to
mitigate the effect of the debt and poverty that afflicted so many Romans
patrons.
The key factor behind the political stability of the Republic up until the
aftermath of the Punic Wars was that there had never been open fighting
expansion (and especially the brutal wars against Carthage) had united the
Romans; despite their constant political battles within the assemblies and the
settled with debate and votes, not clubs and knives. Both that unity and that
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emphasis on peaceful conflict resolution within the Roman state itself began
The first step toward violent revolution in the Republic was the work of
is the plural of “Gracchus”). The older of the two was Tiberius Gracchus, a rich
but reform-minded politician. Gracchus, among others, was worried that the
that would limit the amount of land a single man could own, distributing the
excess to the poor. The Senate was horrified and fought bitterly to reverse the
bill. Tiberius ran for a second term as tribune, something no one had ever
done up to that point, and a group of senators clubbed him to death in 133
BCE.
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Tiberius's brother Gaius Gracchus took up the cause, also becoming
radical move was to try to extend full citizenship to all of Rome's Italian
subjects, which would have effectively transformed the Roman Republic into
the Italian Republic. Here, he lost even the support of his former allies in
Rome, and he killed himself in 121 BCE rather than be murdered by another
they were both killed, the Gracchi’s central effort to redistribute land
until 118 BCE, by which time it had redistributed huge tracts of land held
illegally by the rich. Despite their vociferous opposition, the rich did not
suffer much, since the lands in question were “public lands” largely left in the
aftermath of the Second Punic War, and normal farmers did enjoy
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benefits. Likewise, despite Gaius’s death, the Republic eventually granted
citizenship to all Italians in 84 BCE, after being forced to put down a revolt in
Italy. In hindsight, the historical importance of the Gracchi was less in their
reforms and more in the manner of their deaths - for the first time, major
Roman politicians had simply been murdered (or killed themselves rather
than be murdered) for their politics. It became increasingly obvious that true
power was shifting away from rhetoric and toward military might.
combined political savvy with effective military leadership. Marius was both a
consul (elected an unprecedented seven times) and a general, and he used his
army. This allowed the poor to join the army in return for nothing more than
an oath of loyalty, one they swore to their general rather than to the
consistent victories against enemies in both Africa and Germany, and because
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he distributed land and farms to his poor soldiers. This made him a people's
hero, and it terrified the nobility in Rome because he was able to bypass the
usual Roman political machine and simply pay for his wars himself. His
decision to eliminate the property requirement meant that his troops were
totally dependent on him for loot and land distribution after campaigns,
soldiers directly and using his military power to bypass the government. In
the aftermath of the Italian revolt of 88 - 84 BCE, the Assembly took Sulla’s
command of Roman legions fighting the Parthians away and gave it to Marius
cities. Sulla promptly marched on Rome with his army, forcing Marius to
flee. Soon, however, Sulla left Rome to command legions against the army of
the anti-Roman king Mithridates in the east. Marius promptly attacked with
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Sulla. Marius himself soon died (of old age), but his followers remained united
men joining the fighting and many thousands killed. After Sulla’s ultimate
was named dictator; he greatly strengthened the power of the Senate at the
expense of the Plebeian Assembly, had his enemies in Rome murdered and
their property seized, then retired to a life of debauchery in his private estate
(and soon died from a disease he contracted). The problem for the Republic
was that, even though Sulla ultimately proved that he was loyal to republican
institutions, other generals might not be in the future. Sulla could have simply
held onto power indefinitely thanks to the personal loyalty of his troops.
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Julius Caesar
Republic: when a new politician and general named Julius Caesar became
empire, was he merely making good on the threat posed by Marius and Sulla,
Caesar’s rise to power is a complex story that reveals just how murky Roman
BCE. Caesar himself was both a brilliant general and a shrewd politician; he
his family. He was loyal, in fact, to almost no one, even old friends who had
supported him, and he also cynically used the support of the poor for his own
gain.
Two powerful politicians, Pompey and Crassus (both of whom had risen
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revolt of Spartacus in 70 BCE and were elected consuls because of their
success. Pompey was one of the greatest Roman generals, and he soon left to
asked the Senate to approve land grants to his loyal soldiers for their service,
a request that the Senate refused because it feared his power and influence
with so many soldiers who were loyal to him instead of the Republic. Pompey
reacted by forming an alliance with Crassus and with Julius Caesar, who was a
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Busts of the members of the First Triumvirate: Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey.
hungered for glory and wealth and hoped to be appointed to lead Roman
armies against the Celts in Western Europe, Crassus wanted to lead armies
against Parthia (i.e. the “new” Persian Empire that had long since overthrown
Seleucid rule in Persia itself), and Pompey wanted the Senate to authorize
land and wealth for his troops. The three of them had so many clients and
wielded so much political power that they were able to ratify all of Pompey's
demands, and both Caesar and Crassus received the military commissions
they hoped for. Caesar was appointed general of the territory of Gaul
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(present-day France and Belgium) and he set off to fight an infamous Celtic
Gaul. He was both a merciless combatant, who slaughtered whole villages and
people in the end), and a gifted writer who wrote his own accounts of his wars
Roman territory there that lasted centuries. All of the lands he invaded were
languages based on Latin, like French, rather than their native Celtic dialects.
Caesar's victories made him famous and immensely powerful, and they
his power and called on Caesar's former ally Pompey to bring him to heel
Parthians; his head was used as a prop in a Greek play staged by the Parthian
king). Pompey, fearing his former ally’s power, agreed and brought his armies
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to Rome. The Senate then recalled Caesar after refusing to renew his
governorship of Gaul and his military command, or allowing him to run for
consul in absentia.
The Senate hoped to use the fact that Caesar had violated the letter of
republican law while on campaign to strip him of his authority. Caesar had
committed illegal acts, including waging war without authorization from the
him to run for office as consul, he would be open to charges. His enemies in
the Senate feared his tremendous influence with the people of Rome, so the
conflict was as much about factional infighting among the senators as fear of
Caesar knew what awaited him in Rome - charges of sedition against the
Republic - so he simply took his army with him and marched off to Rome. In
49 BCE, he dared to cross the Rubicon River in northern Italy, the legal
boundary over which no Roman general was allowed to bring his troops; he
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reputedly announced that “the die is cast” and that he and his men were now
Caesar's move was that he could pose as the champion of his loyal troops as
well as that of the common people of Rome, whom he promised to aid against
the corrupt and arrogant senators; he never claimed to be acting for himself,
but instead to protect his and his men’s legal rights and to resist the
Pompey had been the most powerful man in Rome, both a brilliant
boldness. Caesar surprised him by marching straight for Rome. Pompey only
had two legions, both of whom had served under Caesar in the past and, and
he was thus forced to recruit new troops. As Caesar approached, Pompey fled
to Greece, but Caesar followed him and defeated his forces in battle in 48
agents of the Ptolemaic court who had read the proverbial writing on the wall
and knew that Caesar was the new power to contend with in
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Rome. Subsequently, Caesar came to Egypt and stayed long enough to forge a
political alliance, and carry on an affair, with the queen of Egypt: Cleopatra VII,
last of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Caesar helped Cleopatra defeat her brother (to
whom she was married, in the Egyptian tradition) in a civil war and to seize
complete control over the Egyptian state. She also bore him his only son,
Caesarion.
Caesar returned to Rome two years later after hunting down Pompey's
remaining loyalists. There, he had himself declared dictator for life and set
directly to him. He filled the Senate with his supporters and established
military colonies in the lands he had conquered as rewards for his loyal troops
and their families would now live there permanently). He established a new
calendar, which included the month of “July” named after him, and he
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Instead of leading another glorious military campaign, however, in
resented his power and genuinely desired to save the Republic. The result
was not the restoration of the Republic, however, just a new chapter in the
Octavian, to whom Caesar left (much to almost everyone’s shock) almost all of
Mark Antony, joined with Octavian and another general named Lepidus to
form the “Second Triumvirate.” In 43 BCE they seized control in Rome and
killing off the men who had killed Caesar and murdering the strongest
senators and equestrians who had tried to restore the old institutions. Mark
Antony and Octavian soon pushed Lepidus to the side and divided up control
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of Roman territory - Octavian taking Europe and Mark Antony taking the
eastern territories and Egypt. This was an arrangement that was not destined
to last; the two men had only been allies for the sake of convenience, and both
began scheming as to how they could seize total control of Rome’s vast
empire.
and a romantic relationship with Cleopatra, and the two of them were able to
Mark Antony and Cleopatra declared that Cleopatra’s son by Julius Caesar,
Caesarion, was the heir to Caesar (not Octavian), and that their own twins
Antony was under Cleopatra’s thumb (which is unlikely: the two of them were
both savvy politicians and seem to have shared a genuine affection for one
another) and was breaking with traditional Roman values, and Octavian
seized on this behavior to claim that he was the true protector of Roman
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morality. Soon, Octavian produced a will that Mark Antony had supposedly
written ceding control of Rome to Cleopatra and their children on his death;
whether or not the will was authentic, it fit in perfectly with the publicity
campaign on Octavian’s part to build support against his former ally in Rome.
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A dedication featuring Cleopatra VII making an offering to the Egyptian goddess Isis. Note the
remarkable mix of Egyptian and Greek styles: the image is in keeping with traditional Egyptian
carvings, and Isis is an ancient Egyptian goddess, but the dedication itself is written in Greek.
because it was not immediately stated that it was yet another Roman civil
war. Antony and Cleopatra’s forces were already fairly scattered and weak
BCE, Octavian defeated Mark Antony's forces, which were poorly equipped,
sick, and hungry. Antony and Cleopatra’s soldiers were starved out by a
commander Agrippa, and the unhappy couple killed themselves the next year
in exile. Octavian was 33. As his grand-uncle had before him, Octavian began
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Conclusion
One of the peculiar things about the Roman Republic is that its rise to
dominate the Mediterranean world, and the Romans of 500 BCE would have
been shocked to find Rome ruling over a gigantic territory a few centuries
later. Likewise, the demise of the Republic was not inevitable. The class
struggles and political rivalries that ultimately led to the rise of Caesar and
then to the true transformation brought about by Octavian could have gone
very differently. Perhaps the most important thing that Octavian could, and
did, do was to recognize that the old system was no longer working the way it
should, and he thus set about deliberately creating a new system in its
place. For better or for worse, by the time of his death in 14 CE, Octavian had
permanently dismantled the Republic and replaced it with the Roman Empire.
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Romulus and Remus - Stinkzwam
Introduction
last obstacle to his own control of Rome's vast territories. While paying lip
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service to the idea that the Republic still survived, he in fact replaced the
republican system with one in which a single sovereign ruled over the Roman
state. In doing so he founded the Roman Empire, a political entity that would
survive for almost five centuries in the west and over a thousand years in the
east.
This system was called the Principate, rule by the “First.” Likewise,
although “Caesar” had originally simply been the family name of Julius
the end of the first century CE. The Roman terms for rule would last into the
twentieth century CE: the imperial titles of the rulers of both Russia and
Germany - “Tsar” and “Kaiser” - meant “Caesar.” In turn, the English word
the field, which was adopted as yet another honorific by the Roman
Civitatis, “First Citizen,” the term that Augustus invented for himself. For the
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sake of clarity, this chapter will use the anglicized term “emperor” to refer to
Augustus
The height of Roman power coincided with the first two hundred years
of the Roman Empire, a period that was remembered as the Pax Romana: the
Roman Peace. It was possible during the period of the Roman Empire's
height, from about 1 CE to 200 CE, to travel from the Atlantic coast of Spain or
Morocco all the way to Mesopotamia using good roads, speaking a common
language, and enjoying official protection from banditry. The Roman Empire
was as rich, powerful, and glorious as any in history up to that point, but it
conquered peoples.
his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, Octavian eliminated all political rivals and set up
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restoring not just peace and prosperity, but the Republic itself. Since the term
Rex (king) would have been odious to his fellow Romans, Augustus instead
actions they were to take; a good example is that the Senate “asked” him to
the position of tribune for life, the position that allowed unlimited power in
him, and having conquered Egypt from his former ally Mark Antony, Augustus
was worshiped there as the latest pharaoh. The Senate awarded Octavian the
maintain the facade of the Republic, along with republican values like thrift,
penalized (elite) young men who tried to avoid marriage and he celebrated
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the piety and loyalty of conservative married women. Even as he converted
doubt reflected his own conservative tastes, but it also eased the transition
imperium majus, that was something like access to the extraordinary powers
of a dictator under the Republic. Combined with his ongoing tribuneship and
direct rule over the provinces in which most of the Roman army was
garrisoned at the time, Augustus’s practical control of the Roman state was
unchecked. As a whole, the legal categories used to explain and excuse the
reality of Augustus’s vast powers worked well during his administration, but
sometimes proved a major problem with later emperors because few were as
laws were truly irrelevant to their own conduct, and the formal relationship
between emperor and law was never explicitly defined. Emperors who
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respected Roman laws and traditions won prestige and veneration for having
done so, but there was never a formal legal challenge to imperial
seize power through force, it was painfully apparent that the letter of the law
was less important than the personal power of a given emperor in all too
many cases.
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One of the more spectacular surviving statues of Augustus. Augustus was, among other things,
transformed the Senate and equestrian class into a real civil service to manage
the enormous empire. He eliminated tax farming and replaced it with taxation
he supervised the consolidation of Roman power after the decades of civil war
and struggle that preceded his takeover, and the large majority of Romans and
Roman subjects alike were content with the demise of the Republic because of
the improved stability Augustus's reign represented. Only one major failure
marred his rule: three legions (perhaps as many as 20,000 soldiers) were
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attempt to expand Roman power past the Rhine and Danube rivers. Despite
that disaster, after Augustus’s death the senate voted to deify him: like his
2. The Flavian dynasty: 69 – 96 CE - a father and his two sons who seized
members.
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The Julian Dynasty
There is a simple and vexing problem with any discussion of the Roman
emperors: the sources. While archaeology and the surviving written sources
create a reasonably clear basis for understanding the major political events of
the Julian dynasty, the biographical details are much more difficult. All of the
surviving written accounts about the lives of the Julian emperors were written
many decades, in some cases more than a century, after their reign. In turn,
the two most important biographers, Tacitus and Suetonius, detested the
actions and the character of the Julians, and thus their accounts are rife with
scandalous anecdotes that may or may not have any basis in historical truth
Twelve Caesars does make for very entertaining reading). Thus, the
sure, along with some notes on the scandalous assertions that may be at least
partly fabricated.
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When Augustus died in 14 CE, his stepson Tiberius (r. 14 – 37 CE)
became emperor. While it was possible that the Senate might have tried to
reassert its power, there was no political will to do so. Only idealistic or
would have been rejected by the vast majority of Roman citizens. Under the
Caesars, after all, the empire had never been more powerful or
especially soldiers, and the only people who really lost out in the short term
were the old elite families of patricians, who no longer had political power
and status).
Tiberius began his rule as a cautious leader who put on a show of only
Senate and ensuring that the empire remained secure and financially
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Roman state: the Roman Empire no longer embarked on a sustained campaign
of expansion as it had done ever since the early decades of the Republic half a
millennium earlier. This does not appear to have been a conscious policy
choice on the part of Tiberius, but instead a shift in priorities: the Senate was
now staffed by land-owning elites who did not predicate their identities on
warfare, and Tiberius himself saw little benefit in warring against Persia or
invading Germany (he also feared that successful generals might threaten his
power, at one point ordering one to call off a war in Germany). The Roman
never to the degree or at the pace that it had under the Republic.
(off the west coast of Italy). Suetonius’s biography would have it that on
Capri, Tiberius indulged his penchant for bloodshed and sexual abuse, which
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state. When he died, much to the relief of the Roman populace, great hopes
That heir was Gaius (r. 37 - 41 CE), much better known as "Caligula,"
boy, Caligula moved with his father, a famous and well-liked general related
by marriage to the Julians, from army camp to army camp. While he did so he
instead).
Even if some of the stories of his personal sadism are exaggerated, there
own godhood, Caligula had the heads of statues of the gods removed and
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replaced with his own head. He liked to appear in public dressed as various
gods or goddesses; one of his high priests was his horse, Incitatus, whom he
for treason to enrich himself after squandering the treasury on buildings and
public games. He also made senators wait on him dressed as slaves, and
The next emperor was Claudius (r. 41 – 54 CE), the one truly competent
emperor of the Julian line after Augustus. Claudius had survived palace
intrigues because he walked with a limp and spoke with a pronounced stutter;
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he was widely considered to be a simpleton, whereas he was actually highly
Julius Caesar decades earlier. He was also a scholar, mastering the Etruscan
and Punic languages and writing histories of those two civilizations (the
also established a true bureaucracy to manage the vast empire and began the
poisoned by his wife, who sought to have her son from another marriage
become emperor. That son was Nero. Nero (r. 54 – 68 CE) was another Julian
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like tendency of having elite Romans (including his domineering mother)
killed. In 64 CE, a huge fire nearly destroyed the city, which was largely built
out of wood. This led to the legend of Nero "playing his fiddle while Rome
burned" - in fact, in the fire's aftermath Nero had shelters built for the
homeless and set about rebuilding the roughly half of the city that had been
destroyed, using concrete buildings and grid-based streets. That said, he did
use space cleared by the fire to begin the construction of a gigantic new palace
in the middle of Rome called the "golden house," into which he poured state
revenues.
hounded and persecuted elite Romans, using a law called the Maiestas that
made it illegal to slander the emperor to extract huge amounts of money from
elites, his other major target was the early Christian movement, whom he
blamed for the fire in Rome and whom he relentlessly persecuted (thousands
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were killed in the gladiatorial arena, ripped apart by wild animals). Thus, the
two groups in the position to write Nero's history - elite Romans and early
Christians - had every reason to hate him. In addition, Nero took great pride
of both the army and the Senate, Nero committed suicide in 68 CE.
Another note on the sources: what the "bad" emperors of the Julian line
(Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero) had in common is that they violated the old
various ways, thus inspiring hostility from many elite Romans. Since it was
other elite Romans (albeit many years later) who became their biographers,
conduct. Historians have rehabilitated much of the rule of Tiberius and (to a
lesser extent) Nero in particular, arguing that even if they were at loggerheads
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with the Senate at various times and probably did unfairly prosecute at least
some senators, they did a decent job of running the empire as well.
In the aftermath of Nero's death, a brief civil war broke out. Four
end, a general named Vespasian (r. 69 – 79 CE) seized power and founded a
fairly short-lived dynasty consisting of himself and his two sons, known to
reinforced the idea that real power in Rome was no longer that of the old
power-broking families, but instead the armies; Vespasian had no legal claim
of the armies above all else, because they could and would openly fight to put
their man on the throne in a time of crisis - this occurred numerous times in
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Vespasian was one of the great emperors of the early empire. He pulled
state finances back from the terrible state they had been left in by Nero and
restored the relationship between the emperor and the Roman elite; it
certainly did not hurt his reputation that he was a successful general, one of
renowned for his openness and his grounded outlook. Reputably, he did not
keep a guard and let people speak to him directly in public audiences. In an
setting for public games and performances. All of this happened in just a
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The outside of the Colosseum in present-day Rome.
Vespasian's older son Titus (r. 79 – 81 CE) had been groomed to follow
almost as soon as he took the throne a volcano in southern Italy, Mt. Vesuvius,
Rome. Titus struggled to aid victims of all three disasters, but was then struck
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atmosphere of terror in elite Roman circles in an effort to watch out for
addressed as “dominus et deus”) and liked to appear before the senate in the
about both sex and the divinity of the emperors, instituting the policy that all
oaths had to be sword to the godhood of the emperor. About the only positive
undertaking in his rule was major building projects, both for palaces for
himself and public works (including roads and fortifications), and it is also
worth noting that the empire remained under a stable administration during
his reign. That noted, Domitian became increasingly paranoid and violent
between 89 and 96 CE, until he was finally killed by assassins in the palace.
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The "Five Good Emperors" and the Severans
Edward Gibbon, historians frequently refer to the rulers of the Roman Empire
who followed the death of Domitian as the “Five Good Emperors,” those who
emperors appointed their own successors from the most competent members
of the younger generation of Roman elites. Not least because none of them
their own, each emperor would adopt a younger man as his son, thereby
ensuring his succession. Rome prospered during this period under this
these emperors, Trajan, that the empire achieved its greatest territorial
expanse.
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Romans, during the period of the Republic, the good emperors tried to live
only for their own glorification but for the good of the Roman state. The
borders were maintained (or, as under Trajan, expanded), public works and
his success in expanding the Empire, but in how he governed it. He was a
farmers and used the interest to pay for food for poor children, and he worked
closely and successfully with the Senate to maintain stability and imperial
solvency. The fact that personally led the legions on major military campaigns
capped his reign in the military glory expected of an emperor following the
rule of the Flavians, but he was remembered at least as well for his skill as a
leader in peacetime.
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The next two emperors, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, did not win
comparable military glory, but they did defend the borders (Hadrian gave up
stability. Hadrian spent much of his reign touring the Roman provinces,
particularly Greece. It was clear by his reign that the emperor’s authority was
known as “rescripts” while away from Rome that carried the force of law.
This period of successful rule eventually broke down when the practice
brilliant leader and Stoic philosopher (161 – 180 CE) named his arrogant and
foolish son Commodus (r. 177 – 192 CE) his co-emperor three years before
Aurelius’s death. Storm clouds had already been gathering under Aurelius,
Germanic tribes in the north despite his own lack of a military background (or,
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focused political leader. His decision to make Commodus his heir was due to a
simple fact: Aurelius was the first of the Five Good Emperors to have a
his taste for debauchery and ignored affairs of state, finally being assassinated
the Severans who ruled from 192 - 235 CE. They faced growing threats on the
known as the Sasanians pressed against Roman territory to the east. The last
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Beyond The Empire
As noted above, by the year 117 CE under Trajan the Empire reached its
Romania, all of North Africa from present-day Morocco, and extended to the
various kinds; as far as the Romans were concerned there were no civilized
people outside of their borders except the Persians. Trajan's successor, the
power on the frontiers - these were eventually (by the third century CE)
known as the limes, permanent garrisons and fortresses that were meant to
patrolled the rivers and oceans, these garrisons controlled access to the
empire.
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The Empire at the height of its territorial expanse under Trajan in 117 CE.
As far as the Romans were concerned, there were only two things
inhospitable land and semi-human barbarians like the Germanic tribes, and to
the east, the only other civilization Rome was prepared to recognize: the
Persians, ruled first by the Parthians and then the Sasanians. For the rest of
the Roman Imperial period, Rome and Persia periodically engaged in both
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raiding and full-scale warfare, with neither side proving capable of
title of king of kings, basing their empire (as of the 120s BCE) out of
confederation of both the settled peoples of Mesopotamia and Persia itself and
clinch control of major Silk Road trade routes, even receiving the first ever
formal diplomatic contact with China in the West in the process, and thus had
a solid economic foundation for their military and political control of the
region.
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Persia had long stood as the only adversary Rome was unable to
infantry, including both heavy, armored lancers and highly mobile mounted
armor). Probably the most notorious Roman defeat was that of the forces led
known as Carrhae, the Persians slew 20,000 Roman troops, took 10,000
prisoners, and killed Crassus to boot. That battle led to a grudging admiration
on the part of the Romans, who were forced to acknowledge that they had
The closest Rome came to defeating the Persians was under Trajan
when he managed to conquer Armenia and parts of Mesopotamia, but after his
however, Persia and Rome still traded, and Rome also adopted various
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Persian technologies and military tactics (for example, Rome adopted
from Rome). Out of necessity, Rome learned to add heavy cavalry units to its
Little else is known about Persia during the Parthian period. The
Roman sources would have it that the power of the ruling dynasty was limited
by both court intrigue and the frequency of invasions from the steppes (the
usual problem for the settled dynasties of Mesopotamia and Persia going back
to the very origins of civilization). Both war and trade came and went
between Rome and Persia, with the Euphrates River existing as the usual
boundary between the two empires and the nearby kingdom of Armenia as a
buffer state dominated by one power and then the other over time. In 224 CE
the last Parthian ruler was overthrown by Ardashir I, the leader of the
Sasanian clan, and Persian history moved into a new phase under Sasanian
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Farther East and North
Far beyond Persia was the Chinese Empire, already thousands of years
old. China and Rome never established formal diplomatic ties, although the
leaders of both empires knew of one another. During the entire period of
Roman Imperial power, only China could produce silk, which was highly
coveted in Rome. Shipments of silk moved along the aptly-named Silk Road
across Central Asia, directly linking the two most powerful empires in the
world at the time (via, as mentioned above, Persia, which derived huge profits
in the process).
of Augustus, when the Romans learned to navigate the Indian Ocean using the
Monsoon winds to reach western India. There, they could trade for Chinese
silk at much better prices. This journey was hugely risky, but if a Roman
merchant could pull it off and return to Rome with a cargo hold full of silk, he
would earn fully 100 times his investment as profit. Along with spices
(especially pepper), the trade for silk eventually drained enormous amounts
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of gold from Rome, something that added up to a serious economic liability
The most important, and threatening, border for Rome was to its north,
on the eastern and northern banks of the Rhine and Danube rivers. The
forested land, which was cold, wet, and uninviting from the Roman
feudal law, the system of law in which offenses were met with clan-based
complex relationships between various tribes and the Roman empire in which
the Romans both fought with and, increasingly, hired German tribes to serve
settle along the Roman borders in return for payments of tribute to Rome.
The two major rivers, the Rhine and the Danube, were the key dividing
fortifications there. As far as the Romans were concerned, even if they were
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able to militarily they did not want to conquer German territory. The Romans
understanding true civilization. Some Romans did admire their bravery and
codes of honor - the same Tacitus who provides much of the information on
the early emperors contrasted the supposed weakness and dissolution of his
contemporary Romans with the rough virtue of the Germans. That being
noted, most Romans believed that the Celts, conquered by Caesar centuries
earlier, were able to learn and assimilate to Roman culture, but the Germans,
supposedly, were not. Likewise, Germania was assumed to be too cold, too
wet, and too infertile to support organized farming and settlement. Thus, the
role of the limes was to hold the Germans back rather than to stage new wars
of conquest. For about three hundred years, they did just that, until the
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The Army and Assimilation
Rome had established control over its vast territory thanks to the
chapter, however, the republican military system declined after the Punic
capable of serving in the army diminished. By the first century, most Roman
tangible rewards rather than volunteers who served only in a given campaign
Perhaps the most important thing Augustus did besides establishing the
ending the reliance on the volunteer citizen - soldiers that had fought for
Rome under the republic. Instead, during the empire, Legionaries served for
twenty years and then were put on reserve for another five, although more
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than half died before reaching retirement age. The major benefits of service
and land: military colonies spread across the empire ensured that a loyal
soldier could expect to establish a prosperous family line if he lived that long.
Service in the army was grueling and intense. Roman soldiers were
summary execution if they were judged to have been derelict in their duties -
one of the worst was falling asleep on guard duty, punishable by being beaten
to death by one's fellow soldiers. Roman soldiers were held to the highest
standards of unit cohesion, and their combat drills meant they were
military was the legion, a self-sufficient army unto itself that could be
combined with other legions to form a full-scale invasion force but could also
operate on its own. During the Augustan period, each legion consisted of
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5,400 infantry and 120 cavalry, along with hundreds of specialists such as
480 men, each of which was led by a centurion, veterans who had risen
through the ranks to lead. The legions were designed to be flexible, adaptable,
the placement of the tents in the camps built at the end of every day while the
legates were often politicians rather than soldiers, meaning that the key
figures in actual battle were the centurions, each of whom had earned his
position through exemplary service. Perhaps most important of all was the
lead centurion, the First Spear, who dictated tactics on the field.
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Wall carvings of a Roman legion in battle, with the characteristic large rectangular shields. A
regular legionnaire would typically fight in formation using a short sword after throwing javelins
The legions were made up of Roman citizens, but not all members of the
auxiliaries: Roman subjects (e.g. Celts, North Africans, Syrians, etc.). who
nevertheless served the empire. The auxiliaries were divided into cohorts of
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Roman legions, the auxiliaries tended to vary their arms - auxiliaries could be
slingers and archers as well as foot soldiers and cavalry. They tended to serve
as scouts and support for the legions as well as engaging in combat in their
own right. As of 23 CE they numbered about 150,000 men, which was the
same as the legions at the time. The emperor Claudius rewarded 25 years of
service with citizenship; by the early second century, all auxiliaries gained
citizenship on discharge.
A key legion that stood apart from the rest of the military was the
Praetorian Guard, whose major job was defending the emperor himself,
followed in priority by the defense of Italy and the city of Rome. The
Praetorian Guard started as nine cohorts of 480 men, but later each cohort
was grown to 1,000 men. The terms of service in the Praetorian Guard were
very attractive: 16 years instead of 25 and pay that was significantly higher
(this was a necessity: emperors started with Claudius knew that they were
vulnerable to the Praetorians and needed to keep them happy and loyal). Not
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not simply serve the emperor in the city of Rome, instead actively
became an increasing problem by the fourth century CE), and with the
culture. A soldier recruited from the provinces had to learn Latin, at least well
enough to take orders and respond to them. Auxiliaries served with men from
all over the empire, not just their own home regions, and what each soldier
had in common was service to Rome. Commanding officers were often from
the Italian heartland, forming a direct link to the Roman center. Military
families were a reality everywhere, with sons often becoming soldiers after
their fathers. Thus, the experience of serving in the legions or the auxiliaries
tended to promote a shared sense of Roman identity, even when soldiers were
drawn from areas that had been conquered by Rome in the recent past.
In the provinces, there was a pattern that took place over a few
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resistance movements and rebellions. Those were put down with
overwhelming and brutal force, often worse than that of the initial
invasion. Eventually, local elites were integrated in the governor's office and
ambitious people made sure their sons learned Latin. Locals started joining
the army and, if lucky, returned eventually with money and land to show for
it. Roman amenities like aqueducts and baths were built and roads linked the
province with the rest of the empire. In short, assimilation happened. A few
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Roman Society
Rome itself was opulent during this period. The city of Rome boasted
eleven aqueducts, enormous structures that brought fresh water into the city
from miles away. The houses of the rich had indoor plumbing with drains that
led to public sewers. There were enormous libraries and temples, along with
numerous public sites for recreation, including public baths, race tracks, and
combat.
productivity not seen again until the seventeenth century CE. Specialized
better-off citizens enjoying access to quality tools, dishware, linens, and so on,
much of which had been manufactured hundreds of miles away. While the
long-term economic pattern was that the wealthier parts of society tended to
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become even richer at the expense of the common people, there was still a
We should note that, while the Romans are not famous as scientists,
they are famous as architects and engineers. The Romans used concrete
extensively in building projects. They mastered the art of building arches and
domes to hold up ceilings without interior supports. Using only gravity, they
could transport water dozens of miles, not just in Rome but in other major
cities across the Empire. Roman roads were so well built that some survive to
the present, now used by cars rather than the horse-drawn carts they were
Each city built by the Romans in their conquered territory was laid out
according to careful plans, with streets built in grids and centered on a public
forum with public buildings. One of the reasons that the Romans were so
effective in assimilating conquered peoples into Roman society was that they
built a great deal of infrastructure; being conquered by Rome seemed less like
a burden when an aqueduct, public baths, and street system appeared within
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a generation of the Roman conquest (the relative cultural and religious
tolerance of Roman culture was also key). All of these cities were linked by
the 40,000 miles of roads that stretched across the empire. The primary
wealth from the local areas and funneling them back to Rome, but they also
served as genuine cultural centers. Likewise, even though the roads were
often built with troop movement in mind, people everywhere could take
Social Classes
That all being said, there were vast social distances that separated elites
and commoners. Even in the city of Rome, most of the citizens lived in
squalor, packed into apartment buildings many stories high, made out of
flammable wood, looming over open sewers. The rich lived in a state of luxury
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that probably would not be equaled until the Renaissance, but the majority of
the army, but most were simply poor folk struggling to get by. They were
seasonal laborers, they rented from wealthy landowners, or they owned farms
but were perpetually threatened by the predatory rich. Over the centuries,
poor farmers found it more and more difficult to hold on to their land, both
because they could not compete with the enormous, slave-tilled plantations of
the rich and because of outright extortion. There are numerous accounts of
rich landowners simply forcing small farmers off of land and seizing it; the
peasants could not afford to battle the rich in court and the rich had few
scruples about hiring thugs to terrify the peasants into submission. Once in a
great while, a poorer Roman citizen could petition an emperor personally for
redress and succeed, as could the occasional provincial to a governor, but the
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immense majority of the time the poor (citizen and non-citizen alike) were
imperial government and their families. In turn, access to political power was
(the basic coin of the empire). To serve on the governing council of a small
typical soldier earned about 1,200 a year, and poor farmers much less. Land
ownership was by far the major determinant of wealth, and with the
prevalence of slavery, economies of scale dictated that the more land a given
The overall pattern in the Roman Imperial period is that the wealthy
the expense of the rest of Roman society: the wealth of elite landowners grew
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approximately eight times from 1 CE to 400 CE, with almost no new wealth
coming into the Roman economy during that period. Thus, as a whole, social
member of the equestrian class in the Empire might have about 17,000 times
the annual income of a poor laborer). Roman elites kept taxes on their own
property low, but the provinces were often ruthlessly exploited and overall
tax levels were high. The immense majority of Roman citizens and subjects
were born into the social class they would stay in for their entire lives
Still, while they might prey on poor farmers, elite Romans were well
during the Republic, the imperial state distributed free grain (and, later, wine
and olive oil) to the male citizens of the city of Rome. Eventually, other Roman
cities adopted the practice as well. In addition, public games and theater
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performances were free, subsidized by the state or by elites showing off their
wealth (the most popular were circuses: horse races around a track). Thus, a
Roman citizen in one of the large cities could enjoy free bread - although it
was not enough to sustain an entire family, necessitating at least some source
cynical move on the part of the state to keep down urban unrest and a legal
right of urban citizens. Free bread or not, the average life expectancy was 45
years for men and 34 for women, the latter because of the horrible conditions
of bearing children.
Augustus took power. Not only were slaves captured in war, but children
born to slave mothers were automatically slaves as well. Some slaves did
domestic labor, but most were part of the massive labor force on huge
plantations and in mines. The conditions of life for slaves were often
atrocious, and strict oversight and use of violent discipline ensured that no
slave revolt ever succeeded (despite the best efforts of leaders of revolts, like
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Spartacus in the first century BCE). Relatively large numbers of slaves did
up and prices rose; without the constant expansion of the empire, there were
far fewer slaves available. By that time, however, the legal and social
conditions of farmers had degenerated to the point that they were essentially
serfs (known as coloni): unfree rural laborers, barely better than slaves
themselves.
Law
For the republican period and the first few hundred years of the Empire,
accountable to their own legal systems so long as they were loyal to Rome and
paid their taxes on schedule. The most famous historical example of the
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overlapping legal systems of the Empire was the biblical trial of Jesus before
the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. Pilate tried to hand the case off to the
local Jewish puppet king, Herod, who in turn refused it and handed Jesus back
over to Pilate. In the end, Jesus was executed by the Roman government for
Roman citizens could always appeal to Roman law if they wanted to,
even if they lived in a province far from Rome. There were many benefits, not
least exemption from the local laws that non-citizens were obliged to follow,
and wealthy citizens were exempt from the more horrible forms of
free men and women (to make it easier to collect taxes). This was an
empire.
Some of the concepts and practices of Roman law were to outlive the
empire itself. Rome initiated the tradition of using precedent to shape legal
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decisions, as well as the idea that there is a spirit to laws that is sometimes
more important than a literal interpretation. The Romans were the first to
codify the idea that someone accused of a crime was innocent until proven
guilty; this was a totally radical idea in the area of justice, which in the rest of
the ancient world normally held the accused guilty unless guilt could be
conclusively disproved.
rich and the poor, even in the case of citizens. The rich were protected from
torture and painful execution, while the poor were subject to both. Slaves
were held in such a subservient position by the law that the testimony of a
slave was only allowed in court cases if it had been obtained through
torture. And, over everything else, the decrees of the emperor were the
fundamental basis of law itself; they could not be appealed or contested in the
emperor was not just about the law, he was the law.
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Conclusion
For the first two centuries of its existence, Rome was overwhelmingly
powerful, and its political institutions were strong enough to survive even
and as the meritocratic system of the “Five Good Emperors” gave way to
infighting, assassination, and civil war. At the same time, what began as a cult
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Roman Legion - Ursus
Chapter 10:
century CE. Beset along its borders and hobbled by constant infighting, the
empire was at real risk of collapse for decades. It did not collapse, however,
and in fact enjoyed a resurgence of a sort that held the Roman state together
until the end of the fifth century (the western half of the Empire “fell” in 476
CE).
In fact, the period between the end of the five good emperors and the
collapse of Rome was much more complex than one of simple decline and
weakness, and even when the city of Rome could not defend itself, Roman
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Civilization. Perhaps most importantly, what began as an obscure cult in
Major crises affected the Empire from 235 to 284 CE. The basis of the
crises was increasing pressure from foreign invaders on the Roman borders
coupled with political instability within the Empire itself. The emperor
Severus Alexander was murdered in 235 CE. All of the emperors to follow for
the next fifty years were murdered or died in battle as well, save one; there
were twenty-six emperors in those fifty years, and only one died of natural
causes. Many emperors stayed on the throne for only a few months before
they were killed. Not surprisingly, in this environment, most emperors were
only concerned with either seizing the throne or staying alive once they had it,
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meaning they tended to neglect everything important to the stability of the
Empire.
the Praetorian Guard auctioned off the throne, would-be emperors eagerly
assassinated their rivals, and Roman elites largely retreated to their enormous
estates to profit off of their serfs. Other factors, however, were external:
Rome's international environment grew much worse. In 220 BCE, a new clan -
the Sasanians - seized control of Persia. The Sasanians were much more
aggressive and well-organized than the earlier Parthian dynasty had been, and
Rome was obliged to fight almost constant wars to contain the Persian threat.
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As the quality of Roman leadership declined and the threats grew
worse, the results were predictable: Rome lost battles and territory. The
emperor Valerian was captured by the Persian king Shapur I when he led a
Roman army against Persia and, according to some accounts, was used as the
Persian king's personal footstool for climbing up onto his horse. Another
emperor rebuilt walls around Rome itself in 270 CE because of the threat of
Germanic invaders from the north, who had pushed all the way into northern
Italy. Likewise, emperors, all being generals at this point, traveled constantly
with their armies and made their courts wherever they had to while waging
campaigns.
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The defeat of the emperor Valerian, kneeling on the left, before the Persian king Shapur I, on
horseback.
The problem was that the entire Roman imperial system hinged on the
supposed to oversee all major building campaigns, state finances, and the
worship of the Roman gods, not just military strategy. Thus, in an era when
the speed a message could travel was limited by how fast a messenger could
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whenever the latest emperor was weeks or even months away from
Rome. Needless to say, the problem was exacerbated when the Empire was
torn between rival claimants to the throne - for a few years toward the end of
the crisis period the empire proper was split into three competing “empires”'
Sasanian Persia
Persia was not, of course, simply the most powerful and well organized
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of its own, by the Sasanian period already nearly eight centuries old under the
for the Persian people, the Sasanians identified their empire as Iranshahr, land
Iran (this textbook will continue to use the term “Persia” for clarity’s sake,
however). Under Sasanian rule, Persia reached the height of its organization,
While the Sasanian kings were obliged to govern both settled peoples
and nomads, as had all earlier Persian dynasties, they were more successful in
creating a stable system of rule, not just relying on their own charismatic
authority. For the first time in its history, Zoroastrianism became the official
state religion and its holy books were codified, in contrast to the earlier oral
traditions of the religion. The state made major efforts to increase both
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trade, as did crafts and manufacturing in Sasanian territory (Sasanian silk
textiles were of such high quality that they were even exported to China
centralization, and prosperity at precisely the same time that the chaos in
tradition. All rulers were members of the Sasanian family line, and governors
family. Authority was understood to emanate from the Zoroastrian god Ahura
the sheer size and diversity of the empire, regional rulers knew themselves to
between the rulers and the magi (Zoroastrian priesthood) emerged in which
Sasanian rule was justified by the direct, unequivocal support of the religious
power structure. And, of course, the religious power structure received the
approval and support of the royal state in the process, up to and including the
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only campaigns of religious persecution against non-Zoroastrians in Persian
history.
One symptom of the success of the Sasanian state is its longevity in the
power in 220 CE until it was conquered during the Arab invasions in 651
CE. Rome and Persia did not war constantly, but when they did Persia was
process). Invaders from the Central Asian steppes and the mountains of
the Arab tribes to the southwest well before they unified under the Islamic
victories, the Sasanian state remained stable and the economy prosperous for
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Sasanians as the model to emulate, just as the Sasanians had emulated the
Achaemenids.
Diocletian
Turning back to Rome, the period of crisis that had made the eastern
emperor Diocletian in 284 CE. Diocletian not only managed to survive for
twenty years after taking the throne, he also reorganized the empire and
pulled it back from the brink. Recognizing that the sheer size of the empire
with a co-emperor: Diocletian ruled the eastern half of the empire and his co-
emperor Maximian ruled the west. Then, about ten years after he took the
took on junior emperor. This created the Tetrarchy, the rule of four. Diocletian
further subdivided the empire, so that for the rest of his reign, the four co-
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emperors (two “augusti” and two “caesars”) worked together to administer
A Roman depiction of the tetrarchy dating from the period of Diocletian’s reign.
Diocletian’s hope was that the tetrarchy would end the cycle of
heirs, destined to assume full power when their seniors stepped down. When
that happened, each new senior emperor would then select new juniors. The
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overall effect was, if it worked, a neat succession of power instead of the
constant bloodshed and uncertainty that had haunted Roman politics for half
a century; this system was quite similar to the merit-based selection process
of emperors that had held during the rule of the Five Good Emperors.
“vicar.” When Christianity moved from being an illegal cult to the official
religion of the empire (see below), the division of imperial territory into
practice persists all the way to the present in the administration of the
Church.
To deal with the threat of both Persia and the Germanic tribes,
Diocletian reorganized the Roman army and recruited more soldiers, making
it larger than it ever had been. He built new roads for military use to be able to
move armies along the borders more efficiently. Borrowing from the Persian
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practice, he emphasized the use of heavy cavalry to respond quickly to threats.
Finally, even though the army itself was now larger, he made individual
legions smaller, so that each legion’s commander no longer had enough power
to take over with a single attack on the current emperor (that worked well
enough for Diocletian himself, but it made little difference in the long run).
to deal with the problem, Diocletian reformed the tax system and instituted an
official census for taxation purposes. He also tried to freeze wages and prices
by decree, something that did not work since it created a black market for
both goods and labor. Peasants bore the brunt of Diocletian's reforms; most
independent farmers that still existed were turned into serfs (coloni), one step
above slaves. State tax collectors were so feared that many peasants willingly
gave their land to wealthy landowners who promised to protect them from
that too many people had turned away from worship of the Roman gods,
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which had in turn brought about the long period of crisis preceding his
wipe out the cult once and for all. Needless to say, this was a spectacular
failure.
co-emperor in the west. The idea behind the Tetrarchy was that the junior
emperors would then become the senior emperors and recruit new juniors -
this system worked exactly once, as the junior emperors under Diocletian and
new beginning, however, the Empire was yet again plunged into civil war. A
general (at the time stationed in Britain) named Constantine, son of the
sole rule. By 312 CE he had succeeded, claiming total control and appointing
no co-emperor.
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Constantine
would re-emerge after his death), but otherwise he left things as they had
been under Diocletian's reforms. The eastern and western halves of the
Empire still had separate administrations and he kept up the size and
organization of the army. He also took a decisive step toward stabilizing the
economy by issuing new currency based on a fixed gold standard. The new
coin, the solidus, was to be the standard international currency of the western
religion. He was the first Christian emperor, something that had an enormous
effect on the history of Europe and, ultimately, the world. Before his climactic
battle in 312 CE to defeat his last rival to the imperial throne, Constantine had
a vision that he claimed was sent by the Christian God, promising him victory
cynical explanation for his conversion (most revolving around the fact that
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Constantine went on to plunder the temples of the old Roman gods), but
regardless of the fact that he used his conversion to help himself to the wealth
In 324 CE, Constantine founded a new capital city for the entire empire
which is today Istanbul). It was at the juncture of the eastern and western
halves of the Empire, with all trade routes between Asia and Europe passing
through its area of influence. It became the heart of wealth and power in the
Empire and a Christian “new beginning" for Roman civilization itself. The city
grew to become one of the great cities of late antiquity and the Middle Ages,
fed by grain from Egypt and bringing in enormous wealth through trade.
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it took 1,000 years for an enemy to be able to breach them (namely the
Rome had always been a hotbed of religious diversity. While the official
Roman gods were venerated across the Empire, Roman elites had no
objections to the worship of other deities, and indeed many Romans (elites
shared a belief that the universe was full of magical charms that could lead to
spiritual salvation or eternal life itself. In many ways, they were more like
rituals in hopes of securing good fortune and wealth in life and the possibility
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Even Rome’s perennial adversary Persia supplied sources of spiritual
inspiration to Rome. Mithras, the Zoroastrian god of war, the sun, and rebirth
had been a soldier, slain by his enemies, who then rose to enjoy eternal
since Mithras’s identity as a former soldier made his worship all the more
popular that, some historians have noted, it is easy to imagine the Roman
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A relief from an altar of Mithras dating from the second or third century CE. In all of the
discovered Mithran temples, Mithras is depicted slaying a bull, which somehow (the details of
one of the Severan emperors embraced the worship of the Syrian sun god Sol
Invictus (meaning "the unconquered sun") and had a temple built in Rome to
honor the god alongside the traditional Roman deities. The notion of being as
subsequent emperors tended to venerate Sol Invictus along with the Roman
Jupiter until the triumph of Christianity. In other cases, the worship of non-
Roman gods was so popular that it simply could not be suppressed in the few
cases in which Roman leaders saw a need to. The Egyptian goddess Isis, who
was at the heart of the largest mystery cult in the entire Mediterranean region,
was so popular among both women and men that repeated attempts to purge
her cult from Rome for being socially disruptive utterly failed.
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The Jews and Jesus
the unshakable opposition of the Jews. Palestine suffered from heavy taxation
and deeply-felt resentment toward the Romans. One key point of contention
was that the Jews refused to pay lip service to the divinity of the
rituals acknowledging the primacy of the emperors, but since the Jews were
In 66 CE there was a huge uprising against Rome. It took four years for
diaspora, the people without a homeland united only by the Hebrew Bible, the
decades later (between 132 - 136 CE) resulted in the almost complete
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dispersal of the Jews, to the point that the Jewish homeland was truly lost to
them until the foundation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 CE.
In the first century CE, Jewish society, especially its leadership, was
divided between rival groups. Some powerful priests, the Sadducees, claimed
that all Jews should follow the 10 Commandments, but only the priests of the
Temple needed to follow the 613 laws and injunctions laid down by
Moses. They were opposed by the Pharisees, who insisted that all Jews had to
abide by all of the laws of Moses, and they also preached that a messiah - a
savior - would soon come to bring about a day of judgment before Yahweh
and bring about the fulfillment of the Biblical Covenant. In the deserts outside
of the major cities, a group called the Essenes emphasized a life of asceticism
the Zealots advocated for armed revolt against the Roman occupier.
sorts: Jesus of Nazareth. The major source of information on the life of Jesus
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are the four Gospels, accounts of his life and teachings composed after his
death by three of his apostles (his closest followers and students), Matthew,
Mark, and John, and another early Christian leader, Luke. The Gospels were
(about sixty years after the death of Jesus). While the specific language of the
Gospels is, of course, different, and some of the events described are also
described differently, the Gospels agree on most of the major aspects of the
life of Jesus.
According to the Gospels, Jesus was the son of the miraculous union of
the Holy Spirit, one of the aspects of the Jewish God Yahweh, and a virgin
priests when he was still a boy. At the age of thirty, having earned his living as
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sought forgiveness from God for its sins. He traveled and delivered his
kingdoms dominated by the Romans for three years, but was then arrested by
the Roman authorities for inciting rebellion. In the end, Jesus was executed in
According to the Gospels, Jesus returned to life, with an angel rolling the
boulder back from the entrance to the tomb in which his body had been laid to
rest. He renewed his call for devotion to God and the offer of salvation for
those who sought forgiveness, then passed into the divine presence. Jesus's
followers, led by the twelve apostles, began to teach his lessons to others, and
the new religion of Christianity was born. His followers began to refer to Jesus
as "the Christ," meaning "the anointed one" in Greek, a reference to the idea
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Early Christianity
At the beginning of the Christian faith, there was no single set of texts or
beliefs that united Christians. The four major Gospels do not agree on
(decades after the apostles themselves were alive). It was St. Paul, a Jewish
foremost Christian evangelist, who popularized the notion that the death of
Jesus on the cross was part of a divine plan that canceled out human sin. For
message had “really” been because many of Jesus's teachings were, and are,
issues, including:
What God did Jesus represent? One cult believed that the God of Christ
was not the Jewish God, who had been vengeful and warlike. According to this
sect, Christ's God was a more powerful and loving deity come to save the
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Was Jesus the messiah? In Jewish doctrine, the messiah was to be a
figure who liberated the Jews from oppression and made good on the
Covenant between the Jews and God, delivering the Promised Land for all
eternity. Many Jews had hoped that Jesus would be a revolutionary against
Roman rule and, since Judea remained in Roman hands after his death, they
did not believe that Jesus had been the messiah. Early Christians came to
insist, following Paul, that Jesus had indeed been the messiah, but that the
prosaic politics. In other words, the potential to save one's soul from
like a normal man, but according to the gospels he had also performed
miracles, and he claimed to be the son of God. Likewise, while Jesus lived an
exemplary life, he also displayed traits like anger and doubt (the latter most
famously on the cross when he asked God why He had “forsaken” Jesus), traits
that did not seem those of a “perfect” being. This debate would go on for
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centuries, with equally pious groups of Christians coming to completely
indeed the specifically Jewish messiah, after all, it did not make sense for a
to the influence of St. Paul again, most Christians came to believe that the
salvation offered by Christ was potentially universal, and that not just Jews
Under the influence of the mystery religions noted above, many early
Christians were Gnostics, meaning "those who know" in Greek. The Gnostics
believed that Jesus had been a secret-teller, almost a magician, who provided
clues in his life and teachings about how to achieve union with God. This had
customs - for example, many Gnostics believed that it was possible to deduce a
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"names of God." If a Gnostic was to properly chant all of the names of God, he
would not only achieve salvation but might enjoy power on earth, as well. The
there were common themes, most importantly the emphasis Jesus Himself
had placed on the spiritual needs of the common people, even social
outcasts. The most radical aspect of Christianity was its universalism. From
Judaism, it inherited the idea that all human beings are spiritually equal. Once
the debate about whether non-Jews could become Christians was resolved, it
was also potentially open to anyone who heard Christianity's teachings and
formal legal separations between social classes and a stark system of social
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compassion to others regardless of their social rank. Few concepts could have
that refused to accept the worship of the Roman emperors. What made it
even more threatening than Judaism, however, was that Christianity actively
sought out new converts (i.e. Christianity was inherently evangelical, in stark
contrast to Judaism which did not seek new members). Roman authorities
potential rabble-rousers. In 68 CE, Nero blamed the Christians for the huge
fire that consumed much of the city of Rome, and hundreds of Christian were
later, when Christianity was firmly entrenched as the religion of Europe, the
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Early Christian Organization
Empire but did not seriously disrupt polytheism or the Empire’s religious
became a way to get ahead in the Roman power structure, and over time it
been a religion of the common people, Roman elites flocked to convert after
worshipers, a divide between priests and worshipers. Bishops were the head
of each city's congregation, and they supervised a staff of priests and deacons
who interacted with everyday worshipers and led services. The bishops of
main cities, usually the imperial capitals of their respective provinces, came to
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following the imperial structure, in instructing people in Christian doctrine
and in building charity networks. One important effect was that the church
actively supported charities for the poor and hungry, a practice which won
over new converts. This was one of the notable moments in history when a
religion linked together a message of compassion for the needy and real,
practical efforts to help the needy. In another strong contrast with Roman
practice, Christianity saw disenfranchised groups like women and the poor
(not to mention poor women) play major roles in the church’s organization,
representing not just the church but their cities in actions and requests before
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with that of the traditional Roman nobility, directly linking power within the
The most important bishop was the archbishop of Rome, who for the
first few centuries of Christianity was just one among several major church
Roman archbishops tried to assert authority over the entire church hierarchy
in the west. Their authority, however, was not recognized in much of the
eastern part of the Empire, and it should be emphasized that it took more than
receive acceptance even in the west. Eventually, however, that authority was
The pope's role as leader of the church emerged for a few reasons. First
and foremost, the symbolic power of the city of Rome itself gave added weight
to the Roman archbishop's authority. Second, there was a doctrinal tie to the
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Apostle Peter, who was supposed to have been given the symbolic keys to
heaven directly from Christ, which were in turn passed on to his successor in
could thus argue that the Christian church itself was centered in Rome, and
that they inherited the spiritual keys to heaven upon taking office - this
concept was known as the “Petrine Succession.” By the mid-fifth century CE,
the popes were claiming to have total authority over all other bishops, and at
least some of those bishops (in Western Europe, at any rate) did look to Rome
for guidance. In later centuries, the mere fact that the early popes had claimed
that authority, and certain bishops had acknowledged it, was cited as “proof”
that the Roman papacy had always been the supreme doctrinal power in the
Church as a whole.
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financed construction of huge churches, including the Basilica of St. Peter in
what is today the Vatican (at the time it was an obscure graveyard in Rome).
bathhouses and so on, were often neglected in favor of churches, and many
churches.
Once it enjoyed the support of the Roman elite, the Christian church
calendar. December 25 had been the major festival of the sun god Sol Invictus,
and early Christians embraced the overlap between that celebration and
Christmas, noting that Christ was like the sun as a source of spiritual
life. Other Christian holidays like Easter coincided with various fertility
festivals that took place in early spring, around the time of the spring
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practice, arguing that the ultimate goal was the salvation of souls through
conversion, so it made perfect sense to use existing holy days and rituals in
the liturgical calendar did not imply that Christians were willing to accept
polytheism. Unlike most ancient faiths, Christians could not tolerate the
worship of other gods, which they regarded as nothing more than nonexistent
delusions that endangered souls. They used the term “pagan,” coming from
all worshipers of all other gods, even gods that had been worshiped for
thousands of years at that point. Christians thus used scorn and contempt to
vilify worshipers of other gods - "pagan" indicated that the non-Christian was
both ignorant and foolish, even if he or she was a member of the Roman elite.
It took about a century for the believers in the old Roman gods,
shifted toward building Christian churches and away from temples, so did
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Christians sometimes lead attacks to desecrate the sites of pagan worship.
gods, all with the tacit support of the emperors. In 380 CE the Empire was
never a unified system, and it was impossible for people who worshiped a
A much more difficult battle, one that it some ways was never really
“magic” and “spirits.” Christian leaders came to believe that, in general, magic
was dangerous, generated by the meddling of the devil, and that the spirits
found in nature were almost certainly demons in disguise. There was very
little they could do, however, to overturn the entire worldview of their
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followers, considering that even Christian leaders themselves very much
believed that spirits and magic were present in the world, demonic or
not. Thus, pagan practices like blessing someone after they sneezed (to keep
out an invading spirit or demon), throwing salt over one's shoulder to ward
off the devil, and employing all manner of charms to increase luck were to
Roman culture had a few centuries earlier. At the same time, because of the
Christians spoke a host of different languages and lived across the entire
expanse of the Empire. As noted above, there were serious debates around
meaning "correct belief," because there was no authority within the church
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(very much including the popes) who could enforce a certain set of beliefs
The beginning of orthodoxy was in the second and third centuries, when
a group of theologians argued that there were three personas or states of the
divine being, referred to as the Holy Trinity. In this view, God could exist
simultaneously as three beings: God the Father, the being that spoke in the Old
Testament, God the Son, Jesus himself, and God the Holy Spirit, the presence of
God throughout the universe. This concept did not quell controversy at all,
though, because it created a distinct stance that people could disagree with -
God the father had created Jesus, so it did not make any sense for Jesus to be
the same thing as God. Furthermore, it was impossible to be both human and
perfect; since Jesus was human, he was imperfect and could not therefore be
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God, who was perfect. This belief came to be known as "Arianism" (note that
the word has nothing whatsoever to do with the misguided belief in some
almost two thousand years later). Arianism quickly took hold among many
people, most importantly among the Germanic tribes of the north, where
became the largest and most persistent heresy in the early Christian church.
Nicaea, to lay Arianism to rest. One of the results was the Nicene Creed (now
usually referred to as the Apostles' Creed), to this day one of the central
status as the son of God and the Virgin Mary, Christ’s resurrection, and the
promise of Christ’s return at the end of the world. There was now the first
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“party line” in the early history of Christianity: a specific set of beliefs backed
by institutional authority.
western Empire still spoke Latin and the eastern Empire Greek. In 410 the
monk Jerome produced a version of the Christian Bible in Latin, the Vulgate,
not until 1442 (during the Renaissance) that the definitive and in a sense
“final” version of the Bible was established by the Western Church when it
defined exactly which books of the Old Testament were to be included and
Meanwhile, in the east, Greek was not only the language of daily life for
many, it was the official language of state in the Empire and the language of
the church. The books of the New Testament, starting with the Gospels, were
written in Greek in the first place, and the Greek intellectual legacy was still
very strong. There was an equally strong Jewish intellectual legacy that
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provided accurate translations from Hebrew and Aramaic to Greek, providing
Testament.
While it certainly clarified the beliefs of the most powerful branch of the
guaranteed that there would always be those who rejected that orthodoxy in
Near the end of the third century, a new Christian movement emerged
that was to have major ramifications for the history of the Christian world:
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about 280, Antony sold his goods and retreated to the desert to contemplate
the divine, eschewing all worldly goods in imitation of the poverty of Christ.
He would have remained in obscurity except for a book about him written by
the bishop Athanasius, The Life of Antony, that celebrated Antony's rejection of
Athanasius, normal life was full of temptation, greed, and sin, and that the
holiest life was thus one that rejected it completely in favor of prayer and
from the temptations of a normal social existence (although they had to live
close enough to civilization for the donations of food that kept them alive).
One particularly extreme sect of early monks were the Stylites, from the
Greek word stylos, meaning "column." The founder of the group, St. Simeon
the Stylite, climbed up a pillar in Syria and spent the next 30 years living on
top of it. He was so famous for his holiness and endurance in the face of the
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obvious physical toll of living on top of a pillar that he attracted followers
from all over the Roman world who came to listen to him preach. Soon, many
A depiction of St. Simeon from the sixth century CE. The snake symbolizes the temptation to
abandon his holy life, presumably by getting down off of the pillar.
monasteries. Originally, these early monks spent almost all of their time in
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prayer, but over time most monastic communities came to embrace useful
who wrote a book known as the Rule in about 529 that laid out how monks
should live. The Rule dictated a strict schedule for daily life that revolved
around prayer, study, and useful work for the monastery itself (tending crops
and animals, performing labor around the monastery, and so on). Going
western Roman Empire. One of the tasks undertaken by monks was the
Christian leaders, etc.), but some of which were classical Greek or Roman
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writings that would have otherwise been lost. Often, these books were
town (and many small villages) in the Roman sphere of influence. One
phenomenon in early Christianity was the focus on relics: holy objects. Relics
were everything from the bones of saints to fragments of the "True Cross" on
which Christ was crucified. Each church had to have a relic in its altar
truly holy ground. All relics were not created equal: the larger the object, or
the closer it had been to Christ or the apostles, the more holy power it was
it was not easy to determine if a given finger bone was really the finger bone
of St. Mark!) developed in Europe as rival church leaders tried to secure the
most powerful relic for their church. This was not just about the symbolic
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importance of the relics, as pilgrims would travel from all over the Roman
world to visit the site of noteworthy relics, bringing with them considerable
Christian Learning
the basic tenets of Christian doctrine. In other words, the whole intellectual
world of Greek and Roman philosophy, literature, science, and so on did not
necessarily relate to the Church's primary task of saving souls. Many church
leaders were learned men and women, however, and insisted that there was
indeed a place for learning within Christianity. The issue was never settled -
one powerful church leader, Tertullian, once wrote “what does Athens have to
do with Rome?”, meaning, why should anyone study the Greek intellectual
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Once Christianity was institutionalized, church leaders generally came
learning, especially things like rhetoric, while warning against the spiritual
and classical learning was St. Augustine of Hippo (a Roman city in North
Africa), whose life spanned the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Augustine
lived through the worst period of Roman decline, completing his work while
his own city was besieged by a Germanic group called the Vandals. To Roman
them, why was their empire falling apart? Augustine's answer was that life on
earth is not ultimately significant. In his work The City of God, Augustine
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Christian faith, versus the flawed and imperfect world of the living. This
concept explained the decline of the Empire as being irrelevant to the greater
facet of material life; useful in its way but totally insignificant compared to the
necessity of laying one's soul bare to God and waiting for the second coming of
Christ.
learning was that the issue was decided by the collapse of Rome. When Rome
organized learning - there simply was no funding from Roman elites for what
literature and philosophy and engineering all but vanished, preserved only in
monasteries and in the eastern Empire. Once the western Empire collapsed,
the church was the only institution that still supported scholarship (including
basic literacy), but over time the levels of literacy and education in Europe
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Renaissance thinkers who wrote off the period between the fall of Rome and
Ultimately, after the western part of the Roman Empire fell in the late
fifth century, it was the Christian Church that carried on at least parts of
Roman civilization, learning, and culture. One of the historical ironies of this
period of history is that even though Rome's Empire began to decline and
The fall of Rome, conventionally dated to 476 CE, is one of the most
iconic events in the history of the western world. For centuries, people have
tried to draw lessons from Rome’s decline and fall about their own societies, a
practice inspired by the question of how so mighty and, at one time, stable a
considerably: Rome grew corrupt and weak over time, Rome was infiltrated
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by “barbarian” cultures, Rome was simply overcome by overwhelming odds,
or perhaps Rome was simply transformed into a different, more diverse set of
societies rather than destroyed in so many words. However the events of the
period are interpreted, the simple fact remains: the political unity of the
Roman Empire was shattered by the end of the fifth century CE.
While the debate as to the causes of Rome’s fall will probably never be
"really" fall for another thousand years, even though the city of Rome itself,
along with the western half of the Empire, did indeed lose its sovereignty in
the face of invasion by Germanic "barbarians." The Roman capital had already
been moved to Constantinople in the early fourth century, and the eastern half
of the empire remained intact, albeit under constant military pressure, until
1453. Arguably, one of the major causes for the collapse of the western
empire was the fact that the Empire as a whole had focused its resources in
the east for a century by the time waves of invaders appeared on the horizon
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At the time, most Christians blamed polytheism and heresy for Rome's
fall: it was God's wrath exacted on a sinful society. In turn, the remaining
polytheists blamed Christians for undermining the worship of the gods who
From the contemporary perspective, Rome's fall seems to have less to do with
for the destruction of the western empire as barbarians when referring to the
Roman perception of Germanic and Central Asian groups. The point is not to
vilify those groups, but to emphasize the degree to which Romans were both
will refer to specific groups by name such as the Goths and the Huns. In
addition, it will refer to “Germans” when discussing the specific groups native
to Central Europe that played such a key role in the fall of Rome. That is
called “Germany” until 1871 CE (i.e. about 1,400 years later). Thus, when
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using the term “Germans,” this section is referring to any of the Germanic
cultural groups of the era rather than the citizens or subjects of a unified
country.
that the lands held by barbarians (such as Scotland and Germany) were
largely unsuitable for civilization, being too cold and wet for the kind of
that barbarian peoples like the Germans were inferior to subject peoples like
the Celts, who could at least be made useful subjects (and, later, citizens) of
the Empire. For the entire history of the Empire, the Romans never seem to
have figured out exactly which groups they were interacting with; they would
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“should have known better,” Roman writers would actually refer to Germans
as Celts.
Germanic tribes who did rise to prominence in Rome (one, Stilicho, was one of
the greatest Roman generals in the late Empire, and he was half Vandal by
career of fighting in the Roman armies and then returning to their native
be emulated, not some kind of permanent enemy. Some Romans clearly did
admire things about certain barbarian groups, as well - the great Roman
historian Tacitus, in his Germania, even praised the Germans for their vigor
and honor, although he did so in order to contrast the Germans with what he
That said, it is clear that the overall pattern of contact between Rome
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usually resulting in brutal Roman reprisals. As the centuries went on, Rome
came increasingly to rely on both Germanic troops and on playing allied tribes
off against hostile ones. In fact, by the late fourth century CE, many
(sometimes even most) soldiers in “Roman” armies in the western half of the
civilization was Persia. When Rome was forced to cede territory to Persia in
363 CE after a series of military defeats, Roman writers were aghast because
mention among Roman writers, since it was assumed that the territory could
occurred. Especially since the third century, major conflicts were an ongoing
reality of the enormous borders along the Rhine and Danube. Those conflicts
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had prompted emperors to build the system of limes meant to defend Roman
territory, and from that point on, the majority of Roman legions were usually
border guards and administrators and never experienced battle itself; there is
no question that the performance of the Roman military was far poorer in the
late imperial period than it had been, for instance, under the Republic.
In turn, many of the Germans who settled along those borders were
known as federatii, tribal groups who entered into treaties with Rome that
required them to pay taxes in kind (i.e. in crops, animals, and other forms of
wealth rather than currency) and send troops to aid Roman conquests, and
who received peace and recognition (and usually annual gifts) in return. The
problem for Rome was that most Germanic peoples regarded treaties as being
something that only lasted as long as the emperor who had authorized the
treaty lived; on his death, there would often be an incursion since the old
peace terms no longer held. The first task new emperors had to attend to was
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often suppressing the latest invasion from the north. One example was the
Constantine severely punished after they turned on his forces during his war
The bottom line is that, as of the late fourth century CE, it seemed like
Empire. The borders were teeming with barbarians, but they had always been
teeming with barbarians. Rome traded with them, enlisted them as soldiers,
necessary. No one in Rome seemed to think that this state of affairs would
that things had changed: there were more Germans than ever before, they
forces. What followed was a kind of "barbarian domino effect" that ultimately
broke the western Empire into pieces and ended Roman power over it.
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One other factor in the collapse of the western half of the Empire should
be emphasized: once Rome began to lose large territories in the west, tax
revenues shrunk to a fraction of what they had been. While the east remained
intact, with taxes going to pay for a robust military which successfully
under-manned, and vulnerable. There was thus a vicious cycle of lost land,
lost revenue, and poor military performance that saw Roman power simply
disintegrate over the course of less than a century. Even the handful of
effective emperors and generals in the west during that period could not
Invasions
The beginning of the end for the western empire was the Huns. The
Huns were warriors of the central Asian steppes: expert horsemen, skillful
warriors, unattached to any particular land. They had much in common with
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other groups of steppe peoples like the Scythians who had raided civilized
farther west claimed that they were the product of unions between demons
In 376 the Huns drove a tribe of Goths from their lands in southern
Russia. Those Goths were allowed to settle in the Balkans by the Romans, but
were soon extorted by Roman officials, causing the Goths to rise up against
Rome in retribution. In 378 the Goths killed the emperor, Valens, and
destroyed a Roman army in an open battle. The new emperor made a deal
with the Goths, allowing them to serve in the Roman army under their own
commanders in return for payment. This proved disastrous for Rome in the
long run as the Goths, under their king Alaric, started looting Roman territory
in the Balkans, finally marching into Italy itself and sacking Rome in 410
CE. The Roman government officially moved to the city of Ravenna in the
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The Gothic attack on Rome was the first time in roughly seven hundred
years that the walls of Rome had been breached by non-Romans. The entire
Roman world was shocked and horrified that mere barbarians could have
overwhelmed Roman armies and struck at the heart of the ancient Empire
itself. Rome’s impregnability was itself one of the founding stories Romans
told themselves; Romans had long vowed that the Celtic sack of 387 BCE
would be the last, and yet the Goths had shattered that myth. With the benefit
of historical hindsight, we can see the arrival of the Huns as the beginning of a
"domino effect" in which various groups were pushed into Roman territory,
with the sack of Rome merely one disaster of many for the Empire.
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The major invasions of the Roman Empire leading up to its fall. Note, among other things, their
astonishing scope: the Goths may have originated in Scandinavia but some of their
descendents ended up ruling over Spain, while the Vandals came from somewhere in present-
Leading up to that event, the Roman legions were already losing their
former coherence and unity. In 406 CE a very cold winter froze the Rhine
river, and armies of barbarians invaded (literally walking across the frozen
river in some cases), bypassing the traditional Roman defenses. One group,
the Vandals, sacked its way to the Roman provinces of Spain and seized a large
swath of territory there. The entire army of Britain left in 407 CE, when yet
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another ambitious general tried to seize the imperial throne, and Roman
Roman armies from the western empire hastily marched back to Italy to
fight the Goths, abandoning their traditional defensive posts. For the next fifty
looting and, soon, settling down to occupy territory that had only recently
been part of the Roman Empire. Most of these groups soon established
kingdoms of their own. The Vandals pushed through Spain and ended up
conquering most of Roman North Africa. After the Goths sacked Rome itself in
410, the emperor Honorius gave them southern Gaul to get them to leave;
they ended up seizing most of Spain (from the Vandals who had arrived before
them) as well. At that point, the Romans came to label this group the Visigoths
- “western Goths” - to distinguish them from other Gothic tribes still at large in
the Empire.
Back in Italy, the Huns, under the leadership of the legendary warlord
Attila, arrived in the late 440s, pushing as far as the gates of Rome in
490
451. There, the Pope (Leo I) personally appealed to Attila not to sack the city
and paid them a hefty bribe. Attila died in 453 and the Huns were soon
army. By then, however, the damage was done: the domino effect set off by
the Hunnic invasion of the previous century had already almost completely
swallowed up the western empire. Only two years after the Huns were
defeated, the Vandals sailed over from Africa in 455 and sacked Rome
nevertheless led to the use of the word “vandal” to mean a malicious destroyer
of property.
Italy itself held out until 476, when an Ostrogothic (“eastern Goth”)
warlord named Odoacer deposed the last emperor and declared himself king
Theodoric, but the link with Constantinople remained intact. The Roman
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emperor worked out a deal with Theodoric to stabilize Italy, and Theodoric
went on to rule for decades (r. 493 - 526). Thus, by 500 CE Italy and the city
of Rome were no longer part of the empire still called "Roman" by the people
of the eastern empire. By the end of the fifth century, the western empire was
the Italian peninsula and joining together with other Gothic territories to the
west. He maintained excellent relations with the Pope even though he was an
Arian Christian, and he set up a system in which a government existed for his
Goths that was distinct from the Roman government (with him at the head of
both, of course). Some historians have speculated that Theodoric and the
Goths might have been able to forge a new, stable Empire in the west and
thereby obviate the coming of the "Dark Ages," but that possibility was cut
short when the Byzantine Empire invaded to try to reconquer its lost territory
492
In Gaul, a fierce tribe called the Franks, from whom France derives its
name, came to power, driving out rivals like the Visigoths. Unlike the other
Germanic tribes, the Franks did not abandon their homeland when they set
out for new territory. From the lower Rhine Valley, they gradually expanded
into northern Gaul late in the fifth century. Under the leadership of the
warrior chieftain Clovis (r. 481/482 - 511), the various Frankish tribes were
united, which gave them the military strength to depose the last Roman
governor in Gaul, drive the Visigoths into Spain, absorb the territory of yet
France.
In almost every case, the new Germanic kings pledged formal allegiance
legitimacy of their rule. They often did their best to build on the precedent of
Roman civilization as well; for example, Clovis of the Franks made a point of
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having the Frankish laws recorded in Latin, and over time the Frankish
language. In fact, for well over a century, most Germanic “kings” were,
well, since the treaties of acknowledgment were often full of loopholes. Thus,
when the emperor Justinian invaded Italy in the sixth century, he was doing so
to reassert not just the memory of the united Empire, but to restore the
Conclusion
question about the basic facts: half of what had once been an enormous,
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coherent, and amazingly stable state was splintered into political fragments
Mithras - Jastrow
As noted in the last chapter, the eastern half of the Roman Empire
survived for 1,000 years after the fall of the western one. It carried on most of
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science, religion, and learning. It was truly one of the great civilizations of
view of the past as is the earlier united Roman Empire. Why might that be?
The answer is probably this: like the western empire before it,
was absorbed into a distinct culture with its own traditions: that of the
Turkish Ottoman Empire. More to the point, the religious divide between
was so stark that Byzantium was “lost” to the tradition of Western Civilization
in a way that the western empire was not. Even though the Ottoman Empire
itself was a proudly “western” civilization, one that eagerly built on the
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Byzantine civilization’s origins are to be found in the decision by the
empire fell, the center of power in the Roman Empire had long since shifted to
the east: simply put, by the fifth century CE the majority of wealth and power
long after Rome itself was permanently outside of their territory and control.
After the fall of the western empire, the new Germanic kings
formally his vassals (lords in his service) and he remained the emperor of the
entire Roman Empire in name. At least until the Byzantine Empire began to
decline in the seventh century, this was not just a convenient fiction. Even the
Franks, who ruled a kingdom on the other end of Europe furthest from the
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treaties they had established with Constantinople were full of loopholes and
Why was it that the west had fallen into political fragmentation while
the east remained rich, powerful, and united? There are a few major
reasons. First, Constantinople itself played a major role in the power and
wealth of the east. Whereas Rome had shrunk steadily over the years,
especially after its sacking in 410 and the move of the western imperial
government to the Italian city of Ravenna (which was more easily defensible),
compared to the capital of the Gothic kingdom of Gaul, Toulouse, which had
15,000 (which was a large city by the standards of the time for western
seize power, and they deposed unpopular emperors who tried to rule as
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military tyrants rather than true emperors possessing sufficient Roman
"virtue."
The Roman Empire after its political division between east and west under Diocletian. From the
third through fifth centuries CE, the eastern part of the empire became the true locus of power
and wealth, and as of the late fifth century, the entire western half “fell” to barbarian invasions.
The east had long been the richest part of the empire, and because of its
into the imperial coffers in the east than it did in the west. Each year, the
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gold in tax revenue, as compared to about 20,000 in the west. This made
unbelievably rich Roman elites who undermined the power, authority, and
their own prerogatives in the name of a stronger united empire. In the east,
while nobles were certainly rich and powerful, they were nowhere near as
walls. Simply put, Roman identity - the degree to which social elites, soldiers,
loyal to the Empire - seems to have been stronger in the east than the
west. This might be explained by the reverse of the “vicious cycle” of defeat
and vulnerability described in the last chapter regarding the west. In the east,
the strength of the capital, the success of the armies, and the allegiance of
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elites to Rome as an idea encouraged the continued strength of Roman
identity. Even if poor farmers still had little to thank the Roman state for in
their daily lives, their farms were intact and local leaders were still Roman,
Lastly, the east enjoyed a simple stroke of good luck in the threats it
faced from outside of the borders: the barbarians went west and Persia did
not launch major invasions. The initial Gothic uprising that sparked the
beginning of the end for the west was in the Balkans, but the Goths were then
directed at the west. Even though the Huns were from the steppes of Central
Asia, they established their (short-lived) empire in the west. Eastern Roman
armies had to repulse threats and maintain the borders, but they did not face
Persia’s overall strength and coherence, there was a lull in Persian militarism
501
Justinian
ruled from 527 to 565. Justinian was the last Roman emperor to speak Latin
leader, the sponsor of some of the most beautiful and enduring Byzantine
empress in the history of the empire, a former actress and courtesan named
Theodora.
Justinian created a tradition that was to last for all of Byzantine history:
that of the emperor being both the spiritual leader of the Christian Church and
the secular ruler of the empire itself. By the time the western empire fell, the
archbishops of Rome had begun their attempts to assert their authority over
the church (they would not succeed even in the west for many centuries,
however). Those claims were never accepted in the east, where it was the
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emperor who was responsible for laying down the final word on matters of
religious doctrine. Justinian felt that it was his sacred duty as leader of the
his subjects and to stamp out heresy. He called himself “beloved of Christ,” a
title the later emperors would adopt as well. While he was never able to force
regions far from the capital city), he did launch a number of attacks and
already been shut down by the emperor Theodosius I back in 393 CE (he
Christianity and renounce their teaching of the Greek classics; when they
refused in 528, he shut down Plato’s Academy, functioning at that point for
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almost 1,000 years. (Many of the now-unemployed scholars fled to Persia,
Roman law on all of his subjects. The empire had traditionally left local
customs and laws alone so long as they did not interfere in the important
empire. Justinian saw Roman law as an aspect of Roman unity, however, and
sought to stamp out other forms of law under his jurisdiction. He had legal
experts go through the entire corpus of Roman law, weed out the
codified this project in the Corpus Juris Civilis, which forms the direct textual
expand the legal rights and protections of women, and protect children from
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lives together, helping to conceive of not just legal revisions, but the splendid
from early in Justinian’s reign, Theodora prevented Justinian and his advisors
from fleeing from a massive riot against his rule, instead inspiring Justinian to
order a counter-attack that may well have saved his reign. While most
Justinian clearly shared both genuine affection for one another and
intellectual kinship.
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The best-known surviving depiction of Justinian from a mosaic in Ravenna, Italy. In the mosaic,
Justinian is dressed in the “royal purple,” a color reserved for the imperial family.
Germanic kings that had taken over. He was equally interested in imposing
Africa in 533 with a fairly small force of soldiers and cavalry, and within a year
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Belisarius soundly defeated the Vandal army and retook North Africa for the
empire. From there, Justinian dispatched Belisarius and his force to Italy to
What followed was twenty years of war between the Byzantines and the
Gothic kingdom of Italy. The Goths had won over the support of most Italians
through fair rule and reasonable levels of taxation, and most Italians thus
fought against the Byzantines, even though the latter represented the
destroying the Gothic kingdom and retaking Italy, but the war both crippled
the Italian economy and drained the Byzantine coffers. Italy was left
devastated; it was the Byzantine invasion, not the “fall of Rome” earlier, that
(the “Plague of Justinian”) killed off half the population of Constantinople and
on military recruiting and morale. In the long term, the more important
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impact of the plague was in severing many of the trade ties between the two
halves of the empire. Economies in the west became more localized and less
debris in the air that Europe’s climate cooled considerably with “years
natural disaster, and disease helped usher in the bleakest period of the Middle
Ages in the west, as well as leading to a strong economic and cultural division
Even as the Byzantine forces struggled to retake Italy, Justinian, like the
emperors to follow him, had a huge problem on his eastern flank: the Persian
Empire. Still ruled by the Sasanians, the Persians were sophisticated and well-
Rome. Ongoing wars with Persia represented the single greatest expense
and Persians battled over Armenia, which was heavily populated, and Syria,
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which was very rich. Toward the end of his reign, Justinian simply made
peace with the Persian king Khusro I by agreeing to pay an annual tribute of
30,000 gold coins a year. It was ultimately less expensive to spend huge sums
The problem with Justinian's wars, both the reconquest in the west and
the ongoing battles with the Persians in the east, was that they were
loot, and because the empire was relatively stable and prosperous under his
reign, he was able to sustain these efforts during his lifetime. After he
died, however, Byzantium slowly re-lost its conquests in the west to another
round of Germanic invasions, and the Persians pressed steadily on the eastern
territories as well.
back to Byzantium declined steadily after his death. For almost 1,000 years,
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the two kinds of Christianity - later called "Catholic" and "Eastern Orthodox,"
although both terms speak to the idea of one universal and correct form of
the Germanic kingdoms of the west and Byzantium itself in the east. In
Eastern Europe, small kingdoms and poor farmers played host to rival
existed, but was never as strong as it had been during the days of the united
empire.
states and groups for most of its existence, and it slowly but steadily lost
territory until it was little more than the city of Constantinople and its
process took many centuries, longer even than the Roman Empire itself had
lasted in the west. During that time, Constantinople was one of the largest and
most remarkable cities on the planet, with half a million people and trade
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goods and visitors from as far away as Scandinavia, Africa, and England. Its
people believed that their empire and their emperor were preserved by God
Himself as the rightful seat of the Christian religion. Thanks to the resilience
of its people, the prosperity of its trade networks, and the leadership of its
emperors (the effective ones, anyway), Byzantium remained a major state and
culture for centuries despite its long-term decline in power from the days of
Justinian.
The most significant leader after Justinian was the emperor Heraclius (r.
610 – 641). He was originally a governor who returned from his post in Africa
to seize the throne from a rival named Phocas in the midst of a Persian
invasion. The empire was in such disarray at the time that the Persians seized
Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, cutting off a huge part of the food supply to
Constantinople. In the process, the Persians even seized the “True Cross,” the
cross on which (so Christians at the time believed) Christ Himself had been
crucified, from its resting place in Jerusalem. Simultaneously, the Avars and
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Bulgars, steppe peoples related to the Huns, were pressing Byzantine territory
Heraclius managed to save the core of the empire, Anatolia and the
temporarily abandoning Egypt but keeping his people fed. He led Byzantine
armies to seize back Jerusalem and the True Cross from the Persians, soundly
defeating them in 628, and in 630 he personally returned the True Cross to its
shrine in Jerusalem. The fighting during this period was often desperate -
one point - but in the end Heraclius managed to pull the empire back from the
brink.
Byzantium was growing in the south. The very same year that Heraclius
returned to his native city of Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula with the first
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army of Muslims. Heraclius had no way of knowing it, but Byzantium would
soon face a threat even greater than that of the Persians: the Arab caliphates
lead Byzantium during the first wave of the Arab invasions, and despite his
own leadership ability vital territories like Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were
lost during his own lifetime (he died in 641, the same year that most of Egypt
wealthy landowners and monasteries in Asia Minor, then using the seized land
as the basis for new territories from which to recruit soldiers. A theme was a
controlled each theme. In turn, only soldiers from that theme would serve in
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it; this led to local pride in the military prowess of the theme, which helped
morale. It was only because of the success of the themes that Byzantine losses
systems. Soldiers were granted land to become farmers. From there, they
were to fund the purchase of weapons for themselves and their sons. Young
men still joined the army, but the system could operate without significant
military recruitment that had been so successful during the days of the Roman
Republic: free citizens who provided their own arms, thereby relieving some
of the financial burden on the state. At their height, the themes supported an
army of 300,000 men (comparable to the Roman army under Augustus), with
the financial burden evenly distributed across the empire. The four themes
were divided over the centuries, with villages being watched by commander
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families. Ultimately, it was this system, one that encouraged morale and
loyalty, that preserved the empire for many centuries. One straightforward
demonstration of the strength of the system was that the perennial enemy of
Rome, the Persians, fell against the Arab invasion of the seventh century while
however. While Byzantium did indeed survive as a state for many centuries
while neighboring empires like Persia fell, Byzantium itself arguably ceased to
be an “empire” by the middle of the seventh century CE. The Arab invasions
swiftly destroyed Byzantine power in the Near East and North Africa, and
was, despite its continued pretensions to empire, really a kingdom after the
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rather than by those Romans as well as its former Syrian, Jewish, African,
control were united. They held out in Spain until the 630s, Africa until the end
of the seventh century, and Italy until 751, when a Germanic tribe called the
the time, they proved something of a blessing in disguise to the empire: with
its territory limited to the Balkans and Anatolia, the smaller empire had much
more coherent and easily-defended borders. Thus, those core areas remained
come. The emperor Leo the Isaurian (r. 717 – 741) used themes-recruited
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soldiers to both fight off Arab sieges of Constantinople and to cement control
of Anatolia. By the end of his reign, Anatolia was secure from the Arabs and
would remain the major part of the Byzantine Empire for centuries.
In addition to the themes system, the empire added heavy cavalry to its
roster and, famously, used a substance called Greek Fire in naval warfare;
there are very few details, but it appears to have been an oil-based incendiary
substance used to attack enemy ships. Finally, the empire made liberal use of
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A medieval illustration of Greek fire.
In the Balkans, Slavic tribes proved a major ongoing problem for the
Byzantines. A people known as the Avars invaded from the north in the sixth
century and raided not just the Balkans but all across Europe, making it as far
century an even more ferocious nomadic people, the Bulgars (for whom the
Bulgar Khan, Krum, converted the skull of a slain emperor into a goblet in
about 810 CE to toast his victory over a Byzantine army. Fifty years later,
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This was an interesting and surprisingly common pattern: many
than having Christianity imposed on them through force. The Bulgars were
seized from the Byzantine Empire, yet Boris I chose to convert (and to insist
that his followers do as well). The major reason for this deliberate conversion
revolved around the desire on the part of barbarian kings to, simply, stop
to entering into trade and diplomatic relations with Byzantium and the
itself a member of the network of civilized societies, carry out alliances and
trade with other kingdoms, and receive official recognition from the emperor
(who still wielded considerable prestige and authority, even outside of the
who in the ninth century created an alphabet for the Slavic languages, now
519
called Cyrillic and still used in many Slavic languages including Russian. He
then translated Greek liturgy into Slavonic and used it to teach and convert
the inhabitants of Moravia and Bulgaria. Monasteries sprung up, from which
monks would go further into Slavic lands, ultimately tying together a swath of
territory deep into what would one day be Russia. The success of these
present, the Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, and Serbian Orthodox churches all
share common historical roots and a common set of beliefs and practices.
The origins of Russia emerged out of this interaction, and out of the
Russia. Originally, the “Rus” were Vikings who ruled small cities in the vast
steppes and forests of western Russia and the Ukraine. They were united in
about 980 CE by a king, Vladimir the Great, who conquered all of the rival
cities and imposed control from his capital in Kiev. He converted to Orthodox
Christianity and forbade his subjects to continue worshiping Odin, Thor, and
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the other Norse gods. Just as Boris of Bulgaria had a century earlier, Vladimir
used conversion to legitimize his own rule, by connecting his nascent kingdom
to the prestige, power, and glory of ancient Rome embodied in the Byzantine
Empire.
prosperity, and beauty had on visitors. Constantinople was simply the largest,
richest, and most glorious city in Europe and the Mediterranean region at the
abundant food thanks to the availability of Anatolian grain and fish from the
Aegean Sea. Silkworms were smuggled out of China in roughly 550, at which
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imperial monopoly which generated tremendous wealth. The entire economy
Constantinople was impregnable for centuries. Strong walls protected it in the west, and it was
surrounded by cliffs leading down to the sea (and its ports) on all of the other sides.
522
clothed in garments dyed specific colors to denote their respective ranks,
separated the person of the emperor from supplicants and ambassadors. This
was not just self-indulgence on the part of the emperors, of showing off for the
sake of feeling important; this was part of the symbolism of power, of reaching
and obtain positions. Bribery was rife and nepotism was as common as talent
in gaining positions; there was even an official list of maximum bribes that
was published by the government itself. That said, the bureaucracy was
somewhat like the ancient Egyptian class of scribes, men who maintained
coherence and order within the government even when individual emperors
governance.
The imperial office controlled the minting of coins, still the standard
currency as far away as France and England because the coins were reliably
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weighted and backed by the imperial government. The emperor's office also
controlled imperial monopolies on key industries like silk, which were hugely
lucrative. It was illegal to try to compete with the imperial silk industry, so
Europe), but there were many other rich cities within its empire. As a whole,
for raw materials like ore and foodstuffs. Despite its wars with its neighbors
to the east and south, Byzantium also had major trade links with the Arab
states.
Constantinople was at the center of the empire that Byzantines thought it had
a special relationship with God. Its power was derived from the sheer number
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of churches and relics present in the city, which in turn represented an
oversaw Constantinople and that the Virgin Mary interceded before God on
the behalf of the city. Many priests taught that Constantinople was the New
Jerusalem that would be at the center of events during the second coming of
however. Over time, the church grew increasingly suspicious of learning that
did not have either center on the Bible and religious instruction or have direct
Constantinople and a few other important Greek cities. What was later
Greek philosophy and literature - was thus largely analyzed, translated, and
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Ages. Likewise, almost no one in Byzantium understood Latin well by the
ninth century, so even Justinian’s law code was almost always referenced in a
her family might find themselves enlisted to fight against Byzantium despite
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Iconoclasm
hindsight, but it had an enormous (and almost entirely negative) impact at the
time. For people who believed in the constant intervention of God in the
was the holiest of states, watched over by the Virgin Mary and ruled by
emperors who were the “beloved of God,” why was the empire declining? Just
as Rome had fallen in the west, Byzantium was beset by enemies all around it,
enemies who had the depressing tendency of crushing Byzantine armies and
their congregations to repent of their sins, because it was sin that was
undermining the empire's survival. The emperor Leo III, who ruled from 717
527
– 741, decided to take action into his own hands. He forced communities of
Icons were (and are) one of the central aspects of Eastern Orthodox
the Virgin Mary, or one of the saints, that is used as a focus of Christian
crafted and, in a largely illiterate society, were vitally important in the daily
experience of most Christians. The problem was that it was a slippery slope
from venerating God, Christ, and the saints “through” icons as symbols, versus
of believers did treat the icons as idols, as objects with potentia unto
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A fourteenth-century icon of the Virgin Mary.
sea. Leo III took this as proof that icon veneration had gone too far, as some of
his religious advisers had been telling him. He thus ordered the destruction of
holy images, facing outright riots when workers tried to make good on his
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provinces, whole regions rose up in revolt when royal servants showed up
and tried to destroy icons. In Rome, Pope Gregory II was appalled and
excommunicated Leo. Leo, in turn, declared that the pope no longer had any
religious authority in the empire, which for practical purposes meant the
The official ban of icons lasted until 843, over a century, before the
emperors reversed it (it was an empress, named Theodora like the famous
wife of Justinian centuries earlier, who led the charge to officially restore
iconoclasts loyal to the official policy of the emperors and traditionalists who
venerated the icons, while the empire itself was still beset by
permanent split between the eastern and western churches - Orthodoxy and
Catholicism. The final and permanent split between the western and eastern
churches, already de facto in place for centuries, was in 1054, when Pope Leo
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to acknowledge Leo’s preeminence – this event cemented the "Great Schism"
(schism means "break" or "split") between the western and eastern churches.
well – it was acceptable to study classical literature and even philosophy, but
dangerous. The long-term pattern was thus that, while it preserved ancient
lasting from 867 – 1056. A murderous leader named Basil I, originating from
Macedonia, seized the throne in 867 and initiated a line of ruthless but
competent leaders who governed for about two hundred years. Under the
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Mesopotamia and Armenia in the east and Crete and Cyprus in the
stretching across Europe and the Middle East. This vastly enriched
art. Under the patronage of the Macedonian dynasty, some ancient learning
was revived, as scholars tried to find ways to make the work of the ancient
with food supplies guaranteed by the imperial government. Even the poor
lived better lives in Constantinople than did the relatively well-off in Western
532
Greek writings that is the only record of many texts that would have been
Byzantium in its late golden age - note that Constantinople remained both geographically and
politically central.
These happy times for Byzantium ended when the emperor Basil II died
in 1025 with no male heirs. Simultaneously, a series of bad harvests hit the
empire. Byzantium's military success was based on the themes, which were in
farmers. Bad harvests saw those farmers vanish, their lands swallowed up by
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the holdings of wealthy aristocrats. As had happened in the Roman Republic
so long ago, the problem was that there were thus no soldiers to recruit, and
Likewise, the relative calm of the Macedonian period ended with the
rise of a new group of invaders from the east: the Seljuk Turks. A powerful
group of nomadic raiders from the western part of Central Asia, the Turks had
(the Seljuks themselves were just one of the dominant clans with no real
authority over most of their fellow raiders), by about the year 1000 CE they
began invading both Byzantine territories and those of their fellow Muslims,
the Arabs. Over the next few centuries, the Turks grew in power, steadily
Fewer independent citizens meant fewer good soldiers, and the armies
534
invaded and sacked by crusaders (during the Fourth Crusade) from Western
Europe who were supposed to be sailing to fight in the Holy Land. For about
fifty years, Byzantium (already reduced to a fraction of its former size) was
ruled by a Catholic king. Even when the king was deposed and a Greek
Constantinople finally fell in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks. With it, the last
vestige of Roman civilization, founded over two thousand years earlier on the
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Late Golden Age - Cplakidas
1. Islam was born in the heartland of Western Civilization: the Middle East.
was the last prophet, bringing the "definitive version" of God's message
536
3. The Islamic empires were the most advanced in the world, alongside
China, during the European Middle Ages. During that period, they
ones. They were certainly the target of the European crusades. But, at
the same time, the Christian kingdoms were often the enemies of one
conflict. The political, and military, history of medieval Europe and the
trading; religion was certainly a major factor, but there are many cases
5. The Islamic states were the active trading partners and sometimes allies
537
Europe. Islam's initial spread was due to an enormous, unprecedented
military campaign, but after that campaign ended the resulting empires
that has created the conceit that Islam is some alien entity to Western
Civilization. After the rise of Christianity and the conversion of the Roman
became central to the identity of Christians in Europe. Once Rome itself fell,
this idea became even more important. The Germanic Kingdoms, what was
left of the western empire, the new rising empires like the Kievan Rus, and of
course Byzantium were all linked in the concept of Christendom. For many of
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those Christian states, Islam was indeed the enemy, because the rise of Islam
Thus, from its very beginning, there have been historical reasons that
generations of Muslims did indeed try to conquer every culture and kingdom
important thing to bear in mind, however, is that throughout the Middle Ages
many of the struggles between Christian and Muslim kingdoms, and Christian
and Muslim people, were as often about conventional battles over power,
wealth, and politics as religious belief. Likewise, once the years of conquest
were over, Islamic states settled into familiar patterns of peaceful trade and
539
Origins of Islam
of Saudi Arabia, was populated by the Arab people. The Arabs were herders
and merchants. They were organized tribally, with tribes claiming descent
each clan. The Arabs were well known in the Roman and Byzantine world as
merchants for their camel caravans that linked Europe to a part of the Spice
Road, transporting goods from India and China. They were also known to be
some of the most fierce and effective mercenary warriors in the eastern
Mediterranean region; they rode slim, fast, agile horses and fought as light
cavalry.
Yemen. By the late Roman Empire, small but prosperous Arab kingdoms were
in diplomatic contact with both Rome and Persia (as well as the Christian
540
kingdom of Ethiopia, then called Aksum). As the wars between Rome and
Persia became even more destructive after the Sasanian takeover in 234 CE,
the Arabs emerged as important mercenaries and political clients for both
in cultivating the maritime trade route across the Indian Ocean and along the
south and west coasts of Arabia. For a time, the southern coast of Arabia was
ruled by Persia through Arab clients and Persia was clearly a major cultural
influence (so great was the renown of the Persian Great King Khusrau that his
name became the root of an Arabic word for king: kisra). This contact and
trade enriched the Arabic economy and led to a high degree of tactical
541
Arabia in 600 CE. The names in black on the map are the clan groups at the
various oases in the desert. One important holy site that would take on even
greater importance after the rise of Islam was the city of Mecca. Mecca had
been a major center of trade for centuries, lying at the intersection of trade
routes and near oases. In the center of Mecca was a shrine, called the Ka’aba,
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Arabic faiths, and Mecca was a major pilgrimage site for the Arabs well before
Islam.
Muhammad
Everything changed in the Arab world in the sixth century CE. A man
widow named Khadija (who was originally his employer) and traveling with
business, dealing with both Christians and Jews in Palestine and Syria, where
was in the habit of retreating to hills near Mecca, where there was a cave in
543
which he would camp and meditate. When he was about forty, he returned to
Mecca and reported that he had been contacted by the archangel Gabriel, who
informed him that he, Muhammad, was to bear God's message to the people of
Mecca and the world. The core of that message was that the one true God, the
God of Abraham, venerated already by the Jews and Christians, had called the
Muhammad did not meet with much success in Mecca in his initial
preaching. The temples of the many gods there were rich and powerful and
religion, in large part because he was asking them to cast aside centuries of
religious tradition. The real issue with Muhammad's message was its call for
exclusivity – if Muhammad had just asked the Meccans to venerate the God of
incited such fierce resistance, especially from the clan leaders who dominated
Meccan society. Those clan leaders were fearful that if Muhammad's message
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caught on, it would threaten the pilgrims who flocked to Mecca to venerate
Thus, in 622 CE, Muhammad and a group of his followers left Mecca,
exiled by the powerful families that were part of Muhammad’s own extended
clan, and traveled to the city of Yathrib, which Muhammad later renamed
Medina (“the city of the Prophet”), 200 miles north. They were welcomed
there by the people of Medina who hoped that Muhammad could serve as an
families. Muhammad’s trek to Medina is called the Hejira (also spelled Hijra in
authority. His followers would regularly gather to hear him recite the Koran,
Muhammad by the angel. In 624, just two years after his arrival in Medina,
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Muhammad led a Muslim force against a Meccan army, and then in 630 CE, he
Persia. By his death in 632, Muhammad had already rallied most of the Arab
Islam
Islam that distinguishes it from Judaism and Christianity is that the Koran has
believed by Muslims that it cannot be translated from Arabic and remain the
"real" holy book. In other words, translations can be made for the sake of
education, but every word in the Koran, spoken in the classical Arabic of
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Muhammad's day, is believed to be that true language of God - according to
stretching back to Abraham and Moses and including Jesus, whom Muslims
told to him by Gabriel on the mountainside. The core tenets of Islamic belief
2. Each Muslim must pray five times a day, facing toward the holy city of
Mecca.
3. During the holy month of Ramadan, each Muslim must fast from dawn
to sundown.
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5. If possible, at least once in his or her life, each Muslim should undertake
ethnicity, and culture. All Muslims are to follow the five pillars, just as all
Muslims are to meet other members of the Ummah at least once in their lives
while on pilgrimage.
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The Ka’aba (contemporary photograph).
"struggle." It does mean “holy war” in some cases, but not in most. The
concept of Jihad revolves around the struggle for Muslims to live according to
Muhammad's example and by his teachings. Its most common use is the
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“jihad of the heart,” of struggling to live morally against the myriad corrupting
temptations of life.
The Koran itself was written down starting during Muhammad’s life (his
revelations were delivered over the course of about twenty years, and were
years following his death. Of secondary importance to the Koran is the Hadith,
generations following his death, Muslim leaders created the Sharia, the system
Muslim Arabs. He did not name a successor, but he had been the definitive
leader of the Islamic community during his life; it seemed clear that the
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Muhammad's father in-law, Abu Bakr (r. 632 – 634), as the new leader after a
head of the Ummah, the man who represented both spiritual and political
authority to Muslims.
fathers in-law; r. 634 - 644), and Uthman (r. 644 – 655), Muslim armies
expanded rapidly. This began as a means to ensure the loyalty of the fractious
Arab tribes as much as to expand the faith; both Abu Bakur and Umar were
forced to suppress revolts of Arab tribes, and Umar hit upon the idea of
raiding Persia and Byzantium to keep the tribes loyal. For the first time in
Riding their swift horses and camels and devoted to their cause, the
the Arab army that finally conquered Persia in 637 (although it took until 650
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adversary of Rome. The Arabs conquered Syria and seized Byzantine territory
Byzantine counter-attack fought off in 645. Within twenty years of the death
of Muhammad, the heartland of the Middle East was firmly in Arab Muslim
hands.
Part of the success of the first decades of the Arab conquests was
because of the vulnerability of Byzantium and Persia at the time, and another
part was the tactical skill of Arab soldiers. The Arabs conquered Persia not
just because it was weakened by its wars with Byzantium (most importantly
its defeat by Heraclius in 627), but because many Arab clans had fought as
mercenaries for both sides in the conflict; great wealth had been flowing into
Arabia for decades, and the Arabs were already veteran soldiers. They had
learned both Roman and Persian tactics and strategy and they were skilled at
The Arab armies were easily the match of the Byzantine and Persian
forces. The Arabs were able to field armies of about 20,000 – 30,000 men,
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with a total force of closer to 200,000 by about 700 CE. Most were Arabs from
Arabia itself, along with Arabs who had settled in Syria and Palestine and
and joined the armies. Tactically, the majority were infantry who fought with
The major tactical advantage of the Arab armies was their speed: horses
and camels were important less as animals to fight from than as means of
paid in coins captured as booty and whole armies were expected to buy their
supplies as they marched rather than relying on heavy baggage trains. Their
military "technology" that the Arabs used to great effect was camels, since no
other culture was as adept at training and using camels as were the
Arabs. Camels allowed the Arab armies to cross deserts and launch sudden
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Finally, especially in Byzantine territories, high taxes and ongoing
struggles between the official Orthodox form of Christianity and various other
Christian sects led many Byzantine citizens to welcome their new Arab rulers;
taxes often went down, and the Arabs were indifferent to which variety of
Christian their new subjects happened to be. In addition, the Arabs made little
effort to convert non-Arabs to Islam for several generations after the initial
The second caliph, Umar, was murdered by a slave in 644 and the
Muslim leaders had to pick the next caliph. They chose an early convert and
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claiming he should be the head of the Ummah, as someone who was part of
Muhammad's direct family line. That group was known as the “party” or
“faction” of Ali: the Shia of Ali (note that Shia is also frequently spelled “Shi’ite”
in English). For Shia Muslims, the central idea was that only descendants of
While the Shia rejected Uthman’s authority in theory, there was as yet
no outright violence between the two factions within the larger Muslim
rebellion against the Arabs. Ali was elected as the next caliph, seemingly
ending the dispute over who should lead the Ummah. Unfortunately for
Uthman named Mu’awiya, a member of the Umayyad clan governing Syria. Ali
was murdered by a rebel (unrelated to the power struggle over the caliphate)
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in 661, cementing the Umayyad claim on power, but not the doctrinal dispute
It was thus under the leadership of caliphs who were not themselves
related to Muhammad’s family line that the Arab conquests not only
continued, but stabilized in the form of a true empire. The Umayyad clan
created the first long-lasting and stable Muslim state: the Umayyad
Caliphate. It was centered in Syria and lasted almost 100 years. It supervised
the consolidation of the gains of the Arab armies to date, along with vast new
administrators and skilled generals and the majority of Muslims saw the
What they could not do, however, was destroy the Shia, despite Ali's
death. Shia Muslims, representing about 10% of the population of the Ummah
illegitimate, rejecting the very idea of a caliphate and arguing instead that the
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of Muhammad’s family. When Ali’s son Hussein, then the leader of the Shia
and a grandson of Muhammad himself, was killed by the Umayyads in 680, the
By 700 CE, the Umayyads had conquered all of North Africa as far as the
Atlantic. Then, in 711, they invaded Spain and smashed the Visigothic
kingdom, definitively ending Arian Christianity across both North Africa and
Spain. They were finally stopped in 732 by a Frankish army led by the
Frankish lord Charles Martel at the Battle of Poitiers; this marked the end of
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The Arab Conquests, stretching from Persia in the east to Morocco and Spain in the
west. The colors correspond to chronology: Arabia itself was united under Muhammad and his
immediate successors, the regions in orange under the first four caliphs, and the regions in
In Africa, Umayyad armies also attacked Nubia, still one of the richest
kingdoms in the region, but were unable to defeat it. For the first time, the
important precedent because it established the idea that a Muslim state could
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Umayyad Caliphate came to deal with non-Muslim powers primarily in terms
Asia outside of the caravan city of Samarkand (they fought an army of the
Tang dynasty, which had been expanding along the Silk Road). The last
Umayyad caliph had been murdered shortly before this conflict, however, and
the Muslim forces thus had little reason to continue their expansion. This
battle marked the furthest extent of the core Muslim-ruled territories. For
several centuries to follow, the Muslim world thus consisted of the Middle
The Umayyads did not just complete and consolidate the conquests of
the Arabs. They also established lasting forms of governance. They quickly
insisting on a hereditary line of caliphs. This alone caused a civil war in the
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late seventh century, as some of their Muslim subjects rose up, claiming that
they had perverted the proper line of leadership in the community. The
The major problem for the Umayyads was the sheer size of their
empire. Just like other rapid conquests, like that of Alexander the Great 1,000
years earlier, in the course of just a few decades a people found itself in
control of enormous swaths of territory. The Arabs had a strong lingual and
cultural identity and many of the Arab conquerors saw themselves as a people
apart from their new subjects, regardless of religious belief. Thus, while non-
Alexander, the Romans during their centuries of conquest, and the Germanic
tribes that sliced up the western Roman empire, the Arabs found themselves a
To try to effectively govern this vast new empire, the Umayyads took
over and adapted the bureaucracies of the people they conquered, including
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those of both the Byzantines and, especially, the Persians. They created new
borders and provinces to better suit their administration and ensure that tax
additional factor of needing to pay an ongoing salary to all Arab soldiers, even
One change that was to last until the present was lingual. Unlike in the
Greek case during the Hellenistic period, Arabic was to replace the vernacular
of the land conquered during the Arab conquests. The only exceptions were
Persian, which would eventually become the modern language of Farsi (the
vernacular of the present-day country of Iran), and Spain, where Arabic and
centuries later. This lingual uniformity was a huge benefit to trade and
cultural and intellectual exchange, because one could travel from Spain to
single administration.
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Arabs also followed the patterns of Greek and Roman conquerors by
colonizing the places they conquered. At first, they settled in garrison and
cities. As Arabic became the language of daily life, not just of administration,
Arabs and non-Arabs mixed more readily. Arabs also built new cities all
across their empire, the most notable being a small town in Egypt that would
eventually grow into Cairo. They built these cities on the Hellenistic and
Roman model: planned grids of streets at right angles. In the center of each
city was the mosque, which served not only as the center of worship, but in
various other functions. Mosques were both figuratively and literally central
to the cities of the Umayyad caliphate. They were the predominant public
spaces for discussion among men. They were the courthouses and the
banks. They provided schooling and instruction. They were also often
The Umayyads imposed taxes across their entire empire, even insisting
that their fellow Arabs pay a tax on their land, which was met with enormous
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resistance because, to Arabs unused to paying taxes at all, it implied
the Umayyads were able to support a very large standing army. That allowed
them not only to keep up the pressure on surrounding lands, but to quash
rebellions.
commerce across the Middle East and North Africa as well. Muhammad had
been a merchant, after all, and the longstanding commercial practices and
networks. Muslim traders regularly sailed all across the Mediterranean, the
Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and eventually as far as China and the
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One effect of Arab seafaring is that Islam spread along sea routes well
beyond the political control of any of the Arab empires and kingdoms to come;
Muslim merchants that brought their faith along the trade routes. By the time
from India to the Pacific, thousands of miles from its Middle Eastern
heartland.
Other Faiths
One of the noteworthy aspects of the Arab conquests is the complex role
and Christians. It does allow that non-Muslim monotheists pay a special tax,
however. For the century of Umayyad rule, only about 10% of the population
law) had to pay a head tax and were not allowed to share in governmental
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decision-making or in the spoils of war. Many Jews and Christians found Arab
government had actively persecuted religious dissenters and the Arabs did
Byzantium. These traditions of relative tolerance would continue all the way
up to the modern era in places like the Ottoman Empire. However, even
without forcible pressure, many people did convert to Islam either out of a
There was also the case of the nomadic peoples of North Africa,
Africa. They had already seen the Romans and the Vandals come and go and
simply kept up their traditions with the arrival of the Arabs. They were,
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faced with the choice of forcible conversion or death, the Berbers converted
and then promptly joined the Arab armies as auxiliaries. This lent
tremendous strength to the Arab forces and helps explain the relative ease of
were often left much more free to practice their religions than they would
have been in Christian lands, because the Umayyads simply did not care about
as the taxes were paid. Over time, various sects of Christianity survived in
Muslim lands that vanished in kingdoms that were officially, and rigidly,
Christian. Likewise, Jews found that they were generally better off in Muslim
of Muslim rulers accepted Zoroastrians as People of the Book like Jews and
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Christians, but that acceptance atrophied over time. Muslims were less
and its traditions were markedly different from those of Judaism and
Christianity. Likewise, as Muslim rule over Persia was consolidated over time,
the Persian people weakened. By the tenth century, most Zoroastrians who
had not converted to Islam migrated to India, where they remain today in
The Abbasids
uprising against their rule led by the Abbasids, a clan descended from
Muslim subjects of the Caliphate (called mawali) who resented the fact that
the Umayyads had always protected the status of Arabs at the expense of non-
Arab Muslims in their empire. After seizing control of the Caliphate, the
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Abbasids went on a concerted murdering spree, trying to eliminate all
leadership surviving. The Abbasids lost control of some of the territories that
had been held by the Umayyads (starting with Spain, which formed its own
caliphate under the surviving Umayyad), but the majority of the lands
The true golden age of medieval Islam took place during the Abbasid
Caliphate. The Abbasids moved the capital of the caliphate from Damascus to
governmental traditions. There, they combined Islam even more closely with
Persian traditions of art and learning. They also created a tradition of fair
caliphs were the leaders of both the political and spiritual orders of their
practice was running smoothly and fairly. They enforced fair trade practices
and used their well-trained armies primarily to ensure good trade routes, to
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enforce fair tax collection, and to put down the occasional rebellion. The
achieving the highest state offices and political and social importance.
was the great emphasis and respect the caliphs placed on learning. New
The major library in Baghdad was called the House of Wisdom; it was
one of the great libraries of the world at the time. The various advances that
Optics: early telescopes, along with the definitive refutation of the idea
that the eye sends out beams to detect things and instead receives
spirits: al-kuhl, meaning “the essence," from which the English word
alcohol derives.
characters, which were far easier to work with than the clunky Roman
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along with new navigational technologies like the astrolabe (a device
merchants.
literacy. Not only were Muslims (men and women alike) encouraged to
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memorize the Koran itself, but scholars and merchants were often
as being somehow morally tainted. Thus, Muslims, whose literacy was due to
study of specifically Islamic texts, the Koran and the Hadith especially, easily
used the same skills in commerce. The overall result was a higher literacy
rate than anywhere else in the world at the time, with the concomitant
part from their willingness to follow Persian traditions of rule (a pattern that
would be repeated by later Turkic and Mongol rulers). The Abbasid caliphs
Persian Great Kings, although they did not adopt that title. Their role as
which sharia law could prosper - it was in the Abbasid period that Islamic law
was truly developed and codified. From the Persian tradition the Abbasid
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and an equally important tradition of political status: they were the rulers
At its height, the Abbasid Empire was truly enormous– it covered more
land area than had the Roman Empire. Its merchants traveled from Spain to
thousands of miles from Baghdad. The Caliphate reached its peak during the
rule of the caliph Harun al-Rashid (r. 786 – 809). His palace was so enormous
Caliphate of Spain, the last vestige of Umayyad power, and the Abbasids acted
emperors recognize the legitimacy of his imperial title (as an aside, one of
Charlemagne’s prized possessions was his pet elephant, sent to his distant
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Already by al-Rashid’s reign, however, the Caliphate was splintering; it
of rival Islamic kingdoms. Other territories followed suit during the rest of the
ninth century, leaving the Caliphate in direct control of only the core lands of
well. Even the idea of a united (Sunni) ummah was a casualty of this political
breakdown - the ruler of the Spanish kingdom claimed to be the “true” caliph,
with a Shia dynasty in Egypt known as the Fatimids contesting both claims
keeping the Caliph alive as a figurehead. In 1055, a Turkish group, the Seljuks
(the same group then menacing Byzantium), seized control and did exactly the
same thing. For the next two centuries the Abbasid caliphs enjoyed the
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respect and spiritual deference of most Sunni Muslims, but exercised no
the Middle East, North Africa, and northern India, leaving even the Middle
starting in 1095, and most disastrously during the Mongol invasion of 1258
(under a grandson of Genghis Khan). It was the Mongols who ended the
Caliphate once and for all, murdering the last caliph and obliterating much of
Europe
Two parts of Europe came under Arab rule: Spain and Sicily. Spain was
the last of the large territories to be conquered during the initial Arab
conquests, and Sicily was eventually conquered during the Abbasid period. In
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both areas, the rulers, Arab and North African immigrants, and new converts
to Islam lived alongside those who remained Christian or Jewish. During the
between the Islamic and Christian worlds, where all faiths and peoples were
tolerated. The city of Cordoba in Spain was a glorious metropolis, larger and
more prosperous than any in Europe and any but Baghdad in the Arab world
itself - it had a population of 100,000, paved streets, street lamps, and even
indoor plumbing in the houses of the wealthy. All of the Arabic learning noted
above made its way to Europe primarily through contact between people in
and the caliphates, on the one hand, and most of Europe, on the other, was
between the eighth and eleventh centuries. During that period, there were no
cities in Europe with populations of over 15,000. The goods produced there,
to their Arab (or Byzantine) equivalents, and Christian Europe thus imported
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numerous goods from the Arab world, often through Spain and Sicily. Europe
was largely a barter economy while the Muslim world was a currency-based
power.
Conclusion
As should be clear, the civilizations of the Middle East and North Africa
were transformed by Islam, and the changes that Islam's spread brought with
Empire earlier. The geographical contours of these two faiths would remain
largely in place up to the present, while the shared civilization that brought
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Map of Arabia - Murraytheb
Introduction
Once the last remnants of Roman power west of the Balkans were
extinguished in the late fifth century CE, the history of Europe moved into the
(between). Roughly 1,000 years separated the fall of Rome and the beginning
believed they were recapturing the lost glory of the classical world. Historians
have long since dismissed the conceit that the Middle Ages were nothing more
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than the “Dark Ages” so maligned by Renaissance thinkers, and thus this
chapter seeks to examine the early medieval world on its own terms - in
particular, what were the political, social, and cultural realities of post-Roman
Europe?
After the fall of the western Roman empire, it was the Church that
religious tradition would persist and spread, ultimately extinguishing the so-
called “pagan” religions, despite the political fragmentation left in the wake of
the fall of Rome. The one thing that nearly all Europeans eventually came to
share was membership in the Latin Church (a note on nomenclature: for the
sake of clarity, this chapter will use the term “Latin” instead of “Catholic” to
describe the western Church based in Rome during this period, because both
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universal). As an institution, it alone was capable of preserving at least some
That legacy was reflected in the learning preserved by the Church. For
example, even though Latin faded away as a spoken language, all but
vanishing by about the eighth century even in Italy, the Bible and written
communication between educated elites was still in Latin. Latin went from
being the vernacular of the Roman Empire to being, instead, the language of
the educated elite all across Europe. An educated person (almost always a
member of the Church in this period) from England could still correspond to
the other side of the subcontinent, but they would share a written tongue.
had previously proved militarily stronger than Christian opponents, from the
Germanic invaders who had dismantled the western empire to the Slavic
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both because of the astonishing perseverance of Christian missionaries and
with Christians. That noted, there were also straightforward cases of forced
Christian, a Latin Christian in the west and an Orthodox Christian in the east.
The Papacy
of the papacy based in Rome - indeed, it was the papal claim to leadership of
the Christian Church as a whole that drove a permanent wedge between the
authority over both church and state. The popes were not just at the apex of
the western church, they often ruled as kings unto themselves, and they
always had complex relationships with other rulers. For the entire period of
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the early Middle Ages (from the end of the western Roman Empire until the
the Church outside of Italy. Instead, this period was important in the longer
authority over doctrine and organization - centuries later, popes would look
back on the claims of their predecessors as “proof” that the papacy had always
been in charge.
Gregory the Great, who was pope at the turn of the seventh century. Gregory
still considered Rome part of the Byzantine Empire, but by that time
Byzantium could not afford troops to help defend the city of Rome, and he was
shrewdly played different Germanic kings off against each other and used his
spiritual authority to gain their trust and support. He sent missionaries into
the lands outside of the kingdoms to spread Christianity, both out of a genuine
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desire to save souls and a pragmatic desire to see wider influence for the
Church.
Gregory’s authority was not based on military power, nor did most
Christians at the time assume that the pope of Rome (all bishops were then
called “pope,” meaning simply “father”) was the spiritual head of the entire
Church. Instead, popes like Gregory slowly but surely asserted their authority
authority over the western Roman Empire to the pope of Rome; that
document was often cited by popes over the next several centuries as “proof”
realistic about the limits of their power, with many popes being deposed or
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Thus, Christianity spread not because of an all-powerful, highly
missionaries and the support of secular rulers (the Franks, considered below,
were critical in this regard). All across Europe, missionaries had official
instructions not to battle pagan religious practice, but to subtly reshape it. It
was less important that pagans understood the nuances of Christianity and
more important that they accepted its essential truth. All manner of "pagan"
practices, words, and traditions survive into the present thanks to the
crossover between Christianity and old pagan practices, including the names
Thursday is Thor's day, etc). and the word “Easter” itself, from the Norse
leaders (later a saint), Bede, Pope Gregory advised Bede and his followers not
to tear down pagan temples, but to consecrate and reuse them. Likewise, the
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saints. Clearly, the priority was not an attempted purge of pagan culture, but
instead the introduction of Christianity in a way that could more easily truly
take root. Monks sometimes squabbled about the nuances of worship, but the
key development was simply the spread of Christianity and the growing
institution was the only path to spiritual salvation. It was much less
than it was that they participate in Christian worship and, most importantly,
receive the sacraments administered by the clergy. Given that the immense
belief. The path to salvation was thus not knowing anything about the life of
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Christ, the characteristics of God, or the names of the apostles, but of two
things above all else: the sacraments and the relevant saints to pray to.
practical, day-to-day power and influence exercised by the Church was based
on the fact that only priests could administer the sacraments, making access to
the Church a prerequisite for any chance of spiritual salvation in the minds of
who died would be denied entrance to heaven. Thus, most people tried
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significant element of this was the belief in transubstantiation: the idea
that the wine and holy wafer literally transformed into the blood and
young adulthood.
7. Last Rites - a final ritual carried out at the moment of death to send the
where the soul's sins would be burned away over years of atonement
and purification.
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not usually feel worthy of direct contact with the divine. Instead, the saints
were hugely important to medieval Christians because they were both holy
and yet still human. Unlike the omnipotent and remote figure of God,
medieval Christians saw the saints as beings who cared for individual people
supplicants. Thus, every village, every town, every city, and every kingdom
Along with the patron saints, the figures of Jesus and Mary became
much more important during this period. Saints had served as intermediaries
before an almighty and remote deity in the Middle Ages, but the high Church
positive image of women that had never existed before in Christianity. The
charity within the Church, since she was believed to intervene on behalf of
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Medieval Politics
remaining pagans, and members of heretical groups) may have come to share
politically. The numerous Germanic tribes that had dismantled the western
Roman Empire formed the nucleus of the early political units of western
bureaucracy and rely on its officials and laws when ruling their subjects, but
they also had their own traditions of Germanic law based on clan
membership.
The so-called “feudal” system of law was one based on codes of honor
and reciprocity. In the original Germanic system, each person was tied to his
or her clan above all else, and an attack on an individual immediately became
an issue for the entire clan. Any dishonor had to be answered by an equivalent
dishonor, most often meeting insult with violence. Likewise, rulership was
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tied closely to clan membership, with each king being the head of the most
violence-based system of “law,” from which the modern English word “feud”
derives, stood in contrast to the written codes of Roman law that still survived
Over time, the Germanic rulers mixed with their subjects to the point
that distinctions between them were nonexistent. Likewise, Roman law faded
away to be replaced with traditions of feudal law and a very complex web of
rights and privileges that were granted to groups within society by rulers (to
help ensure the loyalty of their subjects). Thus, clan loyalty became less
important over the centuries than did the rights, privileges, and pledges of
lords, and priests ruled over the vast majority of the population: peasants.
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Eventually, the relationship between lords and kings was formalized in
pledges of loyalty, called a pledge of fealty, from other free men called his
vassals; in return for their support in war he offered them protection and
land-grants called fiefs. Each vassal had the right to extract wealth from his
land, meaning the peasants who lived there, so that he could afford horses,
armor, and weapons. In general, vassals did not have to pay their lords taxes
(all tax revenue came from the peasants). Likewise, the Church itself was an
almost always tax-exempt; bishops were often lords of their own lands, and
every king worked closely with the Church's leadership in his kingdom.
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Depiction of a feudal pledge of fealty from Harold Godwinson, at the time a powerful Anglo-
Saxon noble and later the king of England, to William of Normandy, who would go on to defeat
Harold and replace him as king of England. William claimed that Harold had pledged fealty to
him, which justified his invasion (while Harold denied ever having done so).
This system arose because of the absence of other, more effective forms
system was never as neat and tidy as it sounds on paper; many vassals were
lords of their own vassals, with the king simply being the highest lord. In turn,
the problem for royal authority was that many kings had “vassals” who had
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more land, wealth, and power than they did; it was very possible, even easy,
for powerful nobles to make war against their king if they chose to do so. It
wealth and power to dominate their nobles, and it certainly did not happen
punish unruly vassals was simply visiting them and eating them out of house
and home - the traditions of hospitality required vassals to welcome, feed, and
entertain their king for as long as he felt like staying. Kings and queens
expected respect and deference, but conspicuously absent was any appeal to
what was later called the “Divine Right” of monarchs to rule. From the
perspective of the noble and clerical classes at the time the monarch had to
hold on to power through force of arms and personal charisma, not empty
in which a powerful lord simply usurped the throne, defeated the former
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king's forces, and became the new king. Ultimately, medieval politics
a step above anarchy. Pledges of loyalty between lords and vassals served as
the only assurance of stability, and those pledges were violated countless
times throughout the period. The Church tried to encourage lords to live in
accordance with Christian virtue, but the fact of the matter was that it was the
nobility’s vocation, their very social role, to fight, and thus all too often
“politics” was synonymous with “armed struggle” during the Middle Ages.
Anglo-Saxon England
By about 400 CE, the Romans abandoned Britain. Their legions were
needed to help defend the Roman heartland and Britain had always been an
imperial frontier, with too few Romans to completely settle and “civilize” it
outside of southern England. For the next three hundred years, Germanic
invaders called the Anglo-Saxons (from whom we get the name “England”
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itself - it means “land of the Angles”) from the areas around present-day
northern Germany and Denmark invaded, raided, and settled in England. They
fought the native Britons (i.e. the Romanized, Christian Celts native to England
itself), the Cornish, the Welsh, and each other. Those Romans who had settled
in England were pushed out, either fleeing to take refuge in Wales or across
the channel to Brittany in northern France. England was thus the most
culture all but vanished, and thus English history “began” as that of the Anglo-
Saxons.
in what had been Anglo-Saxon territory in eastern England. It took until 879
for the surviving English kingdom, Wessex, to defeat the Viking invaders. For a
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Beowulf). Raids started up again, however, and in 1066 William the
invaded and defeated the Anglo-Saxon king and instituted Norman rule.
France
France, ruled in the aftermath of the fall of Rome by the Franks, a powerful
Germanic people who invaded Gaul from across the Rhine as Roman power
crumbled. The Franks were a warlike and crafty group led by a clan known as
the Merovingians. A Merovingian king, Clovis (r. 481 – 511) was the first to
unite the Franks and begin the process of creating a lasting kingdom named
after them: France. Clovis murdered both the heads of other clans who
threatened him as well as his own family members who might take over
the last remnants of Roman power in Gaul by the end of the fifth century.
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In 500 CE Clovis and a few thousand of his most elite warriors
converted to Latin Christianity, less out of a heartfelt sense of piety than for
Christianity, Clovis ensured that the subjects of the Goths were likely to
right, and by 507 the Franks controlled almost all of Gaul, including formerly-
The Merovingians held on to power for two hundred years. In the end,
they became relatively weak and ineffectual, with another clan, the
Charles Martel, who defeated the invading Arab armies at the Battle of Tours
Martel’s son Pepin seized power from the Merovingians in a coup, one later
ratified by the pope in Rome, ensuring the legitimacy of the shift and
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Only the first few kings in the Merovingian dynasty of the Franks were
particularly smart or capable. When Pepin seized control in 750 CE, he was
merely assuming the legal status that his clan had already controlled behind
the scenes for years. The problem facing the Franks was that Frankish
tradition stipulated that lands were to be divided between sons after the
death of the father. Thus, with every generation, a family's holdings could be
split into separate, smaller pieces. Over time, this could reduce a large and
powerful territory into a large number of small, weak ones. When Pepin died
in 768, his sons Charlemagne and Carloman each inherited half of the
ignored the right of Carloman’s sons to inherit his land and seized it all (his
Charlemagne (r. 768 – 814) was one of the most important kings in
Germans to his east and, equally, in the name of seizing loot for his
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followers. From his conquests arose the concept of the Holy Roman Empire, a
Charlemagne was the Empire a truly united state, but the concept (with
1806 when it was finally permanently dismantled by Napoleon. Thus, like the
western Roman Empire that it succeeded, the Holy Roman Empire lasted
territories as the new, rightful king. In 773, at the request of the pope,
Germanic tribe that had expelled Byzantine forces earlier. When Charlemagne
conquered them a year later, he declared himself king of the Lombards, rather
than forcing a new Lombard ruler to become a vassal and pay tribute. This
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to proclaim himself king of a different people - how could Charlemagne be
"king of the Lombards,” since the Lombards were a separate clan and
could pass to a different clan or even kingdom itself depending on the political
Leo III. While Charlemagne’s biographers claimed that this came as a surprise
and looked to use the prestige of the imperial title to cement his hold on
power. Charlemagne had already restored Leo to his throne after Leo was run
out of Rome by powerful Roman families who detested him. While visiting
Italy (which was now part of his empire), Charlemagne was crowned and
declared to be the emperor of Rome, a title that no one had held since the
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western empire fell in 476. Making the situation all the stranger was the fact
usurpation.
Charlemagne’s empire at its height stretched from northern Spain to Bohemia (the present-day
Czech Republic). His major areas of conquest were in Central Europe, forming the earliest
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Charlemagne’s empire was a poor reflection of ancient Rome. He had
spent almost all of his reign traveling around his empire with his armies, both
leading wars and issuing decrees. He did insist, eventually, that these decrees
be written down, and the form of “code” used to ensure their authenticity was
simply that they were written in grammatically correct Latin, something that
commoners, all of whom were sent to rule lands they did not have any
personal ties to. He protected his borders with marches, lands ruled by
margraves who were military leaders ordered to defend the empire from
empire inspecting the counties and marches to ensure loyalty to the crown.
602
Despite all of his efforts, rebellions against his rule were frequent and
on several occasions.
including areas like England beyond his political control, and sponsored the
the Vulgate (the Latin Bible) corrected and he revived disciplines of classical
learning that had fallen into disuse (including rhetoric, logic, and
astronomy). His efforts to reform Church training and education are referred
Roman practice of large, clear letters that are separated from one another and
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sentences that used spaces and punctuation, rather than the cursive scrawl of
between upper and lower-case letters and the practice of starting sentences
than had the Merovingian. The problem, again, was the Frankish succession
law. Without an effective bureaucracy or law code, there was little cohesion to
the kingdom, and areas began to split off almost immediately after
until 1871, over a thousand years after Charlemagne’s lifetime) was East
Francia, the kingdom that Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious left to one of his
sons. A different line, not directly descended from the Carolingians, eventually
ended up in power in East Francia. Its king, Otto I, was crowned emperor in
962 by the Pope, thereby cementing the idea of the Holy Roman Empire even
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Invaders
violence that lasted until at least 1100 CE. Even though the specific invaders
mentioned below had settled down by about 1000 CE, the overall state of
like the Vikings, the major political problem of the Middle Ages was that the
whole feudal system was one based on violence: lesser lords often had no
livelihood outside of war, and they pressured their own lords to initiate raids
on nearby lands. "Knights" were often little better than thugs who had the
distinction of a minor noble title and the ability to afford weapons and
armor. Likewise, one of the legacies of feudal law was the importance placed
on honor and retribution; any insult or slight could initiate reprisals or even
Sicily in the ninth century, while a new group of steppe raiders, the Magyars,
605
swept across Europe in the tenth century, eventually seizing land and settling
The Vikings
Until the eighth century, the Scandinavian region was on the periphery
of European trade, and Scandinavians (the Norse) themselves did not greatly
subsequently, throughout the Middle Ages) with both other Germanic tribes
and even with the Romans directly during the imperial period. While the
details are unclear, what seems to have happened is that sometime around
Baltic goods like furs, timber, fish, and (as before) amber. This created an
ongoing flow of wealth coming into Scandinavia, which in turn led to Norse
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leaders becoming interested in the sources of that wealth. At the same time,
the Norse added sails to their unique sailing vessels, longships. Sailed
longships allowed the Norse to travel swiftly across the Baltic, and ultimately
The Oseberg ship, a surviving Viking longship discovered in a Viking burial mound in
Norway and preserved in a dedicated museum in Oslo. Longships allowed the Vikings
unprecedented mobility, being capable of both oceanic voyages and of sailing up rivers to raid
inland communities.
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The Norse, soon known as Vikings, exploded into the consciousness of
monasteries in the 790s, with the first major raid in 793 and follow-up attacks
over the next two years. The Vikings swiftly became the great naval power of
Europe at the time. In the early years of the Viking period they tended to
monasteries and settlements. As the decades went on, bands of raiders gave
especially silver, which was their standard of wealth, and slaves, who were
equally lucrative. Unfortunately for the monks of Europe, silver was most
fortifications at the mouth of the Seine river and began expanding his naval
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The word "Viking" was used by the Vikings themselves – it either meant
“raider” or was a reference to the Vik region that spanned parts of Norway
and Sweden. They were known by various other names by the people they
raided, from the Middle East to France: the Franks called them “pagani” or
(sorcerers), the Germanic tribes “ascomanni” (shipmen), and the Slavs of what
would become Russia the “Rus” or “Varangians” (the latter are described
below.) Outside of the lands that would eventually become Russia, the Vikings
At their height, the Vikings fielded huge fleets that raided many of the
major cities of early medieval Europe and North Africa. By the late ninth
century they were formally organized into a “Great Fleet” based in their
East Anglia in the 870s). While the precise numbers will never be known, not
609
clear that their raids were on scale that dwarfed their earlier efforts. In 844
more than 150 ships sailed up the Garonne River in southern France,
plundering settlements along the way. In 845, 800 ships forced the city of
Charlemagne’s capital of Aachen and sacking it. Then, in 885, at least 700
ships sailed up the Seine River and besieged Paris (note that their initial
target, a rich monastery, had evacuated with its treasure; the wine cellar was
silver and gold. Vikings attacked Constantinople at least three times in the
ninth and tenth centuries, extracting tribute and concessions in trade, and
perhaps most importantly, they came to rule over what would one day
about the places they were raiding, in some cases actually working as
mercenaries for kings who hired them to defend against other Vikings.
610
Starting in roughly 850 CE, the Vikings started to settle in the lands they
England itself. It was founded in 911 as a land-grant to the Viking king Rollo
in order to defend against other Vikings. Likewise, the Vikings settled areas in
England that would help shape the English language and literary traditions
(for example, though written in the language of the Anglo-Saxons, the famous
epic poem Beowulf is about Viking settlers who had recently converted to
Christianity). Ultimately, the Vikings became so rich from raiding that they
The Vikings were not just raiders, however. They sought to explore and
settle in lands that were in some cases completely uninhabited when they
arrived, like Iceland. They appear to have been fearless in quite literally going
611
where no one had gone before. Much of their exploration required audacity as
well as planning - they were the best navigators of their age, but at times their
Europeans. Vikings were the first Europeans to arrive in North America, with
however, quite possibly because of a conflict between the Vikings and the
Indigenous people they encountered, and the people of the Americas were
thus spared the presence of further European colonists for almost five
centuries.
conquest, and colonization had begun even earlier. The Vikings started
traveling down Russian rivers from the Baltic in the mid-eighth century, even
before the raiding period began farther west. Their initial motive was trade,
not conquest, trading and collecting goods like furs, amber, and honey and
transporting them south to both Byzantium and the Abbasid Caliphate. The
612
Vikings were slavers as well, capturing Slavic peoples and selling them in the
south. In turn, the Vikings brought a great deal of Byzantine and Abbasid
currency to the north, introducing hard cash into the mostly barter-based
their trade routes, often invited to establish order by the native Slavs in cities
like Kiev, with the Vikings ultimately forming the earliest nucleus of Russia as
a political entity. The very name “Russia” derives from “Rus,” the name of the
specific Viking people (originally from Sweden) who settled in the Slavic lands
bordering Byzantium.
613
Eleventh-century illustration of the Varangian Guard, the personal bodyguards of the Byzantine
emperors starting in the tenth century. The guard was composed of warriors from the Rus, the
Vikings who conquered and then settled in present-day Russia and Ukraine.
As the Vikings settled in the lands they had formerly raided and as
century, the kings of the Scandinavian lands began to assert their control and
by 1000, helped end the raiding period as well. Denmark became a stable
kingdom under its king Harald Bluetooth in 958, Norway in 995 under Olaf
the former Viking states, with its duke William the Conqueror conquering
614
Conclusion
contact with North America, and founding the first Russian states - they are
also included here simply for their inherent interest; their raids and
expansion were one of the most striking and sudden in world history.
Far more important to the historical record were the larger patterns of
state and society that formed in the early Middle Ages. Above all, the feudal
system would have a long legacy in forming the basis of later political
structures, and the Latin Church would be the essential European intellectual
and spiritual institution for centuries to come. Early medieval Europe was
defined by shared cultural traits, above all having to do with religion. Despite
having lost the opulence and much of the learning of Rome, medieval Europe
was not a static, completely backwards place. Instead, it slowly but surely
615
Second Part
Introduction 3
616
Chapter 7: Religious Wars 135
it? Like all ideas, the concept of Western Civilization itself has a history, one
that coalesced in college textbooks and curriculums for the first time in the
United States in the 1920s. In many ways, the very idea of Western
others as if they were distinct, even unrelated. Thus, before examining the
attitudes. The obvious answer is that “the West” has something to do with
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Europe. If the area including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Israel -
Palestine, and Egypt is somewhere called the “Middle” or “Near” East, doesn't
In fact, we get the original term from Greece. Greece is the center-point,
east of the Balkan Peninsula was east, west of the Balkans was west, and the
Greeks were at the center of their self-understood world. Likewise, the sea
that both separated and united the Greeks and their neighbors, including the
Egyptians and the Persians, is still called the Mediterranean, which means “sea
in the middle of the earth” (albeit in Latin, not Greek - we get the word from a
around the Mediterranean treated it as the center of the world itself, their
major trade route to one another and a major source of their food as well.
To the Greeks, there were two kinds of people: Greeks and barbarians
(the Greek word is barbaros). Supposedly, the word barbarian came from
Greeks traded with all of their neighbors and knew perfectly well that the
619
Persians and the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, among others, were not their
inferiors in learning, art, or political organization, but the fact remains that
they were not Greek, either. Thus, one of the core themes of Western
Civilization is that right from its inception, of the east being east of Greece and
the west being west of Greece, and of the world being divided between Greeks
and barbarians, there was an idea of who is central and superior, and who is
out on the edges and inferior (or at least not part of the best version of
culture).
In a sense, then, the Greeks invented the idea of west and east, but they
did not extend the idea to anyone but themselves, certainly including the
“barbarians” who inhabited the rest of Europe. In other words, the Greeks did
barbarian. Likewise, the Greeks did not invent “civilization” itself; they
inherited things like agriculture and writing from their neighbors. Neither
was there ever a united Greek empire: there was a great Greek civilization
when Alexander the Great conquered what he thought was most of the world,
620
stretching from Greece itself through Egypt, the Middle East, as far as western
India, but it collapsed into feuding kingdoms after he died. Thus, while later
cultures came to look to the Greeks as their intellectual and cultural ancestors,
the Greeks themselves did not set out to found “Western Civilization” itself.
Mesopotamia
Greece, this one does not. That is because civilization is not Greek in its
origins. The most ancient human civilizations arose in the Fertile Crescent, an
and into Iraq. Closely related, and lying within the Fertile Crescent, is the
region of Mesopotamia, which is the area between the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers in present-day Iraq. In these areas, people invented the most crucial
including:
621
Cities: note that in English, the very word “civilization” is closely related
some people concentrate all of their time and energy on tasks like art,
622
decision-making. Historically, bureaucracy was one of the most
Large-scale warfare: even before large cities existed, the first towns
were built with fortifications to stave off attackers. It is very likely that
the stars and other heavenly bodies because they needed to be able to
track when to plant crops, when to harvest, and when religious rituals
had to be carried out. Among other things, the Mesopotamians were the
623
first to discover the 365 (and a quarter) days of the year and set those
ethnically. The Mesopotamians were the first to conquer and rule over
Greeks and skip places like Mesopotamia, because those areas were the
624
Greece and Rome
their importance. Alexander the Great was one of the most famous and
world” when he was eighteen years old. When he died his empire fell apart, in
part because he did not say which of his generals was to take over after his
their buildings, putting on plays in the Greek style, and of course, trading with
one another. This period in history was called the Hellenistic Age. The people
who were part of that age were European, Middle Eastern, and North African,
people who worshiped both Greeks gods and the gods of their own regions,
625
Civilization has always been a blend of different peoples, not a single
Civilization was ancient Rome. Over the course of roughly five centuries, the
Romans expanded from the city of Rome in the middle of the Italian peninsula
to rule an empire that stretched from Britain to Spain and from North Africa
work of Roman citizens and Roman subjects, and the massive use of slave
labor, they built remarkable buildings and created infrastructure like roads
The Romans are the ones who give us the idea of Western Civilization
being something ongoing – something that had started in the past and
continued into the future. In the case of the Romans, they (sometimes
used Greek shapes and forms, the Roman gods were really just the Greek gods
given new names (Zeus became Jupiter, Hades became Pluto, etc.), and
626
educated Romans spoke and read Greek so that they could read the works of
the great Greek poets, playwrights, and philosophers. Thus, the Romans
an ongoing civilization that blended Greek and Roman values. Like the Greeks
before them, they also divided civilization itself in a stark binary: there was
Greco-Roman culture on the one hand and barbarism on the other, although
conquered. They united their provinces with the Latin language, which is the
(French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc.), Roman Law, which is the ancestor of
most forms of law still in use today in Europe, and the Roman form of
government. Along with those factors, the Romans brought Greek and Roman
science, learning, and literature. In many ways, the Romans believed that they
were bringing civilization itself everywhere they went, and because they
made the connection between Greek civilization and their own, they played a
627
significant role in inventing the idea of Western Civilization as something that
was ongoing.
That noted, the Romans did not use the term “Western Civilization” and
as their empire expanded, even the connection between Roman identity and
Italy itself weakened. During the period that the empire was at its height the
bulk of the population and wealth was in the east, concentrated in Egypt,
the Levant. This shift to the east culminated in the move of the capital of the
empire from the city of Rome to the Greek town of Byzantium, renamed
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The Middle Ages and Christianity
came about after Rome ceased to exist as a united empire, during the era
known as the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were the period between the fall
of Rome, which happened around 476 CE, and the Renaissance, which started
around 1300 CE. During the Middle Ages, another concept of what lay at the
religion. The Roman Empire had started to become Christian in the early
Christianity. Many Europeans in the Middle Ages came to believe that, despite
the fact that they spoke different languages and had different rulers, they
Western Civilization. It inspired amazing art and music. It was at the heart of
629
scholarship and learning for centuries. It also justified the aggressive
other religions were infidels (meaning "those who are unfaithful," those who
worshipped the correct God, but in the wrong way, including Jews and
Muslims, but also Christians who deviated from official orthodoxy) or pagans
exterminated. For instance, despite the fact that Muslims and Jews worshiped
the same God and shared much of the same sacred literature, medieval
eventually drove many Jews from Europe itself to take shelter in the kingdoms
and empires of the Middle East and North Africa. Historically it was much
safer and more comfortable for Jews in places like the predominantly Muslim
630
A major irony of the idea that Western Civilization is somehow
both Judaism and Christianity. Its holy writings are also closely aligned to
Jewish and Christian values and thought. Perhaps most importantly, Islamic
kingdoms and empires were part of the networks of trade, scholarship, and
exchange that linked together the entire greater Mediterranean region. Thus,
to separate Islamic states and cultures from the rest of Western Civilization.
Civilization in the pre-modern period was the Renaissance. The idea of the
“Middle Ages” was invented by thinkers during the Renaissance, which started
around 1300 CE. The great thinkers and artists of the Renaissance claimed to
be moving away from the ignorance and darkness of the Middle Ages – which
631
they also described as the “dark ages” - and returning to the greatness of the
de Pizan, and Petrarch proudly connected their work to the work of the
Romans and Greeks, claiming that there was an unbroken chain of ideas,
virtues, and accomplishments stretching all the way back thousands of years
thousand years after the life of the Greek philosopher Plato based their own
in Roman and Greek art. The scientific discoveries of the Renaissance were
inspired by the same spirit of inquiry that Greek scientists and Roman
proudly linked together their own era to that of the Greeks and Romans, thus
632
In the process of reviving the ideas of the Greeks and Romans,
rhetoric (among other subjects) with the cultivation of an ethical code the
program of education remained intact into the twentieth century, with the
university system that was born near the end of the nineteenth century.
It was not Renaissance ideas, however, that had the greatest impact on
the globe at the time. Instead, it was European soldiers, colonists, and most
consequentially, diseases. The first people from the Eastern Hemisphere since
633
prehistory to travel to the Western Hemisphere (and remain - an earlier
Viking colony did not survive) were European explorers who, entirely by
accident, “discovered” the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century CE. It
people already lived there, as their ancestors had for thousands of years, but
geography had left them ill-prepared for the arrival of the newcomers. With
peoples of the Americas had no resistance, and within a few generations the
descendents was thus made vastly easier. Europeans suddenly had access to
exploitation of its resources and its people, Europe went from a region of little
economic and military power and importance to one of the most formidable in
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the following centuries. Following the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of
Central and South America, the other major European states embarked on
emerged over the course of the seventeenth century, first and foremost those
of the Dutch and English, which established the precedent that profit and
and growing, global empires. By 1800, roughly 35% of the surface of the
many regions of Africa, but (in an ironic reversal of the impact of European
explorers and conquerors were unable to penetrate beyond the coasts of most
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of sub-Saharan African entirely. Meanwhile, the enormous and sophisticated
empires and kingdoms of China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and South Asia (i.e.
little importance. The Middle East was dominated by two powerful and
The explosion of European power, one that coincided with the fruition
of the idea that Western Civilization was both distinct from and better than
of the eighteenth century, Europeans learned how to exploit fossil fuels in the
wealth, and military power, this time built on the backs not of outright slaves,
636
powerhouse to global hegemon. By the early twentieth century, Europe and
roughly 85% of the globe. Europeans either forced foreign states to concede
South Asia (i.e. India) and Africa. None of this would have been possible
To Europeans and North Americans, however, the reason that they had
come to enjoy such wealth and power was not because of a (temporary)
their inherent biological and cultural superiority. The idea that the human
species was divided into biologically distinct races was not entirely invented
acquired all the trappings of a “science” over the course of the 1800s. By the
year 1900, almost any person of European descent would have claimed to be
637
part of a distinct, superior “race” whose global dominance was simply part of
That conceit arrived at its zenith in the first half of the twentieth
century. The European powers themselves fell upon one another in the First
global dominance. Soon after, the new (related) ideologies of fascism and
Nazism put racial superiority at the very center of their worldviews. The
Second World War was the direct result of those ideologies, when racial
warfare was unleashed for the first time not just on members of races
that fascists and Nazis now considered inferior races in their own right, most
million deaths, including the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and at
least 25 million citizens of the Soviet Union, another “racial” enemy from the
638
Western Civilization Is “Born”
It was against the backdrop of this descent into what Europeans and
civilization that started with the Greeks - that the history of Western
Civilization first came into being as a textbook topic and, soon, a mainstay of
historians, came to believe that the best way to defend the elements of
that may not have strictly speaking started in Europe, but which enjoyed its
greatest success there. The early proponents of the “Western Civ” concept
ideas, technologies, and cultural achievements that led to the present. Along
the way, of course, they included the United States as both a product of those
639
European achievements and, in the twentieth century, as one of the
crafting what was to be the core of history curriculums for most of the
schools. The narrative in the introduction in this book follows its basic
contours, without all of the qualifying remarks: it starts with Greece, goes
through Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, then on to the growth in
European power leading up to the recent past. The traditional story made a
hard and fast distinction between Western Civilization as the site of progress,
and the rest of the world (usually referred to as the “Orient,” simply meaning
“east,” all the way up until textbooks started changing their terms in the
1980s) which invariably lagged behind. Outside of the West, went the
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This was, in hindsight, a somewhat surprising conclusion given when
“civilized” culture had imploded with the world wars, but the inventors of
legacy from that implosion, but to celebrate it as the only major historical
legacy of relevance to the present. In doing so, they reinforced many of the
intellectual dividing lines created centuries earlier: there was true civilization
achievement and progress, and most importantly, only people who were born
role. The entire history of most of humankind was not just irrelevant to the
the modern world for everyone. In other words, even Africans and Asians, to
say nothing of the people of the Pacific or Native Americans, could have little
of relevance to learn from their own history that was not somehow “obsolete”
in the modern era. And yet, this astonishing conclusion was born from a
641
culture that unleashed the most horrific destruction (self-destruction) ever
textbooks, focusing in many cases on the critical historical role of the Middle
East, not just Europe. It also abandons the pretense that the history of
Western Civilization was generally progressive, with the conditions of life and
understanding of the natural world of most people improving over time (as a
642
The purpose of this approach is not to disparage the genuine
in “the West.” Technologies as diverse and important as the steam engine and
movements calling for religious toleration, equality before the law, and
feminism all came into being in the West. For better and for worse, the West
was also the point of origin of true globalization (starting with the European
events that occurred in the West over approximately the last 10,000
years. “Balance” is in the eye of the reader, however, so the account will not
the background and the framework that informed the writing of the book, and
643
knowledge that many others will have the opportunity to modify it as they see
fit.
Finally, a note on the kind of history this textbook covers is in order. For
social, and so on. Historians have made enormous strides in the last sixty
importantly in considering the histories of the people who were not in power,
including the common people of various epochs, of women for almost all of
history, and of slaves and servants. The old adage that “history is written by
the winners” is simply untrue - history has left behind mountains of evidence
about the lives of those who had access to less personal autonomy than did
social elites. Those elites did much to author some of the most familiar
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This textbook tries to address at least some of those histories, but here
it will be found wanting by many. Given the vast breadth of history covered in
its chapters, the bulk of the consideration is on “high level” political history,
political changes. There are two reasons for that approach. First, the history
of political history (one that infuriates many professional historians, who are
trained to identify and study complexity). Political history can thus serve as
The other, related, reason for the political framing of this textbook is
that history has long since declined as a subject central to education from the
elementary through high school levels in many parts of the United States. It is
no longer possible to assume that anyone who has completed high school
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already has some idea of major (measured by their impact at the time and
since) events of the past. This textbook attempts to use political history as,
that changed the world at the time and continue to exert an influence in the
present.
an extent, religious history. Social and cultural history are covered in less
detail, both for reasons of space and the simple fact that the author was
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Chapter 1: The High Middle Ages
and 1300 CE as the “high” Middle Ages to emphasize its dynamism, creativity,
developments. During the high Middle Ages the European economy greatly
commerce. Towns and cities grew, and with them new centers of learning
kingdoms did start the gradual process of transforming into more highly
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The Crusades
carnage. The Crusades serve as one of the iconic points of transition from the
early Middle Ages to the high Middle Ages, in which the localized, barter-
economic system.
nomadic warriors in the Middle East, that of the Seljuk Turks. The Seljuks
raiders, who had converted to Islam prior to the eleventh century. The Seljuks
were a tribal confederation, not a united kingdom or empire, and they invaded
unity they proved even more deadly foes to the Byzantine Empire than had
648
the Arab caliphates, and by late in the eleventh century the Byzantine
emperor Alexius called for aid from the Christians of western Europe, despite
near the Holy Land. Urban spoke of the supposed atrocities committed by the
Turks, the richness of the lands that European knights might expect to seize,
and the righteousness of the cause of aiding fellow Christians. The idea caught
on much faster and much more thoroughly than Urban could have possibly
expected; knights from all over Europe responded when the news reached
them. The idea was so appealing that not only knights, but thousands of
Jerusalem, for the most part without weapons, armor, or adequate supplies.
Much of the impulse of the Crusades came from the fact that Urban II
offered unlimited penance to the crusaders, meaning that anyone who took
part in the crusade would have all of their sins absolved; furthermore,
649
pilgrims were now allowed to be armed. Thus, the crusades were the first
armed Christian pilgrimage, and in fact, the first “official” Christian holy war in
the history of the religion. In addition to the promise of salvation, and equally
important to many of the knights who flocked to the crusading banner, was
the promise of loot (and, again, Urban’s speech explicitly promised the
crusaders wealth and land). Many of the crusaders were minor lords or
landless knights, men who had few prospects back home but now had the
Land. Thus, most crusaders combined ambition and greed with genuine
Christian piety.
Christianity. These orders came into being after the First Crusade, originally
Land. They were made up of “monk-knights” who took monastic vows (i.e. of
obedience, poverty, and chastity) but spent their time fighting as well as
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praying. The concept already existed at the start of the crusading period, but
the orders grew quickly thanks to their involvement in the invasions. Two
achieve great wealth and power despite their professed vows of poverty.
The First Crusade (1095 - 1099), which lasted only four years following
the initial declaration by Pope Urban, was amazingly successful. What had
once been the great power of the Middle East, the Abbasid Caliphate, had long
since splintered apart, with rival kingdoms holding power in North Africa and
the Middle Ages. The doctrinal differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims
Arab kingdoms battled the Seljuk Turks, who were intent on conquering
everything, not just Christian lands. Thus, the crusaders arrived precisely
when the Muslim forces were profoundly divided. By 1099, the crusaders had
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territories in the heart of the Holy Land. These were called The Latin
The Latin Principalities at their height. Note how the Seljuk (here spelled “Seljuq”) territories
After their success in taking Jerusalem, the knightly orders became very
powerful and very rich. They not only seized loot, but became caravan guards
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and, ultimately, money-lenders (the Templars became bankers after
abandoning the Holy Land when Jerusalem was lost in 1187). Essentially, the
monasteries, and there is no question that many of their members did a very
chastity. Likewise, the rulers of the Latin Principalities made little effort to
Subsequent crusades were much less successful. The problem was that,
once they had formed their territories, the westerners had to hold on to them
with little but a series of strong forts up and down the coast. The European
the local people were mostly Jews and Muslims who detested the cruel
worthwhile endeavor, that enthusiasm did ebb over time as the crusades
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Attacks on the Latin Principalities resulted in the Second Crusade, which
lasted from 1147 - 1149. The Second Crusade consisted of two crusades that
happened simultaneously: some European knights sailed off to the Holy Land,
Peninsula. The Europeans ultimately lost ground in the Middle East but
northern Spain, concluded that there were plenty of infidels much closer to
home than Jerusalem and its environs. These wars of Christians against
they lasted until the last Muslim kingdom fell in 1492 CE.
at the Battle of Hattin. This prompted the Third Crusade (1189 - 1192), a
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massive invasion led by the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (Frederick
Barbarossa), the king of France (Philip II), and the king of England (Richard I -
negotiating a peace deal with Saladin after Frederick died (he drowned trying
to cross a river) and Philip returned to France. After this, only a few small
Arguably the most disastrous (in terms of failing to achieve its stated
goal of controlling the Holy Land) crusade was the Fourth Crusade, lasting
from 1199 – 1204. This latest attempt to seize Jerusalem began with a large
crusaders carrying out a horrendously bloody sack of the ancient city. In the
end, the crusaders set up a Latin Christian government that lasted for about
fifty years while completely ignoring their original goal of sailing to the Holy
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Land. The only lasting effect of the Fourth Crusade was the further weakening
point: Christian knights from Western Europe set out to attack the Muslim
and the last political remnant of the Roman Empire at that, instead.
official large-scale invasions of the Middle East until the end of the thirteenth
century, and the efforts of Christian knights in Spain during the Reconquest
very much carried on the crusading tradition for centuries. Later crusades
were often nothing more than politically-motivated power grabs on the part
the last crusade was the Holy League, an army drawn from various kingdoms
1684. None of the latter crusades succeeded in seizing land in the Middle
East, but they did inspire a relentless drive to overthrow and destroy the now
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centuries-old Muslim kingdom of Spain, as noted above, and they also inspired
Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, grew rich transporting goods and crusaders back and
forth between Europe and the Middle East. As the transporters, merchants,
and bankers of crusading expeditions, it was northern Italians that derived the
greatest financial benefit from the invasions. The crusades provided so much
capital that the northern Italian cities evolved to become the banking center of
Europe and the site of the Renaissance starting in the fifteenth century.
explorers and conquerors for centuries. The most obvious instance of this
phenomenon was the Reconquest of Spain, which was explicitly seen through
the lens of the crusading ideology at the time. In turn, the Reconquest was
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completed in 1492, precisely the same year that Christopher Columbus
arrived in the Americas. With the subsequent invasions of South and Central
religious purity among many Christian Europeans during and after the
Crusades. One effect of this new focus was numerous outbreaks of anti-
Europe while the crusaders were on their way to the Holy Land, and anti-
Jewish laws were enacted by many kings and lords inspired by the fervent,
intolerant new brand of Christian identity arising from the Crusades. Thus,
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Often overlooked in considerations of the crusades were the “Northern
between 1171, when the Pope Alexander III authorized a crusade against the
heathens of the east Baltic region, and the early fifteenth century, when the
The Teutonic Knights were a knightly order founded during the Third
Crusade at a hospital in the Latin city of Acre. They were closely modeled after
the Templars, adopting their “rule” (their code of conduct) and spending most
of the twelfth century crusading in the Holy Land. Their focus shifted,
however, in the middle of the century when they began leading crusades
against the pagan peoples of the eastern Baltic, including the Lithuanians,
The Baltic lands were the last major region of Europe to remain
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headway in converting the people of the region, outside of the border region
between the lands of the Rus and the Baltic Sea. Thus, the Teutonic Knights
could make a very plausible case for their Crusades as analogous to the
Spanish Reconquest, and the Teutonic Knights proved very savvy at placing
agents in the papal court that worked to maintain papal support for their
efforts.
literally held down the fort in newly-built castles. They were authorized by
various popes not only to conquer and convert, but to rule over the peoples of
the east Baltic, and thus by the thirteenth century the Teutonic Knights were
in the process of conquering and ruling Prussia, parts of Estonia, and a region
kingdoms lasted a remarkably long time; the Teutonic Order ruled Livonia
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until 1561, when it was finally ousted. Thus, for several centuries, the map of
Europe included the strange spectacle of a theocratic state: one ruled directly
The theocracy of the Teutonic Knights as of 1466 (marked in orange and purple along the
shores of the Baltic). Note that 1466 falls squarely into the Renaissance period - the Northern
Crusades began during the Middle Ages but their influence lasted far longer.
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The Northern Crusades were, in some ways, as important as the
crusades to the Holy Land in that they were responsible for extinguishing the
last remnants of paganism in Europe – it was truly gone by the late fourteenth
The irony of the crusades to the Holy Land is that the vast majority of
people who lived in the Middle East did not think of politics in terms of
Muslim versus Christian (or Jewish) identity. The fairly brief and ephemeral
period of political unity under the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates that saw
most of the Middle East and North Africa united under the rule of “caliphs”
volume of this textbook) was gone by the time the first European crusaders
arrived. In turn, despite disrupting and transforming the Holy Land itself for
time, the crusades had little overall impact on the societies of the Middle East
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themselves. Those societies represented a cross-section of ethnic, religious,
By the time the last Abbasid caliph was murdered by the Mongols in
1258 the caliphate itself had long degenerated into a legal fiction. The caliphs
starting in 945, and the territories of the former caliphate were divided
between numerous sultans, an Arabic word that simply means “ruler.” Many
of those sultans petitioned for recognition from the captive caliphs as a form
of spiritual and political currency, but the bottom line is that the caliphs
This was not, however, a period of stagnation in the Middle East and
North Africa. First and foremost, the culture of learning that had blossomed
and “New Persian,” Persian (the vernacular language of Iran, which is the
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as theology and astronomy was supported by numerous sultans. Persian
became the international language of both scholarship and poetry during this
period, with major works being written in Persian from northern India to
not until the nineteenth century that writers drifted away from Persian as the
parallel to Latin in Europe, with the major difference being that (unlike Latin)
caliphate Middle East. Almost without exception, elites went out of their way
to actively encourage trade by building and policing trade routes and founding
the contempt for merchants felt by most elite Europeans at the time,
merchants were an honored part of Persian, Turkic, and Arabic societies. The
result was a thriving commercial economy across most of the region, although
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it is important to bear in mind that most people were still farmers in the
Middle East just as they were everywhere else in the pre-modern world.
By far the most important and far-reaching event in the Middle East
during the post-caliphate period was the arrival of the Turks. As noted above,
the group known as the Seljuks migrated from Central Asia starting in earnest
in the tenth century CE, settling from Afghanistan to Anatolia over the course
of the following centuries. The Turks were nomadic warriors organized into
tribal confederations (the Seljuks were simply the leading tribe rather than
the actual rulers during the first wave of migration), effective in warfare but
dynasties across the region began in 998 under the Ghaznavids in Persia, but
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Where Turkic dynasties were able to establish a stable rule for at least a
statecraft. The Seljuk dynasty that overthrew the Ghaznavids in 1040 drew on
madrasas (schools for instruction in the Koran and Islamic law) and public
the first stable Turkic state there - the Sultanate of Rum (Rome) - relied
The greatest literary work of medieval Islam was in Persian, the poet
reaching back to the ancient past that suggested a single cultural and political
tradition. Even though they were not ethnically Persian, Turkic rulers
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political culture was crucial in creating actual states out of tribal
Unfortunately for the Turkic dynasties at the time and for millions of
ordinary people across the Middle East, the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth
century devastated much of the region. By 1256 the Seljuk territories had
and pillaging ensued. The Mongols established a kingdom known as the Il-
Khanate in Persia in 1256, but it took until 1295 for the Mongol ruler Ghazan,
the first to convert to Islam, to shift Mongol priorities away from plundering
off the Mongols, most of the rest of the Middle East either experienced harsh
It was in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions that the Ottoman Turks
began their ascent to power. Starting as nothing more than a small Turkic
beglik (sultanate), the Turks defeated a Byzantine army in 1302 and seized
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part of Anatolia. Over the next few decades they built up a formidable
reputation as ghazis, holy warriors, but they also made a point of taking over
or cruelty (to Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike). In 1352 they took control
Ottoman territories.
Thus, the Middle East during the period of the crusades was already a
the time was also politically disunited, and it had much further to climb in
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significant economic expansion, demographic growth, and cultural
achievement.
The early Middle Ages, from about 500 CE – 800 CE, operated largely on
almost entirely local; local lords and kings extracted wealth from peasants,
but because there was nowhere to sell a surplus of food, peasants tended to
grow only as much as they needed to survive, using methods that went
unchanged for centuries. There was a limited market for luxury goods even
among those wealthy enough to afford them, and the only sources of reliable
minted coins were over a thousand miles away, in Byzantium, Persia, and the
Arab kingdoms.
This descent into subsistence had happened for various reasons over
the course of the earlier centuries. The fall of the western empire of Rome had
that had been very extensive in Rome). Centuries of banditry, raids, and wars
made long-distance travel perilous. In turn, the simple lack of markets meant
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that there was no incentive to grow more than was needed, and the nobility
another’s lands.
rest of the ninth and tenth centuries, however, the invasions of the Magyars,
Saracens, and Vikings had undermined the stability of the fragile political
order created by the Carolingians. Many accounts written at the time, almost
exclusively by priests and monks, decried the constant warfare of the period,
including the wars caused by invaders from beyond the European heartland
and those between European rulers themselves. Historians now believe that
about 800 CE, but the period between 800 - 1000 was still one of political
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Things started to change around the year 1000 CE. The major causes
for these changes were twofold: the end of full-scale invasions from outside of
the core lands of Europe, and changes in agriculture that seem very simple
1300 it was 74 million. That 500% increase was due to two simple changes:
the methods by which agriculture operated and the ebb in large-scale violence
brought about by the end of foreign invasions. The first factor in the dramatic
relative social stability, peasants were able to consistently plant and harvest
crops and not see them devoured by hungry troops or see their fields
trampled. Those invasions stopped because the Vikings went from being
likewise took over and settled in present-day Hungary, and the Saracens were
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beaten back by increasingly savvy southern-European kingdoms. Warfare
violence did drop off over the course of the eleventh century.
technology. Early medieval farmers had literally scratched away at the soil
with light plows, usually drawn by oxen or donkeys. Plows were like those
used in ancient Rome: the weight of the plow was carried in a pole that went
across the animal’s neck. Thus, if the load was too heavy the animal would
simply suffocate. In turn, that meant that only relatively soft soils could be
way of knowing who) developed a new kind of collar for horses and oxen that
rested on the shoulders of the animal and thus allowed it to draw much
heavier loads, enabling the use of heavier plows. Those plows were called
carruca: a plow capable of digging deeply into the soil and turning it over,
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bringing air into the topsoil and refreshing its mineral and nutrient
power, and iron plowshares proved capable of digging through the soil with
greater efficiency.
leaving another “fallow” to recover its fertility for the next year. This system
was sustainable but limited the amount of crops that could be grown. Starting
around 1000 CE, farmers became more systematic about employing three-
field crop rotation: working with three linked fields, they would plant one
with wheat, one either with legumes (peas, beans, lentils) or barley, and leave
one fallow, allowing animals to graze on its weeds and leftover stalks from the
last season, with their manure helping to fertilize the soil. After harvest,
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farmers would rotate: the fallow field would be planted with grain, the grain
with legumes, and the legume field left fallow. This process dramatically
allowing it to naturally recover while it lay fallow. Thus, the overall yields of
edible crops dramatically increased. Likewise, with the greater variety, the
into usable flour. The difference in speed between hand-grinding grain and
using a mill was dramatic - it could take most of a day to grind enough flour to
bake bread for a family, but a mill could grind fifty pounds of grain in less than
a half hour. While peasants resented having to pay for access to mills (which
enormous increase in productivity meant that much more food was available
overall. Thus, mills were still cost effective for peasants, and milled flour
became the norm across most of Europe by the end of the twelfth century.
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The medieval agricultural revolution had tremendous long-term
consequences for peasants and, ultimately, for all of European society Thanks
to the increase in animal power and the effects of crop rotation, existing fields
became far more productive. Whole new areas were opened to cultivation,
thanks to the ability of the carruca to cut through rocky soil As a result, there
was a major expansion between 1000 – 1300 from the middle latitudes of
Europe farther north and east, as the farming population took advantage of
the new technology (and growing population) to clear and cultivate what had
lords to convert payment in kind (i.e. taxes and rents paid in actual foodstuffs
and livestock) to cash rent. Likewise, the relative stability allowed smaller
kingdoms to mint their own coins, and over the course of a century or so (c.
1000 – 1100) much of Europe became a cash economy rather than a barter
possible.
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Peasants actually did very well for themselves in these centuries; they
were often able to bargain with their lords for stabilized rents, and a fairly
rights vis-à-vis the nobility. Thus, the centuries between 1000 CE - 1300 CE
were relatively good for many European peasants. Later centuries would be
much harder for them. As an aside, it is important to bear in mind that the
progressive view of history, namely the idea that "things always get better
over time" is actually factually wrong for much of history, as reflected in the
increasing family size, it led to the growth of towns and cities. Even though
most peasants never left the area they were born in, many did migrate to the
nearest towns and cities and try to make a life there; serfs (unfree peasants)
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who made it to a town and stayed a year and day were even legally liberated
from having to return to the farm. Likewise, whole families and even villages
migrated in search of new lands to farm, generally speaking to the east and
This period saw the rebirth of urban life. Not since the fall of Rome had
most towns and cities consisted of more than just central hubs of local trade
with a few thousand inhabitants. By the twelfth century, however, many cities
few centuries. Likewise, the leaders of these cities were often merchants who
Even as the agricultural revolution laid the foundation for growth and
the cities took advantage of it, other factors led to the economic boom of this
period. Lords created new roads and repaired Roman ones from 1,000 years
earlier, which allowed bulk trade to travel more cheaply and effectively. More
important than bulk goods, however, were luxury goods, a trade almost
entirely controlled by the Italian cities during this period. Caravans arrived in
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the Middle East from China and Central Asia and sold goods to Italian
merchants waiting for them. From the Black Sea Region and what was left of
Byzantium, the Italians then transported these goods back to the west. Silk
and spices were worth far more than their weight in gold, and their trade
Trade networks emerged not only linking Italy to the Middle East but
brought merchants together to trade their goods. German rivers saw the
exchanged. Starting in the twelfth century, the German city of Lubeck became
the capital of the Hanseatic League, a group of cities engaged in trade that
The social consequences were dramatic and widespread, yet the status
poor (still the vast majority of the population), often held in contempt by
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Church. Usury, the practice of lending money and charging interest, was
classified as a sin by the Church even though the Church itself had to borrow
Jews as greedy and ruthless arose from the simple fact that dealing in money
and money-lending was one of the only professions Jews were allowed to
loans (as it happens, loans and banking are essential to a functioning cash
economy), but despised the Jews they got those loans from - hence the origins
Even though cities did not "fit" in the medieval worldview very well,
even the most conservative kings had to recognize the economic strength of
the new cities. Just as peasants had been able to negotiate for better
treatment, large towns and cities received official town charters from kings in
return for stable taxation. In many cases, cities were practically politically
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The growth in trade did not, however, create a real “market economy” in
the modern sense. For one thing, skilled trades were closely regulated by
trade who was not a member of the corresponding guild could be fined,
imprisoned, or expelled. Guilds jealously guarded the skills and tools of their
guilds. Guilds existed to ensure that their members produced quality goods,
but they also existed to keep out outsiders and to make the "masters" who
Medieval Politics
The feudal system flourished in the High Middle Ages. While it had its
origins in the centuries after the collapse of the western Roman Empire, the
kings (or, increasingly, in return for cash payments in lieu of military service)
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really came of age in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The lords themselves
presided over a rigidly hierarchical social and political system in which one’s
vocation was largely determined by birth, and the vocation of the nobility was
denoted not only their actual houses but the lands they owned. All of the
peasants on their lands owed them rent, originally in the form of crops but
independent yeomen and freeholders, who owned their own plots of land,
down to the serfs, semi-free peasants tied to the land, and then the cottagers,
who were the landless peasants worse-off even than serfs. The system of
land-ownership and the traditional rights enjoyed by not just lords, but serfs
and freeholders who lived under the lords, is referred to as “manorialism,” the
rural political and economic system of the High Middle Ages as a whole.
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One of the traditional rights, and a vital factor in the lives of peasants,
were the commons: lands not officially controlled by anyone that all people
had a right to use. The commons provided firewood, grazing land, and some
limited trapping of small animals, collectively serving as a vital “safety net” for
peasants living on the edge of subsistence. Access to the commons was not
about written laws, but instead the traditional, centuries-old agreements that
medieval period itself, the peasants continued to enjoy the right to their use.
cases, kings were simply the most powerful nobles, men who extracted
pledges of loyalty from their subjects but whose actual authority was limited
to their personal lands. Likewise, kings in the early Middle Ages were largely
itinerant, moving from place to place all year long. They had to make an
annual circuit of their kingdoms to ensure that their powerful vassals would
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stay loyal to them; a vassal ignored for too long could, and generally did,
simply stop acknowledging the lordship of his king. Those patterns started to
change during the High Middle Ages, and the first two kingdoms to show real
In France, a series of kings named Philip (I through IV) ruled from 1060
judges who were directly beholden to the crown. The kings ruled the region
around Paris (called the Île-de-France, meaning the "island of France"), but
their influence went well beyond it as they extended their holdings. Philip IV
even managed to seize almost complete control of the French Church, defying
papal authority. He also proved incredibly shrewd at creating new taxes and
in attacking and seizing the lands and holdings of groups like the French
Jewish community and the Knights Templar, both of whom he ransacked (the
his invasion in 1066) was also effective in creating a relatively stable political
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system. All land was legally the king’s, and his nobles received their lands as
“fiefs,” essentially loans from the crown that had to be renewed for payments
1189) created a system of royal sheriffs to enforce his will, created circuit
courts that traveled around the land hearing cases, and created a grand jury
In 1215, a much less competent king named John signed the Magna
Carta (“great charter”) with the English nobility that formally acknowledged
the feudal privileges of the nobility, towns and clergy. The important effect of
the Magna Carta was its principle: even the king had to respect the
law. Thereafter English kings began to call the Parliament, a meeting of the
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Gender standards in medieval Europe were based on a combination of
standards. Greek and Roman medical ideas, very much the basis of the
inferior versions of men: weaker, less intelligent, and suffering from an excess
of moist “humors” (the bodily fluids that supposedly formed the foundation of
health). Biblical stories taught that women were inherently more credulous
and sinful, with Eve’s temptation in the Garden of Eden both the origin and the
writers emerged over the course of the Middle Ages, but since there were
almost no opportunities for women to learn Latin (the great exception being
the education afforded to some nuns) they were cut off from the world of
medieval scholarship.
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choices about their own lives). Legally, women could inherit and own
property independently, and in most cases they retained control of the dowry
brought to marriage. Women almost always married younger than men did,
sacred duty: it was one of the seven sacraments that the Church held were
entered into the marriage willingly, and it is clear that many medieval
sinfulness. Likewise, at least some male authors were clearly aware that
agriculture and the vast majority of the population were peasants, with men
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and women both obliged to work from childhood to old age (which for most
people was their late 30s - life expectancy was the early 40s for both men and
women). Farm work was divided between men’s and women’s labor. Men
plowed fields, tended the large farm animals, and performed maintenance and
construction. Women gardened, tended the small animals (e.g. poultry), made
cheese and ale, and were almost completely responsible for cooking, cleaning,
and childcare. This gendered division of labor was never absolute, of course,
especially since women did “men’s work” out of necessity whenever men
were away in war, were injured or sick, or were otherwise unavailable. One
area that had an obvious negative impact on medieval women was that their
work was never done - a man’s workday ended when he returned from the
fields, but a woman always had work that needed to be done around the
house.
economic tasks, but they were increasingly excluded from the formal
institutions of organization and power like craft guilds (i.e. more women
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worked as skilled artisans before craft guilds cemented their control of
production). The wives of artisans were often artisans themselves, but their
occasionally leading troops when called into service. Still, the expectation was
that women in general were to defer to men in almost every case, and even
hand over much of their former independence). Even queens were usually
wives of kings, with the latter possessing complete political control, far more
often than “queens regnant,” rulers in their own right who were able to share
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Monasticism
attention: the monks and nuns. Monks and nuns took vows of poverty,
chastity, and obedience when they left their normal lives and joined
spend their time attending to the spiritual needs of laypeople (i.e. people
outside of the Church), which was the primary function of priests. Instead,
they were to devote themselves to prayer and to useful works, activities that
were thought to encourage piety and devotion among the monks and nuns,
convents themselves.
housing people whose full-time job was to pray for the souls of Christians
sustaining, overseeing both agriculture and crafts on their lands. Over time,
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activities like overseeing agriculture on monastery lands, brewing beer or
textiles and the above-mentioned beer and wine) at a healthy profit, and
chances of avoiding eternal damnation was leaving land and wealth in their
posthumous legacy. The result was the astonishing statistic that monasteries
owned a full 20% of the arable land of Western Europe by the late Middle
Ages.
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Corruption
Monasteries and convents were not alone in their wealth. The upper
from the ranks of the same peasants that they ministered to from one of the
small parish churches that dotted the landscape. All of the wealth that went
into the Church, from an obligatory tax called the tithe, was siphoned up to the
upper reaches of the institutional Church, and many of the high-level priests
concubines and equally openly supported their children, seeing their sons set
off daughters to noble families. Despite the injunction to live simply and avoid
luxury, many priests (and monks, and nuns) were greedy and ostentatious;
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one notorious practice was of bishops or archbishops who controlled and
but never actually visited them. Another practice was of noblemen literally
buying positions in the Church for their sons - teenage boys might find
fathers, with Church officials pocketing the bribe. Medieval depictions of hell
were full of the image of priests, monks, and nuns all plummeting into the fire
to face eternal torment for what a profoundly poor job they had done while
words, medieval laypeople were well aware of how corrupt many in the
confined to the Church as an institution, many rural priests were at best semi-
literate. All Church services were conducted in Latin, and yet some priests
understood Latin only poorly, if at all (it had long since vanished as a
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Christian belief in medieval society often had a very shallow understanding of
For all of the Middle Ages, however, the fact that the lay public knew
that the Church was corrupt and that many of its members were incompetent
Church, without the sacraments only it could offer, without the prayers issued
by monks and nuns for the souls of believers, and without its reassurance of a
life to come after death, medieval Christians were certain that their eternal
Medieval Learning
period was nothing but the “dark ages,” bereft of learning and culture, there
CE. Most of these had to do with foreign influences that were taken and
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reshaped by European thinkers, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to
innovations originating in the Islamic empires to the south and east of Europe.
members of the clergy, scholarship did continue and even prosper within the
church during the late Middle Ages. Numerous priests were not only literate in
Latin and deeply knowledgeable about Christian theology, but made major
more than a kind of "scam" - it did provide meaningful guidance and comfort
to medieval Christians, and some of its members were exemplary thinkers and
major intellectuals.
A symptom of the growth of intellectual life in the High Middle Ages was
the fact that literacy (which, at the time, meant the ability to read, not
necessarily to write) finally revived, at least a bit, following the real nadir of
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literacy that had lasted from the collapse of the western Roman Empire until
whom were priests, some of the latter only being able to stumble through the
calculate anything close to the exact literacy rates at any point before the
modern era, it is still clear that literacy started to climb following that
eleventh-century low point, with many regular merchants and even a few
educational institutions that had only existed in a few pockets earlier in the
Middle Ages.
literacy (in Latin) to laypeople as well as the monks themselves, and even
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some prosperous farmers achieved a basic degree of literacy as a
result. Cathedral schools in cities offered the same, and they increasingly
trained not only local elites, but even the children of artisans and merchants.
While they did offer basic education to laypeople, the official focus of
cathedral schools was in training priests. They began to expand after 1000
CE, offering a more focused and rigorous grounding in sacred texts and, to an
extent, ancient texts from Rome, to help educate Church leaders and
laypeople. The cathedral schools were supposed to be turning out not just
spiritual leaders, but skilled bureaucrats, and that required a rigorous form of
education that encouraged the study not just of the Bible, but of classics of
Latin literature like the speeches of the great Roman politician Cicero and
ancient Rome's great epic poem, Virgil's Aeneid. Thus, those priests-in-
training who were lucky enough to attend one of the better cathedral schools
acquired a strong command of classical Latin and were made aware of the
high intellectual standards that had prospered in the glory days of Rome.
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Scholasticism
the late Middle Ages, it was the arrival of the lost works of the ancient Greek
logic. Some of Aristotle's works had survived in Europe after the fall of Rome,
but most of it had vanished. Over the course of the eleventh century,
Europe. Most had been preserved in the Arab world, where Aristotle was
them Jewish philosophers who lived in North Africa and Spain - translated
Aristotle's work on logic from Arabic into Latin. Later, Greeks from
Byzantium came to Europe with the originals in Greek and they, too,
697
The importance of this rediscovery of Aristotle is that his work on logic
offered a formal system for evaluating complicated bodies of work like the
Christian Bible itself. The inherent problem facing believers of any religion
based on a single major text is figuring out what that text fundamentally
means. To wit: the Christian Bible is full of parables, stories, and accounts of
events that are often terrifically difficult to interpret. Even in the four gospels
that describe the life of Christ, not all of Christ's actions or sayings are easy to
understand, and the gospels sometimes offer conflicting accounts. What did
Christ mean when he said "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom
of God" (Matthew 19:24)? What did he mean with "Do not suppose that I have
come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword"
(Matthew 10:34)? Not to mention, how was a Christian to make sense of the
stern, vengeful God described in the Old Testament and the deity of peace and
simply accept the sacraments and offer prayers to the saints without worrying
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about the theological details, but increasingly, educated priests themselves
logical interpretation, key figures within the Church began to analyze the
Bible and the works of early Christian thinkers with new energy and focus.
The result was scholasticism, which was the major intellectual movement of
the High Middle Ages. Scholasticism was the rigorous application of methods
because the cathedral schools of the late Middle Ages increasingly relied on
scholasticism to train and teach new priests, it spread rapidly across all of
Europe.
instructor would read a short passage from the Bible or an early Christian
699
passage. This was called the lecture, which simply means the
"reading." Students would then consider the possible meanings of the passage
expected to cite not only the passage itself but any supporting evidence they
could come up with from the vast body of sacred and ancient writings. The
result was that, at least at the better cathedral schools, large numbers of
and logical analysis. One obvious example of a field that benefited from
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from biblical questions to legal ones, and by the twelfth century new
revive aspects of Roman law and to hone their own skills as lawyers.
celebrities, the most celebrated being Peter Abelard (1079 – 1142), a brilliant
teacher and debater in Paris who gave extensive lectures exploring both the
pros and cons of various important questions that had been considered by the
Church fathers. Abelard’s major focus was the use and application of reason
to faith – he was of the belief that ultimate truth could and should sustain
reasoned investigation of its precepts, a stance that got him into considerable
trouble with some Church leaders. Abelard's point was that educated
Christians should challenge their own beliefs and try to understand them; to
him, since Christians were safe in the assumption that the Bible would always
be the ultimate source of truth, their own attempts to understand its apparent
whole.
701
The new rigor of education and the expansion of cathedral schools,
helped in part by the popularity of figures like Abelard, led in turn to the
craft guilds, with organizations of students and teachers negotiating over the
northern Italy in 1158, which marks it as the first recognized university. The
1257. It grew out of the cathedral school of Notre Dame, at which Abelard had
taught, and it is usually considered the oldest large university in the western
graduation requirements and exams, and conferred degrees. The robes and
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religion, hence the term "professor." The core disciplines, which date back to
Roman times, were divided between the liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and
logic (called the trivium) and what might now be described as a more
and sciences.” Finally, the four kinds of doctorates, the PhD (doctor of
(doctor of theology, a priest), and the MD (doctor of medicine), are all derived
All students and professors were male, since the assumption was that
the whole purpose of studies was to create better church officials; while some
women did become important medieval thinkers, they were either exceptional
individuals who had been tutored by men or were nuns who had access to the
medieval woman who was known in her own lifetime as a major intellectual
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convent. While not formally educated in the scholastic tradition, Hildegard
of medicine. She was a musician and composer as well, writing music and
and was eventually sainted by the Church. While Hildegard was exceptional
in her range of intellectual production, many other women within the Church
Conclusion
about 1000 CE as part of a "dark age," that was obviously no longer the case
expanded, and the quality of education and scholarship increased along with
illiterate and largely ignorant of the world beyond their own villages, there
704
was at least a current of real intellectual curiosity and rigorous scholarship
expanding in the cities, monasteries, and convents of the High Middle Ages.
From a very "high level" perspective, the years between about 1000 CE -
1300 CE were relatively good ones for Europe. The medieval agricultural
advances in education and scholarship paid off in higher literacy rates and a
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spreading to Western Europe in the fourteenth century, however, a series of
levels. Historians refer to these events as the "crises of the Middle Ages."
The Mongols
The Mongols are not always incorporated into the narrative of Western
territories held by the Mongols were in Asia. The Mongols, however, are
devastated the kingdoms of the Middle East at the time and because they
The Mongols and the Turks are related peoples from Central Asia going
back to prehistory. They were nomads and herders with very strong
traditions of horse riding, archery, and warfare. In general, the Turks lived in
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the western steppes (steppe is the term for the enormous grasslands of
Central Asia) and the Mongols in the eastern steppes, with the Turks
threatening the civilizations of the Middle East and Eastern Europe and the
Mongols threatening China. A specific group of Turks, the Seljuks, had already
taken over much of the Middle East by the eleventh century, and over the next
two hundred years they deprived the Byzantine Empire of its remaining
1167) “Khan,” which simply means “lord” or “warlord.” The election was the
rival clan leaders. By the time he united the Mongols under his rule, he had
major history commissioned by the Mongol rulers, the Secret History of the
Mongols. After his election as Khan, he set his sites on the lands beyond
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lord.” He united both the Mongols and various Turkic clans, then launched the
“Mongol Horde” across all of Central Asia as far as the borders of Russia and
China. Over the following decades, Mongol armies conquered all of Central
Asia itself, Persia (in 1221), northern China (in 1234), Russia (in 1241), the
Abbasid Caliphate (in 1258), and southern China (in 1279). Importantly, most
of these conquests occurred under Chinngis’s sons and grandsons (he died in
1227), demonstrating that Mongol military prowess was not dependent on his
divided between the sons and grandsons of Chinggis) stretched from Hungary
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The Mongol Empire at its height, under Temujin’s grandson Kublai Khan, was the largest land
code of conduct and laws called the Yasa (historians debate whether or not
the Yasa was a codified set of laws or just a set of traditions). They were
709
of a given clan in different Tumen to water-down clan loyalty and encourage
clans.
Mongols had strict regulations for order of march, guard duty, and
maintenance of equipment. All men were expected to serve in the armies, and
the Mongols quickly and efficiently plundered the areas they conquered to
supply their troops. Mongols trained relentlessly; during the brief periods of
peace they took part in great hunts of animals which were then critiqued by
their commanders. Each warrior had several horses, all trained to respond to
flags.
The Mongols also made extensive use of spies and intelligence to gather
travelers before they arrived. They were noteworthy for being willing to
change their tactics to suit the needs of a campaign, using siege warfare, terror
710
walls) as necessary. Once the Mongols had conquered a given territory, they
would deport and use soldiers and engineers from the conquered peoples
against new targets: Persian siege engineers were used to help the conquest of
China, and later, Chinese officials were used to help extract taxes from what
The Mongol horde often devastated the lands it conquered. Some, like
the Central Asian kingdom of Khwarizm, were so devastated that the areas it
civilization was a threat that might soften his men, so he had whole cities
the areas conquered by the Mongols, however, under Chinngis’s sons and
grandsons this policy of destruction gave way to one of (often still vicious)
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The Mongols in Eastern Europe
Russia. Russia was not a united kingdom - instead, each major city was ruled
by a prince, and the princes often fought one another. When the Mongols
arrived, the Russian principalities were divided and refused to fight together,
making them easy prey for the unified and highly-organized Mongol army. By
1240, all of the major Russian cities had been either destroyed or captured –
the city of Vladimir was burned with its population still inside.
European knights and peasant foot-soldiers. Both kingdoms would have been
incorporated into the Mongol empire if not for the simple fact that the Great
Khan Ogodei (Chinngis's third son, who had become Great Khan following
Chinngis) died, and the European Tumen were recalled to the Mongol capital
of Karakorum. This event spared what very well could have been a Mongol
push into Central Europe itself; the pope at the time called an anti-Mongol
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crusade and those Europeans who understood the scope of the threat were
The Mongols were finally stopped militarily by the Mamluk Turks, the
rulers of Egypt as of the thirteenth century, who held back a Mongol invasion
in 1260. By then, the inertia of the Mongol conquests was already slowing
Temujin; the Mamluk victory did not represent the definitive defeat of the
the vast Mongol empire. By then, the Mongol khanates had become truly
independent from one another, with Mongol rule eventually collapsing over
time (a process that happened in just a few decades in some places, but took
centuries in others - Russia was not free of Mongol rule until the second half of
Mongol rule had mixed consequences for both Asian and European
history. There was a beneficial stabilization in the trade that crossed the west
713
– east axis in Eurasia as a continent, as Silk Road traders enjoyed a relatively
peaceful and stable route. It also terrified Europeans, who heard travelers’
tales of the non-Christian “Tatars” in the east who had crushed all opposition,
and in Russia it created a complex political situation in which the native Slavic
peoples were forced to pay tribute to Mongol lords. To this day, the period of
Mongol rule is often taught in Russia as the period of the "Tatar Yoke," when
any hope of progress for Russia was suspended for centuries while the rest of
kernel of truth.
spread west: the Black Death, or simply “the plague,” of the fourteenth
century. The plague devastated the areas it affected, none more so than
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Europe. That devastation was in large part due to the vulnerability of the
European population to disease thanks both to poor harvests and the lack of
were poor, Europeans not only died outright from famine, but those who
result.
check. Europeans did not understand contagion – they knew that disease
spread, but they had absolutely no idea how to prevent that spread. The
prevailing medical theory was that disease was spread by clouds of foul-
smelling gases called "miasmas," like those produced by stagnant water and
715
decay. Thus, people sincerely believed that if one could avoid the miasmas
(which of course never actually existed), they could avoid sickness. Over the
centuries, doctors advocated various techniques that were meant to dispel the
century, wearing masks that resembled the heads of birds, with the “beaks”
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Not surprisingly, given the dearth of medical knowledge, epidemics of
all kinds regularly swept across Europe. When harvests failed, the poor often
went to the cities in search of some kind of respite, either work or church-
based charity. In 1330, for instance, the official population of the northern
Italian city of Florence was 100,000, but a full 20,000 were paupers, most of
whom had come from the countryside seeking relief. The cities became
incubators for epidemics that were even more intense than those that affected
the countryside.
victim to the virulence of the Black Death from 1348 to 1351. Historians still
knowledge) disease or diseases the the Black Death consisted of, but the
by fleas, both those carried by rats and transmitted to humans, and on fleas
717
were both rats and fleas everywhere. In turn, many victims of bubonic plague
made it both incredibly virulent and lethal (about 90% of those who
The theory the Black Death was the bubonic plague runs into the
quickly as did the Black Death, although that almost certainly has much to do
with the vastly more effective sanitation and treatment available in the
modern era as compared to the medieval setting of the Black Death. One
hypothesis is that those with bubonic plague may have caught pneumonia as a
secondary infection, and that pneumonia was thus another lethal component
The plague exploded across Europe starting at the end of the 1340s. All
718
spread even further and continued to fester until 1351, when it had killed so
many people that the survivors had developed a resistance to it. The death
toll was astonishing: in the end, the Black Death killed about one-third of the
some present-day historians have calculated that it was closer to half!). Some
cities lost over half of their population; there are even cases of villages where
there was only a single survivor. This was an enormous demographic shift in
a very short amount of time that had lasting consequences for European
719
The plague’s spread, from south to north, over the course of just a few years. The section
marked in grey is incorrectly labeled “minor outbreak”: in fact, while data is difficult to come by
for that region, it seems clear that the plague hit just as hard there as elsewhere in Europe.
The only somewhat effective response to the Black Death was the
Europe locked those who had plague symptoms in their homes, often for more
and towns out of fear of infection. Even though quarantines slowed the
spread of the plague in some cases, overall they did little but delay it.
prayer and the search for scapegoats to blame for the devastation. The
God for relief, beg for forgiveness, and to look to outsiders to blame. Building
on the murderous anti-Semitism that had begun in earnest during the period
of the crusades, Jews were often the victims of this phenomenon. There was a
720
huge spike in anti-Semitic riots during plague outbreaks, as Jews were blamed
for somehow bringing the plague (a frequent accusation was that Jews had
towns whipping themselves and begging God for forgiveness. Many people
sincerely believed that the Black Death was the opening salvo of the End
involved both famine and pestilence - two of the four "horsemen" that were to
accompany the end times according to the Bible (the others, war and death,
The Black Death ended in 1351, but the plague returned roughly every
twenty years in some form. Some cases were as devastating, at least in limited
areas, as the Black Death had been. The plague did not stop entirely until the
early eighteenth century - to this day it is not clear what brought an end to
721
rat that was not as vulnerable to the plague overwhelmed the older black rats
were largely positive for many people. The demographic consequences of the
Black Death, namely its enormous death toll, resulted in a labor shortage
across all of Europe. The immediate effect was that lords tried to keep their
peasants from fleeing the land and to keep wages at the low levels they had
been at before the plague hit, sparking various peasant uprisings. Even
though those uprisings were generally bloodily put down in the end, the
overall trend was that laborers had to be paid more; their labor was simply
more valuable. In the decades that followed, then, many peasants benefited
Another group that benefited was women. For roughly a century after
the plague, women had more legal rights in terms of property ownership, the
722
right to participate in commerce, and land ownership, than they had enjoyed
before the plague’s outbreak. Women were even able to join certain craft
guilds for a time, something that was almost unheard of earlier. The reason
for this temporary improvement in the legal and economic status of women
The plague also ushered in a cultural change that came about because of
bodies. When people were dying, their families and friends were supposed to
come and view them, inoculating everyone present against the temptation to
enjoy life too much and encouraging them to greater focus on preparing their
723
The dance of death, with this image produced decades after the Black Death had already run its
course.
England and France remembered as the Hundred Years’ War, which lasted
from 1337 – 1453. That conflict was not really one war, but instead consisted
of a series of battles and shorter wars between the crowns of England and
724
The war began because of simmering resentments and dynastic
politics. The root of the problem was that the English kings were descendants
of William the Conqueror, the Norman king who had sailed across the English
Channel in 1066 and defeated the Anglo-Saxon king who then ruled
England. From that point on, the royal and noble lines of England and France
were intertwined, and as marriage between both nobles and royalty often
took place across French - English lines, the inheritance of lands and titles in
both countries was often a point of contention. The culture of nobility in both
countries was so similar that the “English” nobles generally spoke French
English royal line (the Plantagenets) often enjoyed pledges of fealty from
being as much French as English - the English King Richard the Lion-Hearted,
for instance, spent most of his career in France battling for control of more
725
was formally the property of the English royal line, with the awkward caveat
that, while a given English king might be sovereign in England, his lordship of
Aquitaine technically made him the vassal of whoever the French king
happened to be. Thus, hundreds of years after William’s conquest, the royal
and noble lines of England and France were often hard to distinguish from one
another.
The war began in the aftermath of the death of the French King Charles
IV in 1328. The king of England, Edward III, was next in line for succession,
but powerful members of the French nobility rejected his claim and instead
pledged to give the crown to a French noble of the royal line named Philip
territory of Aquitaine, Edward went to war, sparking the Hundred Years’ War
itself.
forces punctuated by the occasional large battle. English kings and knights
kept the war going because it was a way to enrich themselves – they would
726
arrive in France with a moderately-sized force of armed men to loot and
pillage. English forces tended to be better organized than were their French
counterparts, so even France’s much greater wealth and size did prevent
major English victories. The most famous of those victories was the Battle of
Agincourt in 1415, in which a smaller English force decimated the elite French
English peasant into more than the equal of a mounted French knight. The
aftermath of Agincourt saw most of the French nobility accept the English
king, Henry V, as the king of France. Henry V promptly died, however, and the
factions of English and French nobles (one French territory, Burgundy, even
declared its independence from France and became a staunch English ally for
a time).
Decades into the war, the French received an unexpected boost in their
fortunes thanks to the intervention of one of the future patron saints of France
itself: Joan of Arc. Joan was a peasant girl who walked into the middle of the
727
conflict in 1429, supporting the French Dauphin (heir) Charles VII. Joan
reported that she had received a vision from God commanding her to help the
French achieve victory against the invading English. French forces rallied
around Joan, with Joan herself leading the French forces in several
and rallying the French troops to victory. Buoyed by the sense that God was
on their side, French forces prevailed. Even though she was soon captured
and handed over to the English for trial and execution as a witch by the
Burgundians, Joan became a martyr to the French cause and, eventually, one
of the most significant French nationalist symbols. By 1453, the French forces
728
An illustration of Joan of Arc from 1505, just under 60 years after the end of the war.
The war had a devastating effect on France. Between the fighting and
the plague, its population declined by half. Many French regions suffered
economically as luxury trades shut down and whole regions were devastated
by the fighting. The French crown introduced new taxes, such as the Gabelle
(a tax on salt) and the Taille (a household tax) that further burdened
commoners. On the cultural front, the English monarchy and nobility severed
their ties with France and high English culture began to self-consciously
reshape itself as distinctly English rather than French, leading among other
729
things to the use of the English language as the language of state and the law
Even as the French and English were at each other’s throats, the
Catholic Church fell into a state of disunity, sometimes even chaos. The cause
was one of the most peculiar episodes in late medieval European history: the
Babylonian Empire in the sixth century BCE, but the late-medieval Babylonian
Captivity refers instead to the period during which the popes no longer lived
The context for this strange event was the state of the Catholic Church
as of the early fourteenth century. The Church was a very diverse, and
between Rome and the kingdoms of Europe, the popes did not exercise much
730
practical authority over the various national churches, and high-level
their respective kings than with Rome. Likewise, there were many times
during the Middle Ages when individual popes were weak and ineffectual and
could not even command obedience within the church hierarchy itself.
Over the centuries the papacy struggled, and often failed, to assert its
control over the Church as an institution and to hold the pretensions of kings
in check. Those weaknesses were reflected in a simple fact: there had been a
number of times over the centuries in which there were rival popes, generally
having rival popes undermined the central claim of the papacy to complete
authority over the Church itself and over Christian doctrine in the process (let
alone the occasional insistence by popes that their authority superseded that
The Babylonian Captivity began when Pope Boniface VIII issued a papal
bull (formal commandment) in 1303 to the effect that all kings had to
731
acknowledge his authority over even their own kingdoms, a challenge he
monarchs of Europe and the ability to defend himself. Infuriated, the French
king, Philip IV, promptly had the pope arrested and thrown in prison; he was
1305. Clement was a Frenchman with strong ties to the French nobility. At
the time, Rome was a very dangerous city, with rival noble families literally
fighting in the streets over various feuds, so Clement moved himself and the
papal office to the French city of Avignon, which was much more
(most of them Italian), who feared that the French king, then the most
powerful ruler in Europe, would have undue influence over the papacy. Their
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pattern that ultimately saw 113 French cardinals out of the 134 who were
From 1305 to 1378, the popes continued to live and work in Avignon
(despite the English invasions of the 100 Years’ War). They were not directly
controlled by the French king, as their opponents had feared, but they were
definitely influenced by French politics. They also came to accept bribes and
kickbacks for the appointment of priests and bishops, along with shady
schemes with Church lands. This situation was soon described as a new
In 1378, the new pope, Urban VI, announced his intention to move the
papacy back to Rome. As rival factions developed within the upper levels of
pope (Clement VII), and Europe thus was split between two rival popes, both
733
used at the time was “antipope.”) This led to the Great Western Schism, a
period from 1378 to 1417 during which there were as many as three rival
popes vying for power. For almost forty years, the church was a battlefield
between both rival popes and their respective followers, and laypeople and
monarchs alike were generally able to go about their business with little fear
of papal intervention.
single pope in 1417. The movement elected a new pope, Martin V, and made
the claim that church councils could and should hold the ultimate authority
over papal appointments – this concept was known as the via consilii, the
leadership. This, however, undermined the very concept of what the papacy
was: the “Doctrine of the Keys” held that the pope’s authority was passed
down directly from Christ, and that even if councils could play a role in the
practical maintenance of the church, the pope’s authority was not based on
734
their approval. Ultimately, a powerful pope, Eugene IV, reconfirmed the
absolute power of the papacy in 1431. Thus, this attempt at reform failed in
the end, inadvertently setting the stage for more radical criticisms of papal
Great Western Schism was simple: the moral and spiritual authority of the
rejecting the authority of the Church altogether, many people regarded the
Conclusion
Some of the trends, patterns, and phenomena that were to take shape
during the Renaissance era which began around 1300 began in the midst of
the crises of the Middle Ages. France and England emerged from the 100
735
labor shortage in the aftermath of the Black Death spurred a period of modest
economic growth. And, while European culture may have become more
pessimistic and xenophobic as a whole, one region was rising to wealth and
736
Chapter 3: The Renaissance
culture, art, and learning that took place between the fourteenth and sixteenth
Europe. It produced a number of artists, scientists, and thinkers who are still
Botticelli, and others. The Renaissance is justly famous for its achievements in
art and learning, and even though some of its thinkers were somewhat
nothing but the “Dark Ages,” it is still the case that the Renaissance was
“The” Renaissance lasted from about 1300 – 1500. It ended in the early
importance and the pace of change and progress in the arts and learning
slowed, but in a very real sense the Renaissance never truly ended - its
737
innovations and advances had already spread across much of Europe, and
even though Italy itself lost its prominence, the patterns that began in Italy
continued elsewhere. That was true not only of art, but of education,
The timing of the Renaissance coincided with some of the crises of the
Middle Ages described in the last chapter. The overlap in dates is explained
by the fact that most of Europe remained resolutely “medieval” during the
political structure of the Middle Ages did not suddenly change with the
flowering of the Renaissance, not least because it took so long for the
the lives of most people (especially outside of the major cities) were all but
738
Background
northern Italy. Italy did not face a major, ongoing series of wars like the
Hundred Years’ War in France. It was hit hard by the plague, but no more so
than most of the other regions of Europe. One unexpected “benefit” to Italy
was actually the Babylonian Captivity and Great Western Schism: because the
popes’ authority was so limited, the Italian cities found it easy to operate with
directly in the election of popes when it suited their interests. Likewise, the
other powers of Europe either could not or had no interest in troubling Italy:
England and France were at war, the Holy Roman Empire was weak and
fragmented, and Spain was not united until the late Renaissance period. In
short, the crises of the Middle Ages actually benefited Italy, because they were
centered elsewhere.
739
In this relatively stable social and political environment, Italy also
enjoyed an advantage over much of the rest of Europe: it was far more
Italian cities were larger and there were simply more of them as compared to
standards.
overall population. While that means that 90% of the population was either
rural or lived in small towns, there was still a far greater concentration of
urban dwellers in Italy than anywhere else in Europe. Among those cities
were also several that boasted populations of over 100,000 by the fifteenth
trade, and craftsmanship. Italian cities had large numbers of very productive
740
craft guilds and workshops producing luxury goods that were highly desirable
Economics
Italy lay at the center of the lucrative trade between Europe and the
Middle East, a status determined both by its geography and the role Italians
period. Along with the trade itself, it was in Italy that key mercantile practices
emerged for the first time in Europe. From the Arab world, Italian merchants
techniques that helped them (Italians) stay at the forefront of the European
merchants invented the commenda, a way of spreading out the risk associated
for expensive and risky commercial projects. Italian banks had agents all over
741
Europe and provided reliable credit and bills of exchange, allowing merchants
was the use of Arabic numerals instead of Roman numerals, since the former
far easier to introduce errors in calculation using the former). Overall, Italian
merchants, borrowing from their Arab and Turkic trading partners, pioneered
Benefiting from the fragmentation of the Church during the era of the
Babylonian Captivity and the Great Western Schism, Italian bankers also came
to charge interest on loans, becoming the first Christians to defy the church’s
742
usury remained, but bankers (including the Medici family that came to
wealthy that social and religious stigma alone was not enough to prevent the
since the one social role played by Jews that Christians had grudgingly
Much of the prosperity of northern Italy was based on the trade ties (not
just mercantile practices) Italy maintained with the Middle East, which by the
Constantinople as well as the Ottoman Turkish empire, the rising power in the
east. From the Turks, Italians (especially the great mercantile empire
controlled by Venice) bought precious cargo like spices, silks, porcelain, and
coffee, in return for European woolens, crafts, and bullion. The Italians were
also the go-betweens linking Asia and Europe by way of the Middle East: Italy
743
The Italian city-states were sites of manufacturing as well. Raw wool
from England and Spain made its way to Italy to be processed into cloth, and
Europe. Italian luxury goods were superior to those produced in the rest of
Europe, and soon even Italian weapons were better-made. Italian farms were
nobility and rich non-nobles spent lavishly to display their wealth as well as
their culture and learning. All of the famous Renaissance thinkers and artists
were patronized by the rich, which was how the artists and scholars were able
744
specific use of wealth: mercantile and banking riches translated into social
Political Setting
Even though the western Roman Empire had fallen apart by 476 CE, the
great cities of Italy survived in better shape than Roman cities elsewhere in
the empire. Likewise, the feudal system had never taken as hold as strongly in
Italy – there were lords and vassals, but especially in the cities there was a
large and strong independent class of artisans and merchants who balked at
subservience before lords, especially lords who did not live in the cities. Thus,
by 1200, most Italian cities were politically independent of lords and came to
Instead of kings and vassals, power was in the hands of the popoli grossi,
literally meaning the “fat people,” but here meaning simply the rich, noble and
non-noble alike. About 5% of the population in the richest cities was among
745
them. The culture of the popoli grossi was rife with flattery, backstabbing, and
titles meant less, more depended on one’s family reputation, and the most
important thing to the social elite was honor. Any perceived insult had to be
met with retaliation, meaning there was a great deal of bloodshed between
Renaissance Italy, featuring rival elite families locked in a blood feud over
honor. There was no such thing as a police force, after all, just the guards of
the rich and powerful and, usually, a city guard that answered to the city
Another aspect of the identify of the popoli grossi was that, despite their
penchant for feuds, they required a peaceful political setting on a large scale in
order for their commercial interests to prosper. Thus, they were often
746
Likewise, the focus on education and culture that translated directly into the
creation of Renaissance art and scholarship was tied to the identity of the
popoli grossi as people of peace: elsewhere in Europe noble identity was still
very much associated with war, whereas the popoli grossi of Italy wanted to
show off both their mastery of arms and their mastery of thought (along with
747
Portrait of a young Cosimo de Medici, who would become the de facto ruler of Florence in the
fifteenth century. He is depicted holding a book and wearing a sword: symbols of his learning
The central irony of the prosperity of the Renaissance was that even in
northern Italy, the vast majority of the population benefited only indirectly or
not at all. While the lot of Italian peasants was not significantly worse than
that of peasants elsewhere, poor townsfolk had to endure heavy taxes on basic
cities were “paupers,” the indigent and homeless who tried to scrape by as
laborers or sought charity from the Church. Cities were especially vulnerable
to epidemics as well, adding to the misery of urban life for the poor.
In the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth centuries, the city-
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independent cities were swallowed up by the most powerful among
them. However, as the power of the French monarchy grew in the west and
the Ottoman Turks became an active threat in the east, the most powerful
cities signed a treaty, the Peace of Lodi, in 1454 which committed each city to
the defense of the existing political order. For the next forty years, Italy
avoided major conflicts, a period that coincided with the height of the
Renaissance.
height under the Visconti family from 1277 – 1447. Milan controlled
considerable trade from Italy to the north. Its wealth was dwarfed, however,
by that of Venice.
Venice
the Doge. Its Mediterranean empire generated so much wealth that Venice
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minted more gold currency than did England and France combined, and its
gold coins (ducats) were always exactly the same weight and purity and were
representation for all of the moneyed classes, but no one represented the
The main source of Venice's prosperity was its control of the spice
trade. It is difficult to overstate the value of spices during the Middle Ages and
Renaissance - Europeans had a limitless hunger for spices (as an aside, note
that the theory that spices were desirable because they masked the taste of
rotten meat is patently false; medieval and Renaissance-era Europeans did not
eat spoiled food). Unlike other luxury goods that could be produced in Europe
itself, spices could only be grown in the tropical and subtropical regions of
1300 40% of all ships bearing spices offloaded in Venice, and by 1500 it was
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up to 60%. The prices commanded by spices ensured that Venetian
Indonesia, halfway around the world from Italy) was worth a full 60,000% of
its original price once it reached Europe. Likewise, spices like pepper, cloves,
and cinnamon could only be imported rather than grown in Europe, and
Venice controlled the majority of that hugely lucrative trade. Spices were, in
Based on that wealth, Venice was the first place to create true banks
(named after the desks, banchi, where people met to exchange or borrow
too risky to travel with chests full of gold, so Venetian banks were the first to
issued from one bank branch at a certain amount, redeemable only by the
account owner. That individual could then travel to any city with a Venetian
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bank branch and redeem the letter of credit, which could then be spent on
trade goods.
formal diplomacy in its relations with neighboring states. By the late 1400s
practically every royal court in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa had
spearheaded many of the practices and patterns that later spread across
northern Italy and, ultimately, to the rest of Europe: the political power of
governance. Citizens voted on laws and served in official posts for set terms,
with powerful families dominating the system. By 1434 the real power was in
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the hands of the Medici family, who controlled the city government (the
Signoria) and patronized the arts. Rising from obscurity from a resolutely
the papacy, acquiring vast wealth as a result. The Medici spent huge sums on
buildings, and the completion of the great dome of the city’s cathedral, at the
time the largest freestanding dome in Europe. They also patronized most of
the most famous Renaissance artists (at the time as well as in the present),
priding themselves not just on wealth, but knowledge and refinement. By the
fifteenth century there were 8,000 children in both religious and civic schools
could quote the great poet, and native of Florence, Dante Alighieri (author of
The Divine Comedy). At the height of Medici, and Florentine, power in the
second half of the fifteenth century, Florence was unquestionably the leading
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city in all of Italy in terms of art and scholarship. That central position
independence.
The city of Rome, however, remained firmly in papal control despite the
major Renaissance city after the end of the Great Western Schism. The popes
re-asserted their control of the Papal States in central Italy, in some cases (like
those of Julius II, r. 1503 – 1513) personally taking to the battlefield to lead
troops against the armies of both foreign invaders and rival Italians. The
popes usually proved effective at secular rule, but their spiritual leadership
was undermined by their tendency to live like kings rather than priests; the
most notorious, Alexander VI (r. 1492 – 1503), sponsored his children (the
infamous Borgia family) in their attempts to seize territory all across northern
Italy. Thus, even when “good popes” came along occasionally, the overall
pattern was that the popes did fairly little to reinforce the spiritual authority
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Regardless of their moral failings, the popes restored Rome to
during the Babylonian Captivity. Under the so-called "Renaissance popes," the
Vatican itself became the gloriously decorated spectacle that it is today. Julius
II paid Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and
many of the other famous works of Renaissance artists stud the walls and
facades of Vatican buildings. In short, popes after the end of the Great
Western Schism were often much more focused on behaving like members of
the popoli grossi, fighting for power and honor and patronizing great works of
art and architecture, rather than worrying about the spiritual authority of the
Church to laypeople.
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Print
proliferation of the movable-type printing press. Not until the invention of the
typewriter in the late nineteenth century and the Internet in the late twentieth
about. Print vastly increased the rate at which information could be shared,
and in turn, it underwrote the rise in literacy of the early modern period. It
production.
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Middle Ages had been brought about by technology (heavier plows, new
fast and comparatively cheap, more people had access to that information
than ever before. Print was also an enormous leap forward in the long-term
view of human technology as a whole, since the scribal tradition had been in
an image or text with ink, then pressing that ink onto paper. The concept had
existed for centuries, first invented in China and used also in Korea and parts
of Central Asia, but there is no evidence that the concept was transmitted
from Asia to Europe (it might have, but there is simply no proof either way). In
the late 1440s, a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg from the city
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of Meinz struck on the idea of carving individual letters into small, movable
viable to print not just a single page of text, but to simply rearrange the letters
printed with clear, readable letters, and at a fraction of the cost of hand-
copying.
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A modern replica of a printing press of Gutenberg’s era.
printed book to reach a mass market, namely a copy of the Latin Vulgate (the
official version of the Bible used by the Church). Later dubbed the “Gutenberg
Bible,” it became available for purchase in 1455 and in turn became the
copies of the Bible that quickly became apparent to church officials was that
errors in the text were far less likely to be introduced as compared to hand-
copying. Likewise, once new presses were built in cities and towns outside of
Meinz, it became cheaper to purchase a printed Bible than one written in the
scribal tradition.
Print spread quickly. Within about twenty years there were printing
presses in all of the major cities in Western and Southern Europe. Gutenberg
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cities everywhere once the benefits of print became apparent. By 1500, about
fifty years after its invention, the printing press had already largely replaced
the scribal tradition in book production (there was a notable lengthy delay in
its diffusion to Eastern Europe, especially Russia, however – it took until 1552
for a press to come to Russia). Presses tended to operate in large cities and
smaller independent cities, especially in the Holy Roman Empire. The free
cities of the German lands and Italy were thus as likely to host a press as were
carved blocks that were sized to fit alongside movable type. Printed
rates remained low overall; even when people could not read, however, they
illustrations. Mere decades after the invention of the press, cheap printed
posters and pamphlets were commonplace in the major cities and towns,
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often shared and read aloud in public gatherings and taverns. Thus, even the
be disseminated far more quickly than ever before. Whereas with the scribal
tradition, readers tended to hold books in reverence, with the reader having
to seek out the book, now books could go to readers. In turn, there was a real
incentive for all reasonably prosperous people to learn to read because they
religious texts dominated early print, both literary works and political
sheer volume of all kinds of written material: in the first fifty years after the
invention of the press, more books were printed than had been copied in
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legacy of good penmanship surviving well into the twentieth century (in part
because it was not until the typewriter was invented in the nineteenth century
the past, while the Church did its best to crack down on heresies, it was not
be mass-produced, so the only ideas that spread quickly did so through word
of mouth. Print made censorship both much more difficult and much more
important, since now anyone could print just about anything. As early as the
1460s, print introduced disruptive ideas in the form of the next best-seller to
follow the Bible itself, a work that advocated the pursuit of salvation without
reference to the Church entitled The Imitation of Christ. The Church would
several works were already banned by the time the Index was created.
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While there were other effects of print, one bears particular note: it
began the process of standardizing language itself. The long, slow shift from a
were able to read the same works and understand their grammar and their
meaning. For the first time, the very concept of proper spelling emerged, and
Patronage
patronage, a member of the popoli grossi would pay an artist in advance for a
work of art. That work of art would be displayed publicly - most obviously in
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municipal buildings that spread across Italy during the Renaissance. In turn,
that art would attract political power and influence to the person or family
who had paid for it because of the honor associated with funding the best
artists and being associated with their work. While there was plenty of
as often took the form of an ongoing battle over who could commission the
best art and then "give" that art to their home city, rather than actual fighting
in the streets.
Cosimo de Medici, then the leader of the Medici family and its vast banking
empire, threw a city-wide party called the Council of Florence in 1439. The
huge church council that brought together representatives of both the Latin
Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church in a (doomed) attempt to heal the
schism that divided Christianity. The Catholic hierarchy also used the
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Christian Bible itself (in question were which books ought to be included in
the Old Testament). The entire affair was paid by Cosimo out of his personal
fortune - he even paid for the travel expenses of visiting dignitaries from
places as far away as India and Ethiopia. The Council clinched the Medici as
the family of Florence for the next generation, with Cosimo being described by
Italy precisely because the wealthy and powerful of northern Italy competed
to pay for the best art and the most innovative scholarship - without that form
Humanism
rebirth. But what was being reborn? The answer is the culture and ideas of
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classical Europe, namely ancient Greece and Rome. Renaissance thinkers and
artists very consciously made the claim that they were reviving long-lost
and artists was that the ancient Greeks and Romans had achieved truly
incredible things, things that had not been, and possibly could never be,
Greek and Roman art and scholarship (correspondence in classical Latin, for
example), but over the decades the more outstanding Renaissance thinkers
struck out on new paths of their own - still inspired by the classics, but
both the beauty and the centrality of humankind in the universe. Humanists
held that humankind was inherently rational, beautiful, and noble, rather than
debased, wicked, or weak. They sought to celebrate the beauty of the human
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body in their art, of the human mind and human achievements in their
artistic and intellectual possibility that cited the achievements of the ancient
creation.
individuality, along with the idea that education ought to arrive at a well-
orthodoxy; the point of education was to create a more competent and well-
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Along with the idea of a well-rounded individual, Renaissance thinkers
championed the idea of civic humanism: one’s moral and ethical standing was
tied to devotion to one’s city. This was a Greek and Roman concept that the
Medici of Florence are the ultimate example: there was a tremendous effort on
the part of the rich and powerful to invest in the city in the form of building
projects and art. This was tied to the prestige of the family, of course, but it
concept of patriotism.
elites wanted skilled bureaucrats to staff their merchant empires; they needed
(girls and boys alike, at least in certain cities like Florence) directly, along with
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the role played by private tutors. These schools and tutors emphasized
practical education: rhetoric, math, and history. Thus, one of the major effects
of the Italian Renaissance was that this new form of education, usually
as well, but the term "Renaissance man" was used exclusively for men) was a
man who cultivated classical virtues, which were not quite the same as
eloquence, and honor, among others. Drawing from the work of thinkers like
support the idea of a virtuous life that was not the same thing as a specifically
person simply through studying the classics – all of the major figures of the
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Renaissance were Christians, but they insisted that one’s moral status could
Christian piety. While the Renaissance case for the debasement of medieval
culture was overstated (medieval intellectual life prospered during the late
Middle Ages) there was definitely a distinct kind of intellectual courage and
optimism that came out of the return to classical models over medieval ones
girls, they insisted that it was to be very different than that offered to
boys. Girls were to read specific texts drawn from the Bible, the “Church
Fathers” (important theologians in the early history of the Church), and from
classical Greek and Roman writers that emphasized morality, modesty, and
wife, not an independent thinker in her own right. That theme would remain
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come, although it is clear from the number of independent, intellectually
courageous women writers throughout the early modern period that girls’
the end.
that lasted for centuries: the querelles des femmes (“debates about
numerous essays and books contesting whether or not women were naturally
lead to intelligence and morality comparable with those of men. While men
had dominated these debates early on, women educated in the humanist
both that education was key to elevating women’s competence and that
women shared precisely the same spiritual and moral nature as did
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agree, most remained adamant that women were biologically and spiritually
education.
Important Thinkers
renowned as both. What Renaissance thinkers had in common was that they
embraced the ideals of humanism and used humanism as their inspiration for
language), theology, history, and political theory. In other words, reading the
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Dante (1265 - 1321)
major figure who anticipated the Renaissance rather than being alive during
date). Experiencing what would later be called a mid-life crisis, Dante turned
of the late Middle Ages: The Divine Comedy. Written in his own native dialect,
the Tuscan of the city of Florence, The Divine Comedy describes Dante’s
descent into hell, guided by the spirit of the classical Roman poet Virgil. Dante
and Virgil emerge on the other side of the earth, with Dante ascending the
Dante’s work, which soon became justly famous in Italy and then
thought. Dante’s travels through hell, purgatory, and heaven in the poem are
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replete with encounters with two categories of people: Italians of Dante’s
lifetime or the recent past, and both real and mythical figures from ancient
Greece and Rome. In other words, Dante was indifferent to the entire period
fate of the great thinkers and heroes of the classical age would have been (and
work became so famous that it established Tuscan as the basis of what would
would eventually come to read the Comedy as a matter of course and it came
process.
and imitating the great writers and thinkers of the past. Petrarch personally
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rediscovered long-lost works by Cicero, widely considered the greatest writer
of ancient Rome during the republican period, and set about training himself
in a classical, grammatically spotless Latin (as opposed to the often sloppy and
emulate the classics in their writing, thought, and values. He went on to write
many works of poetry and prose that were based on the model provided by
Petrarch was responsible for coming up with the very idea of the "Dark
Ages" that had separated his own era from the greatness of the classical
past. His own poetry and writings became so popular among other educated
people that he deserves a great deal of personal credit for sparking the
Renaissance itself; following Petrarch, the idea that the classical world might
force.
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Christine de Pizan (1364 - 1430)
Christine de Pizan was the most famous and important woman thinker
and writer of the Renaissance era. Her father, the court astrologer of the
French king Charles V, was exceptional in that he felt it important that his
daughter receive the same quality of education afforded to elite men at the
time. She went on to become a famous poet and writer in her own right, being
French and Italian nobles. Her best-known work was The Book of the City of
Ladies, in which she attacked the then-universal idea that women were
naturally unintelligent, sinful, and irrational; it was a key text in the querelles
des femmes noted above. Instead, she argued, history provided a vast catalog
of women who had been moral, pious, intelligent, and competent, and that it
was men's pride and the refusal of men to allow women to be properly
educated that held women back. In many ways, the City of Ladies was the first
truly feminist work in European history, and it is striking that she was
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supported by, and listened to by, elite men due to her obvious intellectual gifts
In the illustration above, Christine de Pizan presents a copy of The City of Ladies to a French
style, without linear perspective, despite its approximate date of 1475. This is one example of
the traditional scholastic education of the late-medieval church and the new
humanistic style that emerged from the Renaissance. Of his various talents,
one of the most important was his mastery of philology: the history of
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medieval Latin, but in the Greek of the New Testament (i.e. most of the earliest
versions of the New Testament of the Bible are written in the vernacular
Greek of the first century CE). He also became conversant in Hebrew, which
In the above well-known portrait of Erasmus, he is depicted in heavy, fur-lined robes and hat, a
necessity even when indoors in Northern Europe for much of the year. Realistic portraiture was
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Armed with his lingual virtuosity, Erasmus undertook a vast study and
Greek originals and correcting the Latin Vulgate that was the most widely
used version at the time. In the process, Erasmus corrected the New
did not re-translate the Old Testament from the Hebrew, he did point out
errors in it as well).
because he was not officially authorized to carry out his studies and
meaning. The Christian message that emerged from the “correct” version of
the New Testament was a deeply personal philosophy of prayer, devotion, and
morality that did not correspond to many of the structures and practices of
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the Latin Church. He was also an advocate of translations of the Bible into
attack on corruption within the church, and Handbook of the Christian Soldier,
official who spent his life in the court of a ruler - in his case, as part of the city
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Machiavelli was caught up in the whirlwind of power politics at court and
which he titled The Prince. Here, Machiavelli detailed how an effective ruler
should behave: training constantly in war, forcing his subjects to fear (but not
hate) him, studying the ancient past for role models like Alexander the Great
and Julius Caesar, and never wasting a moment worrying about morality when
power was on the line. In the process, Machiavelli created what was arguably
the first work of "political science" that abandoned the moralistic approach of
hopes that he would be allowed to return from exile (he detested the rural
Florence). Instead, The Prince caused a scandal when it came out for
completely ignoring the role of God and Christian morality in politics, and
Machiavelli died not long after. That being noted, Machiavelli is now
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remembered as a pioneering political thinker. It is safe to assume that far
more rulers have consulted The Prince for ideas of how to maintain their
power over the years than one of the moralistic tracts that was preferred
Castiglione was the author of The Courtier, published at the end of his
life in 1528. Whereas Machiavelli's The Prince was a practical guide for rulers,
members of the Church, and other social elites who served and schemed in the
courts of princes: courtiers. The work centered on what was needed to win
the prince’s favor and to influence him, not just avoiding embarrassment at
court. This was tied to the growing sense of what it was to be “civilized” –
Italians at the time were renowned across Europe for their refinement, the
quality of their dress and jewelry, their wit in conversation, and their good
taste. The relatively crude tastes of the nobility of the Middle Ages were
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“revised” starting in Italy, with Castiglione serving as both a symptom and
clever, and subtle in his actions and words, a true politician rather than
merely a warrior who happened to have inherited some land. Going forward,
died, no less a personage than the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V lamented
despite the fact that Petrarch should be credited for creating the very concept
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creativity of the great Renaissance artists themselves, who both imitated
classical models of art and ultimately forged entirely new artistic paths of
their own.
Medieval art (called "Gothic" after one of the Germanic tribes that had
from several angles at once to the viewer and had no sense of three-
and overwhelming rather than refined and delicate; the great examples of
Gothic architecture are undoubtedly the cathedrals built during the Middle
Ages, often beautiful and inspiring but a far cry from the symmetrical, airy
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Another example of Gothic art. The artist, Lorenzo Monaco, painted during the Renaissance
period, but the work was created before linear perspective had replaced the “two-dimensional”
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Florentine artist, architect, and engineer named Filippo Brunelleschi
became a prominent client of the Medici, and with their political and financial
Florence. For generations, the cathedral of Florence had stood unfinished, its
main tower having been built too large and too tall for any architect to
top of a tower over 350 feet high. By studying ancient Roman structures and
employing his own incredible intellect, Brunelleschi built the dome in such a
way that it held its internal structure together during the construction
hundreds of feet in the air and was even known to personally ascend the
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both his fame as an architect and the Medici's role as the greatest patrons of
Contemporary photograph of the Florence Cathedral, with Brunelleschi’s dome on the right.
artistic concepts in history: linear perspective. He was the first person in the
787
piece of paper or the equivalent, in such a way that they looked realistically
three-dimensional (i.e. having depth, as in looking off into the distance and
seeing objects that are farther away "look smaller" than those nearby). Here,
al-Haytham, whose Book of Optics laid out theories of light and sight
perception that described linear perspective. The Book of Optics was available
the ability for artists to create realistic depictions of their subjects. This
ideas, the beauty of the human body and mind, and Christian piety. Botticelli
plaster), portraits, and both biblical and classical scenes. Two of his most
The Adoration of the Magi (1475), above, depicts members of the Medici
family, Botticelli’s patrons, as taking part in one of the key scenes from the
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birth of Christ. Botticelli even included himself in the painting; his self-
portrait is the figure on the far right. Note how all of the figures are dressed as
wealthy Italians of the fifteenth century, not Jews, Romans, and Persians of the
painting, no attempt was made to depict people as they might have appeared
at the time. Instead, the paintings projected the world of the popoli grossi
back in time, sometimes (as with this example) even including portraits of
790
The Birth of Venus (1485) celebrates a key moment in Greek mythology
when the goddess of love, sexuality, and beauty is born from the sea. Here
Botticelli pushed the boundaries of Renaissance art (and what was culturally
acceptable his contemporaries) by glorifying not just the beauty of the human
completely rejected the asceticism associated with Christian piety during the
pious Christian throughout his life. In 1490 Botticelli fell under the influence
its “vanities” (art, rich dress, and general worldliness) and call for a strict,
to support the claim, some stories had it that Botticelli even destroyed some of
executed in 1493, Botticelli did not go on to produce art at the same pace he
791
had before the 1490s. By then, of course, he had already clinched his place in
Da Vinci was famous in his own time as both one of the greatest painters
of his age and as what we would now call a scientist – at the time, he was
sought after for his skill at engineering, overseeing the construction of the
points. He was hired by a whole swath of the rich and powerful in Italy and
France; in his old age he was the official chief painter and engineer of the
French king, living in a private chateau provided for him and receiving
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Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Note how the walls and ceiling tiles appear to slant
downwards toward a point at the horizon behind Jesus (in the center). That imaginary point -
the “vanishing point” - was one of the major artistic breakthroughs associated with linear
skills. While the practice of autopsy for medical knowledge was nothing new -
doctors in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe alike had used autopsies
793
dozens of dissections of bodies (most of them executed criminals) and drew
and weapons to fantastical ones like flying machines based on the anatomy of
birds.
One of Da Vinci’s anatomical sketches, in this case examining the skeletal structure of the arm.
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Da Vinci is remembered today thanks as much to his diagrams of things
like flying machines as for his art. Ironically, while he was well known as a
practical engineer at the time, no one had a clue that he was an inventor in the
technological sense: he never built physical models of his ideas, and he never
published his concepts, so they remained unknown until well after his
his own lifetime, patronized by the city council of Florence (run by the Medici)
and the pope alike. He created numerous works, most famously the statue of
the David and the paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The latter
work took him four years of work, during which he argued constantly with the
Pope, Julius II, who treated him like an artisan servant rather than the true
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the most famous artist in Europe thanks to his sculptures. By the time he
completed the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he had to be accepted as one of the
greatest painters of his age as well, not just the single most famous sculptor of
the time.
Michelangelo’s David, completed in 1504 (it took three years to complete). The statue was
meant to celebrate an ideal of masculine beauty, inspired by the example of Greek sculpture
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In the end, a biography of Michelangelo written by a friend helped
cement the idea that there was an important distinction between mere
artisans and true artists, the latter of whom were temperamental and
mercurial but possessed of genius. Thus, the whole idea of the artist as an
Conclusion
process took many decades, both humanist scholarship and education on the
one hand and classically-inspired art and architecture on the other spread
beyond Italy over the course of the fifteenth century. By the sixteenth
elite education itself, joining with (or rendering obsolete) medieval scholastic
797
building. Along with the political and technological innovations described in
the following chapters, Renaissance learning and art helped bring about the
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Chapter 4: Politics in the Renaissance Era
the kings and nobility of the rest of Europe and the elites of the Italian city-
states, especially after a series of wars at the end of the fifteenth and
beginning of the sixteenth century saw the larger monarchies of Europe exert
Detailed below, a new regional power arose in the Middle East and
1453, the ancient Roman city of Constantinople fell to the Turks, by which
time the Turks had already seized control of the entire Balkan region (i.e. the
799
region north of Greece including present-day Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Albania,
and Macedonia). The rise in Turkish power in the east spelled trouble for the
east-to-west trade routes the Italian cities had benefited from so much since
the era of the crusades, and despite deals worked out between Venice and the
Ottomans, the profits to be had from the spice and luxury trade diminished (at
northern European crafts were produced that rivaled Italian products and
undermined the demand for the latter. Thus, the relative degree of prosperity
in Italy vs. the rest of Europe declined going into the sixteenth century.
The real killing stroke to the Italian Renaissance was the collapse of the
independence arose from the growing power of the Kingdom of France and of
north. The French king, Charles VIII, decided to seize control of Milan, citing a
800
dubious claim tied up in the web of dynastic marriage, and a Milanese
pretender invited in the French to help him seize control of the despotism in
1494. All of the northern Italian city-states were caught in the crossfire of
alliances and counter-alliances that ensued; the Medici were exiled from
Florence the same year for offering territory to the French in an attempt to get
The result was the Italian Wars that ended the Renaissance. The three
great powers of the time, France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Spain, jockeyed
with one another and with the papacy (which behaved like just another
warlike state) to seize Italian territory. Italy became a battleground and, over
the next few decades, the independence of the Italian cities was either
the cities became territories or puppets of one or the other of the great
powers, and in the process the Italian countryside was devastated and the
financial resources of the cities were drained. In the aftermath of the Italian
Wars, only the Papal States of central Italy remained truly politically
801
independent, and the Italian peninsula would not emerge from under the
shadow of the greater powers to its north and west until the nineteenth
century.
That being noted, the Renaissance did not really end. What "ended"
with the Italian Wars was Italian financial and commercial dominance and the
glory days of scholarship and artistic production that had gone with it. By the
time the Italian Wars started, all of the patterns and innovations first
developed in Italy had already spread north and west. In other words, "The
century, so even the end of Italian independence did not jeopardize the
Italy.
802
and accounting) were all combined in humanistic education. Royal
Italian mercantile practices for their obvious benefits (e.g. the superiority of
Even the Church, which continued to educate its priests in the older
members of the Church, benefiting from both their scholastic and their
was one such priest, as was the most important figure in the Protestant
803
Likewise, the clear superiority of Italian artists and architects during the
Italy. Those artists tended to study under Italian masters, then return to their
northern Europe, particularly the Low Countries (i.e. the areas that would
While the city-states of northern Italy were enjoying the height of their
804
chapters, the medieval system of monarchy was one in which kings were
really just the first among nobles; their power was based primarily on the
lands they owned through their family dynasty, not on the taxes or deference
nobles could field personal armies that were as large as those of the king,
especially since armies were almost always a combination of loyal knights (by
levies and mercenaries. Standing armies were almost nonexistent and wars
began to wield more power and influence. The long-term pattern from about
1350 – 1500 was for the largest monarchies to expand their territory and
wealth, which allowed them to fund better armies, which led to more
forced to do the bidding of larger ones; this is true of the Italian city-states and
805
War and the Gunpowder Revolution
monarchies were originally the product of the Germanic conquests at the end
of the Roman period, and it was a point of great pride among noble families to
be able to trace their family lines back to the warlords of old. Political loyalty
was to the king one served, not the territory in which one lived. Likewise,
territories were won through war or marriage, so they did not necessarily
make sense on a map; many kings ruled over a patchwork of different regions
that were not necessarily adjacent (i.e. they did not physically abut one
another; a present-day example is the fact that Alaska is part of the United
States but is not contiguous with the "lower 48" states). Kings not only fought
wars to glorify their line and to seize territory, but they had nobles who egged
them on since war was also fought for booty. Kings and nobles alike trained in
806
fanatics about hunting. Henry VIII of England spent about two-thirds of his
developed in China, but first used militarily in the Middle East, gunpowder
inaccurate and dangerous (to the user) by later standards - they frequently
exploded, they were grossly inaccurate, and they took a long time to
reload. They were also, however, both lethal and relatively easy to use. It was
easy to train men to use gunpowder weapons, and those weapons could easily
kill a knight who had spent his entire life training to fight.
Thus, by the later part of the fifteenth century, wars were simply fought
differently than they had been in the Middle Ages. There was still the
symbolic core of the king and his elite noble knights on horseback, but the
807
pikemen (i.e. soldiers who fought with long spears called pikes) supplemented
soldiers for hire, mercenaries, who fought for pay instead of honor or
territory.
ones or mercenaries for hire). The most famous case of the superiority of
finally spelled the end of the Byzantine Empire. The result of the artillery
revolution was that fortresses and walls had to be redesigned and rebuilt
quite literally from the ground up, a hugely expensive undertaking that forced
808
Illustration of a siege during the 100 Years’ War. Cannons were introduced by the second half
of the war, but note the fact that most of the soldiers remain armed with bows and pikes - the
were fought. In the process, states found themselves forced to come up with
809
wealth, leading to new taxes to keep revenue flowing in. Royal governments
also turned to officials drawn from the towns and cities, men whose education
came to resemble that of the humanist schools and tutors of Italy. Humanism
thus arrived from Italy via the staffing of royal offices, ultimately in service of
war. It is also worth noting that most of these new royal officials were not of
before. Likewise, whereas members of the nobility believed that they owned
their titles and authority, royal officials did not – they were dependent on
their respective kings. Kings could not fire their nobles, but they could fire
their officials. Thus, this new breed of educated bureaucrat had to be good at
The major effort of the new royal officials (despised by the old nobility
as “new men”) was expanding the crown’s reach. They targeted both the
nobles and, especially, the Church, which was the largest and richest
810
institution in Europe. One iconic example was the fact that the French crown
almost completely controlled the French Church (despite battles with the
papacy over this control), and directly appointed French bishops. In turn,
those bishops often served the state as much as they did the church.
The very idea of the right of a government, in this case that of the king,
to levy taxes that were applicable to the entire territory under its control
dates from this period. Starting in the fourteenth century, the kingdoms of
Europe started levying taxes on both commodities, like salt, that were needed
by everyone, and on people just for being there (a head tax or a hearth
tax). The medieval idea had been that the king was supposed to live on the
revenues from his own estates; it was the new monarchies of the Renaissance
period that successfully promoted the view that kings had the right to levy
That being noted, nowhere did kings succeed in simply levying taxes
representative bodies from the nobility, the church, and (typically) the cities
811
had the right to approve new taxes; kings were able to secure approval by
rewarding loyalty with additional titles, gifts, land, and promises of no future
which strongly asserted its control over taxation, a role played in France by
Spain
In the Middle Ages, Spain had been divided between small Christian
kingdoms in the north and larger Muslim ones in the south. The Crusades
were part of a centuries-long series of wars the Christian Spaniards called the
Reconquest, which reached its culmination in the late fifteenth century. Spain
became a powerful and united kingdom for the first time when the monarchs
812
of two of the Christian kingdoms were married in 1479: Queen Isabella of
Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon. During their own lifetimes Aragon and
but the marriage ensured that Isabella and Ferdinand’s daughter Joanna and
her son Charles V would go on to rule over Spain as a single, unified kingdom.
complete the Reconquest of the Iberian peninsula, and in 1492 they succeeded
in doing so, capturing Grenada, the last Muslim kingdom. Full of crusading
zeal, they immediately set about rooting out "heretics" like the kingdom's
the kingdom that same year. In 1502 they gave the same ultimatum to the
813
The Spanish monarchs also attacked the privileges of their own nobility,
in some cases literally destroying the castles of defiant nobles and forcing
nobles to come and pay homage at court (in the process neutralizing them as a
New World in 1492, recalcitrant nobles were often shipped off as governors of
islands thousands of miles away. They also succeeded in reforming the tax
1500 the Spanish army was the largest and most feared in Europe.
power, not merely the royal wife of a king) of the entire Renaissance era. She
tended to rule with more boldness and vision than did Ferdinand, personally
leading Castilian troops during the last years of the Reconquest, sponsoring
Columbus’s voyage, and presiding over the larger and richer of the two major
814
rulers asserting greater power over their respective kingdoms than had the
In many ways, the sixteenth century was “the Spanish century,” when
Spain was the most prosperous and powerful kingdom in Europe, especially
after the flow of silver from the Americas began. Spain went from a disunited,
decades.
England
It initially seemed like England would follow a very different path than
did Spain; while Spain was becoming stronger and more unified, England
plunged into decades of civil war before a strong monarchy emerged. After
the end of the Hundred Years’ War, English soldiers and knights returned with
few prospects at home. They enlisted in the service of rival nobles houses,
ultimately fueling a conflict within the royal family between two different
branches, the Lancasters and the Yorks. The result was a violent conflict over
815
the crown called the War of the Roses, lasting from 1455 – 1485. Ultimately, a
Welsh prince named Henry Tudor who was part of the extended family of
Lancasters defeated Richard III of York and claimed the throne as King Henry
VII.
part through the Star Court, a royal court used to try nobles suspected of
betraying him or undermining the king’s authority. The Star Court’s judges
were royal officials appointed by Henry, and it regularly used torture to obtain
confessions from the accused. Henry also seized the lands of rebellious lords
and banned private armies that did not ultimately report to him. The result
was a streamlined political system under his control and a nobility that
remained loyal to him as much out of fear as genuine allegiance. The sixteenth
government and the gentry, the landowning class who exercised the lion’s
816
That alliance was shored up by staggering levels of official violence
the 30 years between 1580 and 1610, a rate which if applied to the present-
day United States would amount to 46,000 executions a year. Criminals who
in order to inspire (in so many words from magistrates at the time) terror
violence and its relatively small population, England did emerge as a powerful
France
France emerged at the same time as the only serious rival to Spain. The
French king Charles VII (r. 1422 – 1461), the same king who finally won the
100 Years’ War for France and expelled the English, created the first French
professional army that was directly loyal to the crown. He funded it with the
817
taille, the direct tax on both peasants and nobles that had originally been
authorized by the nobility and rich merchants of France during the latter part
of the Hundred Years’ War, and the gabelle, the salt tax. Each of these taxes
make the new taxes permanent. In other words, he converted what had been
the monarchy. He was called “The Spider” for his ability to trap weak nobles
and seize their lands under various legal pretenses. He also expelled the Jews
process, and he even liquidated the old crusading order of the Knights
his death, the French monarchy was well funded and exercised increasing
818
The Holy Roman Empire
Renaissance era. Germany was simply a region, a large part of central Europe
in which most, but not all, people spoke various dialects of the German
The Holy Roman Empire dated back to the year 800 CE, when the
pope. The point of the title was to convey on Charlemagne, and the vast
territory he had conquered by the year 800, the historical legacy of the Roman
Empire. In doing so, the imperial position was an attempt to legitimize the
greatest king of the time by association with the legacy of the ancient
819
world. Likewise, an explicit link was made between the pope and the emperor
The Empire itself only stayed united for a short time after
Charlemagne’s life; his three grandsons divided it, and it would never again
see genuine political unity. Instead, the title and the concept survived, but the
the end of a longer list of titles carried by whoever the emperor happened to
be at a given time. The “real” power of any given emperor was determined
not by the imperial title, but by the other lands and titles he had inherited
Charles IV, issued the Golden Bull, which created a system by which future
rulers scattered across the empire (four princes and three archbishops) had
the right to vote on imperial succession. Starting in 1438, the rich and
820
powerful princely Austrian family of Habsburg was able to secure the title and
consistently able to offer the largest bribes to the electors. The Habsburgs
were also favored for leadership by the electors because their kingdoms
bordered the growing Ottoman Turkish empire, and thus they played a vital
role in holding the Turks in check. From 1438 to 1806, when the empire
and church lands met to petition the emperor and to debate political issues of
the day. Practically speaking, the Diet had little impact on the laws of the
constituent states of the empire. The emperor had the right to issue decrees,
but any member state in the empire could safely ignore those decrees unless
the emperor was willing to back them with his own force (meaning, after
821
While the Holy Roman Empire was thus a far cry from the increasingly
of the most powerful royal lines, and their own territories stretched from
Hungary to the New World by the sixteenth century. The greatest emperor (in
terms of the sheer amount of territory he ruled) was Charles V, who ruled
The sheer number and variety of Charles V’s territorial possessions and
perspective. He was emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and king of Spain,
southern German lands, duke of others, and even claimed sovereignty over
Land). Most of these titles were not the result of military conquests - they
were places he had inherited from his ancestors. The unofficial Habsburg
motto was “Let others wage war. You, happy Austria, marry to
822
prosper.” Charles ruled not only the Habsburg possessions in Europe, but the
enormous new (Spanish) empire that had emerged in the New World since
The European possessions of Charles V. Note how his territories were non-contiguous (i.e.
they were not geographically united) because they were primarily the results of lands he
ongoing defensive wars against both France and the Turks, and his territories
823
were so far-flung that he spent most of his life traveling between them. He
eventually abdicated in 1558, and recognizing that the Habsburg lands were
Austria (Ferdinand also became Holy Roman Emperor) and his son Philip II in
Spain and its possessions. Henceforth, the two branches of the Habsburgs
were united in their Catholicism and their enmity with France, but little else.
The single most powerful state of the early modern period in the region
of Western Civilization was not based in Europe, but the Middle East: the
European states rather than being described in adequate detail. That is both
ironic and unfortunate, since the Ottoman Empire was the very model of a
824
prosperous, and engaged in not just warfare but an enormous amount of
commerce with other states, very much including the states of Europe.
were left in the wake of the devastating Mongol invasions of the thirteenth
Asia; they spoke various related dialects and share a common ethnic
origin. Traditionally, along with the Mongol people further to their east, the
Turks were among the most fierce steppe nomads, living by herding animals
The Turks began the transition from steppe nomads to the rulers of
settled kingdoms by the tenth century, culminating with the Seljuk invasion of
the eleventh century. The Turks were driven by two motivations: the
looting defeated enemies. They made frequent war against Byzantium, the
Arab Muslim states, and, as often, against each other. While organized initially
along tribal and clan lines, they took pains to imitate the more settled Islamic
825
empires that had come before them by practicing Islamic (shariah) law and
“Ottoman.”
lands of the earlier Caliphates and, for the first time, parts of Europe that had
never before been held by Islamic rulers, including the islands of the eastern
Mediterranean, Greece, and the Balkans. In 1453, the Ottoman Sultan (king)
restored it to its former glory. By his death in 1481, it was once again one of
the great cities of Europe, and by 1600 its population had reached 700,000,
making it the largest city in Europe or the Middle East. The capture of
826
Ottomans saw themselves as the inheritors not only of the earlier Islamic
The sixteenth century was the high point of Ottoman power, influence,
prosperity, and prestige. Under Sultan Selim I (“The Grim,” r. 1512 - 1520),
Ottoman forces conquered Egypt from the Mameluke Turks and took over
rulership and oversight of the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina,
hitherto under Mameluke control. Selim was equal parts ambitious and
sons away from the capital, having each trained in politics and war to ensure
that each was well prepared to take the throne. The ruthless corollary
expectation was that, when the sultan died, his sons would compete to win
over the court and military command, the winner then having his brothers
murdered to eliminate his rivals and to consolidate power. Selim set the stage
for his son, Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520 - 1566) to preside over the
827
outmaneuvered his brothers when Selim died and promptly had his brothers
killed.
Vienna in 1529. Although the siege failed, the empire now occupied an
from the Safavids of Persia (dealing the nascent dynasty a serious blow in the
process). Next to China under the Ming dynasty, the Ottoman Empire was
that served both practical purposes and amplified the sultan’s power and
828
to rule without interference from the religious authorities. He increasingly
staffed the highest ranks of both the military and the state bureaucracy with
Janissaries, boys taken from Christian lands who were raised to be elite
enjoyed more power and influence than any free Ottoman elite besides the
sultan himself. During his lifetime, the Janissaries were loyal and effective in
policies would prove destructive in the long run. First, the Janissaries slowly
time enriching themselves in commerce than serving the state. Also, late in
life Suleiman retired to the inner chambers of the palace to live out his days as
hands of advisers. Rather than having his sons raised far from the capital,
trained as future rulers (albeit rivals who would attempt to murder one
829
another when they came of age), Suleiman had his children raised in the inner
palace. From then on, rivalry and murder remained an essential part of royal
intrigue, but now it was carried out by assassins and the royal pretenders
Of course, at the time, few would have realized that the empire faced
long-term decline. The seventeenth century did not see territorial expansion
to speak of, but neither did it succumb to invasion. Even decades-long periods
whole. Instead, what is clear in historical hindsight is that the early centuries
were few signs of dissent across the vast breadth of Ottoman territory. It was
830
process that began in earnest with an enormous Habsburg victory in 1699)
The Ottoman Empire at the start of the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent.
that helps to explain its longevity. Regional governors were dismissed if they
peoples, who had to pay a special tax but were not compelled to convert to
831
Islam. Both the Christian patriarch of the Orthodox Church and the head of
patriarch) were official members of the Sultan’s court, with each religious
leader carrying both the privilege and the responsibility of representing their
own distinct educational systems and were responsible for tax collection
were held in a socially and legally secondary position within Ottoman society,
but they still enjoyed vastly better status and treatment than did religious
Safavid Persia
Persia. Persian (Iranian) political and intellectual traditions were, by the time
of the Turkic migrations, the better part of two thousand years old, tracing
their origins all the way back to the Achaemenid Empire founded by Cyrus the
832
Great in 550 BCE. As noted in a previous chapter, when Persia came under
Turkic rule starting in the tenth century it was only through Persian
dynasties. Even then, the Mongol invasions, the subsequent invasion by the
Central Asian warlord Temur, and the constant infighting among Turkic tribes
meant that Persia was rarely united as a state for more than a few decades at a
despite the political instability). The Mongol invasions had been devastating,
Mongol rule cruel and extractive, and the Timurid period that followed was no
Turks who dominated Persia at the time: Shah Ismail, the founder of the
833
Safavid dynasty. The Safavids were a clan of Sufi (Islamic mystics) pirs,
truth in the period leading up to the end of the world. Importantly, Ismail and
his followers were Shia Muslims, the branch of Islam that had long held a
strong presence in Persia, and Ismail could claim that he represented the true
the fractious Turkic tribes and Ismail was able to bring all of Persia under his
rule in a short amount of time. He named his kingdom Iran, following the
Turkic warlord, a Shia Sufi pir, and (he claimed) the inheritor of the pre-
the rightful shah (king) and to be a latter-day Alexander the Great (known as
834
Iskandar in Persian). His meteoric rise to power was cut short, however,
when he led his forces against the Ottomans in 1514 and suffered a crushing
aftermath the Ottomans seized Safavid territory and forced Ismail to retreat to
the Iranian plateau. For the next seventy years Ismail and his descendents
lost control of the Turkic tribal confederacy he had briefly united, to the point
that the Safavid shahs were nothing but figureheads controlled by Turkic
Despite the return to the nearly anarchic conditions of tribal rule, the
one area in which the Safavids proved successful was in supporting the
holy sites, funding madarasas and mosques, and encouraging the expansion of
Shia Islam at the expense of the remaining Sunnis. This was perhaps the most
835
Safavid rule was revived by Shah Abbas I (r. 1587 - 1629). Placed on the
to seize real power and use it to restore Iranian military, commercial, and
served as a vital source of revenue for the state and did everything in his
Christians from Georgia and Armenia and Hindus from India were welcome as
reliance on tribal warriors in war to the use of slave soldiers armed with
firearms, a practice that the Ottomans had already used to great effect in their
conquests to the west. He patronized the Shia ulama but based his own
his rule Iran’s borders coincided with the heartland of the ancient Persian
Iran).
836
Abbas presided over what is remembered in Iranian history as a true
golden age, one that flourished simultaneously with golden ages in the
Ottoman Empire and, to the east, the Muslim-ruled Mughal Empire of India. In
1600 these three empires were among the largest and wealthiest in the world,
exceeded only by China under the Ming dynasty. It was a period in which
trade and scholarship flowed from India to Europe via Iranian and Ottoman
trade routes, enriching all three empires enormously. Iran under Abbas
enjoyed its greatest period of political coherence and military might until the
traced its lineage back to Shia Islam and pre-Islamic monarchy in equal
measure.
Unfortunately for the regime (and for the Iranian economy), the shahs
1629 until the dynasty itself came to an end in 1722 Iran suffered from
837
tolerance of religious minorities, the state (encouraged by conservative Shia
Hindus. Those groups had been at the heart of Iranian commerce, and thus
the brief golden age brought about by Abbas came to an end almost as soon as
it had begun.
The significance of the Safavids, despite the fact that only Ismail and
Abbas I were especially effective rulers, is that they presided over a period in
elements: a ruling dynasty that saw itself as the inheritors of all of the
dynasties of the past (be they Persian, Macedonian, or Turkic) and, even more
authorities of the empire. Simply put, from the Safavid period on, Persia was
838
Like settled societies everywhere in the pre-modern era, the Ottoman
Empire and Safavid Persia were dependent on agriculture. Most people were
farmers and most wealth was derived from taxes and fees associated with
farming. That being noted, what set the economic systems of the Middle East
apart from many other societies (such as Europe at the time, with the
trade. Empires like those of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals all saw
something that was most evident in the legal protections extended to non-
Christians played key economic roles in Safavid Persia, just as Jews and
Christians were a major part of the Ottoman economy. Until the eighteenth
century, the Ottoman state benefited from treating Jews and Christians as
839
distinct legal entities, allowing them a high degree of legal autonomy and self-
were the origin of the “capitulation agreements” that would prove a major
weakness to the Ottoman state in the long run, but originally they were in
communities.
centuries was part of a genuinely global trade network. As they always had,
Europeans desperately wanted luxury goods from the east, including spices,
silks, and porcelain. Once the Spanish discovered the vast silver deposits of
South and Central America in the early sixteenth century, gigantic quantities
of silver bullion flowed from Europe into the Ottoman and Safavid economies,
most of it en route to India and points farther east. The one Persian industry
that generated wealth independently from the east-west trade was silk: under
Shah Abbas I the state established a royal silk monopoly that produced the
lion’s share of tax revenue for the state, and when that monopoly fell apart
840
because of the incompetence of his descendents the state struggled to stay
afloat financially.
the vast breadth of the empire and it also generated significant tax revenue
from the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims (who represented a sizable part of the
able to tax both exports and imports to Europe, and during the major period
well. Unfortunately for the Ottomans, the conquest of both Safavid and
Habsburg territories in the first decades of the sixteenth century cost more to
defend and maintain than they brought in with tax revenue, bringing about a
841
Conclusion
develop; it was not as if there were small medieval kingdoms one year and
major, centralized states the next. Likewise, many historians totally reject the
idea of the gunpowder "revolution" because it took well over a century from
legal control and the right to raise taxes over their entire territories began in
earnest during this period, introducing new legal and political patterns that
would only expand in the centuries that followed. Likewise, while gunpowder
may have taken a long time to fully transform warfare and state finances,
842
Habsburg lands: public domain
Chapter 5 :
invaded the Middle East during the crusades and the European states
was quite weak and poor compared to other regions farther east. China and
India are both outstanding examples of regions that produced far greater
wealth, had far larger populations, and were far more militarily powerful than
any European kingdom was; in the case of China under the Ming dynasty of
843
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, China was probably more powerful
than all of Europe put together. Likewise, China’s cultural influence on its
the long run, while other powers like that of China, the Ottoman Empire, or
the Indian kingdoms did not. Why was it Europe that took over the Americas
(and, much later, much of the rest of the world) rather than Persia, the
Ironically, one of the most likely answers to that question is that it was
Europe’s relative poverty as compared to the states of the Middle East and
Asia that led Europeans to seek out new sources of wealth. Whereas the intra-
Asian trade routes linking China, Korea, Japan, the islands of the western
Pacific, Southeast Asia, and India ensured that Asian states enjoyed access to
wealth and luxury goods, Europeans had to rely on the hugely expensive long-
844
distance trade between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe to access goods like
spices and porcelain that Europeans desperately wanted (so we can conclude
based on the prices elite Europeans were willing to pay for them) but could
explorers was the pursuit of direct access to luxury goods that bypassed the
eastern mercantile networks that had traditionally profited off of the long-
The demand for trade with the east was limitless in European
society. Luxury goods from South and East Asia were always among the most
times. Spices were worth far more than their weight in gold, and Chinese
goods like porcelain were also highly prized. Enterprising merchants who
were able to position themselves somewhere along the Indian Ocean trade
routes or the famous Silk Road between Europe and China stood to make a
fortune, but the distances covered were so vast that it was very difficult and
perilous to take part in mercantile ventures. Thus, Isabella of Spain was not
845
alone in funding explorers who sought to reach the east via easier routes
The situation became even more difficult for Europeans thanks to the
1453, the traditional trade routes to Asia were disrupted, particularly as the
Turks started taking over the Venetian maritime empire. Likewise, Europeans
had long traded with Muslim merchants in North Africa for gold, ivory, and
spices, and they longed to cut out the middlemen and get to the sources
farther south. Some of this was doubtless born of anti-Muslim prejudice, but
there was also the simple fact that the Ottomans now directly controlled a
major link in the East - West trade axis, deriving profits that Europeans
explorers. The Reconquest was only completed in 1492, the same year that
Columbus sailed in search of a western route to Asia, and many of the Spanish
846
conquistadors (conquerors) who invaded South and Central America
afterwards had acquired their military experience from what they considered
peninsula. That crusading ideology was easily adapted for the purposes of
There were thus economic and cultural reasons that Europeans wanted
to reach African and Asian commodities and wealth. They were able to access
had no ships capable of sailing across an entire ocean (the Viking longboats of
the Middle Ages were an exception, but they were no longer in use by the
navigation was extremely primitive. From about 1420 on, however, maritime
that could cross the entire Atlantic Ocean with a reasonable degree of
certainty that they would succeed. The key here was the invention of the
847
caravel, a new kind of ship that was able to sail both with the wind and against
lateral winds; as long as the wind was not blowing in the opposite direction
one wanted to travel in, it was possible to keep moving in the right
called the astrolabe came into European hands from the Middle East around
1400 as well. Thus, by 1400 Europeans had both a number of reasons to want
to explore and for the first time had the technological means to do so.
848
Nineteenth-century drawing of a Portuguese caravel, based on the designs used during the
the rest of the world. They did not, of course, know anything about the
Americas. They tended to confuse “India,” “Cathay,” and “Japan” with Asia
itself. They had a vague notion that all of Asia was ruled by khans, in part
century. Polo was a Venetian merchant who had traveled to the court of the
Mongol Khan Kublai and eventually returned to Europe, but his account
merely reinforced just how far away, and difficult to reach, Asia was taking the
usual eastern routes. Many sincerely believed that monsters occupied the
interiors of Africa and Asia, and besides Polo, no Europeans had ever made the
849
Africa and India
had served as the crossroads of the civilized Western World since ancient
times, and despite North Africa being ruled by Muslim kingdoms, Europeans
regularly traded with Muslim merchants. As noted above, there were many
lucrative commodities (like gold and ivory) that Europeans coveted and were
only available from North African merchants. Europeans knew that these
commodities originated somewhere across the Sahara desert, but were unable
Islam. The largest was that of Mali, which oversaw a lucrative trade in gold
and various luxury goods north via caravan to North Africa and the rest of the
Mediterranean. Likewise, other kingdoms traded with one another and, via
850
caravans, the Middle East and Europe. These kingdoms also engaged in
frequent warfare against one another (just as the states of Europe did).
Drawn by the gold they were able to acquire via merchants in North
Africa, Europeans had tried in the late Middle Ages to sail down the west coast
of the continent, but their naval technology was insufficient. In the fifteenth
century that changed with the introduction of the caravel; the same thing that
made it possible for Europeans to reach the Americas allowed them to make
reliable journeys along the African coast. Along with new compasses and the
Europe happened under the auspices of Prince Henry the Navigator (1394 –
somehow seize lands or at least find routes to lucrative sources of gold and
851
the Portuguese crown and sailed around Africa and as far as India, in the
monopoly of waterborne trade between Europe and India and Africa that
lasted well into the sixteenth century. Thus, tiny Portugal was, for a time, one
foremost a monopoly between the Indian Ocean trade and Europe, not a
monopoly of trade within the Indian Ocean itself (despite the best efforts of
goods and wealth whose value greatly exceeded that of the trade between
Europe and the Indian Ocean region. What changed, however, was that
Europeans were for the first time able to directly access the sources of luxury
852
commodities like spices, indigo, ivory, and gold, and Portugal was in the
forefront of the European states that sought to reach those sources. Other
states were quick to follow once the sheer extent of African and Indian wealth
was revealed through Portuguese trade, and soon the Dutch and then the
English started taking over the oceanic trade routes from the Portuguese.
much as a practical desire for riches – fresh off the successful Reconquest,
Queen Isabella agreed with Columbus’s vision of flanking the Muslim forces of
the Middle East and recapturing the Holy Land as much as she also wanted
new trade routes to Asia. The voyage was thought to be feasible both because
853
all educated people already accepted that the world was round (common
knowledge since the days of ancient Greece) and because the circumference of
the globe was not really clear to them: it simply was not known how long one
thought that Asia was not far west of Europe. Despite being disliked and
succeeded in winning Isabella over to his vision, and she paid to outfit him
with a tiny fleet (she sent him with letters of introduction to the Great Khan,
who she presumed still ruled in Asia). Columbus departed in August of 1492
with three small boats – the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria - and 90 men. They
854
The four voyages of Columbus between 1492 and 1504. ‘Juana’ is present-day Cuba, and
convert Indians by force, intense greed for precious metals, and the
resistance. With Columbus, the traffic in goods and commodities between the
two hemispheres began. While Europeans at the time were obsessed with the
855
that far more important than precious metals were the living things
Exchange.
From the New World, Europeans brought back corn, potatoes, tobacco,
chocolate, and tomatoes, just to name the most important of the crops that
soon flourished across Africa and Eurasia. From the Old World, Europeans
imported all of the large domesticated animals - horses, cows, sheep, goats,
pigs, and sheep - as well as numerous crops like rice, wheat, sugarcane, and
northern Europe and various other regions in the world because they provide
a great deal of nutrition and calories and can grow in poor, rocky soils. The
856
That noted, the single most significant biological entity to be exchanged
between the hemispheres was the smallpox virus, which was at the heart of
the worst epidemic in world history. Isolated from the western hemisphere
diseases. Because almost all diseases that affect humans are mutated strains
of the large animal species that can be domesticated were Eurasian in origin
except llamas, Eurasians and Africans had spent thousands of years both
Americans had not. Those epidemic pathogens arrived all at once with the
European encounter with the Americas as the Great Dying. As much as 90%
Columbus’s arrival. While the Spanish and Portuguese did win some
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gunpowder, and steel, their true military advantage lay in germ warfare,
abandoned, their former inhabitants wiped out by disease. Put simply, the
Americans, but because most of the latter were already dead thanks to
disease.
The Columbian Exchange, and the Great Dying that was part of it, began
to Spain after his expedition, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain grasped the
significance of his discovery and actively funded more expeditions and, soon,
colonists. The Spanish crown also quickly tried to cement its hold on the New
Atlantic. After papal intervention and negotiations between the Spanish and
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Portuguese, the Spanish were to receive everything west of an arbitrary line
on the map 1,100 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands, with everything to the
east granted to the Portuguese. Practically speaking, this meant that the
while the Spanish concentrated on the Caribbean, Central America, and South
America. Needless to say, the other European powers were not about to
honor this agreement, called the Treaty of Tordesillas and dating to 1494, but
completely wrong about the New World being part of Asia. The term
another early explorer (he led two expeditions between 1497 and 1503) and
was the first to grasp the immensity of the western hemisphere. Vespucci
coined the phrase "New World" in the first place, hence “America” rather than
859
self-promoter, whereas Columbus did not attempt to publicize his discoveries
Even though Europeans quickly realized that the Americas were whole
Asia. The Spanish dispatched explorers and sailors who sought Asia by going
around the Americas, even as they were also busy conquering the great
empires of the Aztecs and Incas. This led to the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan
(1480 – 1521), who commanded a small fleet of five ships funded by the
Spanish crown and who tried to find a western route to Asia in 1519. He
succeeded in rounding South America and crossing the Pacific, but was then
killed by natives of the Philippines in 1521. There, his Basque navigator Juan
Sebastián Elcano took over and managed to guide one ship all the way back to
Spain, arriving in 1522 (Magellan is much better remembered than Elcano, but
it was Elcano who actually made it back). The voyage proved definitively that
it was possible to sail around the world. The Spanish would subsequently use
the Philippines as the basis of their Pacific trade network, ultimately linking
860
together Europe, the Americas, and Asia and fulfilling the original vision of a
western route to Asia that had inspired Columbus’s expedition in the first
place.
The Conquistadors
crown to the Americas to claim land, convert "heathens," and enrich both
themselves and the crown. They were usually poor noblemen with few
conquistadors were obliged to turn over the “royal fifth” - 20% of all precious
poor knight who had fought in the aftermath of the Reconquest as a young
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man, he jumped at the chance to travel to the New World. Cortes proved
he arrived in 1519 with 450 Spanish troops and 15 horses. There, a powerful
empire under the Aztecs had recently seized control of a large swath of
territory. The Aztecs did not directly rule their subjects but instead
for human sacrifice. Needless to say, the Aztecs were not popular with their
subjects.
Spanish, Cortes was able to convince native groups resentful of the Aztecs to
fight alongside the Spanish. Practically speaking, this meant that the native
groups suffered most of the casualties. He fought his way to the Aztec capital
II. Once the Aztecs realized the extent of the rapacious designs of the Spanish
they chased them from the city, but then an epidemic of smallpox undermined
their ability to fight. Cortes was able to achieve the surrender of the surviving
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Aztec forces by 1522 and founded the Spanish colony of New Spain in the
center of Mexico.
A later Spanish illustration of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Note the allied Native
Mexican troops both behind and in front of the charging Spanish soldier.
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in Mexico, Pizarro set off (with 180 Spanish troops and 30 horses) for an
empire the Spanish had learned of in the Andes of western South America in
1531. This was the Incan empire, also a relatively young state that
and Peru. Pizarro ambushed the Inca emperor Atahualpa and captured him,
demanding a building full of gold for his release. Instead, once the ransom
was paid, Pizarro had the emperor killed and then marched on the Inca capital
of Cuzco. By 1533, Spanish forces were in control of the empire and began
Thus, less than fifty years after Columbus's initial landing, the two
greatest empires of Central and South America had already fallen to the
Spanish. By 1600, practically every part of Central and South America was at
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New World Wealth
America. The most important source of wealth in all of the Americas for the
Bolivia. Potosi had the most enormous silver deposits in the world at the
time, producing thousands of tons of silver for the crown. It also represented
a horrific site of slave labor for the native people of the entire extended
area. Imposing a system of forced labor known as the mita, Spanish officials
conditions, often until they died from exhaustion. Whereas the Great Dying
might be the most iconic aspect of the Columbian Exchange, Potosi is probably
the greatest symbol of the humongous influx of mineral wealth that flooded
into Spanish coffers for over a century, as well as the site of the greatest
undermined the vitality of the Spanish state itself in the long run – Spain did
865
not have to cultivate trade or pursue technological or bureaucratic innovation
in the same manner as the rest of the European powers because it had such an
enormous surplus of precious metals. Thus, even though Spain was the most
undermined its value, another factor that weakened Spanish power over time.
Much of the story of Spanish conquest is one of the abuse of the native
peoples of the Americas. Part of that abuse grew out of the crusading
tradition, but part of it also came out of the discomfort many of the Spanish
felt in discovering people who had quite obviously never been in contact with
the Christian world. The Bible did not explain their origins, so the Spanish
invented various hypotheses: Native Americans were descended from the Lost
Tribes of Israel described in the Old Testament of the Bible, they were
somehow created and ruled by the Devil, they simply were not human beings
but strange, human-like animals, and so on. The consensus by the 1530s was
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that, wherever they were from, Native Americans were blank slates who had
to be conquered for their own good. The pope recognized the humanity of the
masters.
Back in Europe, funded by the incredible wealth of the New World, the
sixteenth century. In the New World, royal authority was enforced by two
viceroys, royal officials who ruled over the northern and southern parts of the
ran encomiendas, feudal estates with the legal right to exploit native
labor. Those often evolved into the even larger haciendas, the size of whole
formal ban of marriage between Spanish men and native women did not
867
prevent the growth of a large “mixed” class of mestizos, the children of Spanish
the former. There was still a racialized hierarchy in New World society, but
more ethnic mixing occurred in Central and South America than in North
America.
Conclusion
Hemisphere. Whole cultures were obliterated, empires fell, and the survivors
found themselves at the mercy of conquerors whose major priorities were the
extraction of mineral wealth and the exploitation of labor. To those ends, the
mines. The use of slave labor only grew over time, although by the middle of
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Slave Trade (considered in a following chapter). European states in the
Americas were thus built on the backs and with the blood of both the native
evident, but in the long run the conquest of the Americas sparked the
beginning of the process by which Europe became one of the dominant global
precious metal, but vast new natural resources (from huge stocks of fish to
millions of acres of fertile land) that were to bolster European power for
centuries to come. It is no coincidence that the year 1492 is often used as the
starting point of what historians refer to as the early modern period: when
both global hemispheres came into sustained contact for the first time, it was
the starting point of massive change for the human species as a whole.
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Columbus voyages - Roke
Chapter 6: Reformations
The Protestant Reformation was the permanent split within the Catholic
category of "Protestant" - were nothing more or less than new heresies, sinful
breaks with the correct, orthodox beliefs and practices of the Church. The
that the Church proved unable to stamp them out or re-assimilate them into
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against corruption within the Church very quickly evolved into a number of
least in part the product of prosaic reformations already occurring within the
used the humanistic education that had become increasingly common for
Protestantism were drawn to the new movement because they were already
changes to both practice (e.g. colleges that trained priests) and culture (e.g. a
new focus on the spiritual life of the common person) that did amount to
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The Context of the Reformation
The context of the Reformation was the strange state of the Catholic
Church as of the late fifteenth century. The Church was omnipresent in early-
modern European society. About one person in seventy-five was part of the
marriages, contracts, wills, and deaths - all law was, by implication, the law of
popes fought to claim the right to intervene in secular affairs as they saw fit,
although this was a fight they rarely won, losing even more ground as the new
century.
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Simply put, as of the Renaissance era, all was not well with the
Church. The Babylonian Captivity and the Great Western Schism both
undermined the Church’s authority. The stronger states of the period claimed
the right to appoint bishops and priests within their kingdoms, something that
the monarchs of England and France were very successful in doing. This led
both laypeople and some priests themselves to look to monarchs, rather than
continued to live like princes. The papacy not only set a bad example, but
attempts to reform the lifestyles and relative piety of priests generally failed;
the papacy was simply too remote from the everyday life of the priesthood
across Europe, and since elite churchmen were all nobles, they usually
continued to live like nobles. In many cases, they openly lived with
concubines, had children, and worked to ensure that their children receive
lucrative positions in the Church. Laypeople were well aware of the slack
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absolutely shot through with satirical tracts mocking immoral priests, and
depictions of hell almost always featured priests, monks, and nuns burning
orders had been imitating the life of Christ, yet by the early modern period,
gifts; by the late fifteenth century a full 20% of the land of the western
vow of poverty taken by monks and nuns and the wealth and luxury many
The result of this widespread concern with corruption was a new focus
on the inner spiritual life of the individual, not the focus on and respect for the
one called Modern Devotion in the Netherlands, that focused on moral and
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spiritual life of laypeople outside of the auspices of the Church. The handbook
of the Modern Devotion was called The Imitation of Christ, written in the mid-
fifteenth century and published in various editions after that, which was so
popular that its sales matched those of the Bible at the time. It promoted the
Within the Church, there were widespread and persistent calls for
reform to better address the needs of the laity and to better live up to the
Church’s own moral standards. Numerous devout priests, monks, and nuns
abhorred the corruption of their peers and superiors in the Church and called
for change - the Spanish branch of the Church enjoyed a strong period of
reform during the fifteenth century, for example. Despite this reforming zeal
within the Church and the growing popularity of lay movements outside of it,
hierarchy itself.
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Indulgences
held that even the souls of those who avoided hell did not go straight to
spiritual plane between earth and heaven called purgatory - there, their sins
would be purged (note the overlap between the words "purge" and
"purgatory") through fire until they were purified. Only then could they
Church that offered the same spiritual power as the sacrament of confession
and penance: to have one’s sins absolved. Each indulgence promised a certain
amount of time that the individual would not have to spend in purgatory after
death. Naturally, most people would much rather proceed directly to heaven
if possible, and so the Church found that the sale of indulgences to avoid time
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At first, indulgences were granted by the pope for good acts that were
supported by the Church; they were heavily associated with the crusades,
recapture the Holy Land for the Church. Later, popes came to succumb to the
Renaissance-era popes built up both their own secular power and patronized
the art and architecture associated with the Vatican. By the early sixteenth
contracted by the Church, sold indulgences without the slightest concern for
the moral or spiritual status of the buyer, and even invented little jingles like
“when the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs” – that was
the sales pitch of John Tetzel, the specific indulgence salesman who infuriated
– a kind of spiritual bank – whose savings had been deposited by the sacrifices
877
made by Christ and the saints. When someone bought an indulgence, she
drew against that treasury in order to avoid time in purgatory. Another way
to gain access to the treasury of merit was to possess, or even come into
contact with, holy relics (typically the bones of saints). Thus, many rulers did
everything in their power to create large collections. One German prince had
his court preacher calculate the total number of years that his (the ruler's)
large collection of relics would eliminate from his and his subjects' time in
Purgatory; the total was 1,902,202 years and 270 days. There was another
time. From this context, of widespread corruption and the fairly blatant abuse
emerged.
Lutheranism
difficult childhood and a fraught relationship with his father. He suffered from
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bouts of depression and anxiety that led him to become a monk, the
professor at the small university in the city of Wittenberg in the Holy Roman
Empire. There, far from the centers of both spiritual and secular power, he
contemplated the Bible, the Church, and his own spiritual salvation.
plagued with doubt as to his ability to achieve salvation. The key issue for
Luther was the concept of good works, an essential element of salvation in the
combination of the sacraments, faith in God, and good works, which are good
deeds that merit a person’s admission into heaven. Those good works could
be acts of kindness and charity, or they could be gifts of money to the Church -
a common “good work” at the time was leaving money or land to the Church is
one’s will. Luther felt that the very idea of good works was ambiguous,
879
especially because works seemed so inadequate when compared to the
merited admittance to heaven no matter how many good works they carried
out while alive - the very idea seemed petty and base compared to the
quandary: the idea that salvation did not come from works, but from grace,
880
the limitless love and forgiveness of God, which is achievable through faith
alone. Over time, Luther developed the idea that it takes an act of God to
merit a person’s salvation, and the reflection of that act is in the heartfelt faith
heaven were always inadequate; what mattered was that the heartfelt faith of
a believer might inspire an infinite act of mercy on the part of God. This idea -
salvation through faith alone - was a major break with Catholic belief.
away with the entire edifice of church ritual. If salvation could be earned
through faith alone, the sacraments were at best symbolic rituals and at worst
distractions - over time, Luther argued that only baptism and communion
were relevant since they were very clearly inspired by Christ’s actions as
described in the New Testament. In Luther’s vision, the priest was nothing
more than a guide rather than a gatekeeper who could grant or withhold the
essential rituals, and a believer should be able to read the Bible directly rather
881
Having developed the essential points of his theology, Luther then
the building of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Luther was incensed at how crass
the sale of indulgences was (it was as bad as a carnival barker’s act in nearby
Wittenberg) and at the fact that this new indulgence promised to absolve the
purchased on behalf of those who were already dead and “spring” them from
attacks against indulgences to the door of the Wittenberg cathedral. These “95
Protestant Reformation.
indulgences for leading to greed instead of piety, for leading the laity to
distrust the Church, and for simply not working - they did not, Luther argued,
absolve the sins of those who purchased them. Written in Latin, the 95 Theses
882
were intended to spark debate and discussion within the Church. And, while
he criticized the pope’s wealth and (implied) greed, Luther did not attack the
office of the papacy itself. It should be emphasized that calls for reform within
the Church were nothing new, and Luther certainly saw himself as a would-be
were translated into German and reprinted, which led to an unexpected and,
Within two years, Luther was forced to publicly defend his views and, in
the process, to radicalize them. A fellow professor and member of the Church,
Johann Eck, publicly debated Luther and forced him to admit that the pope
had the authority issue indulgences. This, however, led Luther to argue that
the pope could be wrong if his position was not authorized by the Bible
itself. In the end, Luther argued that the pope, and by extension the entire
were part of the priesthood of believers, united by their faith and without
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By 1520 Luther was actively engaged in writing and publishing
to go. In turn, the secular authorities stepped in. In 1521 Luther was tried at
the Diet of Worms, the Holy Roman Empire’s official meeting of princes,
where the emperor Charles V ordered him to recant. Luther refused and was
was to offer Luther food or water, and suffer no legal penalty should Luther be
murdered. Luther was swiftly taken into the custody of a sympathetic German
prince, Frederick the Wise of Saxony, who spirited Luther away and allowed
884
A (highly dramatized) portrayal of Luther at the Diet of Worms painted in the nineteenth century.
that both the pope and Charles V were reluctant to threaten Frederick the
Wise, who was one of the electors of the empire and one of its most powerful
supported and agreed with Luther's views and also realized that he could
benefit from rejecting the authority of the pope and, to a lesser extent, the
emperor. Charles V had enormous prestige and some ability to influence his
subjects, but practically speaking each prince was sovereign in his own
885
domain. This loose overall control was disastrous for Catholic uniformity in
spread. To make matters worse, Charles V was too preoccupied with wars
pope was, in fact, the Anti-Christ foretold in the Book of Revelations, and he
came to believe that he was living in the End Times. He also personally
translated the Bible into German and he happily met with his ever-growing
group of followers. Initially a slur against heretics, the term “Protestant” was
among elites, churchmen, and the educated urban classes. In the 1520s most
effective and radical protest against all of the problems that had plagued the
886
Church for centuries. Part of the appeal of Lutheranism to priests was that it
legitimized the lifestyle many of them were already living; they could get
married to their concubines and acknowledge their children if they left the
Church, which droves of them did starting in the 1520s. Thanks both to the
perceived purity of its doctrine and the support of rulers, nobles, and
felt bound to defend the Church, but he could not do so through force of
arms. He spent most of his reign fighting against both France and the
Ottoman Empire, which were among the greatest powers of the era. Thus, in
1526 he allowed the German princes to choose whether or not to enforce his
ban on Lutheranism as they saw fit, in hopes that they would continue to offer
tolerance in 1529, but it was too late. Practically speaking, the German states
887
ended up being divided roughly evenly, with a concentration of Lutheranism
the use of the term “Lutheranism” to describe the new religious movement he
had started, and he felt certain that the correctness of his position was so
appealing that even the Jews would abandon their traditional beliefs and
convert (they did not, and Luther swiftly launched a vituperative anti-Semitic
attack entitled Against the Jews and their Lies). Much to his chagrin, however,
that true Christians were only accountable to the Bible and could therefore
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Lutheranism and demanding a reduction in feudal dues and duties, the end of
serfdom, and greater justice from feudal lords. In 1525, Luther penned a
venomous attack against the rebels entitled Against the Thieving, Murderous
Hordes of Peasants which encouraged the lords to slaughter the peasants like
dogs. The revolt was put down brutally, with over 100,000 killed, and
Lutheranism was able to keep the support of the elites like Frederick the Wise
Still, the uprising indicated that the movement Luther had begun was
not something he could control, despite his best efforts. The very nature of
Calvinism
889
exiled for his sympathy with Protestantism, settled in Geneva, Switzerland in
1536. Calvin was a generation younger than Luther, and hence was born into
a world in which religious unity had already been fragmented; in that sense,
the fact that he had Protestant views is not as surprising as Luther’s break
with the Church had been. In Geneva, Calvin began work on Christian
theology and soon formed close ties with the city council. The result of his
extend his grace to some people but not to others, Calvin reasoned, it was folly
to imagine that humans could somehow influence Him. Not only was the
Catholic insistence on good works wrong, the very idea of free will in the face
of the divine intelligence could not be correct. Calvin noted that only some
890
concluded that God, who transcended both time and space, chose some people
as the “elect,” those who will be saved, before they are even born. Free will is
merely an illusion born of human ignorance, since the fate of a person’s soul
“predestination,” and while the idea of the absence of free will and
predetermined salvation may seem absurd at first sight, in fact it was simply
Calvin.
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Sixteenth-century portrait of Calvin. Austere black clothing became associated with Calvinists,
argument about salvation. Those who were among the elect acted in certain
ways: they lived according to the standards of behavior defined in the Bible,
they refrained from worldly pleasures, and they strove to conduct themselves
within the legal and social framework of their societies. Thus, good Calvinists
living, and hard work. Counterintuitively, it was not that these behaviors
God’s will. Furthermore, one sign of being a member of the elect was financial
success, because success was a side-effect of the focus and hard work that the
colluded with the city council of Geneva to enforce a whole set of moralistic
laws that regulated almost every aspect of behavior. He was originally asked
892
to reform the local church by the city fathers, then in 1555 he worked with a
group of fellow French exiles to stage a coup d’etat. He created the Consistory,
behavior. The idea was that, predestination or not, Geneva would be the
themselves apart by their plain dress and their dour outlook on merriment,
celebrations, and the pleasures of the flesh. The best known Calvinists in the
American context were the Puritans, English Calvinists who left Europe
893
It should be emphasized that Lutherans and Calvinists quickly came to
Protestants. Luther and Calvin came to detest one another, finding each
would eventually emerge because of persecution or war, for the most part
truth, regarding all others as hopelessly ignorant and, in fact, damned to hell.
against the perceived moral and doctrinal failings of the Catholic Church, the
VIII (r. 1509 – 1547) had received a special dispensation from the papacy to
marry his brother’s widow (a practice banned in the Old Testament of the
Bible), Catherine of Aragon, aunt of Charles V and hence a member of the most
894
powerful royal line in Europe. Catherine, however, was only able to bear
needed a new wife and another chance at a male heir, so he started an affair
petitioned the pope for a divorce - a practice that was strictly forbidden. The
When Anne did not produce a male heir in a timely manner, Henry
threats escalated over his impiety, Henry issued the Acts of Supremacy and
founding in its stead the Church of England. the Church of England was
almost identical to the Catholic Church in its doctrine and rituals, it simply
substituted the king at its apex and discarded allegiance to the Roman pope. It
also gave Henry an excuse to seize Catholic lands and wealth, especially those
895
of England’s rich monasteries, which funded the crown and its subsequent
military and naval buildup into the reign of his daughter Elizabeth.
course of his life, with two divorced, two executed, one dying of natural
causes, and the last, Katherine Parr, surviving him. In the end, Henry had
three children: a young son, Edward, and two older half-sisters, Mary and
Elizabeth. They each took the throne in fairly rapid succession after his death
896
in 1547; under Edward and Mary (both of whom died of natural causes after
only a few years), the kingdom oscillated between a more extreme form of
on to rule for decades (r. 1558 – 1603) as one of Europe’s most effective
England: she insisted that her subjects be part of the Church of England, but
The end result of the English Reformation was that England and
Scotland were divided between competing Christian factions, but ones very
church" branch supported by the nobility and the monarchy itself. A growing
Calvinism, and that movement became known as Puritanism (or "low church")
897
numerous Catholics continued to worship in secret. Finally, most of Scotland
movement (many Scottish nobles remained Catholic until well into the
although the enmity between the different groups is much less pronounced in
Europe, including Italy, Spain, Austria, parts of the Balkans, and kingdoms like
depending on the relative hostility of the local rulers throughout much of the
rest of Europe.
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The Eastern Orthodox Church
The Orthodox Church was the product of medieval divisions within the
Church itself, pitting the western papacy against the Byzantine emperors. It
"Protestant" came to mean all of the different groups that broke away
899
The Catholic Reformation
probably more accurate and useful to see this period of church history as a
Catholic Reformation unto itself – the culmination of the reformist trends that
had been present in the Church for centuries before Martin Luther set off the
Luther, after all, had not set out to split the Church, but to reform it -
hence the very term “reformation." His position radicalized quite quickly,
however, and he did openly defy both the pope and the Church hierarchy
within just a few years of the posting of the 95 Theses. That being noted, one
of the reasons that Lutheranism caught on so quickly was that there were
large numbers of people within the Church who had long fought for, or at least
900
hoped for, significant changes. Thus, while the Catholic Reformation began as
which Lutheranism spread. For practical political reasons, the pope and
various rulers were either unwilling or unable to use force to crack down on
Lutheranism’s spread. Lutheranism also spread much more quickly than had
earlier heresies, which tended to be limited to certain regions; here, the fact
that Luther and his followers readily embraced the printing press to spread
their message made a major impact, with word of the new movement
901
In historical hindsight, the shocking aspect of the Catholic Church’s
reaction. For decades, popes remained focused on the politics of central Italy
or simply continued beautifying Rome and enjoying a life of luxury; this was
the era of the “Renaissance popes,” men from elite families who regarded the
papal office as little more than a political position that happened to be at the
most Church officials that anything out of the ordinary was taking place with
Luther; despite the radicalism of his position, most of the clergy assumed that
Lutheranism was a “flash in the pan,” doomed to fade back into obscurity in
the end. By the 1540s, however, church officials began to take the threat
The initial period of Catholic Reformation, from about 1540 – 1550, was
a fairly moderate one that aimed to bring Protestants back into the fold. In a
sense, the very notion of a permanent break from Rome was difficult for many
people, certainly many priests, to conceive of. After about 1550, however,
902
when it became clear that the split was permanent, the Church itself became
much more hardline and intolerant. The subsequent reforms were as much
The same factors that had made the Church difficult to reform before
the Protestant break made it strong as an institution that opposed the new
princes had originally supported Luther in order to protect their own political
independence, many others came to realize that the last thing they wanted
might reject their worldly authority completely (as had the German peasants
903
Among Catholics at all levels of social hierarchy, Catholic rituals were
comforting, and even though rejecting the excesses in Catholic ritual had been
Reformation is often associated with the “baroque” style of art and music
potentially, with the experience of faith itself. The Church continued to fund
huge building projects and lavish artwork, much of which was aimed to appeal
rapidly by the 1530s, but then as the Protestant denominations splintered off
faded. In other words, when Protestants began fighting each other with the
same vigor as their attacks on Rome, they no longer seemed like a clear and
904
The Inquisition and the Council of Trent
Reformation was Pope Paul III (r. 1534 – 1549). Almost from the beginning of
evaluate the possibility and necessity of reform, which concluded that there
were numerous abuses within the Church that had to be corrected (e.g. the
lack of education of the clergy, the practice of earning incomes from parishes
that bishops never visited, etc.), but there was no budging on doctrine. In
other words, the essential beliefs and practices of the Church were judged to
be entirely correct and Luther (and soon, Calvin) was judged to be entirely
wrong.
905
right to subject people to interrogation and torture and in extreme cases, to
execute them. The (in)famous Spanish branch of the Inquisition was under
the control of the Spanish crown, but its methods and goals were essentially
the same. Inquisitions had been around since the Middle Ages - the first one
was in 1184 and targeted a heretical movement in southern France - but they
had always been short-term responses to heresy. Under Paul III, the
The popes that followed Paul III were similar in their focus on re-
1555 – 1559) created the “Index” of forbidden books (in 1549) that would go
on to form the basis of royal censorship in all Catholic countries for the next
two centuries. He also enforced the stance of the Church that the Bible was
themselves. According to Catholic belief, reiterated under Paul IV, the Bible
906
had to remain in Latin because only trained priests had the knowledge and
would simply get the Bible’s message wrong and endanger their souls in the
process.
Paul III, Paul IV, and the subsequent pope, Pius IV, all oversaw an
ongoing series of meetings, the Council of Trent, that took place periodically
between 1545 – 1563. There, Church officials debated all of the articles and
charges that had been leveled against the Church, from the sale of indulgences,
with Protestantism, hardliners within the Church won out in the subsequent
debates and the Council reaffirmed almost all of the controversial parts of
church doctrine and disputed articles of faith; the major exception was that
the cardinals and bishops banned the sale of indulgences in the future (the
Church still issued them, but they were no longer simply sold for cash). The
907
earnestly hoped that the Church would give ground on some of the doctrinal
issues and thereby win back Protestants in his lands; he even tried to prevent
Pope Paul IV from taking office because the latter was so intransigent.
A depiction of the Council of Trent (in the background) painted in 1588, when wars between
While the Council of Trent would not budge on doctrine, it did propose
908
trained for the job. After Trent, the Church organized and funded seminaries,
colleges whose express purpose was the training of new priests. There, all
thinkers. The ad hoc nature of higher education for priests gave way to a
formal and universal requirement: all priests would be well educated, not just
those who had sought out a university themselves. While abuses of power
and moral laxness were not eliminated from the Church, the one definitive
change for the better in terms of the experience of lay Catholics was that their
The Jesuits
orders. The most important new religious order, by far, was the Society of
909
Jesus, better known as the Jesuits. The Jesuits were founded by Ignatius of
1540. A Spanish knight, Loyola was injured in battle. During his recovery,
Loyola read books on the life of Christ and the saints, which inspired him to
give up his possessions and take a pilgrimage across Spain and Italy. He soon
since he claimed to offer “spiritual conversion” to those who would follow his
teachings.
of Christ that, when followed, led many new members of the Jesuits to
a worldly institution that offered guidance to Christians, but the sole path to
910
As a former soldier, he founded the Jesuits to be “faithful soldiers of the
pope.” The purpose of the Jesuits was to fight Protestantism and heresy,
the Jesuits distinct from the other religious orders was that they were
responsible to the pope, not to kings. They came to live and work in kingdoms
all over Europe, but they bypassed royal authority and took their orders
directly from Rome – this did not endear them to many kings in the long run.
By Loyola’s death in 1556, there were about 1,000 Jesuits; that number
rapidly increased by the end of the century. Many became influential advisors
persecute and root out heresy (including, of course, Protestantism). They also
911
Statue of Ignatius of Loyola at the Church of the Gesù in Rome, one of the original Jesuit
churches. The statues are in the baroque style noted above, practically dripping with
912
undergo an eleven-year period of training and education before they were full
members, and they insisted on the highest quality of rigor and scholarship in
their training and in the education they provided others. They raised young
men, often nobles or rich members of the non-noble classes, with both an
there were 250,000 students in Jesuit schools across continental Europe. The
schools were noteworthy for being free, funded by the Church and private
gifts. Students had to apply for admittance, and the Jesuits working at the
schools were far closer to their students than were the very aloof professors
thus young men who had received both an excellent education and a deep
young men, drawn as they were from families of social elites, often went on to
Jesuits were also active missionaries, soon traveling all over the known
913
themselves by not only learning the native languages of the people they
ministered to, but of adopting their customs as well. They were the first
(in 1549) and China (in 1552). In the Chinese case, the Jesuits failed to make
many converts, but they did bring back an enormous amount of information
about China itself. The most noteworthy Jesuit missionary, Matteo Ricci, lived
in the court of the Chinese emperor, was fluent in Chinese, and served as a
court astrologer. It was the Jesuits who brought back the puzzling (to
Church adopted the use of the printing press and began reaching out to both
priests and educated laypeople, often in the vernacular languages rather than
914
untranslated). The new fervor led to a revival of religious orders focused on
reaching out to the common people rather than remaining sequestered from
the public in monasteries and convents. One significant new order along
those lines was the Carmelites, an order of nuns reformed by St. Teresa of
Avila starting in 1535. St. Teresa led a major reform that redoubled the nuns’
vow of poverty and their focus on prayer and purity (the reforms also
abolished separate residences and lifestyles for nuns from rich and poor
the cities that provided care for both the sick and the poor and indigent. The
Church to its followers and a greater emphasis on the duties of the Church to
laypeople.
915
A famous depiction of St. Teresa at the moment she later claimed to have been overwhelmed
by the divine presence. Like the statue of Ignatius of Loyola, the statue above is in the highly
something that many reformers (including popes) believed was only possible
if the Church “put its house in order.” While Catholic monarchs continued to
almost completely control the Church in their kingdoms (this was especially
916
stop living like princes, to have priests remain at least nominally celibate, and
for church officials to actually live in the places they were supposed to
Protestantism had enjoyed through the use of cheap print. Lives of saints,
throughout Europe. The Church began to stage plays not just of Biblical
scenes, but of great moments in the Church’s history. The new religious
orders, including not just the Jesuits but the Capuchins, the Ursulines, and the
sponsored major charitable works, reconnecting the poor to the Church. All of
917
God. In contrast to the austerity and even harshness of Lutheranism and
form of both worship and religious experience that was very appealing to
many who may have originally been alienated from the institution.
emphasized the importance of reading the Bible, and as the Catholic Church
Europe.
918
Conclusion
The battle lines between Protestantism and Catholicism were firmly set
equally hardened in their beliefs and actively inculcated devotion and loyalty
tolerance" in the modern sense - both sides were convinced that anyone and
919
Calvin - Public Domain
beliefs and even the most optimistic Catholics had to abandon hopes that they
could win many Protestants back over to the Roman Church through
920
believed they had exclusive access to spiritual truth. Simply put, the very
notion of tolerance, of “live and let live,” was almost nonexistent in early-
modern Europe. Exceptions did exist, especially in the Holy Roman Empire,
but beliefs clearly hardened over the course of the sixteenth century: what
tolerance had existed in the early decades of the Reformation era tended to
fade away.
This was not just about Catholic intolerance. While the Catholic
Protestants were equally hostile to Catholics. This was especially true among
social and, if they could, legal controls of behavior in their areas of influence,
addition, while actual wars between Protestant sects were rare (the English
921
Why was religion so divisive? It was more than just incompatible belief-
systems, with some of the reasons being very specific to the early modern
was deeply connected to the faith of its leader. Princes often held some
authority in church lands, and priests had always served as important royal
church.” Likewise, only states had the resources to reform whole institutions,
rival branch of Christianity was, from the perspective of a ruler, not just a
At the same time, over the course of the sixteenth century, specific,
922
confessions. The Lutherans published a specific creed defining Lutheran
beliefs known as the Augsburg Confession in 1530, and the Catholic Council of
consisted of. There was thus a hardening of beliefs as ambiguities and points
another major cause of conflict, one that lent to the savagery of many of the
religious wars of the period: the Little Ice Age. A naturally occurring
degrees during the period, enhancing the frequency and severity of bad
century but became dramatically more pronounced between 1570 and the
early 1700s, with the single most severe period lasting from approximately
923
1600 until 1640, precisely when the most destructive religious war of all
raged in Europe, the Thirty Years’ War that devastated the Holy Roman
Empire.
Overlay of different historical reconstructions of average temperatures over the last two
Lower temperatures meant that crop yields were lower, outright crop
failures more common, and famines more frequent. In societies that were
ensured that social and political stability was severely undermined. To cite
just one example, the price of grain increased by 630% in England over the
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course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, driving peasants on
now demonstrated that not just Europe, but major states across the world
from Ming China, to the Ottoman Empire, to European colonial regimes in the
Americas all suffered civil wars, invasions, or religious conflicts at this time,
and that climate was a major causal factor. Historians now refer to a “general
Thus, religious conflict overlapped with economic crisis, with the latter
making the former even more desperate and bloody. The results are reflected
in some simple statistics: from 1500 to 1700, some part of Europe was at war
90% of the time. There were only four years of peace in the entire
seventeenth century. The single most powerful dynasty, the Habsburgs, were
925
The French Wars of Religion
Against this backdrop of crisis, the first major religious wars of the
period were in France. France was, next to Spain, one of the most powerful
kingdoms in Europe. It was the most populous and had large armies. It had a
dynamic economy and significant towns and cities. It also had a very weak
monarchy under the ruling Valois dynasty, who were kept in check by the
powerful nobility. The Valois kings were often no more powerful than their
most powerful noblemen, some of the latter of whom had armies as large as
that of the king himself, and many Valois kings had little skill for practical
politics. For example, the Valois king Henry II ignored affairs of state in favor
broken lance flew in through the eye-slit of his helmet, impaling his eye - he
died two weeks later from the subsequent infection), and other members of
France was divided between two major factions, led by the fanatically
Catholic Guise family and the Huguenot Bourbon family. The former were
926
advised by the Jesuits and supported by the king of Spain, while the latter
independent kingdom between France and Spain that was soon embroiled in
the war). As of 1560 fully 10% of the people of France were Huguenots, many
powerful than their numbers might initially indicate. Fearing the power of the
Huguenots and detesting their faith, the Guises created the Catholic League, an
From 1562 to 1572 there was on-again, off-again fighting between the
Catholic League and Huguenot forces. The French king, Charles X, was a child
when the fighting started and the state was thus run by his mother, Catherine
927
de Medici, who tended to vacillate between supporting her fellow Catholics
and supporting Protestants who were the enemies of Spain, France’s rival to
the south. Despite their own professed Catholicism, neither Charles nor
Hoping to end the conflict, Charles and Catherine invited the Huguenot
marry Charles’ sister Margaret. Henry arrived in Paris with some 2,000
Huguenot followers, all of whom had agreed to arrive unarmed. The Duke of
Guise led a conspiracy, however, to convince the king that only the death of
Henry and his followers would truly end the threat of religious division, and
Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, in which more than 2,000 Protestants were
killed. That day, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, would live in infamy in
928
A gruesome depiction of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre painted by a Huguenot.
The events in Paris, in turn, sparked massacres all over the country with
at least 20,000 more deaths (supposedly, the pope was so pleased with the
news that he gave 100 gold coins to the messenger who brought it to
him). The one important person who survived was the leader of the Huguenot
ensure his safety but then escaped to the south and rallied the Huguenot
929
Henry as the last male member of his family line available for the
In the years that followed, the French Wars of Religion turned into a
three-way civil war pitting the Catholic League against the legitimate king of
France (both sides were Catholic, but as focused on destroying each other as
turn. There was almost a macabre humor to the fact that the leaders of the
three factions were all named Henry - King Henry III of Valois, Prince Henry IV
Guise and the King. The only heir to the throne was Henry of Navarre himself,
since he had married into the royal family, so after a climactic battle in 1594
he was declared Henry IV of France. He realized that the country would never
930
Henry IV went on to become popular among both Catholics and
Protestants for his competence, wit, and pragmatism. In 1598 he issued the
allowing them to build a parallel state within France with walled towns,
armies, and an official Huguenots church, but banning them from Paris and
eighteen previous attempts) in 1610 by a Catholic fanatic, but by his death the
Following Henry IV's victory, the royal line of the Bourbons would rule
France until the French Revolution that began in 1789. The Bourbons'
greatest rivals for most of that period were the Habsburg royal line, who
931
possessed the Austrian Empire, were the nominal heads of the Holy Roman
Empire, and by the sixteenth century had control of Spain and its enormous
The Spanish king in the mid-sixteenth century was Philip II (r. 1556 –
1598), son of the former Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Philip regarded his
the converted descendants of Spanish Muslims, and forced them to turn their
children over to Catholic schools for education. He also held the Conversos,
suspicion of heresy.
society. He had much more trouble, however, in imposing similar control and
932
religious unity in his foreign possessions, most importantly the Netherlands, a
delicate balance. It was also rich, boasting significant overseas and European
which in turn led Philip to send troops and the Inquisition to impose harsher
control. The most notorious person in this effort was the Spanish Duke of
Alba, who sat at the head of a military court called the Council of Troubles, but
known to the Dutch as the Council of Blood. Alba executed those even
Dutch resistance.
against Spanish forces, and the duke was recalled to Spain in 1573. Spanish
troops, however, were no longer getting paid regularly by the crown and
933
revolted, sacking several Dutch cities that had been loyal to Spain, including
Brussels, Ghent, and especially Antwerp. These attacks were described as the
“Spanish fury” by the Dutch, and they not only permanently undermined the
economy of the cities that were sacked, they lent enormous fuel to the Dutch
Revolt itself.
934
nobles. Flooded with Calvinist refugees from the south, the Dutch Republic
the Republic until 1648. The supply train for Spanish armies, known as the
Spanish Road, stretched all the way from Spain across west-central Europe,
bullion from the New World, the Spanish monarchy was wracked by debts,
England
Even as Spain found itself mired in an ongoing and costly conflict in the
the English queen Mary Tudor in part to try to bring England back to
Catholicism after Mary’s father Henry VIII had broken with the Roman Church
and created the Church of England. Mary and Philip persecuted Anglicans, but
935
Mary died after only five years (r. 1553 – 1558) without an heir. Her sister,
sponsored privateers - pirates working for the English crown - led by a skillful
and ruthless captain named Sir Francis Drake. These privateers began a
campaign of raids against Spanish possessions in the New World and even
rebels who were engaged in the growing war against Spain. Infuriated, Philip
enormous fleet known as the Spanish Armada of 132 warships, equipped not
fleet in a sea battle in the English Channel. The English ships were smaller
and more maneuverable, their cannons were faster and easier to reload, and
936
English captains knew how to navigate in the fickle winds of the Channel more
easily than did their Spanish counterparts, all of which spelled disaster for the
Spanish fleet. The Armada was forced to limp around England, Scotland, and
Ireland trying to get back to Spain, finally returning having lost half of its ships
The end result of the foreign wars that Spain waged in the sixteenth and
that flowed in from the Americas, Spain went from being the single greatest
nineteenth century.
937
The Thirty Years’ War
the middle of the Holy Roman Empire. It ultimately dragged on for decades
and saw the reduction of the population in the German Lands of between 20 –
40%. That conflict, the Thirty Years’ War, saw the most horrific acts of
violence, the greatest loss of life, and the greatest suffering among both
Holy Roman Empire between the Catholic emperor, who had limited power
outside of his own ancestral (Habsburg) lands, and the numerous Protestant
compromise had held since the middle of the sixteenth century and seemed
refused and threw the two officials out of the window of the building in which
Protestant princes and, soon, their allied Danish king. The Habsburgs led a
the Palatinate, a German Calvinist prince, led the Protestant League against
against the Protestants. Bohemia itself was conquered by Catholic forces and
939
over 100,000 Protestants fled; during the course of the war Bohemia lost 50%
living off the land and slaughtering those who opposed them. The Danish
king, Christian IV, entered the war in 1625 to bolster the Protestant cause, but
his armies were crushed and Denmark was briefly occupied by the Catholic
forces. This period of Catholic triumph saw the Emperor Ferdinand II issue an
Edict of Restitution in 1629 that demanded the return of all Church lands
seized since the Reformation – this was hugely disruptive, as those lands had
been in the hands of different states for over 80 years at that point!
backing from the French to oppose the Habsburgs and their forces. Under the
hold its Habsburg rivals in check despite the shared Catholicism of the French
and Habsburg states. Adolphus invaded northern Germany in 1630, then won
a major victory against the Catholic forces in 1631. He went on to lead a huge
Protestant army through the Empire, reversing Catholic gains everywhere and
940
exacting the same kind of brutal treatment against Catholics as had been
In 1635 the French entered the war on the Protestant side. At this
point, the war shifted in focus from a religious conflict to a dynastic struggle
between the two greatest royal houses of Europe: the Bourbons of France and
wars were fought between France and Spain even after the 30 Years’ War
itself ended in 1648, and Spain provided both troops and financial support to
For the next thirteen years, from the French intervention in 1635 until
the war finally ended in 1648, armies battled their way across the Empire,
funded by the various elite states and families of Europe but exacting a
terrible toll on the German lands and people. From 1618 - 1648, the
941
depopulated and massive tracts of farmland were rendered barren; it took
until close to 1700 for the Empire to begin to recover economically. In 1648,
exhausted and deeply in debt, both sides finally met to negotiate a peace. The
messages sent back and forth between the two sides, since the delegations
The end result was that the already-weak centralized power of the Holy
Roman Empire was further reduced, with the constituent states now enjoying
almost total autonomy. In terms of the religious map of the Empire, there was
one major change, however: despite the fact that the Catholic side had not
“won” the war per se, Catholicism itself did benefit from the early success of
the Habsburgs. Whereas roughly half of Western and Central Europe was
Protestant in 1590, only one-fifth of it was in 1690; that was in large part
because few people remained Protestants in Habsburg lands after the war.
kingdoms of France and Sweden, with Austria’s status as the most powerful
942
individual German state also confirmed. The big loser was Spain: having paid
for many of the Catholic armies for thirty years, it was essentially bankrupt,
and its monarchy could not reorganize in a more efficient manner as did its
Central Europe, and the center of economic dynamism thus shifted to the
mercantile middle class became more important than ever, while Spain
If the war had a positive effect, it was that it spelled the end of large-
intolerance well into the nineteenth century, but even pious monarchs were
that took root across all of Europe - the same kind of tolerance that had
943
emerged in France half a century earlier at the conclusion of the French Wars
of Religion.
Soldiers robbing, murdering, and raping peasants during the War. The conduct of soldiers was
so horrific that many Europe elites came to believe that better-regulated and led armies were
Perhaps the most important change that took place in the aftermath of
the wars was that European elites came to focus as much on the way wars
were fought as the reasons for war. The conduct of rapacious soldiers had
been so atrocious in the wars, especially in the Holy Roman Empire, that many
states went about the long, difficult process of creating professional standing
944
armies that reported to noble officers, rather than simply hiring mercenaries
Conclusion
that wracked Europe from roughly 1550 - 1650. Instead, millions died,
intolerance remained the rule, and the major states of Europe emerged more
focused than ever on centralization and military power. If there was a silver
lining, it was that rulers did their best to clamp down on explosions of
and control. Those concepts - order and control - would go on to inspire the
945
St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre - Public Domain
Chapter 8: Absolutism
early modern period. In other words, while the monarchs of the seventeenth
differently than had their predecessors, they did not use the term
“absolutism” itself. The central idea behind absolutism was that the king or
queen was, first, the holder of (theoretically) absolute political power within
the kingdom, and second, that the monarch's every action should be in the
946
name of preserving and guaranteeing the rights and privileges of his or her
monarchy in which the king was merely first among equals, holding formal
feudal authority over his elite nobles, but often being merely their equal, or
case of the French Wars of Religion, there were often numerous small states
and territories that sometimes rivaled larger ones in power, and even nobles
that were part of a given kingdom had the right to raise and maintain their
the monarch held much more power than even the most powerful
947
and, with them, the taxation to support them became both greater in sheer
volume and more efficient in its collection techniques. In short, more real
power and money flowed to the central government of the monarch than ever
power in the same period, as well as a dazzling cultural show of that power
France
began under the reign of Louis XIII, the son of Henry IV (the victor of the
when a king was too young to rule, his mother Marie de Medici held power as
948
regent, one who rules in the name of the king, enlisting the help of a brilliant
stepped down as regent, Richelieu joined the king as his chief minister in 1628
and continued to play the key role in shaping the French state.
Richelieu deserves a great deal of the credit for laying the foundation for
were led by nobles, and he created a system of royal officials called Intendants,
949
royal governors who were men who were usually not themselves noble but
were instead drawn from the mercantile classes. They collected royal taxes
which they were assigned; they did not have to answer to local lords.
abolished three out of six regional assemblies that, traditionally, had the right
providing royal revenue. He managed to increase the revenue from the taille,
the direct tax on land, almost threefold during his tenure (r. 1628 –
1642). That said, while he did curtail the power of the elite nobles, most of
those who bore the brunt of his improved techniques of taxation were the
peasants; Richelieu compared the peasants to mules, noting that they were
church,” officially beholden only to the pope. His real focus, however, was the
950
French crown. It was said that he “worshiped the state” much more than he
French support of the Protestant forces in the Thirty Years’ War as a check
against the power of the Habsburgs, and also supported the Ottoman Turks
against the Habsburgs for the same reason. Just to underline this point: a
Louis XIII died in 1643, and his son became king Louis XIV. The latter
was still too young to take the throne, so his mother became regent, ruling
951
noble-led civil war against the monarchy (the rebels even formed a formal
alliance with Spain). They were defeated by loyal forces in 1653, but the
uprisings made a profound impression on the young king, who vowed to bring
When Mazarin died in 1661, Louis ascended to full power (he was
23). Louis went on to a long and dazzling rule, achieving the height of royal
power and prestige not just in France, but in all of Europe. He ruled from
1643 – 1715 (including the years in which he ruled under the guidance of a
regent) meaning he was king for an astonishing 54 years; consider the fact
that the average life expectancy for those surviving infancy was only about 40
years at the time(!). Louis was called the Sun King, a term and an image he
the sun god Apollo (he once performed as Apollo in a ballet before his nobles,
952
paint pictures, write plays and stories, and build buildings all glorifying his
image.
Paris, into the most glorious palace in Europe, built in the baroque style and
lavishly decorated with ostentatious finery. Over the decades of his long rule,
the palace and grounds of the Palace of Versailles grew into the largest and
most spectacular seat of royal power in Europe, on par with any palace in the
world at the time. There were 1,400 fountains in the gardens, 1,200 orange
trees, and an ongoing series of operas, plays, balls, and parties. 10,000 people
could live in the palace, counting its additional buildings, since Louis
ultimately had 2,000 rooms built both in the palace and in apartments in the
village, all furnished at the state’s expense. The grounds cover about 2,000
acres, or just over 3 square miles (by comparison, Central Park in New York
953
A contemporary photograph of the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, a spectacular
Versailles, where they were lodged in apartments and spent their days
greeted the king as he awoke (the “rising” of the king, in parallel to the rising
of the sun), hand-picked favorites carried out such tasks as tying the ribbons
954
on his shoes, and then the procession accompanied him to
only those nobles in the king’s favor ever had the opportunity to speak to him
directly. The rituals were carefully staged not only to represent deference to
Louis, but to emphasize the hierarchy of ranks among the nobles themselves,
undermining their unity and forcing them to squabble over his favor. One of
the simplest ways in which Versailles undermined their power was that it cost
so much to maintain oneself there – about 50% of the revenue of all but the
very richest nobles present in the town or the château was spent on lodging,
Around the king’s person, courtiers had to be very careful to wear the
right clothes, make the right gestures, use the correct phrases, and even
display the correct facial expressions. Deviation could, and generally did, lead
delighted mockery of the other nobles. This was not just an elaborate game:
anyone wishing to "get" anything from the royal government (e.g. having a son
955
appointed as an officer in the army, joining an elite royal academy of scholars,
convince the king and his officials that he was witty, poised, fashionable, and
respected within the court. One false move and a career could be ruined. At
the same time, the rituals surrounding the king were not invented to humiliate
and impoverish his nobles per se; instead, they celebrated each noble’s power
reminded of two things at once: their dependence and deference to the king,
but also their own dignity and power as those who had the right to be near the
king.
person was welcome to walk through the palace and the grounds and confer
with those present (Louis XIV prided himself on the “openness” of his court,
contrasting it with the closed-off court of a tyrant). Both men and women
from very humble origins sometimes rose to prominence, and made a healthy
956
living, at Versailles by serving as go-betweens for elites seeking royal
need for revenue by proposing new tax schemes; those that were accepted
usually came with a payment for the person who submitted the scheme, so it
the monarchy. Despite the vast social gap between the nobility and
with useful social inferiors, and in some cases real friendships emerged in the
process.
huge that the food was usually cold before it made it from the kitchens to the
dining room; on one occasion Louis’ wine froze en route. Some of the nobles
who lived in the palace or its grounds would use the hallways to relieve
themselves instead of the privies because the latter were so inadequate and
far from their rooms. The palace had been designed for display, not comfort.
957
The costs of building and maintaining such an enormous temple to
60% of the royal revenue went to funding the elaborate court at Versailles
itself (this later dropped to 5% under Louis XVI, but the old figure was well-
refusing to return to Paris (which he hated) and dismissing the financial costs
as beneath his dignity to take notice of. At Versailles, life orbited around his
person and, by extension, his power, which was never seriously challenged
Louis did not just preside over the ongoing pageant at Versailles,
the Académie Française, the body dedicated to preserving the purity of the
French language founded earlier by Richelieu (during Louis XIV’s reign, the
958
Academy published the first official French dictionary). French literature, art,
and science all prospered under his sponsorship, and French became the
The above martial portrait of Louis XIV depicts him, symbolically, in his role as supreme military
commander. He is dressed in full (ceremonial) armor, holding a sword, and presiding over a
959
To keep up with costs, Louis continued to entrust revenue collection to
non-noble bureaucrats. The most important was Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619
– 1683), who doubled royal revenues by reducing the cut taken by tax
80% in some cases), increasing tariffs on foreign trade going to France, and
model of a powerful commoner despised by the nobility: not only was he part
of the system that held noble power in check, he was a mere shopkeeper’s son.
While Louis’ primary legacy was the image of monarchy that he created,
of religious dissenters but concentrating most of his attention and ire on the
convert, over 200,000 fled to parts of Germany, the Netherlands, England, and
960
America. In one fell swoop, Louis crippled what had been among the most
lands and in saddling the monarchy with enormous debts. Colbert, the
Louis that these wars were financially untenable; Louis simply ignored the
France was so great that even traditional enemies like England and the
Netherlands on one hand and the Habsburgs on the other joined forces
against Louis, and after a lengthy war, the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 forced
wars were so high that his government desperately sought new sources of
revenue, selling noble titles and bureaucratic offices, instituting still new
961
taxes, and further trampling the peasants. When he died in 1715, the state
Elsewhere in Europe
the style and the substance of Louis XIV’s court and style of rule. They built
to mention Louis’ constant wars, obliged them to seek out new forms of
compromises with their nobles that saw both sides benefit, generally at the
Prussia
962
Arguably the most successful absolutist state in Europe besides France
the later German state of Prussia. In 1618, the king of Brandenburg inherited
the kingdom of East Prussia, and in the following years smaller territories in
the west on the Rhine River. From this geographically unconnected series of
taxes, along with the right to make law independent of noble oversight. In
return, the nobility received confirmation that only nobles could own land
and, further, that they had total control over the peasants on their land. In
permanent. Serfs could not inherit property or even leave the land they
worked without the permission of their lord. One Prussian recalled being
taught, presumably in a church-run primary school, that “the king could cut off
the noses and ears of all his subjects if he wished to do so, and that we owed it
963
to his goodness and his gentle disposition that he had left us in possession of
efficient state apparatus in Europe, with his tax collection agency (which grew
out of the war office) operating at literally twice the efficiency of the French
equivalent. The major state office was called General Directory Over Finance,
War, and Royal Domains; it was perhaps one of the original sources of the
1713) further consolidated the power of the monarchy, built up the royal
capital of Berlin, and received the right to claim the title of “King of Prussia”
964
Prussia began as the union of Brandenburg and the Duchy of Prussia, eventually growing to
work of his grandfather and father primarily by concentrating all state power
on the military. He more than doubled the size of the Prussian army (from
few rooms in the palace, wore his officer’s uniform everywhere, and
with. It was said during his rule that “what distinguishes the Prussians from
965
other people is that theirs is not a country with an army. They have an army
and a country that serves it.” Most importantly, Frederick Wilhelm created
formal systems of conscription (i.e. "the draft"), meaning more men in Prussia,
per capita, served in the military than did men anywhere else in Europe. He
also established the first system of military reserves, with reservists drilling
for two months a year during the summers. In short, Prussia became the most
series of wars that confirmed its status as a European "great power." Its
version of absolutism, one centered on the authority of the king, the rights of
966
Austria
the ancestral state of the Habsburgs, had always been the single most
powerful German state within the Holy Roman Empire. The Habsburgs,
however, found that the diversity of their domains greatly hampered their
ability to develop along absolutist lines. In some cases, they were able to
were made to work three days a week for their nobles, for free, and in return
the Bohemian nobles allowed the emperor more control of the territory
Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 rendered the political
“Austrian.” The Habsburgs ruled Austria itself and exercised real control over
967
the constituent kingdoms of their empire like Hungary and Bohemia, but had
virtually no authority over the other Holy Roman states. With the Spanish
branch of the family dying off in 1700 (the last Spanish Habsburg, Charles II,
their territories, the Habsburg line produced highly effective rulers in the
eighteenth century in particular. The empress Maria Theresa (r. 1740 - 1780),
the only surviving heir to the Habsburg throne when her father died, proved a
skillful administrator who rationalized the offices of the Austrian state, shored
up the loyalty of her non-Austrian subjects, and even won the grudging
in the gender expectations of the time. She was on the one hand a devoted
wife (to a king “consort” - her husband held no power over the empire) and
power that included her direction of Austrian forces during war and of
968
practical administration during peacetime. Her son Joseph II was obliged to
rule alongside his mother until her death in 1780, inheriting the empire at the
Spain
royal power at the expense of their nobles and on the backs of their
peasants. Those efforts were at least partly successful in places like Sweden
and Denmark, but were disastrous failures in places like Spain and England.
Spain had been the most powerful kingdom in Europe in the sixteenth
marriages by the Habsburgs, Spain was part of the largest dynastic system in
Europe. However, both the failed invasion of England in 1588 and the
969
ongoing debacle of the Dutch Revolt resulted in enormous losses of both
wealth and prestige by the Spanish. By the 1620s and against the backdrop of
the Thirty Years’ War, the monarchy was bankrupt and Spain itself was
territories. Spain became almost like a smaller version of the Holy Roman
Empire, with the Spanish king only directly ruling the central territory of
Castile (it was the Castilian dialect, centered on Madrid, that became the
Spanish nobles came to hold their own kings in contempt and asserted
France met with failure; even as Spain was losing the Dutch Revolt, it was
trying to bankroll the Catholic forces of the Thirty Years’ War, thereby
undermining its own financial reserves and stretching its military power to
970
revolted against the central monarchy in the mid-seventeenth century, with
Spanish royal bureaucracy. The earlier assaults on Jews and Muslims had
already driven out the most dynamic economic elements from Spain, and the
attack on the Moriscos and Conversos (descendants of the Muslims and Jews
who had converted to Catholicism) drove many of them away as well. Spain’s
vast empire continued to produce great wealth, but relatively little of that
wealth ended up in the coffers of the monarchy, and the sheer scale of the
slave-based extraction of precious metals from the New World ran up against
was in dire straits thanks to the inflation silver imports introduced to the
European economy.
971
There was a strong mood of depression and nostalgia among elite
Spaniards of the time, most memorably expressed in one of the great works of
1605 and 1615), portraying a delusional minor nobleman trying to live out a
windmills. Especially as its royal line grew moribund in the second half of the
seventeenth century, and following the inconclusive end of the Thirty Years’
War Spain had largely financed, the power of the Spanish state grew ever
weaker.
century, and yet the state itself emerged all the stronger. Ironically, the two
most powerful states in Europe during the following century were absolutist
972
France and its political opposite, the first major constitutional monarchy in
things first converged in England at the end of the seventeenth and start of the
important but secondary state in terms of its power and influence to the most
powerful nation in the world in the nineteenth century. For those reasons it is
The irony of the fact that England was the first state to move toward
only a quarter of that of France and its monarchy was comparatively weak;
973
monarchy was beset by powerful landowners with traditional privileges they
with various ethnicities and divided religious loyalties, many of whom were
hostile to the monarchy itself. It was an unlikely candidate for what would
The English King Henry VIII had broken the official English church -
renamed the Church of England - away from the Roman Catholic Church in the
English Catholic institutions, mostly monasteries, and used it to fund his own
fought off the Spanish Armada in 1588. While Elizabeth’s long reign (r. 1558 –
1603) coincided with a golden age of English culture, most notably with the
works of Shakespeare, the money plundered from Catholic coffers had run out
974
Despite Elizabeth’s relative toleration of religious difference, Great
Britain remained profoundly divided. The Church of England was the nominal
church of the entire realm, and only Anglicans could hold public office as
by the gentry class of landowners. In turn, the church was itself divided
between an “high church” faction that was in favor of all of the trappings of
predestination, and so on), but were still considered to be full members of the
and Ireland - which had been colonized by the English starting in the sixteenth
975
Thus, the monarchy presided over a divided society. It was also
relatively poor, with the English crown overseeing a small bureaucracy and no
official standing army. The only way to raise revenue from the rest of the
country was to raise royal taxes, which were resisted by the very proud and
defensive gentry class (the landowners) as well as the titled nobility. The
question as of the early seventeenth century was whether it had the right to
set laws as well. The bottom line is that English kings or queens could not
force lawmakers to grant them taxes without having to beg, plead, cajole, and
between the Crown and the House of Commons, the larger of the two legal
While her reign was plagued by these issues, Elizabeth I was a savvy
monarch who was very skilled at reconciling opposing factions and winning
976
over members of parliament to her perspective. She also benefited from what
was left of the money her father had looted from the English
monasteries. This delicate balance started to fall apart with Elizabeth's death
in 1603. She died without an heir (she had never married, rightly recognizing
that marriage would undermine her own authority), so her successor was
from the Scottish royal house of the Stuarts, fellow royals related to the
Tudors. The new king was James I (r. 1603 – 1625), the first of the new royal
line to rule England. James was already the king of Scotland when he
inherited the English crown, so England and Scotland were politically united
and the kingdom of "Great Britain" was born (it was later ratified as a
permanent legal reality in 1707 with the "Act of Union" passed by parliament).
“royal prerogative,” the right of the king to rule through force of will. He set
977
parliament grumbled about his heavy-handed manner of rule, there were no
His son, Charles I (r. 1625 – 1649), was a much greater threat from the
the Anglican church just as Puritanism among the common people was
styling himself after Louis XIII of France (to whom he was related), he came to
be feared and hated by many of his own people. Charles imposed taxes and
tariffs that were not approved by parliament, which was technically illegal,
and then he forced rich subjects to grant the crown loans at very low interest
impose a new high church religious liturgy (set of rituals) in Scotland. That
prompted the Scots to openly break with the king and raise an army; to get the
978
The result was civil war. Not only were the Scots well trained and
various laws and acts illegal and dismissing his ministers, an act remembered
session for years (it was called “the long parliament” as a result). Meanwhile,
there were massacred. Many in parliament thought that Charles was in league
with the Irish. War finally broke out in 1642, pitting the anti-royal “round-
heads” (named after their bowl cuts) and their Scottish allies against the
disciplined fighting force whose soldiers were regularly paid and which
actually paid for its supplies rather than plundering them and living off the
land (as did the king’s forces). Thanks to the effectiveness of Cromwell, the
New Model Army, and the financial backing of the city of London, the round-
979
heads gained the upper hand in the war. In the end, Charles was captured,
Preservation,” with the royalist forces drowning in the allegorical flood while the houses of
During the English civil war, England went from one of the least
980
English men were directly involved in fighting, and few regions in England
the round-heads concerning what kind of government they were fighting for;
democratic republic. The most radical were called the Diggers, who try to set
the army, but the language they use in discussing justice and good
Thanks in large part to the ongoing political debates of the period, the
there were over 2,000 political pamphlets published in 1642 alone. Ordinary
981
people had begun in earnest to participate in political dialog, another pattern
Protector in 1649. He ruled England for ten years, carrying out an incredibly
bloody invasion of Ireland that is still remembered with bitterness today, and
ruling through his control of the army. Following his death in 1658,
parliament decided to reinstate the monarchy and the official power of the
there was a lack of consensus about what could be done otherwise. None of
the initial problems that brought about the civil wars in the first place were
982
Thus, in 1660, Charles II (r. 1660 – 1685), the son of the executed
Charles I, took the throne. He was a cousin of Louis XIV of France and, like his
that he could never achieve a Louis-XIV-like rule (nor did he try to dismiss
that claimed he was a secret Catholic; as it turns out, he had drawn up a secret
proclaimed his Catholicism on his deathbed. A crisis occurred late in his reign
when a parliamentary faction called the Whigs tried to exclude his younger
brother, James II, from being eligible for the throne because he was openly
Catholic. They were ultimately beaten (legally) by a rival faction, the Tories,
that supported the notion of the divine right of kings and of hereditary
succession.
When James II (r. 1685 – 1688) took the throne, however, even his
Catholics to positions of power, against the laws in place that required all
983
lawmakers and officials to be Anglicans. In 1688, James’s wife had a son,
which thus threatened that a Catholic monarchy might remain for the
Orange, a Dutch military leader and lawmaker in the Dutch Republic, to lead a
force against James. William was married to Mary, the Protestant daughter of
James II, and thus parliament hoped that any threat of a Catholic monarchy
English army defected to him, forcing James to flee with his family to
parliament and they agreed to abide by a new Bill of Rights. The result was
but one in which lawmaking was controlled by a parliament and all citizens
were held accountable to the same set of laws. Even as absolutism became the
984
predominant mode of politics on the continent, Britain set forth on a different,
England felt secure enough from royal attempts to seize power unlawfully
that they were willing to increase the size and power of government and to
levy new taxes. Thus, the English state grew very quickly, whereas it had been
parliament in raising taxes that had been behind the conflicts between king
The English state could grow because parliament was willing to make it
grow after 1688. It did grow because of war. William of Orange had already
been at war with Louis XIV before he came to England, and once he was king
985
Britain went to war with France in 1690 over colonial conflicts and because of
Louis’s constant attempts to seize territory in the continent. The result was
To raise money for those wars, private bankers founded the Bank of
England in 1694. While it was not created by the British government itself,
the Bank of England soon became the official banking institution of the
manage state debt effectively. The Bank issued bonds that paid a reasonable
bonds. Thus, individual investors were guaranteed to make money and the
state could finance its wars through carefully regulated sales of bonds. In
contrast, Louis XIV financially devastated the French government with his
wars, despite the efforts of his Intendants and other royal officials to squeeze
every drop of tax revenue they could out of the huge and prosperous
against France grew larger every year. Ultimately, this would see the
986
transformation of Britain from secondary political power to France’s single
While Britain was thus the outstanding exception to the general pattern
of absolutism, the growth in its state was comparable to the growth among its
officials they employed and the tax revenues they collected) over the course of
the seventeenth century, and standing armies went from around 20,000 men
during the sixteenth century to well over 150,000 by the late seventeenth
century.
Armies were not just larger - they were better-disciplined, trained, and
uniforms. Warfare, while still bloody, was nowhere near as savage and
987
chaotic as it had been during the wars of religion, thanks in large part to the
officers, rather than mercenaries simply unleashed against an enemy and told
to live off of the land (i.e. the peasants) while they did so. Officers on opposing
Prussia was a shared concept of royal authority. The theory of absolutism was
that the king was above the nobles and not answerable to anyone in his
oversight. “Arbitrary” power was not the point: the power exercised by the
monarch was supposed to be for the good of the kingdom – this was known as
raison d’etat, right or reason of the state. Practically speaking, this meant that
the whole range of traditional rights, especially those of the nobles and the
cities, had to be respected. Louis XIV famously claimed that "L'etat, c'est moi" -
988
I am the state. His point was that there was no distinction between his own
identity and the government of France itself, and his actions were by
definition for the good of France (which was not always true from an objective
Central and Eastern Europe, what freedoms peasants had enjoyed before
deals with their nobility that ratified the latter’s right to completely control
the peasantry. Serfdom, already in place in much of the east, was hardened in
the seventeenth century, and the free labor, fees, and taxes owed by peasants
to their lords grew harsher (e.g., the Austrian labor obligation was known as
the robot, and it could consist of up to 100 days of labor a year). The general
pattern in the east was that nobles answered to increasingly powerful kings or
emperors, but they were themselves “absolute” rulers of their own estates
989
The irony of the growth of both royal power and royal tax revenue was
that it still could not keep up with the cost of war. Military expenditures were
enormous; in a state like France the military took up 50% of state revenues
during peacetime, and 80% or more during war (which was frequent). Thus,
monarchs granted monopolies on products and then taxed them, and they
frequently sold noble titles and state offices to the highest bidder (the queen
between 1630 – 1650, and the concomitant peasant uprisings were ruthlessly
suppressed.
the great legal benefits enjoyed by members of the nobility in the absolutist
system, was that the rights and privileges of nobility were codified into clear
laws for the first time. Most absolutist states created “tables of ranks” that
specified exactly where nobles stood vis-à-vis one another as well as the
monarch and “princes of the blood.” Louis XIV of France had a branch of the
990
royal government devoted entirely to verifying claims of nobility and
Conclusion
The process by which states went from decentralized and fairly loosely
ways, such as the fact that laws were different from town to town and region
rights over the centuries. That being noted, there is no question that things
in organization.
991
Hall of Mirrors - Jorge Láscar
period with regards to its outlook on wealth and property. Along with that
change came the growth of a new kind of state and society, one not only
the moneyed classes whose wealth was not predicated on owning land. The
992
In the Middle Ages, wealth, land, and power were intimately
to generate money for the state. By the seventeenth century the European
nobility were split between “nobles of the sword” who inherited their titles
from their warlike ancestors and “nobles of the robe” who had either been
warriors. Among almost all of them, there was considerable contempt for
merchants, who were often seen as parasites who undermined good Christian
morality and the proper order of society. Even nobles of the robe who had
only joined the nobility within the last generation tended to cultivate a
there was a finite, limited amount of wealth in the world, and that the only
993
thing that could be done to become wealthier was to get and hold on to more
of it. In both the medieval and Renaissance-era mindset, the only forms of
wealth were land and bullion (precious metals), and since there is only so
much land and so much gold and silver out there, if one society grew richer, by
seizing more territory, especially territory that would somehow increase the
flow of precious metals into royal coffers. Trade was only important insofar
that more bullion was flowing into the economy than was flowing
out. Colonies abroad provided raw materials and, hopefully, bullion itself. As
holdings at home. The ultimate example of this system was the biggest owner
994
Mercantilism worked well enough, but commerce fit awkwardly into its
paradigm. Trade was not thought to generate new wealth, since it did not
directly dig up more silver or gold, nor did it seize wealth from other
traditional elites since they not only did not produce anything themselves,
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not noblemen, but were instead
wealthy merchant townsfolk, especially in places like the Dutch Republic and,
later, England, men who amassed huge fortunes but did not fit neatly into the
existing power structure of landholding nobles, the church, and the common
people. These changes inspired an increasingly spirited battle over the rights
995
of property, the idea that not just land but wealth itself was something that
Early Capitalism
in the Americas) had been driven by a search for gold and a desire to convert
trade routes in the name of commodities and the wealth they generated by the
reasons. Because of the enormous wealth to be generated not from gold and
silver themselves, but from commodities like sugar, tobacco, and coffee (as
well as luxury commodities like spices that had always been important), the
to perpetrate one of the greatest crimes in history: the Atlantic Slave Trade.
996
In short, we see in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the first
historically, by wars that tried to carve out bigger chunks of the global market
major economic and political phenomena: enterprises run explicitly for profit
and a legal framework to protect and encourage the generation of profit. The
pursuit of profit was nothing new, historically, but the political power enjoyed
by merchants, the political focus on overseas expansion for profit, and the
Overseas Expansion
997
by the seventeenth century, and it was that economy that fueled the
expansion during this period was primarily commercial, focused on the search
for commodities and profit, it was also a major political focus of all of the
actively sought not just to trade with, but to conquer and control, overseas
territories both for profit and for their own political "glory" and
or direct control in areas of the globe in which Europe had never before been
an influence. The result: by 1800, roughly 35% of the globe was directly or
998
world by the late seventeenth centuries. As European powers expanded, they
built fortresses in the modern style and defended them with cannons,
muskets, and warships that often outmatched the military forces and
technology they encountered. In the case of China, Japan, and the Philippines,
for instance, local rulers learned that the easiest way to deal with European
piracy was not to try to fight European ships, but instead to cut off trade with
empires in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia that defied European attempts at
hegemony, but much of the world was controlled by smaller states. A prime
kingdoms. The Mughal Empire that ruled much of the subcontinent early in
the period of British expansion was in rapid decline by the early eighteenth
century, well before the British controlled much territory, and it was replaced
by many small states instead of another large, powerful one when it finally
999
collapsed in 1739. When the British and French began taking control of
Indian territory, it was against the resistance of small Indian kingdoms, not
the consolidation of European holdings in the New World and the beginning of
empires in places like India, but it did not include major land-holdings in
Africa, the Middle East, or East Asia. In places with powerful states like China,
the Ottoman Empire, and Japan, even the relative superiority of European
arms was not sufficient to seize territory. Likewise, not only were African
states able to successfully fight off Europeans as well, but African diseases
much African territory. As the Slave Trade burgeoned, Europeans did launch
slave raids, but most slaves were instead captured by African slavers who
1000
world. However, "monopolies" in this case only meant monopolies in trade
going to and from Europe. There were enormous, established, and powerful
networks of trade between Africa, India, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China,
merchants. To cite one example, the Indian Ocean had served as an oceanic
goods that made their way back to Europe rather than seizing control of intra-
Asian or African trade routes, although they did try to dominate those routes
when they could, and Europeans were able to seize at least some territories
The Netherlands
The Dutch were at the forefront of these changes. During their rebellion
against Spain in the late sixteenth century, the Dutch began to look to revenue
1001
middlemen in European commerce, shipping and selling things like timber
from Russia, textiles from England, and wine from Germany, and they also
currency exchange and the stock market, both of which led to huge fortunes
commercial power was that the Netherlands replaced northern Italy as the
In 1602, Dutch merchants with the support of the state created the
world's first corporation: the Dutch East India Company (VOC in its Dutch
company with a legal monopoly to trade with a certain region: India and
offer “protection” from the supposedly more rapacious European powers like
1002
many cases, the VOC simply used the promise of protection as a smokescreen
eventually became a Dutch colony), while in other areas local rulers remained
in political control but lost power over their own spice production and
trade. For the better part of the seventeenth century, the Dutch controlled an
enormous amount of the hugely profitable trade in luxury goods and spices
1003
their investments within the first ten years, in addition to a dramatic boost in
value of the stocks themselves. The other states of Europe were both aghast
at Dutch success and grudgingly admiring of it. In 1601, there were 100 more
Dutch ships in the port of London at any given time than there were English
ships, and by 1620 about half of all European merchant vessels were Dutch.
In 1652, the Dutch seized control of the Cape of Good Hope at the
southern tip of Africa, allowing them to control shipping going around Africa
en route to Asia, and they exerted additional military force in the Indies to
force native merchants to trade only with them (among Europeans). Note
here that the Dutch takeover of the Cape of Good Hope was the historical
origin of the modern nation of South Africa – these were the first permanent
European settlers. The Dutch were also the only European power allowed to
keep a small trading colony in Japan, which was otherwise completely cut off
1004
The iconic moment in the history of the Dutch golden age of early
capitalism was the tulip craze of the 1620s – 1630s. Tulips grow well in the
Netherlands and had long been cultivated for European elites. A tulip fad
among Dutch elites in the 1620s drove up the price of tulip bulbs
themselves.
In 1625, one bulb was sold for 5,000 guilders, about half the cost of a
mansion in Amsterdam. It went up from there – the real height of the craze
was the winter of 1636 - 1637, when individual bulbs sometimes changed
hands ten times in a day for increasing profits. This was the equivalent of
“flipping” bulbs; it had nothing to do with the actual tulips any longer. The
element to emphasize is not just the seemingly irrational nature of the boom,
but of the mindset: the Dutch moneyed classes were already embracing
1005
almost nothing to do with what it does, but instead from what people are
"bubbles" of rising values that then eventually collapse. In this case, the tulip
craze did indeed come crashing down in the winter of 1637 - 1638, but in the
to come.
originated in the Netherlands, but it spread from there. One by one, the other
government. For example, Louis XIV insisted that his son study political
how a king should oversee state finances. This was a significant change, since
dirty one’s hands with commerce. It was because of the incredible success of
1006
the Dutch that kings and nobles throughout Europe began to change their
outlooks and values. Ultimately, at least among some kings and nobles in
of mercantile techniques.
Ultimately, the Dutch Golden Age was the seventeenth century. The
other states of Europe began to focus their own efforts on trade, and when the
Netherlands was dragged into the wars initiated by Louis XIV toward the end
of the seventeenth century, it spelled the beginning of the end for their
resolutely prosperous country ever since). During that period, however, the
Dutch had created a global trade network, proved that commercial dominance
would play a crucial factor in political power in the future, and overseen a
1007
One of the many self portraits of the Dutch master Rembrandt, the most prominent
painter associated with the golden age of Dutch culture in the seventeenth century.
Of the other European states, the British were the most successful at
imitating the Dutch. In 1667 the British king Charles II officially designated
the royal treasury as the coordinating body of British state finances and made
sure that officials trained in the Dutch style of political economy ran it. The
British parliament grew increasingly savvy with financial issues as well, with
1008
numerous debates emerging about the best and most profitable use of state
funds.
In 1651, both to try to seize trade from the Dutch and to fend off
Britain's traditional enemies, France and Spain, parliament passed the English
ships. This, in turn, led to extensive piracy and conflict between the powers of
Europe in their colonial territories as they tried to seize profitable lands and
enforce their respective monopolies. Ultimately, the British fought three wars
with the Dutch, defeating them each time and, among other things, seizing the
Dutch port of New Amsterdam in North America (which the English promptly
renamed New York). Britain also fought Spain in both the seventeenth and
In terms of trade, the major prize, at least initially, was the Caribbean,
due to its suitability for growing sugar. Sugar quickly became the colonial
to exotic products like spices, which were only available from Asian
1009
sources). In Europe, sugar consumption doubled every 25 years during this
period and it was ultimately the profits of sugar that helped bankroll the
with rendering facilities built to extract the raw sugar from sugar cane. That,
labor. Most Native American slaves quickly died off or escaped and hence the
Atlantic Slave Trade between Africa and the New World began in earnest by
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade between Africa and the New World was,
quite simply, one of the worst injustices of human history. Millions of people
the life of slaves, that of incredibly difficult but not always lethal conditions of
work, is largely inaccurate because only a small minority of slaves were ever
1010
sent to North America. The immense majority of slaves were instead sent to
the Caribbean or Brazil, both areas in which working conditions were far
America. The average life of a slave once introduced to sugar cultivation was
seven years before he or she died from exhaustion or injury, and sugar was
the major crop of the Caribbean and one of the major crops of Brazil. Put
The slave trade was part of what historians have described as the
“triangle trade” between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Slaves from Africa
were shipped to the New World to work on plantations. Raw goods (e.g.
exchange for slaves. This cycle of exchange grew decade-by-decade over the
1011
The “triangle trade” led to tremendous profits in Europe, horrendous human suffering, and the
The leg of the triangle trade that connected Africa and the Americas was
known as the Middle Passage because slave ships went directly across the
above. Slaves on board ships were packed in so tightly they could not move
for most of the voyage, with slave ship captains calculating into their profit
margins the fact that a significant percentage of their human cargo would die
1012
en route - over a million slaves died during the Middle Passage in the
Illustration of a slave ship’s human cargo under conditions that often saw more than 10% of the
Trade) suggests that well over twelve million people were enslaved and
transported to the new world from the sixteenth century through the early
nineteenth. That number is lower than the actual total, since roughly 20% of
1013
transported slaves were in undocumented (i.e. smuggled and technically
"illegal" from the standpoint of the slave-trading states) voyages. Thus, the
real number is probably closer to fifteen million. Over 90% of slaves were
sent to the Caribbean or Brazil because the sugar crop, as well as coffee
The topic of slavery is vast; it was a huge economic engine and a major
part of life in the entire New World. It shaped the demography and the
culture of every American society, and its sheer scale dwarfs every other
pattern of slavery in world history. That said, of its various aspects, the one
that probably casts the longest shadow in terms of its historical significance is
the fact that the Atlantic Slave Trade was the first time in history that slavery
developed a range of racist theories to excuse the practice from its obvious
immorality. In fact, the whole idea of human "race" is largely derived from the
1014
Slave Trade - biologically, "race" is nothing more than a handful of
the enslavement of Africans, Europeans in the early modern period led the
Even as the British were actively participating in the Slave Trade in the
Atlantic region, they began the process of seizing control of territory in India
run by the English East India Company (EIC), which had a legal monopoly of
trade just as its Dutch counterpart did in the Netherlands. The original
impetus behind the EIC was profitable trade, not political power per se.
1015
factories, which served as clearinghouses for trade with Indian merchants. In
1756, however, an Indian prince sent an army to Calcutta to drive out the
allies. The next year, a small British force of 800 men with 2,000 Indian
mercenary troops (called sepoys) defeated the prince at the Battle of Plassey,
then began the process of taking over the entire province of Bengal.
The takeover of Bengal started the slow creep of British power: tax
weapons. That, in turn, both allowed the British to drive out the French from
Indian territories and to dominate Indian princes, thereby seizing yet more
Indian territory. In this patchwork fashion, the EIC expanded its power in
India over the next century, directly controlling some territories, indirectly
dominating others. The result was that the EIC, a private corporation backed
1016
by the British state, controlled almost all of the Indian subcontinent by the
On the other side of the world, while far less economically important
colonization. Britain was one of the two major powers – France the other –
that colonized areas of the eastern seaboard of North America. While initial
the original settlers at Jamestown in Virginia were dead by the time more
arrived in 1610), the survivors discovered that they could at least grown one
cash crop that would both enrich themselves and tempt other Europeans to
immigrate: tobacco. Likewise, a relatively small part of the slave trade soon
included the importation of slaves to work first the tobacco fields, and then
river. That soon became the center of New France, and its cash “crop”
1017
consisted of furs gained through barter with Native American groups or taken
by French trappers.
Until the latter half of the seventeenth century, these were small-scale
colonies compared to the vast states of Central and South America. Slowly but
surely, however, colonists did arrive in North America, and not always for
English religious dissenters, Puritans, fled persecution from the Anglican state
and began to settle in Massachusetts by the thousands in the 1620s (this was
during the period under James I and Charles I before the English Civil
War). That said, the North American colonies all remained small and
Spain, of course, still held the largest overseas empire. The Spanish not
only held almost all of South America, all of Central America, and the
American West as far north as Oregon, but they held territory in the Pacific
1018
island chain of the Philippines as well. South American silver passed through
both Spain and the Philippines en route to China, where it paid for luxury
goods that were shipped back to Spain. The Spanish crown, especially under a
branch of the Bourbon royal family that became the royal dynasty of Spain in
1700, exercised direct control over colonial trade and taxation (rather than
Spanish territories in the Americas in the eighteenth century, at the height of their territorial
expanse.
1019
What set the Spanish empire apart from the other overseas empires was
the fact that its colonial system suffered from infighting between Spanish-
born royal bureaucrats and the creole elites who dominated the Spanish New
World itself. Many of these creole elites lived more like traditional nobles in
Brazil. To be clear, South and Central America were important regions within
the global trade network, but the Spanish state itself did not enjoy the same
level of direct control over, or power derived from, its colonial possessions as
did its European rivals over theirs. Instead, the vast Spanish empire was
autonomy. Thus, even the vast wealth still generated within the Spanish
empire did not translate into an equivalent degree of state or military power
colonies and factories were seized or handed over to the Dutch and British in
1020
the seventeenth century. While Portugal had enjoyed a (relatively brief)
Gama in the fifteenth century, it was not able to compete with the better-
funded and equipped forces of the Netherlands and Britain, and thus most
Portuguese colonies and trading posts were lost over time to its rivals. The
major exception was Brazil, which was hugely profitable, and which imported
staggering quantities of slaves (Brazil was also the last European state to
eastward across Siberia from the period of the fifteenth through the
economy at the time that they were often used in lieu of currency outside of
the major cities. In turn, Russian fur trappers and traders arrived at the
Pacific in the late seventeenth century. From there, they sailed across to
Alaska and then down the west coast of North America, establishing small
1021
churches and forts but not colonizing territory (i.e. for the most part, they did
not stay and establish families). By the early eighteenth century, the various
Northwest of what later became the United States: in the eighteenth century,
Russian fur trappers, French fur trappers, Spanish missionaries, and English
Conclusion
The greatest changes in world history during the early modern period
have to do with the ongoing contact between the different regions of the globe
that began with Columbus's (quite literally) misguided voyage in 1492. By the
seventeenth century, the peoples of Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia
were all linked by commerce, trade, politics, slavery, and warfare. Obviously,
those contacts would only grow stronger going into the modern period.
1022
Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):
modern scientific perspective. The practical impact of that shift was relatively
minor at the time, but the long-term consequences were enormous. For the
1023
served as the basis for logical conjecture about how natural laws operated,
For well over a thousand years, Europeans had looked backwards for
insights into the natural world. They relied on Aristotle and accounts by other
operated, and how the human body regulated itself. These teachings were
empirical scientific culture because the point of science had never been to
discover the truth, but to describe it. In other words, practically every pre-
modern person already knew how the world worked: they knew it from myth,
from the teachings of ancient authorities, and from religion. In a sense, all of
1024
the answers were already there, and thus empirical observation was seen as
redundant. The term used at the time for “science” was “natural philosophy,”
increasingly dissatisfied with some ancient authors, since those authors did
not, in fact, explain everything. While ancient authors wrote about astronomy,
for instance, they did not adequately explain the observed movements of the
stars and planets. Likewise, with the explosion of new translations of classical
works, it became clear that ancient scholars had actively debated and even
1025
rejected the teachings of figures like Aristotle. This suggested that it was
the idea that the Earth sits on top of a giant sea that occasionally sloshes
own observations and advancing theories to explain what they saw happening
opposite of deductive reasoning, which starts with a known theory and then
tries to prove that observations fit into it. The classic example of the latter
was taking the idea that the Earth is the center of the universe as a given, then
trying to force the observed movements of the heavenly bodies to make sense
1026
That being noted, deductive reasoning is still an important part of “real”
science in that it allows for proofs: in mathematics, for instance, one can start
since many thinkers insisted that mathematics was part of a divine language
that existed apart from but was as nearly important as the Bible itself. God
had designed the universe in such a way that mathematics offered the
secrets of the universe. Isaac Newton was a scientist but also an alchemist,
1027
“transmute” base metals like lead into gold. Likewise, many thinkers were
explained the universe. There was a great deal of crossover between what we
might think of as magic and spirituality on the one hand and “real” science on
the other.
This is evident not only with Newton, but with other scientists of the era –
and engineers while also being alchemists. The point here is that, ultimately,
even though it turns out that magic does not exist, the interest in discovery
piqued by the idea of probing the universe’s secrets still led to genuine
scientific discovery.
1028
advancing a hypothesis to explain observed data, but then trying to disprove
the hypothesis rather than trying to force the facts to prove it. In this way, the
best that could be hoped for was a highly likely, not-yet-disproven theory,
rather than a flimsy, vulnerable theory that needed artificial defenses. Over
results of an experiment had to yield the same results consistently in order for
Bacon took the radical step of breaking even with the Renaissance
natural world was all but worthless and that scholars in the present should
himself – he was fired as the Lord Chancellor of King James I after accepting
bribes, and he died after catching a cold stuffing snow into a dead chicken as
1029
Scientific Discoveries
Astronomy
that the Earth was at the center of the universe, which consisted of a giant
crystal sphere studded with the stars. That sphere slowly rotated, while the
sun, moon, and planets were suspended above the earth within the sphere
and also rotated around the Earth. Ptolemy, who lived centuries after
Aristotle, elaborated on the Aristotelian system and claimed that there were
not just one but close to eighty spheres, one within the other, which explained
the fact that the different heavenly bodies did not all move in the same
direction or at the same speed. The idea that the earth is at the center of the
1030
The geocentric universe illustrated, with the sun and planets revolving around the
Earth. Interestingly, the illustration above was created in 1660, a few decades after Galileo
In this model of the universe, the earth was distinct from the other
heavenly bodies. The earth was imperfect, chaotic, and changing, while the
heavens were perfect and uniform. Thus, Christian thinkers embraced the
1031
Aristotelian model in part because it fit Christian theology so well: God and
the angels were on the outside of the most distant crystal sphere in a state of
total perfection, while humans and the devil were on, or inside in the case of
model of the universe is where the concept that God and heaven are "up in the
sky" and hell is "below the ground" originated. When the astronomers of the
totally contradicted how most learned people thought about, and had thought
The problem with this model is that it did not match the observed paths
taken by the stars and, especially, the planets, which do not follow regular,
– 1543), was the first to argue in a book published just before his death that
1032
the whole system would match reality if the sun was at the center of the orbits
instead of the earth: this concept is called heliocentrism. He retained the idea
of the crystal spheres, and he also used Ptolemy’s calculations in his own
work, but his was nevertheless the first work to propose the concept of a
course, as an astronomer.
attempted to demonstrate that the Earth was indeed at the center of the
orbits. He spent twenty years carefully observing the heavens from his castle
1033
posterity was that it provided a wealth of data for later astronomers to work
Brahe’s assistant late in his life, ended up using Brahe’s data to argue against
Brahe’s conclusion, demonstrating that the data actually proved that the sun
was indeed at the center of the universe. Kepler also noticed that there was
some kind of force emanating from the sun that seemed to hold the planets in
Kepler concluded that some form of magnetism was likely the cause (in fact,
Kepler had noticed the role of gravity in space). Interestingly, Kepler did his
Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who overlooked the fact that Kepler was a
1034
he had heard and was delighted to discover previously unknown aspects of
the heavenly bodies, such as the fact that the moon and sun did not have
smooth, perfect surfaces, and that Jupiter had its own moons. He publicly
demonstrated his telescope and quickly became well known among educated
elites across Europe. His first major publication, The Starry Messenger in
unknown objects (e.g. the moons of Jupiter) and that planets and moons
In 1632 he published a work, the Dialogue, that used the work of earlier
astronomers and his own observations to support the heliocentric view of the
universe; this work quickly became much better known than had Copernicus’s
whom presented the case for heliocentrism, the other for geocentrism. The
undermined the idea that the heavens were perfect, that the earth was central,
1035
and by extension, that ancient knowledge was reliable. Few things could have
Galileo was tried by the Inquisition in 1633, in part because his former
patron, the pope Urban VIII, thought that Galileo had been mocking him
heliocentrism, not of heresy per se. Galileo was forced to recant and his book
was placed on the Catholic Index of banned books, where it would remain
until 1822. Much of the explanation for this persecution can be found in the
fact that his work was published against the backdrop of religious war then
engulfing Europe; the Catholic Church was not a tolerant institution in the
seventeenth century.
Galileo is less well remembered for his work in physics, but his work
there was as important as his astronomy. Six years after the Dialogue was put
on the Index, he published another work, Two New Sciences of Motion and
1036
aspects of gravity. These theories refuted Aristotelian physics, which had
claimed that objects only stay in motion when there is direct impetus; Galileo
Isaac Newton
was Sir Isaac Newton, an English mathematician (1642 – 1727). Newton was,
University at the age of 27 and was renowned within his own lifetime for
being one of the great minds of his age. In 1687 he published the
universal law of gravitation that applied equally to enormous objects like the
planet Earth and tiny objects that could barely be detected by human
1037
senses. The entire system of physics was mapped out and described in
Principles. It was one of the single greatest works of science of all time: its
scientific information.
correctly calculated the relative mass of earth and water, deduced that
electrical impulses had something to do with the nervous system, and figured
out that all colors are part of the larger spectrum of light. He personally
designed and built a new and more effective kind of telescope, and wrote the
1038
Newton’s treatise on the properties of light, the founding document of optics.
famous in his own lifetime, ultimately being knighted by King William and
published his work, and that only after fearing that his self-understood
“rivals” would steal it if he did not. He was also completely chaste his entire
temperament.
1039
Medicine
While astronomy and physics advanced by leaps and bounds during the
science and biology advanced much more slowly. At the time there were a
continued to rely on the work of the Greek physician Galen, who in the second
century CE had elaborated on the Aristotelian idea of the four “humors” that
one humor and a lack of another - hence the centuries-old practice of bleeding
1040
demonstrated that blood flows through the body by being pumped by the
heart, not emanating out of the liver as had been believed before. Shortly
after his death, other doctors used a new invention, the microscope, the detect
began to consider the human body as an item written into the Book of Nature
as well.
1041
made precise, accurate anatomical drawings possible, and print ensured that
initial publication. Thus, scientists and doctors were able to contribute their
understanding of how the body worked. Even though the concept of the
humors (as well as other ideas like miasmas causing disease) remained
prevalent, doctors now had a better idea of how the body was designed and
bacteria. Unfortunately, he did not deduce that bacteria were responsible for
illness; it would take until the 1860s with the French doctor and scientist
Louis Pasteur for definitive proof of the relationship between germs and
sickness to be established.
1042
Science and Society
Women
wife team, the Lavoisiers, in France that invented the premises of modern
entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian, women struck out on their own and
America and did pioneering work on the life cycles of various insect
1043
One of Merian’s illustrations, depicting the life cycle of butterflies and moths.
that there were only cosmetic differences between what would later be called
1044
“races.” His work was almost unprecedented in its egalitarian vision,
anticipating the ideas of human universalism that only really came of age in
the nineteenth century, and only became dominant views in the twentieth.
tendency of male scientists to use the new science to reinforce rather than
that women had wider hips than did men, which supposedly “destined” them
fields in which women had held very important social roles in the past, such as
midwifery, male scientists and doctors increasingly pushed them to the side,
1045
The Scientific Revolution’s claims about female anatomy ultimately
theory of sexual difference that was actually worse in its outlook on women’s
capacity than earlier ideas. Women were not, according to the new theories,
just inferior versions of men, they were biologically crafted to be the polar
thought. Even the old belief that sexual pleasure for both partners was
necessary for procreation was abandoned (although it took until the late
eighteenth century for that belief to atrophy), with women reduced to passive
sum up, in stark contrast to the breakthroughs in astronomy that proved that
the earth is not at the center of the cosmos, it proved easier to overthrow the
entire vision of the universe than to upset sexual roles and stereotypes.
1046
Scientific Institutions and Culture
occurred in Catholic countries such as Italy, but over time the center of
scientific ideas at first, in the long term Protestant governments proved more
tolerant of ideas that seemed to violate the literal truth of the Bible. This had
fact that Protestant institutions were less powerful and pervasive than was
governments and elites were more open to the idea that God might reveal
Himself in nature itself, not just in holy scripture, and thus they were
1047
tolerance and support of science would see the center of scientific innovation
in the northwest of Europe, not in the heart of the earlier Renaissance in Italy.
power of the French kings in holding the papacy at arm’s length. The Royal
Academy of Sciences in France was opened in the same year as its sister
efforts that were “useful” in the sense of serving shipping and military
The English and French scientific societies were important parts of the
“academia.” Learned men (and some women) from all over Europe attended
1048
experiments. Newton was the president of the Royal Society, which published
The cover of the first volume of the Philosophical Transactions, arguably the first formal
1049
scientist had to "start from scratch," because he or she was already building
on the work of past scholars. Rather than science requiring an isolated genius
like Da Vinci, now any intelligent and self-disciplined individual could hope to
giants.”
The Republic of Science also inaugurated a shift away from the use of
like Kepler and Galileo in part because they wanted to differentiate their work
Latin). Newton initially wrote in Latin so that it could be read by his peers on
the continent, but his later works were in English. Over the course of the
1050
The Philosophical Impact of Science
was a growing belief that the universe itself operated according to regular,
mathematics. This outlook lent itself to one in which God could be seen as a
universe and then set it in motion. In this sense, then, the new scientific
discoveries in no way undermined religious belief at the time, despite the fact
that they contradicted certain specific passages of the Bible. This kind of
religious outlook became known as deism, and its proponents deists, people
who believed that God did not intervene in everyday life but instead simply
1051
starting-point. His conclusion was that the only thing he really knew was that
which in turn implied that there was a thing, himself, capable of thought. This
follow a series of logical “proofs” from this existing, thinking being to “prove”
that God Himself existed, as the original source of thought. This was a
that God was a benevolent and reasonable power of creation, but one who did
Perhaps the most important cultural change that emerged from the
Revolution was the simple fact that science acquired growing cultural
delighted onlookers by allowing them to use his telescope not just to look at
the sky, but at buildings in Rome, thereby proving that his invention
worked. The possibility that science could, and in fact already had, disproved
1052
claims made in the Bible laid the foundation for a whole new approach to
The most extreme figure in this regard was Baruch Spinoza (1632 –
1677), a Sephardic Jew who was born and raised in Amsterdam in the
Netherlands. Spinoza took the insights of the era and applied them
laws was synonymous with God, and that the very idea of a human-like God
laying the groundwork for what were later known as “freethinkers” – people
who may or may not have been actual atheists, but who certainly rejected the
1053
Spinoza’s work was controversial enough that he was condemned as an
atheist not only by the Jewish community, but by both the Catholic Church and
various Protestant churches as well. One of the things about his thought that
infuriated practically everyone was that Spinoza claimed that there was no
such thing as “spirit” or “the soul” – all of the universe was merely matter, and
the only way to truly learn about its operation was to combine empirical
belief that dispensed with the emotional connection to God and reduced it to a
Wager.” In the Wager, Pascal argued that either God does or does not exist,
and each person can choose either to acknowledge Him or not. If He does
exist, and one acknowledges Him, then one is saved. If He does exist, and one
rejects Him, then one is damned. If He does not exist and one acknowledges
1054
Him, nothing happens, and if He does not exist and one does not acknowledge
Him, nothing happens either. Thus, one might as well worship God in some
way, since there is no negative fallout if He does not exist, but there is (i.e. an
his day. He noted that “We see neither justice nor injustice which does not
change its nature with change in climate. Three degrees of latitude reverse all
this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other side.” In other words, there was
no fixed or eternal or God-given about royal decrees and laws; they were
1055
Conclusion
its importance lay in the fact that, first, educated people came to believe that
experimentation, and second, that the universe itself was structured along
Enlightenment.
1056
Merian Entomological Drawing - Public Domain
Western Europe that, he felt, had culminated in his own lifetime in a more
enlightened and just age. According to Kant, Enlightenment was all about the
courage to think for one's self, to question the accepted notions of any field of
kinds were breaking new ground not only in using the scientific method to
discover new things about the physical world, but in applying rational inquiry
toward improving human life and the organization of human society. While
Kant's essay probably overstated the Utopian qualities of the thought of his
era, he was right that it did correspond to a major shift in how educated
Europeans thought about the world and the human place in it.
thinkers, but they still (usually) accept that there were indeed innovative new
technical writing of the period. Likewise, new forms of media and new forums
1058
The Enlightenment: Definitions
convenient dates for it are from the Glorious Revolution in Britain to the
beginning of the French Revolution: 1688 - 1789. The central concern of the
existence: not just science, but philosophy, morality, and society. Along with
of new forms of media and new ways in which people exchanged information,
along with new “sensibilities” regarding what was proper and desirable in
thinkers embraced the idea that scientific progress was limitless. They argued
that all citizens should be equal before the law. They claimed that the best
forms of government were those with rational laws oriented to serve the
1059
public interest. In a major break from the past, they increasingly claimed that
there was a real, physical universe that could be understood using the
proposed ideas that were novel at the time, but were eventually accepted by
almost everyone in Europe (and many other places, not least the inhabitants
traditional religious beliefs, at least in the long run. Perhaps the major theme
practice at the time was the rejection of “superstitions,” things that simply
could not happen according to science (such a virgin giving birth to a child, or
argued that the “real” natural universe was governed by natural laws, all
was essentially the same as the Deism that had emerged from the Scientific
1060
Revolution. While few Enlightenment thinkers were outright atheists, almost
all of them decried many church practices and what they perceived as the
powerful kings and queens - but they roundly condemned cruelty and
selfishness among individual monarchs. The perfect state was, in the eyes of
looked to Great Britain, since 1689 ruled by a monarch who agreed to its
Behind both the scientific worldview and the rejection of tyranny was a
focus on the human mind’s capacity for reason. Reason is the mental faculty
1061
that takes sensory data and orders it into thoughts and ideas. The basic
universal and inherent to humans, and that if society could strip away the
would arrive naturally at a harmonious society. Thus, almost all of the major
thinkers of the Enlightenment tried to get to the bottom of just that task: what
is standing in the way of reason, and how can humanity become more
reasonable?
laws of nature (ones that may or may not have anything to do with God) that
1062
ways the Enlightenment begins with Newton's publication of the Principles in
1687.
Having thus established that the universe was rational, one of the major
themes of the Enlightenment was the search for equally immutable and
important was the significant growth of the urban literate classes, most
notably what was called in France the bourgeoisie: the mercantile middle
class. Ever since the Renaissance era, elites increasingly acquired at least
basic literacy, but by the eighteenth century even artisans and petty
merchants in the cities of Central and Western Europe sent their children
(especially boys) to schools for at least a few years. There was a real reading
1063
public by the eighteenth century that eagerly embraced the new ideas of the
Enlightenment and provided a book market for both the official, copyrighted
reading public also eagerly embraced the quintessential new form of fiction of
the eighteenth century: the novel, with the reading of novels becoming a
and cheap books became very common during the eighteenth century, which
in turn helped the ongoing growth of literacy rates. Simultaneously, there was
a full-scale shift away from the sacred languages to the vernaculars (i.e. from
Latin to English, Spanish, French, etc.)., which in turn helped to start the
regions far from royal capitals. For the first time, large numbers of people
rather than using only their local dialect. Those official languages allowed the
1064
transmission of ideas across entire kingdoms. For example, by the time the
French Revolution began in the late 1780s, an entire generation of men and
women was capable of expressing shared ideas about justice and politics in
There were various social forums and spaces in which groups of self-
styled "enlightened" men and women gathered to discuss the new ideas of the
movement. The most significant of these were coffee houses in England and
salons in France and Central Europe. Coffee houses, unlike their present-day
analogs, charged an entry fee but then provided unlimited coffee to their
patrons. Those patrons were from various social classes, and would gather
together to discuss the latest ideas and read the periodicals provided by the
were common in the major cities of France and Germany, were more
read from their latest works, with the assembled group then engaging in
debate and discussion. Salons were noteworthy for being led by women in
1065
most cases; educated women were thought to be the best moderators of
alike. Likewise, women writers were contributing members of salons, not just
One of the best-known salons, run by Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin, seated on the right. All of
the men pictured are their actual likelinesses. Two are of particular note: seated under the
marble bust is Jean le Rond D’Alembert, noted below, and the bust is of Voltaire (also described
Outside of the gatherings at coffee houses and salons, the ideas and
themes of the Enlightenment reached much of the reading public through the
1066
easy availability of cheap print, and it is also clear that even regular artisans
demonstrated his own command of the ideas of the period and even claimed
to have chatted over drinks with the great Enlightenment philosopher Jean-
science" that played such a role in the Scientific Revolution. They wrote
1067
Enlightenment Philosophes
important philosophes were indeed French, but there were major English,
Locke was an Englishman who, along with Newton, was among the
theorist of the period of the English Civil Wars and Glorious Revolution,
arguing that sovereignty was granted by the people to a government but could
country. He was also a major advocate for religious tolerance; he was even
bold enough to note that people tended to be whatever religion was prevalent
1068
in their family and social context, so it was ridiculous for anyone to claim
thought, arguing that all humans are born “blank slates” – Tabula Rasa in Latin
– and hence access to the human faculty of reason had entirely to do with the
1069
period, Voltaire became famous across Europe for his wit, intelligence, and
Voltaire was well known for publicly intervening against injustice. He wrote
below).
1070
Voltaire
institutions, he noted that “if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent
1071
Him,” because without a religious structure shoring up their morality, the
works on subjects as diverse as physics, mathematics, the Bible, and the very
nature of happiness. Perhaps her best-known work during her lifetime was
the Newtonian concepts to her (French) readers. Despite the gendered biases
member of the “republic of science.” In Châtelet the link between the legacy of
companion (and lover) Voltaire was keenly interested in science and engaged
and mathematician.
1072
The Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert (1751)
Diderot, themselves wrote many of the articles, the majority were written by
other philosophes, including (as noted above) Voltaire. The first volume was
published in 1751, with other volumes following. In the end the Encyclopedia
illustrations. While its volumes were far too expensive for most of the reading
public to access directly, pirated chapters ensured that its ideas reached a
1073
One of the illustrations from the Encyclopedia, in this case diagrams of (at the time, state of the
knowledge, namely that provided by the church and (to a lesser extent) the
state. The claim was that the application of reason to any problem could
1074
scientists and inventors, not only describing aspects of science but including
Edinburgh. Hume was one of the most powerful critics of all forms of
1075
simply an expression of primitive ignorance and fear early in human history,
Hume also expressed enormous contempt for the common people, who
often seems the most surprising from a contemporary perspective, namely the
fact that it did not champion the rights, let alone anything like the right to
generally credited with being the first real economist: a social scientist
devoted to analyzing how markets function. In his most famous work, The
Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that a (mostly) free market, one that operated
1076
without undue interference of the state, would naturally result in never-
ending economic growth and nearly universal prosperity. His targets were
the monopolies and protectionist taxes and tariffs that limited trade between
the market itself would increase wealth as if the general prosperity of the
was that he applied precisely the same kind of Enlightenment ideas and ideals
and explained. His ideas, along with those of David Ricardo, an English
1077
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778)
critique of his contemporary French society and claiming that its so-called
moral character. He went on to write both novels and essays that attracted
enormous attention both in France and abroad, claiming among other things
that children should learn from nature by experiencing the world, allowing
their natural goodness and character to develop. He also championed the idea
that political sovereignty arose from the “general will” of the people in a
society, and that citizens in a just society had to be fanatically devoted to both
that general will and to their own moral standards (Rousseau claimed, in a
excellent model for a truly enlightened and moral polity). Rousseau’s concept
1078
would go on to become of the ideological bases of the French Revolution that
at the time. Almost every society in Europe exercised official censorship, and
mentioned above was in providing safe spaces for Enlightenment ideas, and
perceived in royal governments and the organized churches, but at the same
time their skepticism about the intellectual abilities of the common people
1079
was such that almost none of them advocated a political system besides a
to salute (to the point of being sycophantic at times) monarchs who they
thought were living up to their hopes for the ideal of rational monarchy.
thought. They came to believe in many cases in the essential justice of the
arguments of the philosophes and did not see anything contradictory between
the exercise of their power and enlightenment ideas. That said, monarchs
more efficient. They certainly did not renounce any of their actual power,
although some did at least ease the burdens on the serfs who toiled on royal
lands.
European (and, we should note, early American) politics was in the realm of
justice. A noble from Milan, Cesare Bonesana, wrote a brief work entitled On
Crimes and Punishment in 1764 arguing that the state’s essential duty was the
1080
protection of the life and dignity of its citizens, which to him included those
accused of crimes. Among other things, he argued that rich and poor should
be held accountable before the same laws, that the aim of the justice system
should be as much to prevent future crimes as to punish past ones, and that
latter part of the eighteenth century did, in fact, ban torture in their realms,
the period.
Great) of Prussia (r. 1740 – 1786). A great lover of French literature and
said that German was a language only useful for talking to one's horse), and he
redecorated the Prussian royal palace in the French style, in which he avidly
that Voltaire came to live at his palace for two years until the two of them had
1081
lands and banned the more onerous feudal duties owed by serfs owned by his
nobles. He also rationalized the royal bureaucracy, making all applicants pass
a formal exam, which provided a limited path of social mobility for non-
nobles.
Catherine the Great (r. 1762 - 1796) of Russia. Catherine was a correspondent
learning in Russia. Hoping to increase the efficiency of the Russian state, she
divisions, and introduced a more rigorous and broad education for future
officers of the military. She also created the first educational institution for
girls in Russia, the Smolny Institute, admitting the daughters of nobles and,
eventually, well-off commoners (ironically, given her own power, the Institute
leaders).
1082
Catherine was not just an admirer of Enlightenment philosophy, but an
and operas meant to celebrate Russian culture (not least against accusations
however, as the French Revolution began in 1789, and while Russian nobles
found their own privileges expanded, the vast majority of Russian subjects
One major political theme to emerge from the Enlightenment that did
not require the goodwill of monarchs was the idea of human rights (or “the
rights of man” as they were generally known at the time). Emerging from a
half of the eighteenth century. In turn, they fueled both demands for political
1083
reform and helped to inspire the vigorous abolitionist (anti-slavery)
seen by almost all Enlightenment thinkers as not just cruel, but archaic and
loathsome form of ongoing injustice. Just as the idea of human rights would
soon inspire both the American and French Revolutions in the closing decades
of the eighteenth century, the antislavery movements of the time would see
many of their objectives achieved in the first few decades of the nineteenth
(Britain would ban the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, although
it would take the American Civil War in the 1860s to end slavery in the United
States).
That concern for rights did not, with a few noteworthy exceptions,
1084
subservient social position. The same philosophes who eagerly attended
peers. The great works of early feminism that emerged in the late
the Rights of Woman in 1791, were viciously attacked and then largely ignored
until the modern feminist movement forced the issue the better part of a
century later.
conducted in public, there were other elements to it. The so-called Radical
it) had to do with the ideas too scandalous for mainstream philosophes to
support, like outright atheism. One example of this phenomenon was the
socialize.
publishers and smugglers. In areas with relatively relaxed censorship like the
of things like the Encyclopedia. This illegal industry supplied the reading
public, especially the reading public with little money to spend on books, with
For example, as noted above, an actual volume (let alone the entire
multi-volume set) of the Encyclopedia was much too expensive for a common
1086
pamphlet-sized, pirated copy of several of the articles from the Encyclopedia
that might interest her. Likewise, many works that were clearly outside of the
pornography) were published and smuggled into places like France, England,
and Prussia from the underground publishing houses. Perhaps the greatest
outright the social hierarchy that they were part of. The abuses of the church,
the ignorance of the nobility, even the injustices of kings might be fair game
1087
for criticism, but none of the better-known philosophes called for the
monarchy, and his political ideas were far less well-known during his lifetime
than were his ruminations on education, nature, and morality. Even Kant’s
The problem was that even though most of the major figures of the
claimed that the legitimacy of a monarch was based on their rule coinciding
with the prosperity of the nation and the absence of cruelty and injustice in
the laws of the land. The implication was that people have the right to judge
the monarch in terms of his or her competence and rationality. Likewise, one
major political and social structure that philosophes did attack was the fact
1088
that nobles enjoyed vast legal privileges but had generally done nothing to
contrast, philosophes were quick to point out that many members of the
middle classes were far more intelligent and competent than was the average
nobleman.
itself was undermined. The one stance all of the major Enlightenment
miracles were usually experienced by lunatics, women, and the poor (and
were thus automatically suspect from their elite, male perspective). Miracles,
by their very nature, purported to violate natural law, and according to the
very core principles of Enlightenment thought, that simply was not possible.
1089
Thus, the Enlightenment did more to disrupt the social and political
order by the late eighteenth century than most of its members ever
Great Britain in the 1770s, then in France starting in the 1780s. In both of
those revolutions, ideas that had remained in the abstract during the
and principles of government, and in both cases, one of the byproducts was
violent upheaval.
1090
Chapter 12: The Society of Orders
power and the aristocratic control of society in Europe. It was also the end of
the early modern period, before industrialism and revolution marked the
beginning of the modern period at the end of the century. Ironically, the
enormous changes that happened at the end of the century were totally
unanticipated at the time. No one, even the most radical political philosopher,
believed that the political order or the basic technological level of their society
depicted a more orderly and perfect French society of the future. In the Paris
extends personal audiences to his subjects. The streets are clean, orderly,
well-lit, and (unlike the Paris of his day) houses are numbered. Religious
1091
differences are calmly discussed and never result in violence. Strangely, from
and the political and social order remains intact: a king, nobility, clergy, and
more “rationally.”
monarchy and strong parliament, the monarchs of the major states of Europe
least “absolutist” in their pretensions, even though the nobility and local
assemblies had a great deal of real power almost everywhere. In turn, the
social orders were starkly divided, not just by wealth but by law and custom
France, the societal descendants of the divisions between “those who pray,
those who fight, and those who work” in the Middle Ages.
1092
A late-medieval portrayal of the three orders or estates. A reasonably accurate take on social
divisions in the Middle Ages, but one that was increasingly out of date by the eighteenth
century.
The First Estate, consisting of the clergy, ran not just the churches, but
education, enormous tracts of land held by the church and the monasteries,
orders like the Jesuits and Benedictines, and great influence in royal
government. In Protestant lands, there was the equivalent in the form of the
1093
clergy in Protestant countries was generally weaker than was the Roman
The Second Estate, the nobility, was itself divided by the elite titled
nobility with hereditary lordships of various kinds (Dukes, Counts, etc.) and a
larger group of lesser nobles who owned land but were not necessarily very
wealthy. In Britain, the latter were called the gentry and controlled the House
the realm,” the elite families of nobles often descended from the ancient
the overall population (with peculiar exceptions such as Poland and Hungary
that had large numbers of nobles, most of whom were scarcely wealthier than
peasants).
The Third Estate was simply everyone else, from rich bankers and
merchants without titles down to the destitute urban poor and landless
peasant laborers. During the Middle Ages, the Third Estate was represented
by wealthy elites from the cities and large towns, with the peasantry - despite
1094
being the majority of the population - enjoying no representation
whatsoever. By the eighteenth century, the Third Estate was far more diverse,
dynamic, and educated than ever before. It did not, however, enjoy better
The Nobility
monopoly of political power. The higher ranks of the clergy were drawn from
noble families, so the church did not represent any kind of check or balance of
power. The king, while now generally standing head-and-shoulders above the
1095
“merely” the richest and most powerful person of the richest and most
kingdoms (like Russia), only nobles could own land. Only nobles could serve
as officers in the army, reaping the spoils of war and generous salaries in the
bodies, with the notable caveat that cities still held privileges of their own (the
French politics). Nobles had their own courts, were tried by their peers, and
custom as well - to cite just a few, only members of the aristocracy could wear
1096
masks at masquerade balls, nobles led processions in towns and had special
places to sit at operas and churches alike, and only nobles could wear swords
during peacetime. Some of these legal separations were not trivial; only
nobles could hunt game, and the legal systems of Europe viciously persecuted
constantly reminded of their inferior status thanks to both the legal privileges
social grace, hearkening back to the glory days of the Renaissance courtier and
music, and art became fashionable in Europe in the eighteenth century, and
being witty, well-dressed, musically talented, and well read became a status
was the height of so-called “polite society” among the nobility: a legally-
1097
The Common People
The nobility also exercised considerable power over the (mostly rural)
common people: peasants in the west and serfs in the east. Landowning lords
had the right to extract financial dues, fees, and rents on peasants in the
west. In the east, they had almost total control over the lives and movements
of their serfs, including the requirement for serfs to perform lengthy periods
serfdom was essentially the same thing as slavery. Russian estates were even
sold according to the number of serfs (“souls”) they contained rather than the
eighteenth, many kingdoms saw the gradual elimination of the common lands
that had been an essential economic safety net for the peasantry in the earlier
1098
on the peasants. Many peasant families who had once owned small plots of
their own had to sell them to rich nobles and became landless agricultural
laborers, only one step up from the truly destitute who fled to the cities in
Peasants often fought back, especially when the nobility tried to impose
new fees or tried to cut them off from the commons. There were cases of rural
revolts, of peasants hiring lawyers and taking their lords to royal courts, and
other forms of resistance. There were also truly enormous uprisings in the
east – in both the Austrian Empire and Russia, giant peasant uprisings
with the peasantry, largely because the former were trying to extract more
Another new factor was the rise of the bourgeoisie, the non-noble urban
the economies of the kingdoms of Europe, especially in the west, yet it did not
1099
“fit” into the society of orders. While wealthy members of the bourgeoisie
blended in with and sometimes married into the nobility, others thought of
education over what they saw as the foppery and excess of the aristocracy. It
was this latter self-conscious bourgeoisie that would play an important role in
the revolutions of the end of the century. The (literate and urban) bourgeois
class were also among those most keenly interested in Enlightenment ideas.
The eighteenth century saw the emergence of five states, all of which
Great Powers. Each of these states had certain characteristics: a strong ruling
dynasty, a large and powerful army, and relative political stability. Over the
course of the century, they jockeyed for position and power not only in
Europe itself, but overseas: whole wars were fought between the Great
1100
Of the Great Powers, France was regarded as the greatest at the
time. France had the largest population, the biggest armies, the richest
economy, and the greatest international prestige. Despite the fact that the
crown was hugely debt-ridden, following Louis XIV’s wars and the fact that
the next two kings were little better at managing money than he had been, the
French monarchy was admired across Europe for its sophistication and
power. French was also the international language by the eighteenth century:
common aristocratic culture that had its heartland in France – Russian nobles
often spoke Russian very poorly, and nobles of the German lands often
Prussia claimed that he used German to speak to his horse and other
1101
descendants of Henry IV, continued the practice of keeping court at Versailles
and only going into Paris when they had to browbeat the Parisian city
Great Britain was both the perennial adversary of France in war during
was on the expansion of the commercial overseas empire. France and Britain
1102
possessions. Britain enjoyed great success over the course of the century in
India. On the verge of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in the
last decades of the century, Britain was poised to become the global
powerhouse.
France’s traditional rival was the Habsburg line of Austria. What had
once been the larger and more disparate empire of the Habsburgs was split
into two different Habsburg empires in 1558, when the Holy Roman Emperor
Charles V abdicated. Charles V handed his Spanish possessions to his son and
his Holy Roman imperial possessions to his younger brother. The Spanish line
died off in 1700 when the last Spanish Habsburg, Charles II, died without an
heir, which prompted the War of the Spanish Succession as the Bourbons of
France fought to put a French prince on the Spanish throne and practically
1103
The Holy Roman Empire in 1789. The territories depicted in dark yellow were those of the
Habsburgs. The territory marked in blue in the northeast is the kingdom of Prussia, the great
rival of Habsburg Austria. Note also that the Kingdom of Poland outside of the Holy Roman
Empire was soon to be partitioned out of existence, its territory divided between Prussia,
Austria and its capital of Vienna. That line continued to rule the Austrian
Empire, a political unit that united Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and various
1104
other territories in the southern part of Central Europe. While its nominal
control of the Holy Roman Empire was all but political window dressing by
the eighteenth century, the Austrian empire itself was by far the most
significant German state and the Habsburgs of Austria were often the greatest
The other German state of note was Prussia, the “upstart” great
power. As noted in the discussion of absolutism, the Prussian royal line, the
perfection. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Prussian army was a
match of the much larger Austrian force, with the two states emerging as
military rivals.
Russia
1105
While this textbook has traced the development of the other Great
Powers, it has not considered the case of Russia to this point. That is simply
because there was no unified state called "Russia" before the late fifteenth
the Rus colonized and then mixed with the native Slavs over the course of the
ninth century. The Rus were led by princes who ruled towns that eventually
developed into small cities, the most important of which was Kiev in the
invasion of the thirteenth century. The period of Mongol rule is still referred
Russian people were used as beasts of burden and sources of wealth by their
Russia emerged from the “Mongol yoke” thanks to the efforts of the
Grand Prince of the city of Moscow, Ivan III (r. 1462 – 1505) and his grandson
1106
Ivan IV – “the Terrible” (r. 1533 – 1584). Ivan III was the prince of Muscovy,
the territory around the city of Moscow, but thanks to his ruthless militarism,
Novgorod and its territories. He also overthrew the authority of the Mongol
Golden Horde in his lands and began the process of permanently ending
Mongol control in Russia. For the first time, a Russian prince had carved out a
large part of the Mongol Golden Horde’s territory and also pushed back Turkic
beginning the long process of the conquest of Siberia by Russia. He was also
the first Russian ruler to claim the title of Tsar (also anglicized as Czar),
meaning "Caesar." Because Russia had adopted the Eastern Orthodox branch
1107
remnant of the actual Roman Empire) fell to the Turks in 1453, Russian rulers
after Ivan claimed that they were the true inheritors of the political power of
the ancient Roman emperors. Just as the Holy Roman Emperors in the west
Ivan IV was called The Terrible because of his incredible sadism: he had
the beggars of Novgorod burned to death, he had nobles that displeased him
ripped apart by wolves and dogs, and he crushed his own son’s skull with a
thought they posed a threat to his authority or were simply slow to respond to
his demands that they serve him personally at his court. His overall goal was
the transformation of the Russian nobles – called boyars – into servants of the
state, one in which their power was based only on their loyalty to the
Tsar. During his reign, he succeeded in asserting his authority through sheer
1108
The expansion of Russian imperial control from the early sixteenth century until 1700, with
earlier territories marked in darker shades of green on the map. Imperial power reached the
After Ivan’s death in 1584, Russia was plunged into a thirty-year period
assembly of nobles elected the first member of the Romanov family to hold
the title of Tsar in 1613 – Michael I – but the Tsars remained weak and
plagued by both resistance by nobles and huge peasant uprisings for many
1109
decades. One enormous peasant uprising, led by a man who claimed to be the
“true” Tsar, threatened to overwhelm the forces of the real Tsar before being
defeated in 1670.
The institution of serfdom was cemented in the midst of the chaos of the
seventeenth century. When times were hard for Russian peasants, they
frequent fled to the frontier, either Siberia or what would later be called the
exacerbated an ongoing labor shortage problem. Unlike in the west, there was
more than enough land in Russia, just not enough peasants to work it. Thus,
the tsarist state instituted serfdom in 1649 across the board, formalizing what
was already a widespread institution. This made peasants legally little better
than slaves, forced to work the land and to serve the state in war when
conscripted.
in earnest under Tsar Peter I (the Great), r. 1682 – 1725. Up to that point, so
little was known about Russia in the west that Louis XIV once sent a letter to a
1110
tsar who had been dead for twelve years. Russian nobles themselves tended
the Russian Orthodox Church had little emphasis on the learning that now
played such a major role in both the Catholic and Protestant churches of the
west. Peter learned about Western Europe from visiting foreigners in his
early twenties and decided to go and see what the west had to offer himself –
he disguised himself as a normal workman (albeit one who was seven feet
The young Peter the Great, in a portrait he presented to the English King William III (whom he
1111
In the process, Peter personally learned about shipbuilding and military
military. He forced the Russian nobility to dress and act more like Western
Europeans, sent Russian noble children abroad for their education, built an
enormous navy and army to fight the Swedes and the Turks, and (on the backs
of semi-slave labor) created the new port city of St. Petersburg as the new
conscription in 1705 that required one out of every twenty serfs to serve for
life in his armies, and he oversaw the construction of Russia’s navy from
nothing. Over two-thirds of state revenues went to the military even after he
instituted new taxes and royal monopolies. He also forced the boyars to
undergo military education and serve as army officers, with all male nobles
after 1722 required to serve the state either as civil officials or military
officers.
1112
Peter fought an ultimately-unsuccessful war against the Ottomans in
1711, but he did capture some Turkish territory in the process; likewise, he
seized the Baltic territories of Livonia and Estonia from what was then the
decline over the course of the century). His major enemy, though, was
kingdom. By the 1650s, Sweden ruled Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the
Baltic region. The king Charles XI (r. 1660 – 1697) successfully imitated Louis
XIV’s absolutism by pitting lesser nobles against greater ones, forcing the
nobles to serve him directly. His son Charles XII (r. 1697 – 1718) was so
arrogant that he snatched the crown from the hand of the Lutheran minister
at his own coronation and put it on his head; he also refused to swear the
princedom of Saxony, to reassert its sovereignty in 1700. This turned into the
Great Northern War (1700 – 1721) when Peter the Great joined in, intent on
1113
seizing Baltic territory for a permanent port. The Swedes defeated a large
Russian army in 1700, but then Charles shifted his focus to Poland and Saxony
rather than invading Russia itself. The Russians rallied and, in 1703, captured
the mouth of the Neva River; Tsar Peter ordered the construction of his new
capital city, St. Petersburg, the same year. The war dragged on for years, with
Charles XII dying fighting a rebellion in Norway in 1718, leaving no heir. The
Swedish forces were finally and definitively beaten in 1721, leaving Russia
By the time Peter died (after contracting pneumonia or the flu from
diving into the freezing Neva to save a drowning man) in 1725, the Russian
Empire was now six times larger than it had been under Ivan the
Terrible. Thanks to its territorial gains on the Baltic and the construction of
one. While Russia suffered from a period of weak rule after Peter’s death, it
was simply so large and the Tsar’s authority so absolute that it remained a
great power.
1114
In 1762, the Prussian-born empress Catherine (who later acquired the
honorific “the Great”) seized power from her husband in a coup. Catherine
creating the first state-financed banks and welcoming German settlers to the
philosophy (as noted in the last chapter), Catherine was as focused on Russian
expansion as Peter had been half a century earlier, seizing the Crimean
between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1795. By her death in 1796 Russia
1115
Wars
when the rival commercial empires of Europe fought over territory and trade
routes, not just glory and dynastic lines. The Dutch and British fought
repeatedly from 1652 – 1675, conflicts which resulted in the loss of Dutch
territory in North America (hence the city of New York instead of New
Amsterdam). The British also fought the Spanish over various territories. The
handed over to the British in return for the Cuban port of Havana.
The most significant conflicts, however, were the ongoing series of wars
between the two greatest powers of the eighteenth century: Britain and
France. Britain had established naval dominance by 1700, but the French
state was richer, its army much larger, and its navy almost Britain’s
1116
absolutism. Despite the financial savvy of the British government, most
France became a highly aggressive power under Louis XIV, who saw
territorial gains as essential to his own glory (he had the phrase “The Last
Argument of Kings” stamped onto his cannons). His “grand strategy” was to
series of wars; he planned to force conquered populations to help pay for the
wars and ultimately hoped to expand France to the Pyrenees in the south and
the Rhine in the east. His wars in the late seventeenth century resulted in the
seizure of small territories around the existing French borders, most notably
in the Pyrenees. These wars, however, also drove the other powers of Europe
into a defensive alliance against France, since it was clear that France
threatened all of their interests (at one point Louis even tried to invade
military history rather than the major event of something like the Spanish
Armada).
1117
The most significant war started by Louis was the War of the Spanish
Succession (1701 – 1713). The last Spanish Habsburg died in 1700, and the
heir was Louis’ grandson Philip. The Austrian Habsburgs rejected the
legitimacy of the claim, and soon they recruited the British to help defeat
France. The fighting dragged on for a decade as more European powers were
drawn in. Finally, with France teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and Louis
himself now old and ill, the powers agreed to negotiate. The results of the war
were that Britain acquired additional territory in the Americas and a member
of the Bourbon line was confirmed as the new Spanish king. However, the
distinct from one another: France would not control Spain, in other words. In
was now bereft of its last European territories outside of the Iberian peninsula
itself.
1118
Conflicts continued on and off between the Great Powers even after the
War of the Spanish Succession. The next major conflict was the Seven Years
War (1756 – 1763), better known in America as the French and Indian
War. The war began when Prussia attempted a blatant land-grab from
Austria, which quickly led to the involvement of the other Great Powers. This
was a particularly bloody conflict, especially for the Native American tribes
that allied with French or British colonial forces. The results of this war,
commercial shipping to the Americas. While France was still the most
In turn, the Seven Years War directly led to the American Revolution
(1775 – 1783). The British Parliament tried to impose unpopular taxes on the
1119
American colonists to help pay for the British troops garrisoned there during
and after the Seven Years War. Open revolt broke out in 1775 and the
material and, then, actual military aid to the Americans starting in 1778, and
1783. Significantly, this was the only war that France “won” over the course
of the eighteenth century, and it gained nothing from it but the satisfaction of
having finally beaten its British enemy. The real winners were the American
Conclusion
that first came about in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. The
Great Powers were centralized, organized states with large armies and global
economic ties. The social and legal divisions between different classes and
categories were never more starkly drawn and enforced than they were by
1120
the eighteenth century. Wars explicitly fought in the name of gaining power
and territory, often territory that spanned multiple continents (as in Britain's
Ironically, given the apparent power and stability of this political and
Enlightenment spread and as the groups that made up the Third Estate of
a virtual powder keg was being lit under the political structure of Europe. The
1121
Chapter 13: The French Revolution
had been one of the most traditional and most powerful of the great European
states in the space of a few short years. France went from a Catholic absolute
new calendar, a new system of weights and measures, and the professed goal
of conquering the rest of Europe in the name of freedom, all in about five
years. Even though the Revolution failed to achieve the aims of its most
radical proponents in the short term, it set the stage for everything else that
happened in Europe for the rest of the nineteenth century, with major
The immediate case of the French Revolution was the dire financial
straits of the French state after a century of war against Britain and an
1122
outdated system of taxation. As noted in the last chapter, starting at the end
warfare between France and Britain, much of it fought overseas (in India, the
American Revolution, Britain won every single war. The major impact of the
colonial wars between France and Britain in the eighteenth century on France
was to push the state to the brink of bankruptcy - even as Britain funded its
wars through the sale of bonds from the official national bank, the French
found from private banks, traders, and wealthy individuals, and the interest
Not only did France lose much of its empire in Canada, the Caribbean,
and India to the British, the state also accumulated a huge burden of debt
which consumed 60% of tax revenues each year in interest payments. In turn,
the problem for the monarchy was that there was no way to raise more
money: taxes were tied to land and agriculture, rather than commerce, and
1123
nobles and the church were exempt from taxation. As they had been since the
Middle Ages, taxes were drawn almost entirely from peasant agriculture,
nobility and church were all but tax-exempt, and the monarchy did not have a
systematic way to tax commerce, there was a lot of wealth in France that the
In turn, the power of the nobility ensured that any dream of far-
reaching reform was out of the question. There were about 200,000 nobles in
France (which had a population of 26 million at the time). All of the senior
members of the administration, the army, the navy, and the Catholic Church
were nobles. The nobility owned a significant percentage of the land of France
outright - about one-third - and had lordly rights over most of the rest of
it. The pageantry around the person of the king and queen first established by
Louis XIV continued at the palace of Versailles, but nothing changed the fact
that noble wealth remained largely off-limits to the state and nobles exercised
1124
The one war in which France managed to defeat Britain was the
American Revolutionary War of the 1770s and early 1780s. France subsidized
support. The result was to push the state to the verge of outright bankruptcy,
beneath their royal dignity, but the situation had reached such a point of
Starting In the early 1780s, the French King Louis XVI (great-great-great
through the mountains of reports and ledgers to determine how much the
state owed, to whom, and how paying it back would be possible. Attempts to
overhaul the tax system as a whole were shouted down by the major city
governments and powerful noble interests alike. By 1787, it was clear that
the financial situation was simply untenable and the monarchy had to secure
more revenue, somehow. The king was at a loss of what to do. He reluctantly
1125
came to realize that only taxing the nobility and, perhaps, the Church could
possibly raise the necessary revenue. Thus, Louis XVI was up against the
When his efforts to increase tax receipts met with resistance from the
him. That Assembly consisted of the most powerful noblemen in France, who
outright refused to grant new revenues to the crown. Louis reluctantly agreed
hope of persuading that body to provide more revenue. For the first time in
The Estates General had not met since 1614. Like the British
parliament, its original function was to serve as a venue for the French king to
bargain with the entire nation for money, almost always in the service of
1126
war. The Estates General was a gathering of representatives of the three
estates - clergy, nobility, and everyone else - in which the French king could
ask for tax revenue in return for various bargains and promises (often the
promise not to ask for more taxes in the future). This had not happened for
over 150 years, and thus no living French person had any experience of what
to expect.
with the majority of the male population voting for delegates to the Estates
General. Many hoped that the meeting would result in royal intervention in a
host of perceived injustices, not just more money for the state. Before the
estates met, many voters and their representatives drew up lists of grievances
expectations rose at the very moment when the price of bread was
skyrocketing - 1787 and 1788 had both seen very poor harvests, and there
1127
was widespread fear of outright famine. Even as members of the Third Estate
drew up their lists of grievances, rumors were spreading that nobles and
In the past, the Estates General had consisted of three separate groups,
representing the clergy (the First Estate), the nobility (the Second Estate), and
prosperous townsfolk (the Third Estate). In turn, voting was done by estate,
not by proportional representation, with the first and second estates generally
joining together to outvote the third. Thus, the small minority of the
population that consisted of nobles and clerics could always outvote the
for the political stability of the kingdom was that French society had changed
enormously since the last meeting of the Estates General. Many of the
consisted of commoners and laypeople. The key issue was whether the king
would allow voting to follow the number of representatives, which would give
1128
the Third Estate a clear majority, or if he would insist on the old model in
The cover of What Is The Third Estate?, a highly influential pamphlet written by a liberal
clergyman, the Abbé Sieyès, in the lead-up to the meeting of the Estates General. His
argument: the Third Estate was “everything,” representing the nation of France as a whole.
be by estate. This prompted a spontaneous, and for the moment peaceful, act
1129
joined by some sympathetic nobles and priests. First, they declared
themselves to be not just the representatives of the Third Estate, but of France
itself as a whole: they were the “National Assembly” in whom the will of the
20 that their meeting hall was locked (by accident, as it turned out, although
they feared royal interference), they occupied the tennis court of Versailles
and pledged not to leave until they had drafted a constitution and the king had
1130
The greatest painter of the revolutionary era, Jacques-Louis David, captured the moment in
which the Tennis Court Oath was declared. Note the Catholic priest, Protestant minister, and
agnostic “freethinker” embracing in the front of the crowd: religious divisions were to be laid
The King was, as was typical for Louis XVI, unsure of how to
promising reform, and when faced with continued defiance, he ordered the
1131
Assembly. As the crucial weeks of late June and early July unfolded, however,
a faction of conservative nobles and the queen tried to persuade Louis to use
In Paris, about twenty miles away, rumors spread that the king was
going to crush the new National Assembly with force. As a result, crowds
took to the streets on July 12th. On the 14th, a crowd searching for weapons
overwhelmed the Bastille, a royal prison and arsenal, and murdered its
guards. Soon, royal troops started abandoning their posts and joining with
employed force to stave off the threat of a royalist crackdown, remains the
Day. On July 16th the war minister advised the king that the army could no
1132
nobleman, Lafayette, as commander of a new "National Guard" and,
and to lash out against the nobility who, they thought, were driving them into
destitution. Rumors spread among the peasantry that nobles were hoarding
submission. The result was the “Great Fear,” in which peasants attacked and
looted noble manors. Their main target was the debt ledgers that nobles kept
on their peasants, which the peasants gleefully burned (thereby erasing their
rights to coerce labor and fees of various kinds from the peasantry), on August
14th it abolished the sale of offices, and on August 26th it issued a Declaration
1133
of the Rights of Man and Citizen, modeled in part on the American Bill of
Rights. In October, in a single bold stroke, the Assembly seized church lands
itself. Finally, in early 1790 it abolished noble titles altogether, something that
was almost redundant since those titles no longer had legal privileges
matter of taxation and law - should treat people as individual citizens rather
amount of wealth they owned, but not qualitatively according to social rank or
estate. Thus, in a shockingly short amount of time, the French state was forced
to accept that legitimate power belongs to the nation as a whole, not to the
king, and that every citizen should be equal before the law. The
1134
“Equality”
some ways the most fraught with implications. All of the members of the
National Assembly were men. Almost all were Catholic - a few were
Protestants, but none were Jews. All were white as well, despite the existence
colonies (especially in the Caribbean). The initial claim that all citizens ought
to be equal before the law seemed straightforward enough until the Assembly
had to decide if that equality extended to those besides the people who had
Lynn Hunt, in her The Invention of Human Rights, traces some of the ways in
which the promise of “equality” brought about changes that the members of
the Assembly had never anticipated early on - some of her arguments are
presented below.
1135
While some of the early Revolutionaries had spoken in favor of the
end of 1789 thanks in part to the fact that Protestants already exercised
political rights in parts of southern France. In turn, while the idea of legal
equality for Jews was practically unthinkable before the Revolution, the logic
of equality seemed to acquire its own momentum over the course of 1789 -
1791, with French Jews winning their rights as French citizens in September
of 1791.
For both Protestants and Jews, the members of the Assembly concluded
that religious faith was essentially a private matter that did not directly
impact one’s ability to exercise political rights. Having already broken with
the Catholic church - and seized much of its property - the Assembly now
officially stripped of its political valence for the first time in European
1136
history. This was more than a “separation of church and state”: it suggested
that religious belief was in fact irrelevant to political loyalty and public
conduct. Clearly, much had changed in the centuries since the Protestant
In the case of the blacks and mixed-race peoples of the French colonies,
however, the Assembly at first showed little interest in extending any form of
political rights. Several members of the Assembly argued that slavery should
Haiti), produced enormous wealth for the French state and for numerous
even those in favor of major reforms in France itself often balked at the idea of
meddling with the wealth of the slave economies of the Caribbean. Once
once learning of the events in France, swiftly petitioned to have their own
1137
rights recognized. Much more alarmingly to the members of the Assembly,
The Assembly took steps to recognize the rights of free people of color
only slowly at first. In the summer of 1791, however, a slave uprising in St.
control of the situation, hoping in part to win over the free people of color in
control. Over the course of the following years, the rebellion in St. Domingue
thousands of slaves seizing their freedom. Having already lost control, the
unlike the cases of Protestant and Jewish enfranchisement, racial equality was
1138
The slave rebellion in St. Domingue, soon to be the nation of Haiti, was led by Toussaint
entirely however, were women. There were no debates on the floor of the
colonies. French men, radicals very much included, simply took it for granted
1139
at the Estates General, participating in the storming of the Bastille, and
forcibly removing the royal family from Versailles to Paris (it was a group of
armed women who carried out that particular change of address for the king,
Some women both in France and abroad forcefully drove home the
parallel to the Assembly’s 1789 Rights of Man and Citizen. In England, the
straightforward claim: the liberation of women would play a key role in the
human emancipation.
1140
Neither work, however, inspired sympathy among the vast majority of
the male population of France (or Britain), and as the revolution grew more
radical (see below), the members of the Assembly grew ever-more hostile to
the demand for rights for women. De Gouges was eventually executed on
of women that had sprung up since 1789 were shut down. It would take the
better part of a century for women to force the issue and begin the long,
Europe, all of which were monarchies, along with problems with inflation and
hunger in the countryside. In June of 1791, the king and his family fled Paris,
recognized the king from his portrait on coins). It was soon discovered that
1141
the royal family had been corresponding with foreign monarchs and nobles,
hoping to inspire an invasion from abroad to restore the king to the throne
and to end the Revolution by force. The situation rapidly radicalized as the
prestige of the king was destroyed overnight; even as the new French
The latter situation prompted the kings of Austria and Prussia to call
upon the monarchs of Europe to fully restore Louis XVI to control of his
country, although they did not yet declare war on France. Radical elements of
the National Assembly, however, anticipated war and convinced the Assembly
an alliance with Austria against France. The Assembly dispatched the new
soldiers of the royal army, against the forces of Austria and Prussia along the
French border.
1142
In September of 1792, as the war began in earnest and the king
abolished the monarchy and made France into a republic with universal
manhood suffrage. This was the first time in the history of Europe that every
adult male was allowed the right to vote regardless of wealth or status. In just
over three years, France had gone from an absolute monarchy to the first
major experiment in democracy since the days of the Roman Republic nearly
after heated debate and a close vote in the Assembly. The war grew as Britain
and the Dutch Republic joined with Prussia and Austria against France,
further increasing the military pressure on the French borders. The middle
part of 1793 saw fear of foreign invasion and food shortages, along with
royalist uprisings in parts of France itself. The result was the appointment of
1143
The aftermath of the execution of Louis XVI, with his head displayed to the crowd. He was
Revolutionary government.
the Revolution from both its external enemies and internal rebels. It was
mobilization for war, which swelled the ranks of the French forces and held
1144
system of price controls, requisitions, and currency regulation, backed by
police power. The committee restored order to rebellious areas by sending its
by violence.
Thus, just five years after the Revolution had begun, control was now in
repression to hold the nation together, continue the war against almost all of
Europe, and soon, to pass even more radical measures. They made extensive
use of the guillotine, a new “humane” technology of execution named after the
medical doctor who invented it, and their leader was the (in)famous
Maximilien Robespierre, whom his followers called "the Incorruptible" for his
1145
the metric system. From an unsystematic smattering of different standards of
the invention and use of a simple, unified system based on increments of ten
instituted by the Revolutionary government during its radical phase, this was
Since the members of the committee believed that not just France, but
the world was on the threshold of a new era, they proclaimed the creation of a
new calendar that began on September 22, 1792 (Day 1, Year 1), the day that
the republic had been declared. All of history was to follow from that first
day. Likewise, new ten-day weeks were introduced, with new four-week
months named after their weather rather than arbitrary historical figures (e.g.
1146
celebrations were planned to pay tribute to the Revolution itself in quasi-
reason.” The cathedral of Notre Dame in the center of Paris was stripped of its
culmination of the anticlerical measures that had begun in the first year of the
Revolution, with the seizure of church lands and property, but it now aimed at
of a symbolic parallel, the committee also had the bodies of dead French kings
disinterred and dumped into a common grave (the corpse of Louis XIV landed
To enforce its will and ensure “security,” the Committee for Public
Safety instituted what was later dubbed "The Terror," as suspected traitors
1147
were arrested, interrogated, and confronted with the possibility of
died in prison during the Terror, which was further intensified by widespread
impose its policies on grain procurement and prices, the government had to
rely largely on local organizations of militants who often terrorized the very
battles fought by French troops were against royalist rebels, not foreign
soldiers.
In fact, the bloodiest repression seen during the Terror happened far
from Paris, and did not involve any guillotines. A western region of France,
the Vendée, had been the site of the largest royalist insurrection against the
took until the summer for the royalists to be defeated, and in the aftermath of
that defeat the revolutionary army inflicted a form of revenge against the
1148
people of the region that came close to outright genocide. Men and women
uprising, villages were burned to the ground, and the death toll easily
exceeded 100,000 people (some estimates place the number far higher).
government itself began to fear for their lives. Likewise, the mandate for the
committee’s very existence - protecting the Revolution against its foreign and
domestic enemies - was made somewhat obsolete when French forces won
1794. Robespierre inspired revulsion and fear among even some of his
cause and his overt attachment to using terror to achieve his ends. Thus, in
1149
After the fall of Robespierre the Revolution began to slide away from its
new “Directory” in 1795, which rescinded price controls and ended the
former radicals known as the “white terror” saw tens of thousands murdered
(as many died in the white terror as had under the Committee of Public
rest of Europe, even as royalist uprisings continued in areas across the nation
itself. It was in this context of violence and insecurity that, In October of 1795,
Conclusion
The influence of the ideals of the French Revolution was fairly limited
outside of France in its early years. Monarchs and social elites watched in
1150
horror as the Revolution radicalized, and the armies of states like Prussia and
would-be sympathizers. All too soon, however, the Revolutionary armies had
a new leader, one who would ultimately bring radical reform to much of
Third Part
Introduction 3
Chapter 1: Napoleon 16
1151
Chapter 4: The Politics of the Nineteenth Century 66
Chapter 12: The Soviet Union and the Cold War 222
1152
The Idea of Western Civilization
Introduction
it? Like all ideas, the concept of Western Civilization itself has a history, one
that coalesced in college textbooks and curriculums for the first time in the
United States in the 1920s. In many ways, the very idea of Western
others as if they were distinct, even unrelated. Thus, before examining the
1153
The obvious question is “west of what”? Likewise, where is “the east”?
attitudes. The obvious answer is that “the West” has something to do with
Europe. If the area including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Israel -
Palestine, and Egypt is somewhere called the “Middle” or “Near” East, doesn't
In fact, we get the original term from Greece. Greece is the center-point,
east of the Balkan Peninsula was east, west of the Balkans was west, and the
Greeks were at the center of their self-understood world. Likewise, the sea
that both separated and united the Greeks and their neighbors, including the
Egyptians and the Persians, is still called the Mediterranean, which means “sea
in the middle of the earth” (albeit in Latin, not Greek - we get the word from a
around the Mediterranean treated it as the center of the world itself, their
major trade route to one another and a major source of their food as well.
1154
To the Greeks, there were two kinds of people: Greeks and barbarians
(the Greek word is barbaros). Supposedly, the word barbarian came from
Greeks traded with all of their neighbors and knew perfectly well that the
Persians and the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, among others, were not their
inferiors in learning, art, or political organization, but the fact remains that
they were not Greek, either. Thus, one of the core themes of Western
Civilization is that right from its inception, of the east being east of Greece and
the west being west of Greece, and of the world being divided between Greeks
and barbarians, there was an idea of who is central and superior, and who is
out on the edges and inferior (or at least not part of the best version of
culture).
In a sense, then, the Greeks invented the idea of west and east, but they
did not extend the idea to anyone but themselves, certainly including the
“barbarians” who inhabited the rest of Europe. In other words, the Greeks did
1155
barbarian. Likewise, the Greeks did not invent “civilization” itself; they
inherited things like agriculture and writing from their neighbors. Neither
was there ever a united Greek empire: there was a great Greek civilization
when Alexander the Great conquered what he thought was most of the world,
stretching from Greece itself through Egypt, the Middle East, as far as western
India, but it collapsed into feuding kingdoms after he died. Thus, while later
cultures came to look to the Greeks as their intellectual and cultural ancestors,
the Greeks themselves did not set out to found “Western Civilization” itself.
Mesopotamia
Greece, this one does not. That is because civilization is not Greek in its
origins. The most ancient human civilizations arose in the Fertile Crescent, an
and into Iraq. Closely related, and lying within the Fertile Crescent, is the
region of Mesopotamia, which is the area between the Tigris and Euphrates
1156
rivers in present-day Iraq. In these areas, people invented the most crucial
including:
Cities: note that in English, the very word “civilization” is closely related
some people concentrate all of their time and energy on tasks like art,
1157
place of individual human decisions. That process, while often
Large-scale warfare: even before large cities existed, the first towns
were built with fortifications to stave off attackers. It is very likely that
1158
the stars and other heavenly bodies because they needed to be able to
track when to plant crops, when to harvest, and when religious rituals
had to be carried out. Among other things, the Mesopotamians were the
first to discover the 365 (and a quarter) days of the year and set those
ethnically. The Mesopotamians were the first to conquer and rule over
Greeks and skip places like Mesopotamia, because those areas were the
1159
Greece and Rome
their importance. Alexander the Great was one of the most famous and
world” when he was eighteen years old. When he died his empire fell apart, in
part because he did not say which of his generals was to take over after his
their buildings, putting on plays in the Greek style, and of course, trading with
one another. This period in history was called the Hellenistic Age. The people
who were part of that age were European, Middle Eastern, and North African,
people who worshiped both Greeks gods and the gods of their own regions,
1160
Civilization has always been a blend of different peoples, not a single
Civilization was ancient Rome. Over the course of roughly five centuries, the
Romans expanded from the city of Rome in the middle of the Italian peninsula
to rule an empire that stretched from Britain to Spain and from North Africa
work of Roman citizens and Roman subjects, and the massive use of slave
labor, they built remarkable buildings and created infrastructure like roads
The Romans are the ones who give us the idea of Western Civilization
being something ongoing – something that had started in the past and
continued into the future. In the case of the Romans, they (sometimes
used Greek shapes and forms, the Roman gods were really just the Greek gods
given new names (Zeus became Jupiter, Hades became Pluto, etc.), and
1161
educated Romans spoke and read Greek so that they could read the works of
the great Greek poets, playwrights, and philosophers. Thus, the Romans
an ongoing civilization that blended Greek and Roman values. Like the Greeks
before them, they also divided civilization itself in a stark binary: there was
Greco-Roman culture on the one hand and barbarism on the other, although
conquered. They united their provinces with the Latin language, which is the
(French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc.), Roman Law, which is the ancestor of
most forms of law still in use today in Europe, and the Roman form of
government. Along with those factors, the Romans brought Greek and Roman
science, learning, and literature. In many ways, the Romans believed that they
were bringing civilization itself everywhere they went, and because they
made the connection between Greek civilization and their own, they played a
1162
significant role in inventing the idea of Western Civilization as something that
was ongoing.
That noted, the Romans did not use the term “Western Civilization” and
as their empire expanded, even the connection between Roman identity and
Italy itself weakened. During the period that the empire was at its height the
bulk of the population and wealth was in the east, concentrated in Egypt,
the Levant. This shift to the east culminated in the move of the capital of the
empire from the city of Rome to the Greek town of Byzantium, renamed
1163
The Middle Ages and Christianity
came about after Rome ceased to exist as a united empire, during the era
known as the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were the period between the fall
of Rome, which happened around 476 CE, and the Renaissance, which started
around 1300 CE. During the Middle Ages, another concept of what lay at the
religion. The Roman Empire had started to become Christian in the early
Christianity. Many Europeans in the Middle Ages came to believe that, despite
the fact that they spoke different languages and had different rulers, they
Western Civilization. It inspired amazing art and music. It was at the heart of
1164
scholarship and learning for centuries. It also justified the aggressive
other religions were infidels (meaning "those who are unfaithful," those who
worshipped the correct God, but in the wrong way, including Jews and
Muslims, but also Christians who deviated from official orthodoxy) or pagans
exterminated. For instance, despite the fact that Muslims and Jews worshiped
the same God and shared much of the same sacred literature, medieval
eventually drove many Jews from Europe itself to take shelter in the kingdoms
and empires of the Middle East and North Africa. Historically it was much
safer and more comfortable for Jews in places like the predominantly Muslim
1165
A major irony of the idea that Western Civilization is somehow
both Judaism and Christianity. Its holy writings are also closely aligned to
Jewish and Christian values and thought. Perhaps most importantly, Islamic
kingdoms and empires were part of the networks of trade, scholarship, and
exchange that linked together the entire greater Mediterranean region. Thus,
to separate Islamic states and cultures from the rest of Western Civilization.
Civilization in the pre-modern period was the Renaissance. The idea of the
“Middle Ages” was invented by thinkers during the Renaissance, which started
around 1300 CE. The great thinkers and artists of the Renaissance claimed to
be moving away from the ignorance and darkness of the Middle Ages – which
1166
they also described as the “dark ages” - and returning to the greatness of the
de Pizan, and Petrarch proudly connected their work to the work of the
Romans and Greeks, claiming that there was an unbroken chain of ideas,
virtues, and accomplishments stretching all the way back thousands of years
thousand years after the life of the Greek philosopher Plato based their own
in Roman and Greek art. The scientific discoveries of the Renaissance were
inspired by the same spirit of inquiry that Greek scientists and Roman
proudly linked together their own era to that of the Greeks and Romans, thus
1167
In the process of reviving the ideas of the Greeks and Romans,
rhetoric (among other subjects) with the cultivation of an ethical code the
program of education remained intact into the twentieth century, with the
university system that was born near the end of the nineteenth century.
It was not Renaissance ideas, however, that had the greatest impact on
the globe at the time. Instead, it was European soldiers, colonists, and most
consequentially, diseases. The first people from the Eastern Hemisphere since
1168
prehistory to travel to the Western Hemisphere (and remain - an earlier
Viking colony did not survive) were European explorers who, entirely by
accident, “discovered” the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century CE. It
people already lived there, as their ancestors had for thousands of years, but
geography had left them ill-prepared for the arrival of the newcomers. With
peoples of the Americas had no resistance, and within a few generations the
descendents was thus made vastly easier. Europeans suddenly had access to
exploitation of its resources and its people, Europe went from a region of little
economic and military power and importance to one of the most formidable in
1169
the following centuries. Following the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of
Central and South America, the other major European states embarked on
emerged over the course of the seventeenth century, first and foremost those
of the Dutch and English, which established the precedent that profit and
and growing, global empires. By 1800, roughly 35% of the surface of the
many regions of Africa, but (in an ironic reversal of the impact of European
explorers and conquerors were unable to penetrate beyond the coasts of most
1170
of sub-Saharan African entirely. Meanwhile, the enormous and sophisticated
empires and kingdoms of China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and South Asia (i.e.
little importance. The Middle East was dominated by two powerful and
The explosion of European power, one that coincided with the fruition
of the idea that Western Civilization was both distinct from and better than
of the eighteenth century, Europeans learned how to exploit fossil fuels in the
wealth, and military power, this time built on the backs not of outright slaves,
1171
powerhouse to global hegemon. By the early twentieth century, Europe and
roughly 85% of the globe. Europeans either forced foreign states to concede
South Asia (i.e. India) and Africa. None of this would have been possible
To Europeans and North Americans, however, the reason that they had
come to enjoy such wealth and power was not because of a (temporary)
their inherent biological and cultural superiority. The idea that the human
species was divided into biologically distinct races was not entirely invented
acquired all the trappings of a “science” over the course of the 1800s. By the
year 1900, almost any person of European descent would have claimed to be
1172
part of a distinct, superior “race” whose global dominance was simply part of
That conceit arrived at its zenith in the first half of the twentieth
century. The European powers themselves fell upon one another in the First
global dominance. Soon after, the new (related) ideologies of fascism and
Nazism put racial superiority at the very center of their worldviews. The
Second World War was the direct result of those ideologies, when racial
warfare was unleashed for the first time not just on members of races
that fascists and Nazis now considered inferior races in their own right, most
million deaths, including the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and at
least 25 million citizens of the Soviet Union, another “racial” enemy from the
1173
Western Civilization Is “Born”
It was against the backdrop of this descent into what Europeans and
civilization that started with the Greeks - that the history of Western
Civilization first came into being as a textbook topic and, soon, a mainstay of
historians, came to believe that the best way to defend the elements of
that may not have strictly speaking started in Europe, but which enjoyed its
greatest success there. The early proponents of the “Western Civ” concept
ideas, technologies, and cultural achievements that led to the present. Along
the way, of course, they included the United States as both a product of those
1174
European achievements and, in the twentieth century, as one of the
crafting what was to be the core of history curriculums for most of the
schools. The narrative in the introduction in this book follows its basic
contours, without all of the qualifying remarks: it starts with Greece, goes
through Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, then on to the growth in
European power leading up to the recent past. The traditional story made a
hard and fast distinction between Western Civilization as the site of progress,
and the rest of the world (usually referred to as the “Orient,” simply meaning
“east,” all the way up until textbooks started changing their terms in the
1980s) which invariably lagged behind. Outside of the West, went the
1175
This was, in hindsight, a somewhat surprising conclusion given when
“civilized” culture had imploded with the world wars, but the inventors of
legacy from that implosion, but to celebrate it as the only major historical
legacy of relevance to the present. In doing so, they reinforced many of the
intellectual dividing lines created centuries earlier: there was true civilization
achievement and progress, and most importantly, only people who were born
role. The entire history of most of humankind was not just irrelevant to the
the modern world for everyone. In other words, even Africans and Asians, to
say nothing of the people of the Pacific or Native Americans, could have little
of relevance to learn from their own history that was not somehow “obsolete”
in the modern era. And yet, this astonishing conclusion was born from a
1176
culture that unleashed the most horrific destruction (self-destruction) ever
textbooks, focusing in many cases on the critical historical role of the Middle
East, not just Europe. It also abandons the pretense that the history of
Western Civilization was generally progressive, with the conditions of life and
understanding of the natural world of most people improving over time (as a
1177
The purpose of this approach is not to disparage the genuine
in “the West.” Technologies as diverse and important as the steam engine and
movements calling for religious toleration, equality before the law, and
feminism all came into being in the West. For better and for worse, the West
was also the point of origin of true globalization (starting with the European
events that occurred in the West over approximately the last 10,000
years. “Balance” is in the eye of the reader, however, so the account will not
the background and the framework that informed the writing of the book, and
1178
knowledge that many others will have the opportunity to modify it as they see
fit.
Finally, a note on the kind of history this textbook covers is in order. For
social, and so on. Historians have made enormous strides in the last sixty
importantly in considering the histories of the people who were not in power,
including the common people of various epochs, of women for almost all of
history, and of slaves and servants. The old adage that “history is written by
the winners” is simply untrue - history has left behind mountains of evidence
about the lives of those who had access to less personal autonomy than did
social elites. Those elites did much to author some of the most familiar
1179
This textbook tries to address at least some of those histories, but here
it will be found wanting by many. Given the vast breadth of history covered in
its chapters, the bulk of the consideration is on “high level” political history,
political changes. There are two reasons for that approach. First, the history
of political history (one that infuriates many professional historians, who are
trained to identify and study complexity). Political history can thus serve as
The other, related, reason for the political framing of this textbook is
that history has long since declined as a subject central to education from the
elementary through high school levels in many parts of the United States. It is
no longer possible to assume that anyone who has completed high school
1180
already has some idea of major (measured by their impact at the time and
since) events of the past. This textbook attempts to use political history as,
that changed the world at the time and continue to exert an influence in the
present.
an extent, religious history. Social and cultural history are covered in less
detail, both for reasons of space and the simple fact that the author was
greater emphasis is placed on the history of the Middle East, especially in the
1181
period after the collapse of the political authority of the Abbasid Caliphate in
the ninth century CE. The textbook now addresses the histories of Persia
(Iran) and the Ottoman Empire in considerable detail, emphasizing both their
relationships with other cultures. Second, much greater focus is given to the
From the perspective of the author, the new material on the Middle East
more awkward fit in that women were almost entirely excluded from
were ever in positions of political authority until the recent past. The shift in
not just on gender roles, but on the social history of everyday life, stepping
whole. The result is a broader and more robust historical account than that of
1182
the earlier edition, although the overarching narrative is still driven by
political developments.
proper nouns. For example, terms like “the Church” when referring to the
Europe,” and historical eras like “the Middle Ages” and “the Enlightenment”
are all capitalized. When possible, the names of individuals are kept as close
“Nikolai I” instead of “Nicholas I.” Some exceptions have been made to avoid
instead of the more accurate “Iosif Stalin.” Diacritical marks are kept when
Hitler. Herculean efforts have been made to reduce the number of semicolons
1183
Chapter 1: Napoleon
French rulers of all time, there is considerable irony in the fact that Napoleon
Bonaparte was not born in France itself, but on the island of Corsica in the
prize in one of its many wars, and Napoleon was thus born a French
citizen. His family was not rich, but did have a legitimate noble title that was
recognized by the French state, meaning Napoleon was eligible to join the
army. Thus, as a young man, his parents sent him to France to train as an
artillery officer. There, he endured harassment and hazing from the sons of
"real" French nobles, who belittled his Corsican accent and treated him as a
1184
unchallenged authority. Thanks to his relentless drive, considerable
intellectual gifts, and more than a little luck, he would eventually achieve just
that.
Napoleon was a great contrast. On the one hand, he was a man of the
era. Likewise, with his armies he “exported” the Revolution to the rest of
law code based on the principle of legal equality. Decades later, as a prisoner
claim in his memoirs that everything he had done was in the name of France
1185
after he had conquered them. He ignored the beliefs and sentiments of the
loyal because of his victories and the stability and order he had returned to
empire he had created with his armies and trusted no one besides his older
brother and the handful of generals who had proved themselves over years of
campaigning for him. Thus, while he may have truly believed in the
revolutionary principles of reason and efficiency, and cared little for outdated
and war that affected the French Republic in the 1790s. As of 1795, political
1186
power had shifted again in the revolutionary government, this time to a five-
man committee called the Directorate. The war against the foreign coalition,
which had now grown to include Russia and the Ottoman Empire, ground on
endlessly even as the economic situation in France itself kept getting worse.
1796 and 1797 to lead French armies to major victories in Northern Italy
Egypt in 1797, where he was initially victorious, only to have the French fleet
sunk behind him by the British (he was later recalled to France, leaving
behind most of his army in the process). Even in defeat, however, Napoleon
proved brilliant at crafting a legend of his exploits, quickly becoming the most
that succeeded in seizing power in a coup d’etat; the new government was
1187
called the Consulate, its members "consuls" after the most powerful
Napoleon was dominating the other two members completely, and in 1802 he
was declared (by his compliant government) Consul for Life, assuming total
power. In 1804, as his forces pushed well beyond the French borders, he
the spiritual heir to Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, declaring that, a
1188
Napoleon on his imperial throne. He was not one for subtlety.
continued the existing focus on total war that had begun with the levée en
masse, but he enhanced it further by paying for the wars (and new troops)
soldiers by 1812, the largest armed force ever seen. From 1799 to 1802, he
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defeated Austrian and British forces and secured a peace treaty from both
powers, one that lasted long enough for him to organize a new grand strategy
to conquer not only all of continental Europe, but (he hoped), Britain as
well. That treaty held until late 1805, when a new coalition of Britain, Austria,
His one major defeat during this early period was when he lost the
British fleet destroyed a larger French and allied Spanish one. The British
victory was so decisive that Napoleon was forced to abandon his hope of
invading Britain and had to try to indirectly weaken it instead. Even the fact
that the planned invasion never came to pass did not slow his momentum,
Europe.
Thus, despite the setback at Trafalgar, the years of 1805 and 1806 saw
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defeated first Austria and then Russia. The Austrians were forced to sign a
treaty and Vienna itself was occupied by French forces for a short while, while
the Russian Tsar Alexander I worked on raising a new army. The last major
continental power, Prussia, went to war in 1806, but its army was no match
for Napoleon, who defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Jena and then
occupied Berlin. Fully 96% of the over 170,000 soldiers in the Prussian army
were lost, the vast majority (about 140,000) taken prisoner by the French. In
1806, following his victories over the Austrians and Prussians, Napoleon
Europe from France to Poland, though the powerful British navy continued to
dominate the seas. His empire stretched from Belgium and Holland in the
north to Rome in the south, covering nearly half a million square miles and
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boasting a population of 44 million. In some places Napoleon simply
expanded French borders and ruled directly, while in others he set up puppet
states that ultimately answered to him (he generally appointed his family
the Prussians and, to a lesser extent, Austrians to regain the initiative always
1192
Napoleon’s empire at its height. The regions in dark green were governed directly by
Napoleon’s imperial government, while the regions in light green were puppet states that
answered to France.
Military Strategy
was actually a genius was in his powers of memory, his tireless focus, and his
memorized things like the movement speed of his armies, the amount of and
type of supplies needed by his forces, the rate at which they would lose men to
injury, desertion, and disease, and how much ammunition they needed to
multiple army corps to march separately, miles apart, and then converge at a
and worked relentlessly, often sleeping only four or five hours a night, and his
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such that he was capable of effectively micro-managing his entire empire
within his government or his forces, especially the army. Simply put,
Napoleon was always able to rely on the loyalty of his troops. He took his first
that his army would be paid in silver rather than the paper money issued by
the French Republic that had lost almost all of its value. Napoleon led his men
personally in most of the most important battles, and because he lived like a
soldier like them, most of his men came to adore him. His victories kept
morale high both among his troops and among the French populace, as did the
imperial censorship.
in the two decades he was in power, winning all but eight (the ones he lost
were mostly toward the end of his reign). His victories were not just because
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of his own command of battlefield tactics, but because of the changes
increase the size and flexibility of its armies. It also turned the officer corps
artillery, and support services. On campaign these large units of ten to twenty
extracting supplies from its own area, but capable of mutual support. This
hindsight, it seems clear that his greatest problem was that he could never
stop: he always seemed to need one more victory. While supremely arrogant,
he was also self-aware and savvy enough to recognize that his rule depended
1195
on continued conquests. For the first several years of his rule, Napoleon
France's borders, had ended the war with the other European powers and
imposed peace settlements with the Austrians and the British which were
that he intended to create a huge empire far beyond the original borders of
France.
Civil Life
politician with a keen mind for how the government had to be reformed for
improving tax collection and public auditing, creating the Bank of France in
1800, and substituting silver and gold for the almost worthless paper
notes. He introduced a new Civil Code of 1804 (as usual, named after himself
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as the Code Napoleon), which preserved the legal egalitarian principles of
1789.
certain beneficial reforms to the puppet states created by France, all of them
constitutions, equality before the law, the abolition of archaic noble privileges,
toleration. At least for the early years of the Napoleonic empire, many
school for the training of an elite of leaders and administrators, with a secular
curriculum and scholarships for the sons of officers and civil servants and the
with the Pope in 1801 restored the position of the Catholic Church in France,
1197
though it did not return Church property, nor did it abandon the principle of
support for religious freedom was born out of that impulse: he did not care
what religion his subjects professed so long as they worked diligently for the
censorship of the press and had little time for democracy. He also took after
women from the political community - his 1804 law code made women the
legal subjects of their fathers and then their husbands, stating that a husband
owed his wife protection and a wife owed her husband obedience. In other
words, under the Code Napoleon, women had the same legal status as
children. From all of his subjects, men and women alike, Napoleon expected
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The Fall of Napoleon's Empire
nations, except Denmark, Sweden, and Portugal, had closed their ports to
British commerce. But far from buckling under the strain of the Continental
System, Britain was getting richer, seizing the remains of the French Empire in
the Caribbean and smuggling cheap but high-quality manufactured goods into
seizing the Danish fleet, an example that encouraged the Portuguese to defy
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responded with an invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 1808 (initially an ally
of the Spanish monarchy, Napoleon summarily booted the king from his
throne and installed his own brother Joseph as the new monarch), which in
support the insurrection, and Napoleon found himself tied down in a guerrilla
war - the term “guerrilla,” meaning “little war,” was invented by the Spanish
without major battles or a clear enemy army. The financial costs of the
invasion and occupation were enormous, and over the next seven years
almost 200,000 French soldiers lost their lives in Spain. Even as Napoleon
envisioned the further expansion of his empire, most of his best soldiers were
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Francisco Goya’s “The Third of May,” commemorating the massacre of Spanish villagers by
French troops.
The problem for the French forces was that they had consistently
defeated enemies who opposed them in large open battles, but that kind of
battle was in short supply in Spain. Instead, the guerrillas mastered the art of
force defeats a stronger one by whittling them down over time. The French
controlled the cities and most of the towns, but even a few feet beyond the
outskirts of a French camp they could fall victim to a sudden ambush. French
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soldiers were picked off piecemeal as the years went on despite the fact that
the Spanish did not field an army against them. In turn, the French massacred
villagers suspected of collaborating with the guerrillas, but all the massacres
did was turn more Spanish peasants against them. Napoleon poured hundreds
of thousands of men into Spain in a vain attempt to turn the tide and pacify it;
instead, he found his best troops caught in a war that refused to play by his
rules.
other setbacks of his own design. In 1810, he divorced his wife Josephine
(who had not produced a male heir) and married the princess of the Habsburg
to create his own royal line by marrying into one! In the same year, Napoleon
annexed the Papal States in central Italy, prompting Pope Pius VII to
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Russia, Elba, and Waterloo
outside of his control was Russia. Despite the obvious problem of staging a
full-scale invasion - Russia was far from France, it was absolutely enormous,
time to expand his empire's borders even further. In this, he not only saw
Russia as the last remaining major power on the continent that opposed him,
but he hoped to regain lost inertia and popularity. His ultimate goal was to
conquer not just Russia, but the European part (i.e. Greece and the Balkans) of
Black Sea, thereby re-creating most of the ancient Roman Empire, this time
Napoleon faced problems even before the army left, however. Most of
his best troops were fighting in Spain, and more than half of the "Grand Army"
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Italy and Germany. Likewise, many of the recruits were just that: new recruits
army east, fighting two actual battles (the second of which, the Battle of
Borodino in August of 1812, was extremely bloody), but never pinning the
Russians down or receiving the anticipated negotiations from the Tsar for
engage in the "final battle" Napoleon always sought. As the first snowflakes
started falling, the French held out for another month, but by October
Napoleon was forced to concede that he had to turn back as supplies began
running low.
weak points in the French line and ambushed them at river crossings, disease
swept through the ranks of the malnourished French troops, and the weather
ubiquitous, and of the 600,000 who had set out for Russia, only 40,000
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returned to France. In contrast to regular battles, in which most lost soldiers
could be accounted for as either captured by the enemy or wounded, but not
dead, at least 400,000 men lost their lives in the Russian campaign. In the
Napoleon’s retreat.
fought on for two more years. Increasingly, however, the French were losing,
1205
the coalition armies now trained and equipped along French lines and
had carried for years in case of capture, but the poison was mostly inert from
its age and it merely sickened him (after his recovery, his self-confidence
quickly returned). Fearing that his execution would make him a martyr to the
French, the coalition’s leadership opted to exile him instead, and he was sent
to a manor on the small Mediterranean island of Elba, near his native Corsica.
restored the Bourbons to the throne in the person of the unpopular Louis
XVIII, younger brother of the executed Louis XVI, and when a French force
sent to capture Napoleon instead defected to him, the coalition realized that
they had not really won. Napoleon managed to scrape together one more
army, but was finally defeated by a coalition force of British and Prussian
1206
on the cold, miserable island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, where he
The Aftermath
What were the effects of Napoleon’s reign? First, despite the manifest
significant reform. It brought a taste for a more egalitarian social system with
it, a law code based on rationality instead of tradition, and a major weakening
especially since the Napoleonic Empire was so clearly French despite its
to enrich the French led many of his subjects to recognize the hypocrisy of his
"egalitarian" empire, and in the absence of their old kings they began to think
of themselves as Germans and Italians and Spaniards rather than just subjects
to a king.
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The myth of Napoleon was significant as well – he became the great
gave France its greatest hour of dominance in European history, and for more
than fifty years the rest of Europe lived in fear of another French
invasion. This was the context that the kingdoms that had allied against him
Vienna, Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria gathered together in the Austrian
capital of Vienna to try to rebuild the European order. What they could not
do, however, was undo everything that Napoleon’s legacy completely, and so
European (and soon, world) history’s course was changed by a single unique
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Third of May - Public Domain
Big Changes
One of the most vexing questions for historians is how to identify the
simple fact that Europe controlled a staggering amount of territory all around
the globe by 1900? The old Eurocentric viewpoint was that there was
the world. The even older version, popular among Europeans themselves in
the late nineteenth century, was openly racist and chauvinistic: it claimed that
1209
know-how, of piercing insight and practical sense. All other civilizations were,
inflated view of themselves, and more to the point, their dominance was
regions for less than a century. The Industrial Revolution began in England in
about 1750, took almost a century to spread to other parts of western Europe
(a process that began in earnest around 1830), and reached maturity by the
comparison to the rest of the world, except the United States starting in the
last decades of the nineteenth century, from about 1860 - 1914. After that,
Europe’s competitive edge began a steady decline, one that coincided with the
1210
A more satisfying explanation for the explosion of European power than
one that claims that Europeans had some kind of inherent cultural advantage
has to do with energy. For about a century, Europe and, eventually, the United
the form of fossil fuels. The iconic battles toward the end of the century
Africa and parts of Asia were not just about the rifles; they were about the
factories that made those rifles, the calories that fed the soldiers, the
steamships that transported them there, the telegraph lines that conveyed
orders for thousands of miles away, the medicines that kept them healthy, and
so on, all of which represented an epochal shift from the economic and
While many historians have taken issue with the term “revolution” in
describing what was much more of a slow evolution at the time, there is no
1211
question that the changes industrial technology brought about really were
technological changes were economic and social. All of society was eventually
agricultural revolution that began civilization back in about 10,000 BCE. Even
1212
if it was a revolution that took over a century to come to fruition, from a long-
The Industrial Revolution occurred first in Great Britain, and that simple
fact goes a long way toward explaining why Britain became the single most
first half of the eighteenth century resulted in lower infant mortality rates and
lower disease rates in general. The Little Ice Age of the early modern period
ended in the eighteenth century as well, increasing crop yields. Despite the
1213
experienced as a disaster by peasants and farmers, the fact is that it did
increase the total caloric output of crops at the same time. In short,
urban poor) of peasants who were available to work in the first generations of
factories.
English workers arriving for their shift in 1900. Note the young boy on the right, employed by
1214
In addition, Britain has abundant coal deposits concentrated in northern
the eighteenth century was the heart of the existing British textile industry,
underground band of coal that reaches across to Belgium, eastern France, and
western Germany. This stretch of land would become the industrial heartland
of Europe - one can draw a line down a map of Western Europe from England
stretching across the English Channel toward the Alps and trace most of the
Britain had coal, and the English and Scottish had long known that you
could burn it and produce heat. For many centuries, however, it was an
unpopular fuel source. Coal produces a noxious, toxic smoke, along with
heaps of black ash. It has to be mined, and coal mines in northwestern Europe
tended to rapidly fill with water as they dipped below the water table,
1215
were extremely dangerous and difficult. Thus, coal was only used in small
What changed was, simply, Britain ran out of forests. Thanks to the
need for firewood and charcoal for heat, as well as timber for building
dirty and distasteful had given way to the necessity of its use as a fuel source
for heat. As the Industrial Revolution began in the latter half of the eighteenth
century, thanks to a series of key inventions, the vast energy capacity of coal
was unleashed for the first time. By 1815, annual British coal production
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There were a series of technological breakthroughs that powered the
was not the inventor of the concept, but his design was vastly more effective
than earlier versions). Steam engines were originally used to pump water out
of mines, but soon it was discovered that they could be used to substitute for
mechanism tied to the engine. In turn, this enabled the conversion of thermal
energy unleashed by burning a fossil fuel like coal into kinetic energy (the
energy of movement). With a steam engine, coal did not just provide heat, it
order to explain to potential customers what his machine could do. Almost
anything that moved could now be tied to coal power instead of muscle
power, and thus began the vast and dramatic shift toward the modern world’s
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The first and most important industry to benefit from coal power
besides mining itself was the northern English textile industry, which
harnessed steam power to drive new machines that processed the cotton and
loom in 1787, the first large-scale textile machine that could process an
enormous amount of cotton fiber. By the end of the 1800s, a single “mule” (a
spinning invention linked to steam power in 1803) could produce thread 200
to 300 times as fast as could be done by hand. By 1850 Britain was producing
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Power looms in 1835. Female labor was preferred by factory-owners because women could be
American south thanks to slave labor, and there was an endless market for
textiles all across Europe. British cloth processed by the new machines was of
very high quality and, because of the vast quantity that British mills could
produce, it was far cheaper than textiles produced by hand. Thus, British
1219
tremendous profits for British industrialists. The impact on Britain’s economy
was enormous, as was its textile industry’s growing dominance over its
European rivals. France initially tried to keep British fabric out of its own
markets, but in 1786 the two kingdoms negotiated the Eden Treaty, which
allowed the importation of British manufactured goods. The result was a tidal
In its first century, the areas in Europe that benefited the most from the
Industrial Revolution were the ones closest to coal. Besides access to coal, the
other major factors driving industrial expansion in Britain were political and
cultural. The reason that Britain was far and away the leading industrial
power is that its parliament was full of believers in the principles of free trade,
1220
after securing loans with fair interest rates and they knew that they had a
legal system that favored their enterprise. Finally, taxes were not arbitrary or
extremely high (as they were in most parts of Spain and Italy, for example).
The other major reason that Britain enjoyed such an early and long-
many kingdoms on the continent, members of the nobility were banned from
actively practicing commerce until the period of the French Revolution. Even
after the Napoleonic wars, when noble titles could no longer be lost by
industries. In short, nobles often looked down on those who made their
wealth not from land, but from factories. This attitude helped to slow the
was the southern swath of the Netherlands, which became the newly-created
1221
nation of Belgium in 1830 after a revolution. That region, immediately a close
ally of Great Britain, had usable waterways, coal deposits, and a skilled
overall wealth, however. The traditional elites who dominated the restored
1800, the banking system as a whole was rudimentary and capital was
laborers and poor peasants had little option but to seek factory work, most
1222
cities to work in miserable conditions. Second, French industry had always
country, which had coal deposits, until the second half of the century.
In the German lands, it was not until the establishment of the Zollverein,
a customs union, in 1834 that trade could flow freely enough to encourage
coal deposits, and by 1850 German industry was growing rapidly, especially in
scale industry. It took until the late nineteenth century for the Industrial
Revolution to "arrive" in places like northern Italy and the cities of western
Russia, with some countries like Spain missing out entirely until the twentieth
century.
1223
While the UK enjoyed the early lead in industrial manufacturing, its share of global output had
dropped by 1900. The United States became the major industrial power of the world in the first
The Industrial Revolution began with mining and textiles, but its effects
railroad was put in use in 1820, and the first passenger railroad followed in
northern England. By the middle of the century some trains could go 50 MPH,
1224
far faster than any human had ever gone before (except when falling from a
great height). About 6,500 miles of rail was built in Britain between 1830 and
1850, just 20 years, and railroad expansion soon followed suit on the
financial collapse.
social and cultural effects. The British developed the system of time zones,
based on Greenwich (part of London) Mean Time as the “default,” because the
railroads had to be coordinated to time departures and arrivals. This was the
first time when a whole country, and soon a whole continent, had to have a
Likewise, the telegraph was invented in 1830 and used initially to warn
train stations when multiple trains were on the track. Telegraphs allowed
electrical impulses over a wire as "long" and "short" signals. The inventor of
1225
the telegraph, Samuel Morse, invented a code based off of those signals that
messages. Morse Code thus enabled the first modern mass communications
device. This was the first time when a message could travel faster than a
commerce. The first sailed in 1816, going about twice as fast as the fastest
sailing ship could. This had obvious repercussions for trade, because it
became cheaper to transport basic goods via steamship than it was to use
markets. The first transatlantic crossing was a race between two steamships
going from England to New York in 1838; soon, sailing vessels became what
1226
Two other advances in transportation are often overlooked when
invented a way to cheaply pave roads in the 1830s, and in the 1850s an
roads” with stations for changing horses. Thus, well before the invention of
cars, road networks were being built in parallel to railroads. Likewise, even
though canals had been around since ancient times, there was a major canal-
building boom in the second half of the eighteenth century and first half of the
nineteenth century. Canals linked Manchester to coal fields, the Erie Canal
was built in the US to link the Great Lakes to the eastern seaboard, and even
The net effect of these innovations was that travel was vastly cheaper,
simpler, and faster than it had ever been in human history. In essence, every
1227
Social Effects
deposits, it had a large textile industry, it was linked to the sea via canal as of
1761, and it had an army of artisans and laborers because of its historic role
was 40,000, by 1831 it was 250,000, and by 1850 it was 400,000 - a 200%
increase in a century.
1228
View of Manchester in 1840. While the painting is in the Romantic style, with the nature scene
in the foreground, the masses of factory smokestacks are visible in the distance.
produced by the new factories streamed unfiltered into the air and
water. Soot and filth covered every surface - early evolutionary biologists
noted that certain moths that had a mutation that made them soot-brown
off. To deal with the pollution, factory owners simply started building taller
1229
smokestacks, which spread the pollution farther. Waste from mining (which
was often toxic) was simply left in “slag heaps,” through which rainwater ran
and from which toxic runoff reached water supplies. A coal miner who
age,” (40 at the oldest) since his or her lungs were ridden with toxic coal dust.
Landlords in the cities took advantage of the influx of laborers and their
single room. There was no running water and sanitation was utterly
inadequate. Food was expensive, in part because of an 1815 act in the British
Parliament called the Corn Laws that banned the importation of grain and
kept prices up (the wealthy, land-owning gentry class had pushed the law
for years (e.g. 1839 – 1842), workers were summarily fired to cut costs, and
1230
The English poet William Blake famously referred to the factories as
“satanic mills.” Likewise, the English novelist Charles Dickens used the grim
reality of cities like Manchester as inspiration and setting for his novels like
Hard Times and Oliver Twist. Since real wages did not increase among
working people until fairly late in the century, the actual living conditions of
the second half of the century. In Britain, laws were passed to protect horses
before they were passed to protect children working in mines and factories.
The major cause of this misery was simple: the ruthless pursuit of profit
by factory owners and manufacturers. The aim of the early factory owners
and managers was to simplify the stages of the manufacturing process so that
subjection to harsh work discipline, the degradation of craft skills, long hours,
cheap wages, and the abuse of young women and children (who worked
1231
While they had little reason to consider it, the industrial workers of
northern England lived in a state of misery that was tied to another that was
even worse across the Atlantic: the slave-based cotton economy of the
American south which provided the raw material. Despite the British ban on
technologies besides the invention of the cotton gin in 1794. That increase
to the misery of working conditions, was the creation of social classes. Until
the modern era “class” was usually something one was born into; it was a
1232
legally-recognized and enforced “estate.” With industrialization, the
their social identity was defined by their poverty and their working
recognized that they were united by their wealth and their common interest
in controlling the workers. The non-noble rich and middle class came to
distinguish themselves both from the working class and the old nobility by
taking pride in their morality, sobriety, work ethic, and cleanliness. They
often regarded the workers as little better than animals, but some also
The middle classes that arose out of industrialization were the ranks of
operations. Some were genuine “self-made men” who worked their way up,
but most came from families with at least some wealth to begin with. The
1233
and old-style artisans, whose economic life was precarious and who lived in
constant fear of losing everything and being forced to join the working class.
From this context, socialism, the political belief that government should
before mass socialist parties existed, there were struggles and even massacres
over working conditions; one notorious event was the Peterloo Massacre of
being around male workers in mines and factories than by the working
conditions per se, the British parliament did pass some laws mandating legal
protections. The Factory Act of 1833 limited child labor in cotton mills, the
Miners Act of 1842 banned the employment of girls and women (and boys
under 10) underground, and in 1847 a Ten Hour Law limited the workday for
1234
women and children. These were exceptional laws; further legal protections
for workers took decades and constant struggle by the emerging socialist
Image of a girl hauling a “tub” of coal up a narrow mine shaft. The image originates with the
Gender
almost always doing the same or similar work for lower wages (laws banning
wage differentials based solely on sex were not put in place the late
1235
nineteenth century at the earliest, and they were rarely enforced even
then). Women industrial workers were still expected to carry out domestic
combination of demands that made life for women in the industrial cities even
domestic servants that toiled in the houses of others. A “maid of all work” in a
middle-class household could expect to rise before dawn to light the home’s
hearth and cookfire, cook and clean throughout the day, run errands if
great theorist Karl Marx) routinely ignored servants - they were both taken
for granted and effectively invisible, replaceable when injured or sick, and
paid so little that they were only a minor item in a household budget. As late
1236
as 1940, more than half of European women who earned an income were
classes and a concomitant shift in gender roles. A badge of honor for the
middle classes was that the woman of the house did not have to work for
wages, nor was she to perform hard work around the house if possible. Thus,
involved with raising their own children, maintaining the social relationships
associated with family life, with middle-class women leading the way in
1237
domestic duties to a poor servant girl, and medical and sanitary advances that
society. For the working classes, it was almost impossible for a family to
leadership of the family unit, they were codependent on their wives (and, all
too often, their children) to work as well. Artisanal skills were slowly but
surely rendered obsolete, and as noted above it took until the second half of
the nineteenth century for socialist movements to grow large and strong
people. Thus, all too often working class men turned to alcohol as their
movement that sought legal bans on alcohol. Simply put, too many women
1238
saw their male family members plummet into alcoholism, leading to even
Cultural Effects
how people lived their everyday lives, not just how they made a living or how
the things they used were made. Many of those changes were due to the
above. The speed of railway travel made everything "closer" together, and in
regions. People could travel to the capital cities of their kingdom or, later,
their "nations," and the intense localism of the past started to fade. For the
first time, members of the middle classes could travel just for fun - middle-
class vacations were an innovation made possible by the railroad, and the first
beneficiaries were the English middle class, who "went on holiday" to the
1239
Simultaneously, new, more advanced printing presses and cheaper
public. That encouraged the spread of not just information and news, but of
shared written languages. People had to be able to read the "default" language
of their nation, which encouraged the rise of certain specific vernaculars at the
expense of the numerous dialects of the past. For example, "French" was
originally just the language spoken in the area around the city of Paris, just as
"Spanish" was just the dialect spoken around Madrid. Rulers had long fought,
over which they ruled, but most people continued to speak regional dialects
that often had little in common with the language of their monarch. With the
written in the official language of state, more and more people at least
the nineteenth century. Industry, finance, government itself, and railroads all
1240
converged on capitals. Former suburbs were simply swallowed up as the
cities grew, and there was often a sense among cultural elites that the only
places that mattered were the capitals: London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St.
single city - if a crowd could take over the streets of Paris, for example, they
might well send the king running for the proverbial hills and declare
some cases, the rest of the nation would read about the revolution in their
While all of the cultural effects of the Industrial Revolution are too
numerous to detail here, one other effect should be noted: the availability of
food. With cheap and fast railway and steamship transport, not only could
food travel hundreds or even thousands of miles from where it was grown or
farmed or caught to where it was consumed, but the daily diet itself
underwent profound changes. Tea grown in India became cheap enough for
1241
even working people to drink it daily; the same was true of South American
coffee on the continent. Fruit appeared in markets halfway across the world
from where it was grown, and the long term effect was a more varied
product: for a time, New Zealand (which became a British colony in 1840) was
Britain, the more desirable parts of fish were sold at prices the upper and
middle classes could afford. The other bits - tails, fins and all - were fried up
newspaper. The result was the world's first greasy, cheap, and wildly popular
fast food.
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Image Citations (Creative Commons):
Chapter 3 :
Europe. The French Revolution was seen by the European great powers as
1243
at least it had largely stayed confined to France. From the perspective of elites,
armies went the traditional order of society was overturned. France may have
been the greatest economic beneficiary, but Napoleon's Italian, German, and
Polish subjects (among others) also had their first taste of a society in which
one's status was not defined by birth. The kings and nobles of Europe had
good cause to fear that the way of life they presided over, a social order that
had lasted for roughly 1,000 years, was disintegrating in the course of a
generation.
Revolution and its effects, but there was a shared desire among the traditional
elites to re-establish stability and order based on the political system that had
worked in the past. They knew that there would have to be some concessions
to a generation of people who had lived with equality under the law, but they
1244
worked to reinforce traditional political structures while only granting limited
compromises.
Conservatism
That being noted, how did elites understand their own role in
society? How did they justify the power of kings and nobles over the majority
of the population? This was not just about wealth, after all, since there were
nobles. Nor was it viable for most nobles to claim that their rights were
logically derived from their mastery of warfare, since only a small percentage
of noblemen served in royal armies (and those that did were not necessarily
very good officers!). Instead, European elites at the time explained their own
social role in terms of peace, tradition, and stability. Their ideology came to
be called conservatism: the idea that what had worked for centuries was
inherently better at keeping the peace both within and between kingdoms
1245
Conservatism held that the old traditions of rule were the best and most
stable and successful over the course of 1,000 years of European history. It
was totally opposed to the idea of universal legal equality, let alone of suffrage
political hierarchy to go along with the existing social and economic hierarchy
of European society.
Revolution and Napoleon had already proved that too much change and
the French Revolution had started out, in its moderate phase, by arguing for
the primacy of the common people, but it quickly and inevitably spun out of
control. During the Terror, the king and queen were beheaded, French society
was riven with bloody conflict, tens of thousands were guillotined, and the
1246
the Revolution - led to almost twenty years of war and turmoil across the map
Images like the above (from the French Revolution) were used by conservatives to illustrate the
violence and bloodshed they claimed were an intrinsic part of revolutionary change.
and depraved. The clearest statement of this idea in the early nineteenth
Maistre argued that human beings are not enlightened, not least because (as a
staunch Catholic), he believed that all human souls are tainted by original sin.
1247
Left unchecked, humans with too much freedom would always indulge in
depravity. Only the allied forces of a strong monarchy, a strong nobility, and a
strong church could hold that inherent evil in check. It is worth noting that De
Maistre wrote outside of France itself during the revolutionary period, first in
the small Italian kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia (he was a noble in both France
and Piedmont) and then in Russia. His message resonated strongly with the
Edmund Burke. He argued that, given the complexity and fragility of the social
fabric, only the force of tradition could prevent political chaos. As the French
tidal wave of pent-up anger and, more to the point, foolish decisions by people
millions ought to prevail over two hundred thousand. True; if the constitution
1248
a mob of uneducated, inexperienced would-be political decision-makers and
had no business trying to influence politics. Instead, it was far wiser to keep
things in the basic form that had survived for centuries, with minor
accommodations as needed.
ideas may have looked back to the social and political thought of past
centuries, but Burke was a very grounded and realistic thinker. He simply
believed that “the masses” were the last people one wanted running a
rabble. Meanwhile, the European nobility had been raised for centuries to rule
and had developed both cultural traditions and systems of education and
training to form leaders. It was a given that not all of them were very good at
it, but according to Burke there was simply no comparison between the class
of nobles and the class of the mob – to let the latter rule was to invite disaster.
And, of course, conservatives had all of their suspicions confirmed during the
Terror, when the whole social order of France was turned upside down in the
1249
name of a perfect society (Burke himself was particularly aggrieved by the
innocent victim).
critique of the violence, warfare, and instability that had accompanied the
most cases, there were real attempts on the part of many conservative
regimes after the defeat of Napoleon to completely turn back the clock, to try
to sweep the reforms of the revolutionary era under the collective rug.
Arthur de Gobineau (1816 - 1882). By the time Gobineau was an adult, the
1250
adopt the language of the prevailing form of intellectual authority of the later
volumes collectively entitled Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. The
Essay claimed that the European nobility had once been an unsullied “pure”
example of a superior race rightfully ruling over social inferiors who were
born of lesser racial stock. Over time, however, the nobility had foolishly
mixed with those inferiors, diluting the precious racial characteristics that had
Africa and Asia, Europeans as a whole undermined their “purity” and hence
claimed that his arguments were “scientific.” In debates with his friend and
Gobineau asserted that he was merely describing reality by pointing out that
claims were nonsense in terms of actual scientific reality, but by using the
1251
language of science Gobineau’s grandiose celebration of racial hierarchy
served to support the authority and wealth of those already in power behind a
the Social Darwinist movement that arose later in the nineteenth century that
claimed that the lower classes were biologically inferior to the upper
century it would directly inspire Nazi ideology as well: Hitler himself cited
1252
Ideologies
daunting task of not just creating a new political order but in holding in check
ideas of social and legal equality that came to fruition in the American and
French Revolutions. Likewise, the course of those revolutions along with the
work of thinkers, writers, and artists helped create a new concept of national
identity that was poised to take European politics by storm. Finally, the
political, social, and economic chaos of the turn of the nineteenth century
(very much including the Industrial Revolution) created the context out of
the purpose of government? Who decides the laws? What is just and
unjust? How should economics function? What should be the role of religion
1253
in governance? What is the legal and social status of men and women? All of
liberalism, and socialism. In turn, briefly put, three of those ideologies had
one thing in common: they opposed the fourth. For the first half of the
nineteenth century, socialists, nationalists, and liberals all agreed that the
Romanticism
Even before the era of the French Revolution, the seeds of nationalism
were planted in the hearts and minds of many Europeans as an aspect of the
movement of the arts. It emerged in the late eighteenth century and came of
1254
age in the nineteenth. Its central tenet was the idea that there were great,
human being could do was attempt to pay tribute to those forces – nature, the
spirit or soul, the spirit of a people or culture, or even death – through art.
The central themes of romantic art were, first, a profound reverence for
nature. They very often identified peasants as being the people who were
"closest" to nature. In turn, it was the job of the artist (whether a writer,
and the human spirit. A "true" artist was someone who possessed the real
through training or education. The point of art was to let that genius emanate
1255
from the work of art, and the result should be a profound emotional
thanks to its ties to the folk movement. The central idea of the folk movement
was that the essential truths of national character had survived among the
pagan practices, were the “true” expression of a national spirit that had,
Jacob and Wilhelm, who were both expert philologists and avid collectors of
German folk tales. The Brothers Grimm collected dozens of folk (“fairy”) tales
and published them in the first definitive collection in German. Many of those
tales, from Sleeping Beauty to Cinderella, are best known in American culture
1256
thanks to their adaptation as animated films by Walt Disney in the twentieth
century, but they were famous already by the mid-nineteenth. The Brothers
German dictionary, not only containing every German word but detailed
etymologies (they did not live to see its completion; the third volume E –
nationalists. Many Romantics like them believed that nations had spirits,
which were invested with the core identity of their “people.” The point of the
Grimm brothers' work was reaching back into the remote past to grasp the
called Germany, and yet romantic nationalists like the Grimms believed that
there was a kind of German soul that lived in old folk songs, the German
1257
In many cases, romantic nationalists did something that historians later
called "inventing traditions." One iconic example is the Scottish kilt. Scots had
worn kilts since the sixteenth century, but there was no such thing as a
specific color and pattern of plaid (a "tartan") for each family or clan. The
identification of tartan and clan only emerging in the first few decades of the
tradition. Likewise, in some cases folk tales and stories were simply made up
in the name of nationalism. The great epic story of Finland, the Kalevala, was
1258
British soldiers of the Highland Regiments in government-issued kilts in 1744.
world. Likewise, folk traditions - even those that were at least in part
invented or adapted - became a way for early nationalists to identify with the
culture they now connotated with the nation. It is no coincidence that the
vogue for kilts in Scotland, ones now identified with clan identity, emerged for
1259
Nationalism
their goals realized almost without exception, although that process took over
movements was the concept that the state should correspond to the identity
because more than any other event, it provided the model for all subsequent
nationalisms. The French revolutionaries declared from the outset that they
represented the whole "nation," not just a certain part of it. They erased the
legal privileges of some (the nobles) over others, they made religion
1260
conservative powers of Europe, they called the whole "nation" to arms. The
in the revolutionary period was fighting for la patrie, the fatherland, in place
was that the countries invaded by the French eventually adopted their own
pretensions of the French. That was reflected in the Spanish revolt that began
in 1808, the revival of Austria and Prussia and their struggles of "liberation"
pretensions.
1261
Nationalisms Across Europe
As the Napoleonic wars drew to a close for the first time in 1814, the
deal with the aftermath. That meeting lasted months, thanks in part to
Napoleon’s inconvenient return from Elba and last stand at Waterloo, but in
gains and restored conservative monarchs to the thrones of states like Spain
and France itself. Nothing could have mattered less to the diplomatic
of the people who lived in the territories that were carved up and distributed
like pieces of cake to the victors - the inhabitants of northeastern Italy were
now subjects of the Austrian king, the entirety of Poland was divided between
Russia and Prussia, and Great Britain remained secure not only in its growing
1262
Thus, many of Europe's peoples found themselves without states of
time. Among the notable examples are the Italians and the Poles. Italy had
suffered from the domination of one great power or another since the
Renaissance; after 1815 it was the Austrians who were in control of much of
northern Italy. Poland had been partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and
Russia in the eighteenth century, simply vanishing from the map in the
process. Germany, of course, was not united; Prussia and Austria vied with
each other for dominance of the German lands, but both were fundamentally
century.
What had changed, however, was that the language of nationalism and
the idea of national identity had come into its own by the late Napoleonic
period. For example, German nationalism was powerful and popular after the
Napoleonic wars; in 1817, just two years after the end of the Congress of
1263
first translated the Bible into German, waving the black, red, and gold tricolor
flag that would (over a century later) become the official flag of the German
nation. Two years later, a nationalist poet murdered a conservative one, and
the Austrian Empire passed laws that severely limited freedom of speech,
German unity.
Europe would topple conservative monarchs and assert their sovereignty and
became the rallying word and idea of nationalism. In addition to Young Italy,
there was a Young Germany and a Young Ireland, among others - the idea was
that all people should and would eventually inhabit nations, and that this new
1264
"youthful" manner of politics would lead to peace and prosperity for
everyone. The old, outdated borders abandoned, everyone would live where
they were supposed to: in nations governed by their own people. Nationalists
argued that war itself could be rendered obsolete. After all, if each “people”
lived in “their” nation, what would be the point of territorial conflict? To the
was the identity of “the people,” a term with powerful political resonance in
just about every European language: das Volk, le peuple, il popolo, etc. In every
case, "the people" was thought to be something more important than just
"those people who happen to live here." Instead, the people were those tied to
the soil, with roots reaching back centuries, and who deserve their own
1265
solidarity with individuals with whom a given person might not actually share
much in common.
difficult to discern. For example, were the Germans people who speak
who think that their ancestors were from the same area in which they
themselves were born? If united in a German nation, who would lead it - were
“Germans” who lived in places like Bohemia (i.e. the Czech lands) and Poland,
movements of the first half of the nineteenth century did not need to concern
liberation and unification were not yet achievable. When national revolutions
1266
Liberalism
with commerce and industry in the nineteenth century. Many of the same
people supported another doctrine that had been spread by the Napoleonic
concepts of reason, rationality, and progress from the eighteenth century, but
including the elites of industry, trade, and the professions as well as the
middle classes. They shared the conviction that freedom in all its forms—
freedom from the despotic rule of kings, from the obsolete privilege of nobles,
1267
restrictions and limitations of speech and assembly—could only improve the
reflecting not just abstract theories but the concrete examples of the liberal
most fundamental belief was that there should be equality before the law, in
stark contrast to the old “feudal” (almost a slur to liberals) order of legally-
defined social estates. From that starting point of equality, the very purpose
of law to liberals was to protect the rights of each and every citizen rather
given social group or estate in the past, from the king’s exclusive right to hunt
game in his forests to the peasants’ right to access the common lands, rights
1268
a press free from censorship, and of religious expression were “rights” that
trade (e.g. in shipping between colonies) and the monopolies enjoyed by those
rights of the citizenry and to define, and restrict the power of the king (thus
staving off the threat of tyranny). Liberals also believed in the desirability of
1269
Unlike nationalists, liberals saw at least some of their goals realized in
France, there was now an elected parliament, religious tolerance, and relaxed
censorship. Britain remained the most “liberal” power in Europe, having long
as a result of the Belgian Revolution of 1830, and by the 1840s limited liberal
Socialism
The third and last of the new political ideologies and movements of the
phenomenon born out of two related factors: first, the ideological rupture
with the society of orders that occurred with the French Revolution, and
1270
economic repercussions of the industrial revolution, especially in terms of the
living conditions of workers, and to provide a new moral order for modern
society.
individualism, a favorite term among liberals but one that early socialists saw
pursuit of wealth and power. Socialism proposed a new and better moral
order, one in which the members of a society would care not only for
themselves, but for one another. For the first decades of its existence
socialism was less a movement with economic foundations than with ethical
used more widely to describe several different movements than had hitherto
been considered in isolation from one another. Their common factor was the
1271
idea that material goods should be held in common and that producers should
keep the fruits of their labor, all in the name of a better, happier, more healthy
community and, perhaps, nation. The abiding concern of early socialists was
to address what they saw as the moral and social disintegration of European
civilization in the modern era, as well as to repair the rifts and ameliorate the
There was a major shift in socialism that occurred over the course of the
with the plight of working people and the regrowth of organic social
socialist once they realized its potential. Following the later work of Friedrich
Engels, one of the major socialist thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth
1272
given the strength of both conservative and liberal opposition. The most
important militant socialism was Marxism, named after its creator Karl Marx.
Fourierists. Each was named after its respective founder and visionary. The
binding theme of these three early socialist thinkers was not only radical
proposals for the reorganization of work, but the idea that economic
and instead implies social disorder. The Saint-Simonians called egoism, the
aristocratic conservatives who were also afraid of social disorder and were
nostalgic for the idea of a reciprocal set of obligations that had existed in pre-
revolutionary Europe between the common people and the nobility. In turn,
the early socialists believed that there was nothing inherent in their ideas
threatening to the rich – many socialists expected that the privileged classes
1273
would recognize the validity of their ideas and that socialism would be a way
were mostly highly educated young elites in France, many from privileged
backgrounds, and many also graduates of the École Polytechnique, the most
going to feed, clothe, and house, potentially, everyone. They were, in a word,
the first "technocrats," people who believe that technology can solve any
the French industry, and helped lay the intellectual foundations of such
ventures as the creation of the Suez Canal between the Red Sea and the
Mediterranean.
1274
The Owenites were initially the employees of Robert Owen, a British
factory owner. He built a community for his workers in New Lanark, Scotland
housing. He believed that productivity was tied to happiness, and his initial
experiments met with success, with the New Lanark textile mill realizing
tended to fail in fairly short order. Instead, the lasting influence of Owenism
Association in 1836.
founder Charles Fourier was a very peculiar man. Fourier, who may have been
passions." According to Fourier, the reason that most people detested what
they did to survive was that they were not doing the right kind of work. There
1275
were 810 specific kinds of personalities in the world, each of which was
naturally inclined toward a certain kind of work. Thus, if 1,620 people (one
man and one woman of each type) were to come together in a community, and
each did the kind of work they "should" do, perfect happiness became
possible. For example, according to Fourier, murderers were just people who
should have been butchers, and children should be trash collectors, because
they loved to play in the dirt. These planned communities would be called
socialists. For one, he advocated complete gender equality and even sexual
1276
liberation - he was very hostile to monogamy, which he believed to be
their parents. Above and beyond forward-thinking ideas about gender, some
of his concepts were a bit more puzzling. Among other things, he claimed that
planets mated and gave birth to baby planets, and that once all of humanity
States. While the more oddball ideas were conveniently set aside, they were
still among the first real experiments in planned, communal living. Likewise,
Fourierists. For instance, Flora Tristan was a French socialist and feminist
who emerged from Fourierism to do important early work on tying the idea of
1277
In general, the broad “Utopian” socialism of the 1840s was quite
democratic, it believed in the “right” to work, and its followers hoped that the
higher orders might join it. These early movements also tended to cross over
with liberal and nationalist movements, sharing a vision of more just and
equitable laws and a more humane social order in contrast to the repression
coalitions of socialists and other rebels that had spearheaded them soon fell to
did not lead inevitably to social and political progress, as majorities typically
1278
voted for established community leaders (often priests or nobles). Class
achieve their ends. Russia, for instance, invaded Hungary to ensure the
continued rule of (Russia’s ally at the time) Habsburg Austria. After 1848
society. Two post-Utopian and rival forms of socialist theory matured in this
agitator Louis Blanc. Blanc believed that social reform had to come from
1279
by guaranteeing work for all citizens. He actually saw this happen in the
for workers, which provided paid work for the urban poor.
means the rejection of the state, not the rejection of all forms of social
ownership was vacuous and false to Proudhon, a conceit that ensured that the
wealthy maintained their hold on political and legal power. Unlike his rival
Louis Blanc, Proudhon was skeptical of the state's ability to effect meaningful
reform, and after the failure of the French revolution of 1848 he came to
1280
believe that all state power was inherently oppressive. Instead of a state,
between one another, and each cooperative would reward work with the
fruits of that work. Simply put, workers themselves would keep all profit. He
the slate clean for a new society of free collectives. He loathed the state and
the past. Bakunin thought that if his contemporary society was destroyed, the
“naturally” build a better society. He was also the great champion of the
outcasts, the bandits, and the urban poor. He was deeply skeptical about both
1281
the industrial working class, who he noted all wished could be middle class,
In the end, the most influential socialist was a German: Karl Marx. Marx
was born in 1818 in the Rhineland, the son of Jewish parents who had
interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
1282
The best-known portrait of Marx, dating from 1875.
1840s and penned (along with his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels)
the nineteenth century’s most famous and influential socialist work, The
1283
enormous volumes entitled, simply, Capital. The first was published in 1867,
with the other two edited from notes and published by Engels after Marx’s
profound influence: by the middle of the twentieth century, fully a third of the
ancient pharaohs to feudal kings and their nobles, classes of the rich and
powerful had always abused and exploited classes of the poor and weak. The
world had moved on into a new phase following the Industrial Revolution and
the French Revolution, however, one that (to Marx) simplified that ongoing
struggle from many competing classes to just two: the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat. The bourgeoisie were the rising middle classes, the owners of
factories and businesses, the bankers, and all of those with direct control over
1284
Before this, the classes of workers in the pre-modern era generally had
direct access to their livelihood: a small parcel of land, access to the common
lands, the tools of their trade in the case of artisans. They had, in Marx’s
stocked with a carpenter's tools. In the modern era, however, those rights and
those tools were systematically taken away. The common lands were closed
off and replaced with commercial farms. Artisans were rendered obsolete by
the growth of industry. Peasants were pushed off the land or owned plots so
small their children had to look for work in the cities. The net effect was,
generally, that the class of workers who had "nothing to sell but their labor,"
At the same time, the people who did own property, "the bourgeoisie,"
behind and go out of business. Thus, former members of the bourgeoisie lost
1285
out and became proletarians themselves. The net effect was that the
proletariat grew and every other conceivable class (including peasants, the
terrific glut of products available for purchase. Eventually, there was simply
too much out there and not enough people who could afford to buy it, as one
of the things about the proletariat, one of their forms of "alienation," was their
inability to buy the very things they made. This resulted in a "crisis of
In the midst of one of these collapses, Marx wrote, the members of the
wealth that industrialism had made possible and using it for the common
1286
good. Instead of a handful of super-rich expropriators, everyone could share in
material comfort and freedom from scarcity, something that had never been
possible before. That vision of revolution was very powerful to the young
Marx, who wrote that, given the inherent tendencies of capitalism, revolution
was inevitable.
somehow repeatedly destroyed itself and yet regrew stronger, faster, and
first century of the Industrial Revolution. The hellish mills, the starving
1287
workers, and the destitution and anguish of the factory towns were all part of
in the economy, had not happened on a large scale when Marx was writing -
trade unions themselves were outlawed in most states until the middle of the
so Marx saw no reason that they would ever come about on a large scale in
1840s, when he was first writing about philosophy and economics. After the
rarely wrote about revolution at all after 1850; his great work Capital is
1288
To boil it down to a very simple level, Marx never described in adequate
possible. Across the vast breadth of his books and correspondence, Marx (and
his collaborator Friedrich Engels) argued that each nation would have to
was large and self-aware, and the bourgeoisie was using increasingly harsh
political tactics to try to keep the proletariat in check. There would have to be,
and according to Marxism there always would be, a major economic crisis
caused by overproduction.
At that point, somehow, the proletariat could rise up and take over. In
some of his writings, Marx indicated that the proletariat would revolt
second section of his early work The Communist Manifesto, Marx alluded to the
coordinate and aid the proletariat in the revolutionary process. The bottom
line is, however, that Marx was very good at critiquing the internal laws of the
1289
free market in capitalism, and in pointing out many of its problems, but he had
no tactical guide to revolutionary politics. And, finally, toward the end of his
life, Marx himself was increasingly worried that socialists, including self-
styled Marxists, would try to stage a revolution “too early” and it would fail or
result in disaster.
In sum, Marx did not leave a clear picture of what socialists were
supposed to do, politically, nor did he describe how a socialist state would
socialist revolutions were successful, and those nations had to try to figure out
Social Classes
similar to how it was in earlier centuries than it does radically new – most
people were still farmers, every country but Britain was still mostly rural, and
1290
the Industrial Revolution took decades to spread beyond its British
changes, and Marx was right in identifying the new professional middle class,
administration but did not have a noble title. The bourgeoisie made up
between 15% and 20% of the population of central and western Europe by
the early 1800s. The male members of the bourgeoisie were factory owners,
everyone else who fell into that ambiguous class of “businessmen.” They were
throwback, something that was both limiting their own ability to make money
1291
and society’s possibilities of further progress. At the same time, they were
defined by the fact that they did not work with their hands to make a living;
that took place due to both industrialism and the breakdown of the old social
order that started with the French Revolution. Cities, some of which grew
professionals. It was the middle class that reaped the benefits of a growing,
work ethic, in contrast to the foppery and frivolity of the nobility, successful
members of the middle class often eagerly bought as much land as they could,
both in emulation of the nobles and because the right to vote in most of
western Europe was tied for decades to land-ownership. In turn, nobles were
wary of the middle class, especially because so many bourgeois were attracted
1292
nationalism, but over the course of the century the two classes tended to mix
based on wealth. Old families of nobles may have despised the “nouveau
riche,” but they still married them if they needed the money.
The bourgeoisie had certain visible things that defined them as a class,
literal “status symbols.” They did not perform manual labor of any kind, and
appearance and their homes. In turn, all but the most marginal bourgeois
families employed at least one full-time servant (recruited from the working
possible, bourgeois women did no paid work at all, serving instead as keepers
of the home and the maintainers of the rituals of visiting and hosting that
places: private clubs, the new department stores that opened in for the first
time in the mid-nineteenth century, and the foyers of private homes. The
1293
Clothing among the bourgeoisie came to resemble a specific “uniform” of respectability in the
nineteenth century - the top hat in particular was an iconic mark of class identity by the middle of
the century.
1294
honesty and business ethics. What these concepts shared was the fear of
shame – the literature of the time describing this social class is filled with
What about the nobility? The legal structures that sustained their
identity slowly but surely weakened over the course of the nineteenth
century. Even more threatening than the loss of legal monopolies over land-
owning, the officer corps of the army, and political status was the enormous
industry. Relatively few noblemen had been involved in the early Industrial
Revolution, thanks in large part to their traditional disdain for commerce, but
by the middle of the century it was apparent that industry, banking, and
wealth. Likewise, the one thing that the bourgeoisie and the working class
had in common was a belief in the desirability of voting rights; by the end of
1295
the century universal manhood suffrage was on the horizon (or had already
Thus, the long-term pattern of the nobility was that it came to culturally
resemble the bourgeoisie. While stubbornly clinging to its titles and its claims
to authority, the nobility grudgingly entered into the economic fields of the
bourgeoisie and adopted the bourgeoisie’s social habits as well. The lines
between the upper echelons of the bourgeoisie and the bulk of the nobility
were very blurry by the end of the century, as bourgeois money funded old
noble houses that still had access to the social prestige of a title.
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Chapter 4 :
social changes that saw the birth of new nations and the demise of old
kingdoms. On the other, even its newborn nations often looked back to the
great historians of the period, Eric Hobsbawm, noted in his The Age of Empire
that Europe had never seen so many states ruled by “emperors” as it did at the
turn of the twentieth century: the Empress of the British Empire, the Kaiser of
the German Reich, the Kaiser of the Austrian Reich, and the Tsar of the
Russian Empire were not just contemporaries, they were all related by
dynastic marriages. And yet, each emperor ruled over a profoundly different
“empire” than had his or her predecessors, ones in which (even in Russia by
1297
1905) at least some men voted to elect representatives with real political
power.
peace that held for most of the nineteenth century. After the Napoleonic wars,
1298
the great powers of Europe deliberately crafted a new political arrangement
whose purpose was, in part, to maintain peace between them. That peace was
broken occasionally starting in 1853, but the subsequent wars were shorter,
less bloody, and less frequent than those of any previous century. Historians
have often noted that the nineteenth century technically ended in 1900, but in
terms of its prevailing political, social, and cultural patterns, it really ended in
1914, with the advent of the horrendous bloodshed and destruction of World
War I.
order. When Napoleon was first defeated in 1814, representatives from the
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finally ended his reign for good. The conference, known later as the Congress
Congress was dominated by the five “great powers”: the Austrian Empire,
Great Britain, Prussia, Russia, and (by the end) France itself.
Europe with the goal of preventing France from threatening the balance of
power again. But unlike the conference that ended the First World War a
century later, the Congress of Vienna did not impose a huge penalty on the
aggressor. Once it had been agreed to place Louis XVIII, the younger brother
of the executed Louis XVI, on the throne of France, the powers that had
defeated Napoleon had the good sense to see that it would be illogical to
punish the French (not least because the French might opt to have yet another
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equal partner rather than an enemy to be punished. Instead, the victors
deprived the French of their conquests and imposed a modest indemnity, but
they did not dismember the country. They did, however, redraw the map of
Europe.
The powers that defeated Napoleon had a few specific goals at the
itself. They hoped to restrain French ambition and stave off the threat of
from weaker states like Poland and the formerly independent territories of
great powers.
The Congress System was devoted to peace, stability, and order. While
Great Britain was content with any political arrangement that prevented a
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disruption like the Napoleonic wars from occurring again, the more
conservative states were not: led by the Russian Tsar Alexander I, Russia,
Austria, Prussia, and France (the latter under its new Bourbon monarch Louis
wherever they might occur. Now, war was to be waged in the name of
ambition. In other words, the next time France invaded Spain and Russia
themselves.
As it turns out, they did not have long to wait to put the military
commitment of the Holy Alliance into action. The first liberal revolt against a
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Vienna in what had traditionally been one of the most conservative states of
Europe: Spain.
France, one that taxed it and extracted resources for its wars, but it was also
one that represented the best hope of liberal reform. The French Revolution
was the symbol, for liberals all over Europe, of progress, even if they had
misgivings about the Terror. When the Spanish resistance sprung up against
peasants, along with conservative nobles, who spearheaded it. Most Spanish
liberals did end up supporting the resistance, but they still hoped that the
power, however, the restored Spanish King Ferdinand VII refused to recognize
the constitution, and he also refused to summon the cortes. With the approval
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of the other conservative monarchies of Europe, Ferdinand essentially moved
Ferdinand was able to force Spain back toward the old order, but he
spread to the other colonies. By 1824 all of Central and South America was
liberal state.
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The Arch-Conservative Spanish King Ferdinand VII
The Spanish liberal coup of 1820 was the first major test of the Holy
200,000 in invading Spain and restoring Ferdinand to the throne. The liberals
were persecuted and hounded, and Spain was essentially ruled by an arch-
conservative order for the next few decades. Incidentally, it was in this
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context that the American president James Monroe issued the Monroe
Doctrine, which forbid European powers from interfering in the politics of the
Americas. Monroe was afraid that the Holy Alliance would try to extend its
context in Europe at the time: that of Russia. Late in the Napoleonic wars,
revelations. First, they came to admire the bravery and loyalty of their
soldiers, all of whom were drawn from the ranks of the serfs. In turn, they
and then during the occupation of France. There, the sheer backwardness of
French society (especially in Paris itself). The officers came to see serfdom as
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progress for Russia. Thus, as Russian armies returned home after the
a liberal political order for the Russian state once the aging, fanatically
Ten years later (in 1825) he did die, and the result was the “Decembrist”
uprising. During the years that followed Napoleon’s defeat, the conspiracy of
army officers put plans in motion to force the government to accept liberal
serfs. When the new Tsar, Nikolai I, was crowned in December of 1825, the
officers staged a rebellion in the square in front of the royal palace in St.
Petersburg, hoping that the army as a whole would side with them and force
the Tsar to accept reforms. Instead, after a tense day of waiting, troops loyal
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The Decembrist uprising, depicted at the moment troops loyal to the tsar opened fire.
The Decembrist uprising was the one and only attempt at implementing
liberal reform in Russia in the nineteenth century; it would take until 1905 for
the next revolution to come to pass. Nikolai I was the ultimate reactionary,
and creating Europe’s first secret police force, The Third Section. He would go
on to a long rule (r. 1825 - 1855) guided by the principles he defined for the
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Russian state: autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationality. In the decades that
followed, the slightest sign of dissent from a Russian subject was grounds for
changes that swept across the rest of Europe were thus held at bay. Tsarist
power remained intact, but Russian society (and the Russian economy)
stagnated.
Even as the Decembrist uprising failed, another revolt was being fought
including not only Greece but territories like Bosnia, Serbia, and Macedonia,
had been part of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years. There, the
toleration, but chafed at the tax burden and, increasingly by the late
eighteenth century, resented the “foreign” rule of the Turks. This resentment
regime and Poles detested the Russian and Prussian states that had divided up
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Polish territory, Greeks (as well as Serbs, Croatians, and the other peoples of
Greece and on various islands in the Aegean Sea. Despite the fact that the
Ottoman Empire was a nominal ally of the members of the Holy Alliance and
an official part of the Congress System, and despite the fact that the Greek
uprising was precisely the kind of thing that the Holy Alliance had been
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France, and Russia sunk an Ottoman fleet. Fighting continued between the
rebels and the Ottomans for a few years, with support going to the rebels from
the European powers (and Russia actually declaring war in 1829), and in
Thus, in this case, the cultural bias pitting European Christians against
powers. Following the Greek uprising, the Ottoman Empire entered a period
the “sick man of Europe,” and squabbling over Ottoman territory became an
revolution was brewing once again in France. King Charles X, the arch-
conservative and nearly delusional king of France from 1824 – 1830, was one
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of the most unpopular monarchs in Europe. Under his watch the small group
law making religious sacrilege punishable by death (no one was ever actually
had been able to vote at all and further clamped down on the freedom of the
press.
took to the streets and the king lost his nerve and fled. Just as they had in the
first French Revolution, the army sided with the crowd of protesters, not with
the king. Charles X fled to exile in England, the last ever Bourbon monarch to
have held the throne of France, and his cousin Louis-Philippe of the Orléans
branch of the royal line became the king. The “citizen king” as he was called
expanded the electorate, reinstituted freedom of the press, and abandoned the
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The irony of the “July Monarchy” of Louis-Philippe is that it
was very small, comprised of the wealthy (both noble and bourgeois). The
government essentially ran like a company devoted to making the rich and
connected richer and better connected, while leaving the majority of the
forming unions and even relatively prosperous bourgeois were not rich
years went on (satirical cartoons at the time often depicted him as an obese,
spoiled pear). The July Monarchy only lasted fourteen years, toppled during
having been a constitutional monarchy since 1689, but there was still plenty
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gentry class. Furthermore, the electoral districts were either totally out of
sync with the British population or were, in fact, complete nonsense. Voting
districts had not been revised to reflect changes in population since the
eighteenth century, and thus, the north was sorely underrepresented. Also,
there were “rotten boroughs,” electoral districts with no one in them which
Dunwich, was literally underwater; due to changes in sea walls, it had been
namely the descendant of the lords who had controlled it before it was
submerged.
continental lines. First, in 1828 and 1829, separate bills made it legal for
Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants to hold office. Then, the Great Reform
Bill of 1832 expanded the electorate to encompass most of the urban middle
class and eliminated the rotten boroughs entirely; it only passed the arch-
conservative House of Lords because the lords were terrified that the
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disgruntled middle class would join with workers in an actual revolution. The
British territories (1833), passed the controversial Poor Laws that created
public workhouses (1834) for the unemployed, and eliminated corrupt and
archaic city governments and replaced them with elected councils. A decade
later, the hated Corn Laws were finally repealed after a protracted political
struggle (1846). Thus, the pattern in British politics in the nineteenth century
was a slow, steady liberalization, even as Britain clinched its position as the
The new political ideologies that had emerged from the backdrop of the
French Revolution and Napoleonic period coalesced in 1848. That year, all
across Europe, there were a series of revolutions that combined the liberal,
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Austria, the smaller German kingdoms, and regions like Italy and Hungary,
monarchs out of their capital cities (as in Paris) or forcing their monarchs to
Austria).
revolutionary crowd gathered and, after panicked soldiers fired and killed
forty protesters, began to build barricades and prepare to fight back. The king
promptly fled the city. A diverse group of liberals and socialists formed a
again would a monarch hold the throne of France simply because of his or her
dynastic birth.
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Meanwhile, in Austria, crowds took to the streets of Vienna after
Europe in hours; thus, this was the first time revolutions were tied together
via "social media"). Peasants marched into the capital demanding the end of
nations. For a time it looked like the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself was on
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Europe in 1848. Note the red marks on the map - those denote major revolutionary outbreaks.
legal order. Not only Prussians, but representatives of the various other
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issues. Should the German liberals support free enterprise or a guaranteed
the Czech lands? There were about 800 delegates gathered, elected from all
over the German states, operating without the official sanction of any of the
kings and princes of their homelands, and they all wanted the chance to
speak.
In turn, the major debate that broke out among the delegates was about
a “greater German” state including Austria and all of its various other
ethnicities and languages? It took months for the former position to win out
in debate, and the final conclusion was that any state could join Germany, but
noted, however, that the delegates agreed that Polish and Czech nationalism
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had to be crushed because of German “racial” superiority, an early
had spearheaded the uprisings were good at arguing with one another about
the finer points of national identity, but not at establishing meaningful links to
the bulk of the population who did not live in or near the capital cities. The
direct links to the majority of the German population, despite the growing
Europe was that only in France did the king stay out of power
permanently. In the German kingdoms, Italy, and Austria, monarchs and their
officials worked behind the scenes to re-establish control of their armies and
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to shore up their own support while hastily-created assemblies were trying to
constituent elements did not necessarily agree on the major political issues
that had to be addressed in creating a new government. The first sign of this
dissent was in France: the socialists in the new French parliament (called the
National Assembly, just as it was in the first French republic half a century
earlier) created new "National Workshops" in Paris that offered good wages
to anyone in need of work. Soon, however, the alliance between liberals and
socialists broke down over resentment at the costs of running the workshops
and the Assembly shut them down. The workers of Paris rose up in protest
and a series of bloody street battles called the June Days broke out in which
peasants were sent by railroad from the countryside under orders from the
Assembly and in just a few days, the great socialist experiment was crushed.
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In the aftermath of the June Days, the government of the Second
Republic was torn between liberals, socialists, and conservatives (the latter of
whom wanted to restore the French monarchy). In the midst of the chaos,
of the Republic, winning in large part because of the simple power of his
name. Posing as a unifying force above the fray of petty politics, he was
genuinely popular across class and regional lines throughout France. In 1852
he staged a coup and declared himself Emperor of France, just as his uncle had
decades earlier. And, also like the first Napoleon, he had his power ratified by
bypassing the Assembly entirely and calling for a plebiscite (vote of the entire
the title of Napoleon III (Napoleon II, the first Napoleon's son, had died years
politics in France ended just as the first one had: a popular dictator named
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In both Austria and Prussia (as well as the smaller German kingdoms)
time debating the minutiae of the new political order. Forces loyal to the
name of Holy Alliance principles, restored Habsburg rule across the entirety of
the empire by the autumn of 1849. In the meantime, by the time the
Prussian rule, the Prussian king Wilhelm IV had verified the loyalty of the
accept it (he called the offered position a “crown from the gutter”), and one by
one the kings of the smaller German states reasserted their control across the
German lands.
later, noted that 1848 was the year that European history (specifically,
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German history, although the comment was often applied to the whole
revolutionary enterprise) “reached its turning point and failed to turn.” That
bodies became the norm across Europe by the latter decades of the
nowhere did those electorates include women until the twentieth century, but
politics. Likewise, the very fact that conservative monarchies accepted the
need for written constitutions, and the final end of the old feudal obligations
1324
of peasants in areas where those still existed, were marked steps toward
liberalism.
and Italian uprisings against Austria had been contained only with great
National Unifications
nineteenth century were in Italy and Germany, two areas with ancient
regional identities but a total lack of political unity. Italy had last been united
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during the period of the Roman Empire, whereas Germany had never been
truly united. Each term - Italy and Germany - referred to a region and a
language, not a kingdom or nation, places where people spoke similar lingual
dialects and had some kind of a shared history, but were divided between
This very lack of unity was, however, a source of inspiration for the
nationalists of the first half of the nineteenth century. One of the great
believed that nations would organically emerge to replace the tyranny of the
old feudal order of conservative monarchs. Young Italy was just one of a
number of “Young Europes” (e.g. Young Germany, Young Ireland) that shared
censorship and oppression. Those kind of radical nationalists had their day in
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the Revolutions of 1848, but then saw their hopes dashed when the
conservative kings of Prussia and Austria rallied their military forces and re-
took power.
That being noted, in the aftermath of 1848, even kings came to accept
that the popular desire for nations was too strong to resist forever, and at
least in Prussia, the idea that a conservative monarch might “use” nationalism
to enhance his power came to the fore. Instead of allowing a popular uprising
maneuvering to co-opt the very idea of nationalism. This was not a great,
sheer chance, the first nation to unite under conservative leadership was Italy.
Italy had been dominated by foreign powers since about 1500, when
Spain and France jostled for control and extinguished the independence of
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Wars. Later, it was Austria that came to dominate in the north, adding Italian
regions and cities to the Austrian Empire. The south was an essentially feudal
first the Habsburg and then the Bourbon royal lines. In the middle was the
Papal States, ruled directly by the pope and still controlling Rome as of the
relatively little mass support (and less than 3% of the population was literate
Tuscany).
Italian states. Its king, Vittorio Emanuele II, was from the old royal house of
1328
period because it served as a useful buffer state between the French and
foreign policy and took pride in his military prowess, but he was too lazy to
the most intelligent and important of his ministers was Count Camillo di
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Vittorio Emmanuele II of Piedmont-Sardinia. Even by the standards of the time, he favored an
impressive mustache.
used Italian nationalism to do it. He did not have any sentimental attachment
Crimean War, described below) had torn apart the system of alliances that
had been so crucial in maintaining the balance of power after the Congress of
Vienna, and Cavour knew that he could play one great power off against the
other to Piedmont’s benefit. His plan was to use the rivalry between France
and Austria to his advantage, by having France support some kind of Italian
the Austrians out of northern Italy and gained political ascendancy in the
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name of a new “Italian nation.” Cavour gave France the city of Nice in return
revolutionary who had spent most of his adult life as a mercenary battling in
to Italy during the Revolutions of 1848 only to see his hopes of both a united
Italy and freedom from foreign control dashed thanks to the machinations of
north, however, Garibaldi returned. In May 1860, Garibaldi, with a tiny force
their examinations) packed aboard two leaky steamships, set out to invade
Sicily. Very rapidly, Garibaldi captured Palermo, the chief city of Sicily. He
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succeeded because he won the support of the Sicilian peasants by suspending
taxes and promising to divide up the large estates and distribute the land. The
landowners of Sicily, even those who were most reactionary, were forced to
see that the only hope of law and order lay in protection by this radical
planned an invasion of the Papal States, but Cavour convinced Napoleon III
and assured him that the position of the papacy itself (under French
protection) would not be affected. Cavour threw the bulk of the Piedmontese
army into the Papal States, annexing them and heading off Garibaldi. When he
arrived, Garibaldi ceded his conquests to Vittorio Emanuele, and Italy thus
grew to encompass both Sicily and the south. Thus, in about six months, the
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northern conquests of Piedmont-Sardinia were united with Garibaldi’s bizarre
the south, which like most northern Italians he held in contempt. Thus, in a
real sense southern Italy emerged as the unfortunate loser of the wars of
unification, even more so than did Austria. Taxes had to be increased, because
the war of 1859 had to be paid for, and the new Italian state needed a larger
army and navy. There was also the fact that the extension of low tariffs from
the few local industries that existed. Nor did the new state have funds to
the south. The rural poor became more totally dependent than ever on the
local landowning class in their adjustment to the new scheme of things. Some
refused to adjust and became "brigands" who rose up against the new political
major military operation, the so-called Bandit Wars, which over three years
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that cost more lives than had the wars of the unification itself. In the
aftermath of the wars, the south was treated almost like a colony rather than a
full-fledged part of the Italian nation, and politics in the south revolved
around the growing relationship between the official Italian government and
At the time of Cavour's death in 1861 the new state had a population of
in which the king still had considerable power) was about patronage: getting
jobs for one's cronies and shifting the burden of taxation onto those who
could least afford to pay it. In many respects, unification had amounted to the
occupation of the rest of the country by the north. It would be many years
before the new state would begin to serve the needs and interests of the
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Germany
chancellor Otto Von Bismarck, who was personally responsible for unifying
Germany for the first time. Bismarck was ruthless, practical, and completely
pragmatic and realistic, rather than pursuing empty goals like "glory" or
pulling punches in the name of moral rectitude. He was such a pragmatist that
reform). He was from an old Prussian noble family, a Junker, and he had no
time for romantic nationalist drivel, yet he directly brought about German
unification. He once said that “the great questions of the time are not
determined by speeches and majority decisions – that was the error of 1848 –
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After 1815, “Germany” was nothing more than the “German
Prussia and Austria (and those of the smaller German kingdoms). Despite the
fact that the revolution failed to create a “Germany” in 1848, it was now clear
that a German state probably would come into being at some point; the
During the eighteenth century Prussia had risen from being a fairly poor
backwater in the north, lacking natural resources and remote from the centers
of intellectual and cultural life farther south, to being one of the great
kingdoms of Europe. That was thanks largely to its royal house, the
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the other royal houses sought to live in the style of the glorious French kings,
revenues into the army and insisting on brutal discipline. By the middle of the
coalition that had defeated Napoleon, a military equal with Austria, and was
The Holy Roman Empire in 1789. While many of the smallest states of the region vanished
during the Napoleonic period, “Germany” remained nothing more than an idea in the early
nineteenth century.
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Otto Von Bismarck was an inheritor of these Prussian traditions, a
I. Bismarck did not have a master plan to unify Germany. His goal was always
to maintain or, preferably, increase Prussia’s power (in that sense, he was a lot
nationalist passions to inflame popular support for Prussian wars, but he was,
personally, deeply skeptical about a “national spirit” animating the need for
unification.
seized from Denmark, and succeeded in getting the Austrians to declare war
convinced the Prussian king not to order a march on Vienna and the
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occupation of Austria itself; the goal for Bismarck had been to knock Austria
conquer and control it. Conquest of Austria, he thought, would just lead to
more headaches for Prussia since the Austrians would resent the Prussian
takeover. This decision - not to conquer Austria when Prussia could have -
to war. Bismarck had toyed with Napoleon III, ignoring French demands for
the war itself, the Spanish throne suddenly became available because of a
Spanish ruling line, none other than the Bourbons of France. Even though
Napoleon III was not a Bourbon, this was a direct attack on France’s sphere of
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by leaking a memo to the press in which Napoleon’s machinations for
Prussia.
The ensuing Franco-Prussian War was short and sweet for Prussia; it
started in late 1870 and was over by early 1871. Napoleon III foolishly led the
French army into battle personally (sick with the flu and without an ounce of
his famous uncle’s tactical expertise) and was subsequently captured in the
field. French forces were poorly led and could not stand up to Prussian
training and tactics, and every important engagement was won by the
supremacy, a legacy from the first Napoleon, was destroyed, and Europeans
were confronted with the fact that a new military power had asserted its
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the German Reich (empire). The various smaller German kingdoms
in the process. France lost two important eastern regions, Alsace and
amount of resentment among the French (and leading to a desire for revanche
all men over 25 could vote for representatives in the Reichstag, the
parliament, but an unelected federal council held considerable power and the
In one of the more bizarre historical episodes of the time, the city of
Paris refused to concede defeat and fought on against the Prussians for a short
while before the Prussians simply fell back and handed off the issue to the
hastily-declared Third Republic of France (Napoleon III went into exile). Paris
“Paris Commune,” and for a few months (from March through late May) the
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French army besieged the communards in the capital. In the end, a French
army stormed the city and approximately 20,000 communards were executed.
While Italian unification had redrawn the map of Europe and disturbed
it. Germany was not just Prussia, it was Prussia and most of the rest of what
once had been the Holy Roman Empire. It had a large population, a rapidly
industrializing, wealthy economy, and proven military might. The period after
German unification, from 1871 until the start of World War I in 1914, was one
in which the European great powers jockeyed for position, built up their
their rivals did. Long gone were the days of the Congress System and a
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Germany after unification. Note that the color-coded regions were the states of the German
Empire: they retained considerable autonomy despite now being part of a single unified nation.
Russia
In many ways, the histories of Great Britain and Russia were always
1343
empires. And yet, the two countries were in many ways polar opposites:
monarchy whose real political power declined over time, while Russia was an
autocratic head of state: the Tsar. The modernizing trends that changed much
of the rest of Europe over the course of the century had the least impact on
Tsar Alexander I, who ruled from 1801 – 1825, was present at the
he had a mission from God to maintain the sacred order of monarchy, nobility,
and clergy. In this, he was influenced by timing: he became Tsar shortly after
not just a bad idea or a threat to his personal power, it was an unholy
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Napoleon's armies in 1812, thanks largely to the winter and their brilliant
tactical decision to camp out and wait for the French to run out of supplies.
of the strength of his armies and the prestige he had earned chasing the
French forces back to France and aiding in their defeat in 1814 and 1815.
In 1815, Russia, along with Austria and Prussia (and, technically, the
restored French monarchy), formed the Holy Alliance that vowed to crush
attempts to overthrow the social and political order with force. For Austria,
this was a pragmatic gesture because the Habsburgs had the most to lose in
the face of nationalism. For Prussia, it was a way to cement their great power
Napoleonic coalition. For Russia and for Alexander, however, it was nothing
less than a true holy mission that had to happen regardless of any practical
benefits. Russia did indeed intervene to crush rebellions over the course of
the next few decades, most importantly in 1848 when it decimated the
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Alexander I died in 1825 and his death promptly set off the Decembrist
Uprising (noted above). Not only was the uprising crushed, but Alexander's
younger brother and heir Nikolai I took a personal hand in interrogating its
organizers. Nikolai was much less of a mystic than his brother had been, but
social order. He went on to rule for decades (r. 1825 - 1855), and during that
noted earlier, not only was he a staunch supporter of the Holy Alliance, but he
formed the world's first modern secret police force, The Third
autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationality, the last of the three in service to the
idea of Russian supremacy over its enormous empire (and the other ethnic
change. They were among the poorest, least educated, and most oppressed in
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Europe: the Russian serfs. The Russian Orthodox Church was closely tied to
Tsar. For that tiny sliver of educated society that could read and had access to
foreign books, even to discuss politics at all, let alone advocate reform of any
kind, was a punishable crime, with thousands exiled to Siberia for the crime of
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These people, almost all of whom were nobles, formed the Russian
creation. They were the ones who began modern Russian literature itself in
this period, producing great Russian novelists like Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and
Chekhov. The themes of their art dealt with both the thorny political issues of
their time and a kind of ongoing spiritual quest to understand the Russian
“soul,” something that was usually identified with both nature and the
however, was that reading or discussing anything to do with politics was itself
sufficient cause for arrest and exile to Siberia. Many of the great novelists
spent at least part of their lives in Siberia as a result; even Dostoevsky, who
was almost the equivalent of being a criminal in the eyes of the state. It was a
1348
short step for intellectuals to simply act like criminals. It was in large part
thanks to the police apparatus that matured under Nikolai I’s rule that this
phenomenon occurred.
unrelated to Tsarist autocracy per se: the destruction of the Congress System
created at the Congress of Vienna, thanks to the Crimean War. From 1854 -
1856, France and Britain fought a war against Russia in the Crimea, a
peninsula on the northern shore of the Black Sea. The war was fought over
great power politics: Russia tried to take advantage of the political decline of
the Ottoman Empire to assert total control in the region of the Black Sea, and
the ensuing war, which ruptured the alliance between it and Russia (after all,
Russia had just put down the Hungarian uprising on Austria’s behalf during
1349
The Crimean War, while not long by the standards of the Napoleonic
period, was nevertheless a major conflict. 600,000 men died in the war, the
majority from disease thanks to the abysmal conditions at the front. Russia
ultimately lost, and the end result was that the Congress System was finally
undone. From that point on, the great powers of Europe were in open
competition with one another, fearing and resenting each other more so than
newfound rivalry was the wars that saw the birth of Italy and Germany,
described above.
Nikolai finally died in 1855, and his son Alexander II took the throne (in
the midst of the war). In 1861, following Russia’s defeat, Alexander made the
slaves. It was thought by many Russian elites that one of the reasons Russia
had lost the war was its backwardness, a backwardness that Alexander and
many others believed could not be mitigated with serfdom weighing down the
1350
possibility of progress. The emancipation, however, had surprisingly little
immediate impact on Russian society, because the serfs legally owed the
government the money that had been distributed to buy their freedom from
the nobility. Thus, for generations, serfs were still tied to the same land,
laboring both to survive and to pay off the debt incurred with their “freedom.”
The emancipation of the serfs was the single most significant reform
Alexander II was the only Tsar assassinated by a radical terrorist group. The
group that killed him, The People's Will, believed that the assassination of a
(i.e. the former serfs). In this, they were inspired by the anarchist socialism of
native Russia.
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“back to the people,” living among and trying to educate the former serfs,
which they did during the spring of 1874. The Narodniks believed that the
serfs would form the nucleus of a revolutionary class that would rise up and
deeply suspicious of the urban, educated Narodniks, and in many cases the
disappointed Narodniks that formed the People’s Will, and in March of 1881
While The People’s Will had hoped that their assassination of Alexander
Alexander III, came to the throne and ruthlessly hunted down the terrorist
groups. What had changed by the 1880s, however, was that there were
terrorist groups, not just intellectuals guilty of discussing politics, and the one
believed was that meaningful change would require a significant, even radical,
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restructuring of Russian society. To many intellectuals and terrorists, there
the context into which Vladimir Lenin and the other future Bolsheviks, the
leaders of the Russian Communist Party who seized power in 1917, were
born. Lenin was a brilliant intellectual who synthesized the writings of Marx
in 1917.
Thus, by the late nineteenth century Russia had changed the least
among the great powers of Europe. Whereas the other states, from Austria to
the new Germany to France, had all adopted at least some form of
rural, with industrialization only arriving at the very end of the century in and
around some of the large cities of western Russia. Russia was, in a sense,
1353
stuck in a historical impasse. That impasse would only end with outright
Chapter 5 :
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Culture, Science, and Pseudo-Science
Victorian Culture
Along with the enormous economic and political changes that occurred
in Europe over the course of the nineteenth century came equally momentous
shifts in culture and learning. The cultural era of this period is known as
the nineteenth century. That culture was named after the British Queen
Victoria, who presided over the zenith of British power and the height of
understood elites.
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Queen Victoria, the symbolic matriarch of Western culture in the nineteenth century.
Victorianism was the culture of top hats, of dresses that covered every
inch of the female body, of rigid gender norms, and of an almost pathological
fear of sexuality. Its defining characteristic was the desire for security,
especially security from the influence of the lower classes. Class divisions
were made visible in the clothing and manners of individuals, with each class
outfitted in distinct “uniforms” – this was a time when one’s hat indicated
1356
one’s income and class membership. It was a time in which the bourgeoisie,
increasingly mixed with the old nobility, came to assert a self-confident vision
world. Social elites insisted that scientific progress, economic growth, and
their own increasing political power were all results of the superiority of
their own ingenuity. Particularly by the latter decades of the century, they
instincts. There were always threats present in the lives of social elites at the
time: the threat of sexual impropriety, the threat of financial failure, the threat
of immoral behavior being discovered in public, threats which were all tied to
shame. There was clearly a Christian precedent for Victorian obsessions, and
however, is that the impulse to tie morality to a code of shame was secularized
1357
in the Victorian era to apply to everything, especially in economics. Simply
put, there was a moral connection between virtue and economic success. The
wealthy came to regard their social and economic status as proof of their
strong ethical character, not just luck, connections, or hard work. Thus,
Victorian culture included a belief in the existence of good and evil in the
moral character of individuals, traits that science, they thought, should be able
movements and socialist parties grew, the demands of the working class for
shortened working days spoke not to their exhaustion and exploitation, but to
their laziness and lack of work ethic. The Victorian bourgeoisie were the
champions of the notion that everyone got what they deserved and that
science itself would eventually ratify the social order. What the Victorian elite
feared more than anything was that the working class would somehow
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out of control. They tended to fear a concomitant national decline, sometimes
even imagining that Western Civilization itself had reached its pinnacle and
Victorian life and its lived reality. Even though much of the fear of social
more common (both because alcohol was cheaper and because urbanization
lent itself to casual drinking), and drug use spread. Cocaine was regarded as a
strawberries dipped in ether. Many novels written around the turn of the
pretensions to rectitude. Two classics of horror writing, Dracula and Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde, are both about the monsters that lurked within bourgeois
society. Both were written about Victorian elites who were actually terrible
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Nowhere was the Victorian obsession with defining and restricting
writers, theorists, and even scientists claimed that men and women were
irrational, but gentle and demure, women. Men of all social classes dressed
with different hats for different classes). Women wore wildly impractical
factors behind the rise of the feminist movement in the second half of the
1360
Scientific and Pseudo-Scientific Discoveries and
Theories
that claimed to be truly scientific, but that violated the tenets of the scientific
Disease had always been the greatest threat to humankind before the
Pestilence that traditionally delivered the most bodies to Death. In turn, the
link between filth and disease had always been understood, but the rapid
urbanization of the nineteenth century lent new urgency to the problem. This
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London’s was built in 1848 after a terrible epidemic of cholera. Thus, before
1854, Pasteur built on his ideas and proved that disease was caused by
generation” of life was impossible and that microbes were responsible for
make foodstuffs safe (originally in service to the French wine industry), and
1362
affected both humans and animals. In the course of just a few decades,
followed his lead, and by the end of the century, deaths in Europe by
the 1920s).
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These advances were met with understandable excitement. At the same
time, however, they fed into a newfound obsession with cleanliness. All of a
sudden, people understood that they lived in a dirty world full of invisible
enemies - germs. Good hygiene became both a matter of survival and a badge
of class identity for the bourgeoisie, and the inherent dirtiness of manual labor
was further cause for bourgeois contempt for the working classes. For those
who could afford the servants to do the work, homes and businesses were
regularly scrubbed with caustic soaps, but there was little to be done in the
history and biology. For centuries, naturalists (the term for what would later
be known as biologists) had been puzzled by the fact that the fossils of marine
were a conundrum that the biblical story of creation could not explain. By the
early nineteenth century, some scientists argued that these phenomena could
only occur through stratification of rock, a process that would take millions,
1364
not thousands, of years. The most famous geologist at the time was the British
discoveries in the middle of the century linked human civilization to very long
time frames as well, with the discovery of ancient tools and the remains of
years from earlier concepts (all of which had been based on a literal
the Species. In it, Darwin argued that lifeforms "evolve" over time thanks to
random changes in their physical and mental structure. Some of these traits
are beneficial and increase the likelihood that the individuals with them will
survive and propagate, while others are not and tend to disappear as their
carriers die off. Darwin based his arguments on both the fossil record and
what he had discovered as the naturalist aboard a British research vessel, the
HMS Beagle, that toured the coasts of South America and visited the Galapagos
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Islands off its west coast. There, Darwin had encountered numerous species
that were uniquely adapted to live only in specific, limited areas. On returning
directly contradicted the biblical account of the natural world, in which God’s
nature itself was a profoundly hostile place to all living things; even as nature
weak. Evolutionary adaptations are random, not systematic, and are as likely
adaptation.
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accurate, even before the mechanism by which evolution occurred, genetics,
was understood. In 1871, in his Descent of Man, Darwin explicitly tied human
evolution to his earlier model and argued that humans are descended from
other hominids - the great apes. Despite popular backlash prompted by both
Caricatures of Darwin as a monkey appeared almost as soon as the Descent of Man was
published.
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The mechanism of how evolution occurred, was not known during
time, during the 1850s and 1860s an Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel
carried out a series of experiments with pea plants in his monastery’s garden
and, in the process, discovered the basic principles of genetics. Mendel first
presented his work in 1865, but it was entirely forgotten. It was rediscovered
mutation that new traits emerge, and genes that favor the survival of offspring
nature itself ensured that the human species would improve over time. Very
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both rigid class distinctions and racism. A large number of people, starting
with elite male theorists, came to believe that Darwinism implied that a
view, success and power is the result of superior breeding, not just luck and
Darwinism. He summarized his outlook with the phrase “the survival of the
ones.
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In turn, the new movement led an explosion of pseudo-scientific
that it was not just that non-white races were inherently inferior, it was that
they had reached a certain stage of evolution but stopped, while the white
replete with an evolutionary chain from small creatures through monkeys and
apes and then on to non-white human races, culminating with the supposedly
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A typical pseudo-scientific racial hierarchy. (In fact, all human races have skulls of identical
dimensions and shapes, not to mention identical intellectual and moral capacities.)
their own societies for vilification, often lumping together various identities
and behaviors as “unfit.” For Social Darwinists, the "unfit" included alcoholics,
cause the human species to decline. Likewise, charity, aid, and rehabilitation
were misplaced, since they would supposedly lead to the survival of the unfit
and thereby drag down the health of society overall. Thus, the best policy was
to allow the "unfit" to die off if possible, and to try to impose limits on their
breeding if not. Social Darwinism soon led to the field of eugenics, which
foundation for racist and sexist cultural assumptions, these notions of race
and culture also fed into the fear of degeneration mentioned above. In the
drug use and alcoholism, many people came to fear that certain destructive
traits were not only flourishing in Europe, but were being passed on. There
was thus a great fear that the masses of the weak and unintelligent could and
would spread their weakness through high birth-rates, while the smart and
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Not all of the theories to explain behavior were so morally and
began the academic discipline that would become sociology: the systematic
Christianity like just another set of rituals and beliefs whose real purpose was
human learning: the social sciences. These were disciplines that tried to
deduce facts about human behavior that were equally valid to natural
science’s various insights about the operations of the natural world. The
dream of the social sciences was to arrive at rules of behavior, politics, and
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historical development that were as certain and unshakable as biology or
methodology.
Mass Culture
The Victorian era saw the emergence of the first modern, industrialized,
beyond industrial technology and the use of fossil fuels themselves, is the fact
that culture itself becomes mass produced. Written material went from the
form of books, which had been expensive and treated with great care in the
cheap print. People went from inhabitants of villages and regions that were
1374
fiercely proud of their identities to inhabitants of larger and larger, and hence
became much cheaper over the course of the nineteenth century thanks to
industrialization, and in the process they could be used up and thrown away
with a much more casual attitude by more and more people. Two examples of
this phenomenon were the spread of literacy and the rise of consumerism.
male literacy was just below 50% as of the French Revolution, but it was
almost 80% in 1870 and almost 100% just thirty years later. Female literacy
was close behind. This had everything to do with the spread of printing in
education happened in 1882 under the prime minister of the Third Republic,
Jules Ferry. Free, public primary school did more to bind together the French
France was taught in standard French and studied the same subjects.
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Paper became vastly cheaper as well. Paper had long been made from
resulting paper was durable but expensive. In the late nineteenth century
printers began to make paper out of wood pulp, which dropped it to about a
quarter of the former price. As of 1880, the linotype machine was invented,
which also made printing much cheaper and more simple than it had
been. Thus, it became vastly cheaper and easier to publish newspapers by the
There was also a positive change in the buying power of the average
person. From 1850 to 1900, the average French person saw their real
eventually, the United States). This increase in the ability of average people to
afford commodities above and beyond those they needed to survive was
with the struggles over the quality of life of working people, by the late
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nineteenth century goods were simply so cheap to produce that the average
person actually did enjoy a better quality of life and could buy things like
One result of the cheapening of print and the rise in buying power was
stretched the truth to sell copies. In France, the first major paper of this type
expressions of popular opinion. Rival papers soon sprang up, but what they
had in common was that they did not try to change or influence opinion so
century lent itself to the cultivation of scandals. Important events and trends
were tied to the sensationalizing journalism of the day. For instance, a naval
1377
arms race between Britain and Germany that was one of the causes of World
War I had much to do with the press of both countries playing up the threat of
being outpaced by their national rival. The Dreyfus Affair, in which a French
Jewish army officer was falsely accused of treason, spun to the point that some
people were predicting civil war thanks largely to the massive amount of
press on both sides of the scandal (the Dreyfus Affair is considered in detail
world to establish and expand global empires, received much of its popular
couple of thousand square miles in Africa that the reader had never heard of
before.
In short, the politics of the latter part of the nineteenth century were
male suffrage, leaders were often shocked by the fact that they had to cultivate
public opinion in order to pass the laws they supported. Journals became the
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an unprecedented extent and, in a way, sometimes cheapened political
modern era, luxury goods were basically reserved for the nobility and the
upper bourgeoisie. There simply was not enough social wealth for the vast
majority of Europeans to buy many things they did not need. The average
peasant or shopkeeper, even fairly prosperous ones, owned only a few sets of
clothes, which were repaired rather than replaced over time. More to the
point, most people did not think of money as something to “save” – in good
years in which the average person somehow had “extra” money, he or she
would simply spend it on more food or, especially for men, alcohol, because it
people shopped not just for necessities, but for small luxuries. The former
1379
patterns of consumption had been of small, family-run shops and traveling
peddlers, a system in which bargaining was common and there was next to no
advertising to speak of. With department stores, prices were fixed and a wide
became ubiquitous and branded products could be found across the length
inculcated national identity, so did the fact that consumer goods were
increasingly standardized.
The first area to be affected by these shifts was textiles, both in terms of
clothing and housewares like sheets and curtains. Manufacturing and semi-
stores carried large selections that many people could afford. People below
the level of the rich came not only to own many different items of clothing, but
they voluntarily replaced clothing due to shifts in fashion, not just because it
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The first real department store was the Bon Marché in Paris. It was
entire city block. By 1906 it had 4,500 employees. During the 1880s it had
10,000 clients a day, up to 70,000 a day during its February “white sales” in
which it sold linens for reduced prices. The 1860s were the birth of the
seaside holiday, which the Bon Marché helped invent by selling a whole range
of holiday goods. By the 1870s there were mail-order catalogs and tourists
considered a visit to the Bon Marché to be on the same level as one to the Arc
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Ultimately, the Victorian Era saw the birth of modern consumerism, in
revolution came of age in the last decades of the nineteenth century, a century
after it had begun in the coal mines and textile mills of Northern
England. That society, with its bourgeois standards, its triumphant self-
confidence, and its deep-seated “scientific” social and racial attitudes, was in
the process of taking over much of the world at precisely the same time.
Culture Struggles
the cases of Italy and Germany, the stakes of political and cultural identity had
changed significantly over the course of the nineteenth century. Within the
nations of Europe - and for the first time in history it was appropriate to speak
national identity. After all, liberal and nationalistic legal frameworks had
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triumphed almost everywhere in Europe by turn of the twentieth century, but
limited. Most obviously, nowhere did women have the right to vote, and
everywhere. Likewise, while voting rights existed for some male citizens in
most nations by 1900 (generally, universal manhood suffrage came about only
itself.
These struggles over national identity and legal rights occurred across
Europe. The term “culture struggle” itself comes from Germany. Following
occurred in Europe (and America) around the turn of the century, most
significantly those having to do with feminism and with the legal and cultural
1383
The Kulturkampf was in part a product of Germany’s unique form of
set it apart from the far more liberal regimes in Britain and France. While
there was an elected parliament, the Reichstag, it did not exercise the same
degree of political power as did the British parliament or the French Chamber
of Deputies and Senate. The German chancellor and the cabinet answered not
to the Reichstag but to the Kaiser (the emperor), and while the regional
Germany as a triumph and held Bismarck in high regard, despite his arch-
as the German socialist party, the SPD, emerged in the 1870s as one of the
and he not only loathed socialism but also Catholicism. He (along with many
1384
other northern Germans) regarded Catholicism as alien to German culture and
century, the majority of northern Germans had been Lutherans, and many
were very hostile to the Catholic church. Still, 35% of Germans were Catholic,
mostly in the south, and the Catholic Center Party emerged in 1870 to
represent their interests. The same year the Catholic church issued the
doctrine of papal infallibility - the claim that the Pope literally could not be
wrong in manners of faith and doctrine - and Bismarck feared that a future
pope might someday order German Catholics not to obey the state.
order to be openly ordained, and the state would henceforth only recognize
civil marriages. More laws followed, including the right of the state to expel
Catholic tried to assassinate Bismarck in 1874, which only made him more
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Soon, however, Bismarck realized that the state might need the alliance
of the Catholic Center Party against the socialists, as the SPD continued to
still kept out of important state offices, as were Jews) and instead focused on
measures against the SPD. Two assassination attempts against the Kaiser,
despite being carried out by men who had nothing to do with socialism, gave
Bismarck the pretext, and the Reichstag immediately passed laws that
into formal political parties - not least because most states in Europe before
1848 were not democracies of any kind - socialists in the post-1848 era
of socialists from across Europe and the United States gathered in London and
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of Europe, socialist parties soon acquired mass followings among the
industrial working class, with the SPD joined by sister parties in France,
Britain (where it was known as the Labour Party), Italy, and elsewhere.
The SPD was founded in 1875 out of various other socialist unions and
the Kulturkampf, he pushed laws through the Reichstag in 1878 that banned
the SPD and trade unions entirely. Ironically, however, individual socialists
could still run for office and campaign for socialism. Bismarck’s response was
workers, in a bid to keep the socialists from attracting new members and
growing even more militant. Thus, in an ironic historical paradox, some of the
The SPD was legalized again in 1890 (following the new Kaiser’s firing
of Bismarck himself) and it issued a new manifesto for its goals. Like many of
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the other European socialist parties at the time, its ideological stance was
explicitly Marxist. The party’s leaders asserted that Marx had been right in all
of his major analyses, that capitalism would inevitably collapse, and that the
party’s primary goal was thus to prepare the working class to rise up and take
over in the midst of the coming crisis. Its secondary goals, the “in the
the SPD in the late 1890s: Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein. Kautsky, the
party leader who had written most of its theoretical manifestos, continued to
insist that the real function of the party was to reject parliamentary alliances
and to agitate for revolution. Bernstein, however, claimed that history had
already proven that what the party should be doing was to improve the lives
of workers in the present, not wait for a revolution that may or may not ever
1388
happen in the future. Bernstein was still a socialist, but he wanted the SPD to
SPD rejected Bernstein's revisionism, but what the party actually did was
conditions of labor.
parliaments and mass parties, and at least in some cases the beginning of
social welfare laws. On the other hand, rather than the state socialist
became the official ideology of the majority of these parties. This practical
rejection of capitalism was to have serious consequences for the next hundred
1389
First-Wave Feminism
Zinsser’s A History of Their Own asserts that feminism consists of the claim
that women are fully human, not secondary or inferior to men, that women
have been oppressed throughout history, and that women must recognize
their solidarity with other women in order to end that oppression and create a
more just and equitable society. Those claims go back centuries; perhaps the
and later feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft expicitly linked the feminist
demand for equality to the revolutionary promise of the American and French
Revolutions of the late eighteenth century. It was not until the late nineteenth
women’s rights.
1390
In the context of the Victorian era, most Europeans believed in the
spheres, it was argued that men and women each had useful and necessary
roles to play in society, but those roles were distinct from one another. The
classic model of this concept was that the man’s job was to represent the
family unit in public and make decisions that affected the family, while the
woman’s job was to maintain order in the home and raise the children, albeit
under the “veto” power of her husband. The Code Napoleon, in Article 231,
proclaimed that the husband owed his wife protection, and the wife owed her
husband obedience. Until the late nineteenth century, most legal systems
officially classified women with children and the criminally insane in having
no legal identity.
As of 1850, women across Europe could not vote, could not initiate
divorce (in those countries in which divorce was even possible), could not
control custody of children, could not pursue higher education, could not open
bank accounts in their own name, could not maintain ownership of inherited
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property after marriage, could not initiate lawsuits or serve as legal witnesses,
and could not maintain control of their own wages if working and
ubiquitous - it was taken for granted the the “man of the house” had the right
to enforce his will with violence if he found it necessary, and the very concept
of marital rape was nonexistent as well. In sum, despite the claim by male
socialists that the working class were the “wretched of the earth,” there is no
question that male workers enjoyed vastly more legal rights than did women
What had changed since the dawn of the nineteenth century, however,
was the growth of liberalism. It was a short, logical step from making the
claim that “all men are equal” to “all people are equal,” and indeed some
women (like Wollstonecraft) had very vocally emphasized just that point in
the early liberal movement in the era of the French Revolution. By the late
nineteenth century, liberal legal codes were present in some form in most of
Europe, and after World War I all men won the vote in Britain, France, and
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Germany (along with most of the smaller countries in Central and Western
Europe). Thus, early feminists argued that their enfranchisement was simply
historians as “first-wave” feminism (there have been three “waves” so far). Its
against women in terms of property laws, control over children within the
family, and the right to vote. Of all of the culture struggles and legal battles of
the period, however, first-wave feminism faced the greatest opposition from
those in power: men. Biologists routinely claimed that women were simply
physiologically less intelligent than men. Women who, against the odds, had
risen to positions of note were constantly attacked and belittled; one example
in the early 1900s, whose speech was interrupted by male students shouting
“back to the kitchen!” Queen Victoria herself once said that the demand for
1393
equal rights for women was “a mad, wicked folly…forgetting every sense of
same level and to the same standards as men, they would be able to exercise
their reason at the same level as well, and would hence deserve to be treated
as full equals by the law. As early as the French Revolution, some women had
demanded equal rights for women as a logical outgrowth of the new, more
for daring to argue that things like "equality" and "liberty" obviously implied
that men and women should be equals. A century later, her vision remained
unfulfilled.
right of women to vote. In 1867 in Britain the National Society for Women’s
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over the next three decades. The word “feminist” itself came about in 1890,
(Auclert made a name for herself in part because she refused to pay taxes,
arguing that since she was not represented politically, she had no obligation to
contribute to the state). Only in Finland and Norway, however, did women
gain the vote before World War I. In some cases, it took shockingly long for
women to get the vote: France only granted it in 1944 as a concession to the
allies who liberated the country from the Nazis, and it took Switzerland until
1971(!).
The struggle for the vote was closely aligned to other feminist
was primarily focused on suffrage, since suffrage itself was seen by feminists
iconic example is the attitude of early feminists to marriage: for middle class
women, marriage was a necessity, not a choice. Working class women worked
in terrible conditions just to survive, while the truly desperate were often
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driven to prostitution not because of a lack of morality on their part but
women. In turn, middle class women suffered the consequences when their
transmitted diseases into the middle class home. Women, feminists argued,
marriage without loss of status or respectability, and the right to retain the
marriage. Voting rights and the right to initiate divorce were thus “weapons
countries like Britain and France in the late nineteenth century, but it
she had to somehow have the means to hire a lawyer and navigate
labyrinthine divorce laws; as a result, only the well-off could do so. In other
countries, like Russia, divorce remained illegal. Much more common than
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legal separation was the practice of men simply abandoning their wives and
families when they tired of them; this made the institutions of middle-class
family life open to mockery by socialists, who, as did Marx and Engels, pointed
out that marriage was nothing but a property contract that men could choose
rights, feminists waged other battles as well. In the 1870s and 1880s, British
feminists led by Josephine Butler attacked the Contagious Diseases Act, which
require the male clients of prostitutes to be examined), and drew the radical
condition that applied to practically all women. In marriage, after all, women
1397
finally triumphing: the Contagious Diseases Act was repealed and the age of
The demand for the vote, however, was stymied by the fact that male
politicians across the political spectrum refused to champion the issue, albeit
for different reasons. On the political right, the traditional view that women
had no place in politics prevailed. On the left, however, both liberal and
Britain, the best known militant feminists were the Pankhursts: the mother
Emmeline (1858 – 1928) and daughters Christabel and Sylvia, who formed a
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radical group known as the Suffragettes in 1903. Much of the original
membership came from the ranks of Lancashire textile workers before the
severed their links with the Labour Party and working class activists and
began a campaign of direct action under the motto "deeds, not words". By
1908 they had moved from heckling to stone-throwing and other forms of
occasions treated brutally by police, and those who were arrested were
brutality led to more widespread public support for the Suffragettes, but there
were still no legal changes forthcoming; even the British Liberal Party that
1399
had, on various occasions, claimed to support women’s suffrage always ended
tragic act of protest, a Suffragette named Emily Davison threw herself under
the horse owned by the British king George V during the Derby (the hugely
popular national horse race) of 1913 and was killed - in the aftermath it was
discovered that she had stuffed her dress with pamphlets demanding the vote
for women.
1400
Suffragettes who went on hunger strikes were often brutally force-fed while jailed; here, their
feminists secured other legal rights before they did the right to vote in the
period before World War I. By and large, women secured the right to enter
universities by the early twentieth century and the first female academics
secured teaching positions soon after - the first woman to hold a university
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post in France was the famous Marie Curie, whose work was instrumental in
countries even earlier, along with the right to control their own wages and
property and to fight for the custody of children. In short, thanks to feminist
agitation, women had secured a legal identity and meaningful legal rights in at
least some of the countries of Europe, and the United States, by the onset of
Modern Anti-Semitism
The great irony of feminism - or, rather, the need for feminism - was that
women were not a “minority” but nevertheless faced prejudice, violence, and
everywhere they lived. Furthermore, because of their long, difficult, and often
violent history facing persecution from the Christian majority, Jews faced a
1402
neighbors. That hatred, referred to as anti-Semitism (also spelled
Jews had been part of European society since the Roman Empire. In the
the Christian majority around them. Jews were accused of responsibility for
the death of Christ, were blamed for plagues and famines, and were even
thought to practice black magic. Jews were unable to own land, to marry
lending money (since Christians were banned from lending money at interest
until the late Middle Ages, the stereotypes of Jewish greed originated with the
fact that money-lending was one of the only trades Jews could
perform). Starting with the late period of the Enlightenment, however, some
Christian cities, own land, and practice professions they had been banned
1403
That legal emancipation was complete almost everywhere in Europe by
the end of the nineteenth century, although the most conservative states like
did not vanish. Instead, in the modern era, Jews were vilified for representing
everything that was wrong with modernity itself. Jews were blamed for
urbanization, for the death of traditional industries, for the evils of modern
capitalism, but also for the threat of modern socialism, for being anti-union
and for being pro-union, for both assimilating to the point that “regular”
Germans and Frenchmen and Czechs could no longer tell who was Jewish, and
for failing to assimilate to the point that they were “really” the same as
everyone else. To modern anti-Semites, Jews were the scapegoat for all of the
purify the racial gene pool of Europe (and America). Many theorists came to
1404
believe that Jews were not just a group of people who traced their ancestry
back to the ancient kingdom of Judah, but were in fact a “race,” a group
defined first and foremost by their blood, their genes, and by supposedly
obsession with race that swept across European and American societies in the
late nineteenth century, there was ample fuel for the rise of anti-Semitic
politician named Wilhelm Marr. Marr claimed that Jews had “without striking
and academia, they had negligible political influence. Following Marr’s efforts,
1405
Parties whose major platform was anti-Semitism itself, however, faded
from prominence in the 1890s. The largest single victory won by anti-Semitic
political parties in the German Empire was in 1893, consisting of only 2.9% of
France, Austria, and Germany soon started using anti-Semitic language as part
conspiracy of Rabbis who vowed to seize global power in the nineteenth and
1406
happened. Better known was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document
copied whole sections Goedsche's “Speech” and combined them with various
were first published in 1903 by the Russian secret police as justification for
subsequently became important after World War I when they were used as
“proof” that the Jews had caused the war in order to disrupt the international
political order.
1407
An American copy of the “Protocols” published in 1934.
France in the 1890s, when a French Jewish military officer named Alfred
Dreyfus was framed for espionage, stripped of his rank, and imprisoned. An
enormous public debate broke out in French society over Dreyfus's guilt or
Dreyfusards” argued that no Jew could truly be a Frenchman and that Dreyfus,
1408
as a Jew, was inherently predisposed to lie and cheat, while “Dreyfusards”
argued that anyone could be a true, legitimate French citizen, Jews included.
release, but not before anti-Semitism was elevated to one of the defining
France. Some educated European Jews concluded that the pursuit of not just
legal equality, but cultural acceptance was doomed given the strength and
ancient Israel. That movement, Zionism, saw a slow but growing migration of
European Jews settling in the Levant, at the time still part of the Ottoman
Israel in 1948.
1409
Conclusion
and the culture struggles that raged in European society all occurred
the twentieth century dawned. Lives were transformed for the better by
consumerism and medical advances, but many Europeans still found the sheer
virulence of the culture struggles of the era was due to this sense of fear and
nations. In turn, the world itself provided the stage on which those rivalries
played out as European nations set themselves the task of conquering and
1410
Pasteur - Public Domain
Chapter 6: Imperialism
in the period before World War I in which European powers controlled over
1411
80% of the surface of the globe. The aftershocks of this period of imperialism
are still felt in the present, with national borders and international conflicts
alike tied to patterns put in place by the imperialist powers over a century
ago.
in earlier centuries. For a brief period, Europe (joined by the United States at
regions like Sub-Saharan Africa that had been deathtraps for them in the past
developments like the emergence of Social Darwinism and the obsession with
1412
While Europeans tended to justify their conquests by citing a “civilizing
mission” that would bring the guiding lights of Christianity and Western
that provided a much more tangible excuse for conquest: the rivalry between
European states. With the Congress System a dead letter in the aftermath of
the Crimean War, and with the wars of the Italian and German unifications
powers jockeyed for position on the world stage during the second half of the
century. Perhaps the most iconic example was the personal obsession of the
King of Belgium, Leopold II, with the creation of a Belgian colony in Africa,
which he thought would elevate Belgium’s status in Europe (and from which
he could derive enormous profits). In the end, his personal fiefdom - the
Congo Free State - would become the most horrendous demonstration of the
1413
Technology
from about 35% of the globe to over 80% over the course of the nineteenth
For example, for the first time cities in Europe acquired the means to
colonies. Before telegraphs, it could take up to two years for a message and
reply to travel between England and India, but after telegraph lines were
1414
constructed over the course of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a
message and reply could make the circuit in just two days. This, of course,
well. Africa had never been colonized by Europeans before the nineteenth
century, except for relatively small territories along the coasts. The continent
few harbors for ships, the interior of the continent had no rivers that were
navigable by sail, and most importantly, there were numerous lethal diseases
little resistance. Until the second half of the century, Africa was sometimes
1415
derived from a South American plant, served as an effective preventative
measure against the contraction of malaria. Thus, since malaria had been the
steamboat, with its power to travel both with and against the flow of rivers,
enabled Europeans to push into the interior of Africa (and many parts of Asia
as well). Steamboats were soon armed with small cannons, giving rise to the
term “gunboat.” In turn, when Europeans began steaming into harbors from
Hong Kong to the Congo and demanding territory and trading privileges, the
was in the unwilling concession to western contact and trade on the part of
1416
A typical small and, in this case, unarmed steamship on the Congo River in Central
Africa. “Steamers” as they were called varied greatly in size and armaments.
regions they invaded. In the 1860s, the first breech-loading rifles were
1417
compared to earlier muzzle-loading firearms. A European soldier armed with
a modern rifle could fire accurately up to almost half a mile away in any
weather, while the inhabitants of Africa and Asia were armed either with
older firearms or hand weapons. Likewise, the first machine gun, the Maxim
Gun, was invented in the 1880s. For a few decades, Europeans (and
Americans) had a monopoly on this technology, and for that relatively brief
happens, we have got, the Maxim Gun, and they have not…”
1418
A British soldier with a maxim gun in South Africa.
electrical appliances and home wiring by 1900 in wealthy homes), and both
1880s. These advances created a huge demand for the raw materials –
rubber, mineral ores, cotton – that were components of the new technologies.
necessary for production had been in Europe itself: coal deposits and iron
1419
ore. The other raw material, cotton, that played a key role in the Industrial
Revolution was available via slave labor in the American south and from
weaker states like Egypt (which seized virtual independence from the
Revolution, however, was mostly located outside of the older areas under
possible. For example, when oil fields were discovered in Persia in 1908,
and Asia, as they had been to the early European exploitation of the
were Canadian nickel deposits for steel alloys, Chilean nitrates, Australian
copper and gold, and Malaysian tin, just to name a few mineral resources
1420
coveted by Europeans (of course, in the case of Canada, the people being
European descent). Thus, while the motives behind imperialism were often
industry.
While the United States was not one of the major imperial powers per se
(although it did seize control of the Philippines from Spain in 1898 and
power and the major source of exports in a shockingly short period - from
which had achieved its dominance thanks to the enormity and richness of
1421
American territory (seized by force from Native Americans). Thus, even
though the US did not join in the Scramble for Africa or assert direct control of
East Asian territories, fear of American economic strength was a major factor
production over time; already by the 1870s astute European observers correctly anticipated the
1422
The best known phrase associated with the British Empire from the
middle of the nineteenth century until the early twentieth was that "the sun
never set" over its dominions. That was, quite literally, true. Roughly 25% of
the surface of the globe was directly or indirectly controlled by the British in
worked under white British officials everywhere from the South Pacific to
300,000,000 Indians.
Until 1857, India was governed by the British East India Company (the
imports and exports. Through a long, slow creep of territorial expansion and
one-sided treaties with Indian princes, the EIC governed almost all of the
commodities, including cotton, spices, and narcotics. In fact, the EIC was the
1423
single largest drug cartel in world history, with the explicit approval of the
China.
By the 1830s, 40% of the total value of Indian exports took the form of
opium, which led to the outbreak of the first major war between a European
power, namely Britain, and the Chinese Empire. In 1840, Chinese officials
tried to stop the ongoing shipments of opium from India and open war broke
out between the EIC, supported by the British navy, and China. A single
British gunboat, the Nemesis, arrived after inconclusive fighting had gone on
for five months. In short order, the Nemesis began an ongoing rout of the
Chinese forces. The Chinese navy and imperial fortresses were nearly
penetrate Chinese rivers and the Chinese Grand Canal, often towing sailing
1424
A British commemoration of victory in the Opium War. The Nemesis is in the background on the
right.
In the end, the Royal Navy forced the Chinese state to re-open their
ports to the Indian opium trade, and the British obtained Hong Kong in the
bargain as part of the British Empire itself. In the aftermath of the Opium
War, other European states secured the legal right to carry on trade in China,
administer their own taxes and laws in designated port cities, and support
Christian missionary work. The authority of the ruling Chinese dynasty, the
1425
Qing, was seriously undermined in the process. (A second Opium War
occurred in the late 1850s, with the British joined by the French against China
Trouble for the British was brewing in India, however. In 1857, Indian
soldiers in the employ of the EIC, known as sepoys, were issued new rifles
whose bullet cartridges were, according to rumors that circulated among the
sepoys, lubricated with both pig fat and cow fat. Since part of loading the gun
was biting the cartridge open, this would entail coming into direct contact
with the fat, which was totally forbidden in Islam and Hinduism (note that
there is no evidence that the cartridges actually were greased with the fat of
civil war. The British responded to the uprising, which they dubbed “The
Mutiny” by massacring whole villages, while sepoy rebels targeted any and all
1426
British they could find, including the families of British officials. Eventually,
troops from Britain and loyal Sepoy forces routed the rebels and restored
order.
A British depiction of the Sepoy Rebellion, attributing the uprising to greed rather than its actual
causes. Note also the use of racial caricatures in depicting the sepoys.
After this Sepoy Rebellion (a term that has long since replaced “The
Mutiny” among historians), the East India Company was disbanded by the
British parliament and India placed under direct rule from London. India was
1427
henceforth referred to as the "British Raj," meaning British Rulership, and
Britain. She promised her Indian subjects that anyone could take the civil
government, and elite Indians quickly enrolled their sons in British boarding
schools. The first Indian to pass the exam (in 1863) was Satyendranath
Tagore, but white officials consistently refused to take orders from an Indian
(even if that Indian happened to be more intelligent and competent than they
were). The result was that elite Indians all too often hit a "glass ceiling" in the
Raj, able to rise to positions of importance but not real leadership. In turn,
resentful elite Indians became the first Indian nationalists, organizing what
Africa
While India was the most important, and lucrative, part of the British
Empire, it was the conquest of Africa by the European powers that stands as
1428
the highpoint of the new imperialism as a whole. Africa represents about a
quarter of the land area of the entire world, and as of the 1880s it had about
one-fifth of the world’s population. There were over 700 distinct societies and
peoples across Africa, but Europeans knew so little about the African interior
that maps generally displayed huge blank spots until well into the
the coasts, many of them little more than trading posts. The most substantial
South Africa, split between British control and two territories held by the
descendents of the first Dutch settlers, the Boers. The rest of the continent
That changed in the last few decades of the nineteenth century because
1876, roughly 10% of Africa was under European control. By 1900, just over
twenty years later, the figure was roughly 90%. All of the factors discussed
1429
above, of the search for profits, of raw materials, of the ongoing power
struggle between the great powers, and of the "civilizing mission," reached
their collective zenith in Africa. The sheer speed of the conquest is summed
up in the phrase used ever since to describe it: “the Scramble for Africa.” Even
the word “imperialism” itself went from a neologism to an everyday term over
determine what was to be done with a huge territory in central Africa called
the Congo, already falling under the domination of Belgium at the time. At the
States and the Ottoman Empire, divided up Africa into spheres of influence
which (European) country was to get which piece of Africa. The impetus
behind the seizure of Africa had much more to do with international tension
than practical economics – there were certainly profits to be had in Africa, but
1430
they were mostly theoretical at this point since no European knew for sure
what those resources were or where they were to be found (again, fear of
territory). Thus, in a collective land grab, European states emerged from the
The Berlin Conference was the opening salvo of the Scramble for Africa
territories, notably French North Africa and parts of British West Africa, while
colonial administrations were both racist and enormously secure in their own
genocide.
1431
Among the worst cases was that of Belgium. King Leopold II created a
colony in the Congo in 1876 under the guise of exploration and philanthropy,
claiming that his purpose was to protect the people of the region from the
ravages of the slave trade. His acquisition was larger than England, France,
Germany, Spain, and Italy combined; it was eighty times larger than Belgium
powers declared the territory to be the “Congo Free State,” essentially a royal
Belgium.
handful of cronies, and his methods of coercing African labor were atrocious:
raids, floggings, hostages, destruction of villages and fields, and murder and
novel, Heart of Darkness.) Belgian agents would enter a village and take
women and children hostage, ordering men to go into the jungle and harvest a
1432
certain amount of rubber. If they failed to reach the rubber quota in time, or
sometimes even if they did, the agents would hack off the arms of children,
village outright. No attempt was made to develop the country in any way that
did not bear directly on the business of extracting ivory and rubber. In a
period of 25 years, the population of the region was cut in half. It took until
1908 for public outcry (after decades of dangerous and incredibly brave work
Belgian Parliament to strip Leopold of the colony – it then took over direct
administration.
1433
A few of the millions of victims of Belgian imperialism in the Congo.
One comparable example was the treatment of the Herero and Nama
peoples of Southwest Africa by the German army over the course of 1904 -
1905. When the Herero resisted German takeover, they were systematically
1434
rounded up and left in concentration camps to starve, with survivors stalked
across the desert by the German army, the Germans poisoning or sealing wells
and water holes as they went. When the Nama rose up shortly afterwards,
they too were exterminated. In the end, over two-thirds of the Herero and
Nama were murdered. This was the first, but not the last, genocide carried
Effects
colonial regimes expropriated the land from the people who lived there. This
given person, or group, had a legal title in the western sense to the land they
lived on, they were liable to have it seized. Likewise, traditional rights to hunt,
gather material, and migrate with herds were lost. Second, colonial regimes
1435
be turned into finished products. Third, colonial regimes exploited native
labor. This was sometimes in the form of outright slavery like the Congo, the
where the Dutch imposed quotas of coffee and spices on villages. In other
areas, like most of the territories controlled by Britain, it was in the form of
others in order to better maintain control, such as the British policy of using
the Tutsi tribe (“tribe” in this case being something of a misnomer - “class” is
more accurate) to govern what would later become Rwanda over the majority
Hutus. Thus, the effects of imperialism lasted long after former colonies
achieved their independence in the twentieth century, since almost all of them
1436
were left with the borders originally created by the imperialists, often along
colonial areas went bankrupt. The entire French colonial edifice never
produced significant profits – one French politician quipped that the only
merchant interests went under, the cost of maintaining empire grew along
with the territorial claims themselves. Thus, while economic motives were
jockeying for position on the world stage between the increasingly hostile
1437
The Decline of the Ottoman Empire
imperialism, not least because the core of its empire was never conquered by
building. Simply put, while the Ottoman Empire suffered from its fair share of
World War I.
Ottoman Empire as the “sick man of Europe” and debated “the eastern
question,” namely how Ottoman territory should be divided between the great
Europeans toward most of the world at the time: foreign territories were
prizes for the taking, the identities of the people who lived there and the
1438
turned out) superiority of European arms and technology. The great irony in
the case of the Ottomans, however, was that the empire had been both a
European great power in its own right and had once dominated its European
Some of the reasons for Ottoman decline were external, most obviously
the growth in European power. The Ottomans were never able to make
states build their global trade empires the Ottoman economy remained largely
and eighteenth centuries had no analog in Ottoman lands; it took until 1727
for a state-approved printing house printing secular works and there were no
Empire.
The state that proved the greatest threat to Ottoman power was
powerful and increasingly centralized state under its Tsar Peter the Great
1439
(whose reign is described in the previous volume of this textbook). Peter
launched the first major Russo-Ottoman war and, while he did not achieve all
the Great’s army crushed Ottoman forces and captured the Crimean Peninsula,
securing the Russian dream of warm water (i.e. it did not freeze during the
winter) ports for its navy. Catherine also forced the Ottomans to agree to the
the Janissaries (who had once been elite slave-soldiers who had bested
European forces during the height of Ottoman power) that had played such a
key role in Ottoman victories under sultans like Selim I and Suleiman the
Magnificent were nothing more than parasites living off the largess of the
1440
through commerce rather than military training. In 1793 a reforming sultan,
Selim III, created a “New Force” of soldiers trained in European tactics and
using up-to-date firearms, but it took until 1826 for the Janissaries to be
late eighteenth century, both Europeans and their local (i.e. Ottoman) agents
were basically above the law in Ottoman territories and they also enjoyed
freedom from most forms of taxation. The state was helpless to reimpose
control over its own economy or to restrain European greed because of the
1441
The nineteenth century was thus an era of crisis for the empire. In 1805
the Ottoman governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, seized power and governed
Egypt as an indepedent state despite being (on paper) an official working for
the sultan Abd al-Macid, instituted a broad reform movement, the Tanzimat,
Abdulhamit II (r. 1876 - 1909) came to power and soon did everything he
could to roll back the reforms. Abdulhamit heavily emphasized the empire’s
Muslim identity, inviting conservative Sunni clerics from across the Islamic
world to settle in the empire and playing up the Christian vs. Muslim aspect of
European aggression. In the process, he moved the empire away from its
1442
seized their independence either before or during his reign. The Greek
Revolution that began in 1821 garnered the support of European powers and
had been part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries slipped away thanks to the
strength of modern nationalism and the military support they received from
own role as sultan and caliph would somehow see the empire through its
conspiratorial society known as the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP)
of Abdulhamit, they launched a successful coup d’etat in 1909 and set out to
1443
remake the empire as a modern, secular, and distinctly Turkish (rather than
diverse) state. World War I, however, began in 1914 and ultimately dealt the
empire its death blow as European powers both attacked the empire directly
When the dust settled, one of the leaders of the CUP, Mustafa Kemal, led
a Turkish army to expel European forces from the geographic core of the
former empire, namely Anatolia, and form a new nation in its place. Soon
the state of Turkey refuses to acknowledge it to this day, historians have long
1444
To sum up, the Ottoman Empire was beset by external pressures in the
form of growing European military might and European intrusion into its
economy. It also suffered from internal issues, most notably the corruption of
reform movements culminated in the CUP revolution of 1909, but world war
tore the empire apart before those reforms had time to take effect. And, while
Turkey entered the world stage as a modern nation, it was a modern nation
with the blood of over a million people on the hands of its leaders. In that
states left a trail of bodies as they built empires around the globe while
Qajar Persia
Along with the Ottoman Empire, the other major Middle Eastern power
had long been Persia (Iran), a country whose ancient history stretched back to
the Achaemenid dynasty begun by the legendary Cyrus the Great in 550
1445
BCE. By the modern period, however, Persia was in many ways a shadow of
its glorious past. A ruling dynasty known as the Qajars seized power in 1779
but struggled to maintain control over the various tribal groups that had long
competed for power and influence. Likewise, the Qajar shahs (kings) were
their influence in Central Asia. Like the Ottoman Empire, Persia was not
For most of the nineteenth century, Britain and Russia were the two
European powers that most often competed against one another for power in
Persia, with the Qajar shahs repeatedly trying and failing to play the European
rivals off against each other in the name of Persian independence. Russia
that were a direct parallel of those that so hobbled the Ottomans to the
west. In the following decades succession disputes within the Qajar line were
1446
resolved by Russia and Britain choosing which heir should hold the Qajar
game”: the battle for influence in the region in the name of preserving the
British hold on India on the one hand versus the expansion of Russian power
on the other. Neither European power would allow the other to actually take
arriving at a glacial pace across the country. Instead of trying to expand the
bank notes, and in one notorious case, monopolize the production and sale of
tobacco. Public outcry often forced the cancellation of the concessions, but
1447
regardless. Reformers, some of them religious leaders from the Shia ulama
national sovereignty.
Mass protests finally forced the issue in 1905. The ruler Muzaffar al-Din
parliamentary regime, and in 1907 his successor Muhammad Ali Shah signed
a supplement to the law that introduced civil equality and recognition that
national sovereignty is derived from the people. The period of reform was
short-lived, however, with a near civil war followed by the dismissal of the
parliament in 1911. The dynasty limped toward its end in the years that
followed, losing practically all authority over the country until a Russian-
history in which European powers called the shots both politically and
1448
twentieth century, but modernization did not begin in earnest until after the
Qajar period finally came to an end. The dynasty that began with Riza Khan,
of the attempt at reform in the late Qajar period: the idea that Iran was a
nation that should assert its national identity on the world stage.
Japan. As the Scramble for Africa began in earnest in the 1870s, the recently-
specifically Eritrea and Ethiopia. In 1889, the Italians signed a treaty with the
Ethiopian emperor, Menelik II, but the treaty contained different wording in
1449
Italian and Amharic (the major language of Ethiopia): the Italian version
stipulated that Ethiopia would become an Italian colony, while the Amharic
version simply opened diplomatic ties with Europe through Italy. Once he
Open war broke out in the early 1890s between Italy and Ethiopia,
equipped Ethiopians decisively defeated the Italian army. The Italians were
Russia was already favorably inclined toward Ethiopia, and a small contingent
Adwa). Thus, a non-European power could and did defeat European invaders
thanks to Menelik II’s quick thinking. Nowhere else in Africa did a local ruler
1450
so successfully organize to repulse the invaders, but if circumstances had been
contact with the west through very thinly-veiled threats. As western powers
opened diplomacy and then trade with the Japanese shogunate, a period of
chaos gripped Japan as the centuries-old political order fell apart. In 1868, a
samurai class. Japanese officials and merchants were sent abroad to learn
about foreign technology and practices, and European and American advisers
modernized army and navy. The Japanese state was organized along highly
but practical power held by the cabinet and the heads of the military.
1451
Westernization in this case not only meant economic, industrial, and
began the process of building an empire on par with that of the European
great powers.
leading to war in 1904. To the shock and horror of much of the western
Pacific. Whereas Ethiopia had defended its own territory and sovereignty,
Japan was now playing by the same rules and besting European powers at
1452
Japanese depiction of an assault on Russian forces. Note the European-style uniforms worn by
Conclusion
marvel at its speed, and to consider the vast breadth of European empires
while overlooking what lay behind it all: violence. The cases of the Congo and
the genocide of the Herero and Nama are rightly remembered, and studied by
1453
historians, as iconic expressions of imperialistic violence, but they were only
two of the more extreme and shocking examples of the ubiquitous violence
that established and maintained all of the imperial conquests of the time. The
scale of that violence on a global scale vastly exceeded any of the relatively
petty squabbles that had constituted European warfare itself up to that point -
the only European war that approaches the level of bloodshed caused by
imperialism was probably the 30 Years’ War of the seventeenth century, but
imperialism’s death toll was still far higher. Until 1914, Europeans exported
continents. In 1914, however, it came home to roost in the First World War.
Those who survived it called World War I "The Great War" and "The
War to End All Wars." While they were, sadly, wrong about the latter, they
were right that no war had ever been like it. It was the world's first
than human beings. It devastated enormous swaths of territory and it left the
matters worse, the war utterly failed to resolve the issues that had caused
it. The war began because of the culmination of nationalist rivalries, fears, and
hatreds. It failed to resolve any of those rivalries, and furthermore it was such
1455
people were attracted to the messianic, violent rhetoric of fascism and
Nazism.
The single most significant background factor to the war was the rivalry
twentieth century. The term “great power” meant something specific in this
period of history: the great powers were those able to command large armies,
hold global empires. Their respective leaders, and many of their regular
citizens, were fundamentally suspicious of one another, and the biggest worry
of their political leadership was that one country would come to dominate the
others. Long gone was the notion of the balance of power as a guarantor of
peace. Now, the balance of power was a fragile thing, with each of the great
1456
each power tried to shore up alliances, seize territory around the globe, and
While no great power deliberately sought war out, all were willing to
risk war in 1914. That was at least in part because no politician had an
accurate idea of what a new war would actually be like. The only wars that
had occurred in Europe between the great powers since the Napoleonic
period were the Crimean War of the 1850s and the wars that resulted in the
formation of Italy and Germany in the 1850s, 1860s, and early 1870s. While
the Crimean War was quite bloody, it was limited to the Crimean region itself
and it did not involve all of the great powers. Likewise, the wars of national
unification were relatively short and did not involve a great deal of bloodshed
(by the standards of both earlier and later wars). In other words, it had been
over forty years since the great powers had any experience of a war on
European soil, and as they learned all too soon, much had changed with the
1457
In the summer of 1914, each of the great powers reached the conclusion
that war was inevitable, and that trying to stay out of the immanent conflict
enemies in France and Russia. France had cultivated a desire for revenge
against Germany ever since the Franco-Prussian War. Russia feared German
power and resented Austria for threatening the interests of Slavs in the
Balkans. Great Britain alone had no vested interest in war, but it was unable
1458
Once the war began, the Triple Entente of Russia, France, and Britain faced the Central Powers
of Germany and Austria. Italy was initially allied with the Central Powers but abandoned them
once the war began, switching sides to join the Entente in 1915.
In turn, the thing that inflamed jingoism and resentment among the
great powers had been imperialism. The British were determined to maintain
their enormous empire at any cost, and the Germans now posed a threat to
the empire since Germany had lavished attention on a naval arms race since
1459
the 1880s. There was constant bickering on the world stage between the
great powers over their colonies, especially since those colonies butted up
against each other in Africa and Asia. Violence in the colonies, however, was
almost always directed at the native peoples in those colonies, and there the
comparable weapons.
the nineteenth century as well. Not only had conservative elites appropriated
nationalism to shore up their own power (as in Italy and Germany), but
Englishman was to resent and fear the growth of Germany. Many Germans
racism. The lesser powers of Europe, like Italy, resented their own status and
wanted to somehow seize enough power to join the ranks of the great
1460
powers. Nationalism by 1914 was nothing like the optimistic, utopian
for the simple fact that every one of the great powers had at least a limited
electorate and parliaments with at least some real power to make law. Even
elected parliament, the Duma, and an open press. The fact that all of the
press between patriotic loyalty and a willingness to fight, kill, and die for one’s
country. Since all of the great powers were now significantly (or somewhat, in
the case of Russia) democratic, the opinions of the average citizen mattered in
a way they never had before. Journalism whipped up those opinions and
1461
passions by stoking hatred, fear, and resentment, which led to a more
sought to shore up their security and power through alliances. Those alliances
were firmly in place by 1914, each of which obligated military action if any
one power should be attacked. Each great power needed the support of its
allies, and was thus willing to intercede even if its own interests were not
meant that even a relatively minor event might spark the outbreak of total
In 1914, two major sets of alliances set the stage for the war. German
1879, only a little over a decade after the Prusso-Austrian War. In turn,
France and Russia created a strong alliance in 1893 in large part to contain
the ambitions of Germany, whose territory lay between them. Great Britain
1462
was generally more friendly to France than Germany, but had not entered into
a formal alliance with any other power. It was, however, the traditional ally
toehold on the continent. Finally, Russia grew increasingly close to the new
nation of Serbia, populated as it was by a Slavic people who were part of the
Britain and Russia with Belgium and Serbia, respectively, would not have
mattered but for the alliance obligations that tied the great powers together.
size. All of the great powers now fielded forces of a million men or
"general staff" of a given army. In the past, political leaders had often either
tactics. By the early twentieth century, however, war plans and tactics were
entirely in the hands of the general staff of each nation, meaning political
1463
leaders would be obliged to choose from a limited set of "pre-packaged"
Thus, when the war started, what took all of the leaders of the great
powers - from the Kaiser in Germany to the Tsar in Russia - by surprise was
the ultimatums they received from their own generals. According to the
members of each nation’s general staff, it was all or nothing: either commit all
forces to a swift and decisive victory, or suffer certain defeat. There could be
no small incremental build ups or tentative skirmishes; this was about a total
commitment to a massive war. An old adage has it that “generals fight the last
war,” basing their tactics on what worked in previous conflicts, and in 1914
the “last war” most generals looked to was the Franco-Prussian War, which
Prussia had won through swift, decisive action and overwhelming force.
1464
The Start of the War
The immediate cause of the war was the assassination of the Austrian
Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Franz Ferdinand was the heir to the
friends with the German Kaiser. Ironically, he was also the politician in the
Austrian state with the most direct control of the Austrian military, and he
possible that he would have been a prominent voice for peace if he had
Serbia was a new nation. It had fought its way to independence from
the Ottoman Empire in 1878, and its political leaders envisioned a role for
Serbia like that Piedmont had played in Italy: one small kingdom that came to
conquer and unite a nation. In this case, the Serbs hoped to conquer and unite
1465
path of Serbian ambition since Austria controlled neighboring Bosnia (in
which many Serbs lived as a significant minority of the population). Thus, the
In 1903, a military coup in Serbia killed the king and installed a fiercely
heritage, and Russia became a powerful ally in large part because of the Slavic
connection between Russians and Serbs (i.e. they spoke related languages and
the Russian and Serbian Orthodox churches were part of the same branch of
ultimately seize Bosnia itself. The Serbs did not believe that Austria would
Among the organizers of the coup that had murdered the king and
queen were a group of Serbian officers who created a terrorist group, The
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Black Hand. In 1914, The Black Hand trained a group of (ethnically Serbian)
Ferdinand and his wife came to visit the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. In a
attacks, with some of his would-be killers getting cold feet and running off,
others injuring bystanders but missing the Archduke, and others losing track
Archduke's driver became lost and stuck in traffic outside of a cafe in which
one of the assassins was eating a sandwich. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip,
seized the opportunity to stride outside and shoot the Archduke and his wife
to death.
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The leaders of the Black Hand, the conspiracy responsible for the assassination of Archduke
Serbian honor would never allow such a thing. Austrian troops started
massing near the Serbian border, and the great powers of Europe started
calling up their troops. Germany, believing that its own military and industrial
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resources were such that it would be the victor in a war against France and
warned that Austrian intervention in Serbia would cause war. France assured
No one was completely certain that a war would actually happen (the
German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, left for his summer vacation as planned right in the
middle of the crisis, believing no war would occur), but if it did, each of the
great powers was confident that they would be victorious in the end. A
of state tried at the last minute to preserve the peace, but in the end it was too
late: on July 28, Austria declared war on Serbia, activating the pre-existing
system of alliances, and by August 4 all of the great powers were involved.
Thanks to the fact that Germany invaded through Belgium, Great Britain
declared war on Germany and its allies. In addition to Germany and the
Austrian Empire, the Ottoman Empire soon joined their alliance, known as the
Central Powers. Opposing them was the Triple Entente of Great Britain,
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France, and Russia. Smaller states like Italy and Portugal later joined the
about the onset of war among civilians and soldiers alike. Many felt that the
war would resolve nationalistic rivalries once and for all, and almost no one
anticipated a lengthy war. Wilhelm II anticipated “a jolly little war” and it was
widely thought in France and Germany that the war would be over by
Christmas. 30,000 young men and women marched in Berlin before war was
even declared, singing patriotic songs and gathering at the feet of statues of
in the military of their own volition. There were some anti-war protests in
internationalism, but once the war was actually declared those protests
abruptly stopped.
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The most symptomatic moment of the defeat of socialism by
nationalism as rival ideologies was the fact that 100% of the socialist parties
of Europe supported their respective countries in the war, despite hard and
fast promises before the war that, as socialists, they were committed to
peace. Whereas pre-war socialists had argued vociferously that the working
the major socialist parties voted to authorize the war and supported the sale
of war bonds. In turn, the radical left of the socialist parties soon broke off
and formed new parties that continued to oppose the war; these new parties
“socialists.”
War, for many people, represented a cathartic release. War did not
represent real bloodshed and horror for the young men signing up – they had
never fought in real wars, except for the veterans of colonial wars against
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much less well-armed “natives” in the colonies. War was an ideal of bravery
and honor that many young men in Europe in 1914 longed for as a way to
prove themselves, to prove their loyalty, and to purge their boredom and
uncertainty about the future. A whole generation had absorbed tales of glory
on the battlefield, of the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the Franco-
they were either ashamed and angry or fiercely proud of their country’s
settle accounts, to prove once and for all that they were citizens a great power,
and to shame their opponents into conceding defeat. France would at last get
even for the Franco-Prussian War. Germany would at least prove it was the
most powerful nation in Europe. Russia would prove that it was a powerful
The war itself began with the German invasion of France through
Belgium. German tactics centered on the “Schlieffen Plan,” named after its
author, Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, who had devised it in the first
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years of the twentieth century. The Schlieffen Plan called for a rapid advance
into France to knock the French forces out of the war within six
railroads in time to engage Russia, as it was believed that it would take the
Russians at least that long to mobilize their armies. It not only called for rapid
mobilization, but it required the German military to defeat the French military
at an even more rapid pace had the Prussian forces forty years earlier in the
Franco-Prussian War.
The Schlieffen Plan, in theory. In reality, while it met with initial success, French and British
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The first taste of the horror of the war to come was the German invasion
of Belgium. Belgium was a neutral country leading up to the war, and German
fled to Britain, where they were (to the credit of the British government and
the French and British reading public and emphasized the fact that the war
might go very differently than many had first imagined. Britain swiftly
While the first few weeks of the German invasion seemed to match the
ambitions of the Schlieffen Plan, they soon ground to a halt. A fierce French
mobilizing their forces much more quickly than expected, attacking both
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Germany and Austria in the east in late August. In the autumn of 1914 the
scale of battles grew to exceed anything Europe had witnessed since the
Napoleonic Wars (which they soon dwarfed). To their shock and horror,
soldiers on all sides encountered for the first time the sheer destructive power
out by machine guns, desperate soldiers dove into the craters created by
The weapons that had been developed in the decades leading up to the
explosive artillery shells and machine guns, had all seemed to the nations of
Europe like strengths. The early months of the war revealed that they were
indeed strong, in a sense, being far more lethal than anything created
as the death toll mounted, the human (and financial) costs associated with
modern warfare shattered the image of national strength that politicians and
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favored, and outdated, tactics, sending cavalry in bright uniforms to their
deaths in hopeless charges, ordering offensives that were doomed to fail, and
unauthorized truce held on the Western Front between Entente and German
forces long enough for French and German soldiers to climb out of their
respective trenches and meet in the “no man’s land” between the lines, with a
German barber offering shaves and haircuts to all comers. By then, both sides
were well aware that the conceit that the war would “be over by Christmas”
had been a ridiculous fantasy. Never again in the war would a moment of
voluntary peace re-emerge; while they did not know it for certain at the time,
On the Western Front of the war, it was the trenches that defined almost
everything in the lives of the soldiers on both sides of the conflict. An English
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officer and poet later wrote that “when all is said and done, this war was a
ditches, the trenches involved into vast networks of fortified rifts that
stretched from the English Channel in the north to the Swiss Alps in the
south. Behind the trenches lay the artillery batteries, capable of hurling
enormous shells for miles, and farther back still lay the command posts of the
The tactical problem facing both sides was due to the new technologies
of war: whereas in past wars the offensive strategy was often superior to the
trenches, machine guns, mines, and modern rifles, it was far more effective to
entrench oneself and defend a position than it was to charge and try to take
the enemy’s position. It was nearly impossible to break through and gain
territory or advantage; the British phrase for an attack was “going over the
top,” which involved thousands of men climbing out of their trenches and
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charging across the no man’s land that separated them from the enemy. While
they were charging, the enemy would simply open fire with impunity from
example, one British attack in 1915 temporarily gained 1,000 yards at the cost
of 13,000 lives.
the battlefield, soldiers discovered that their own competence, even heroism,
warfare was so heavily mechanized, the old ideal of brave, chivalric combat
between equals was largely obsolete. Men regularly killed other men they
never laid eyes on, and death often seemed completely arbitrary - in many
cases, survival came down to sheer, dumb luck. No amount of skill or bravery
standing. Likewise, if ordered to “go over the top,” all one could hope for was
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Thus, the experience of war in the trenches for the next three years was
a state of ongoing misery: men stood in mud, sometimes over a foot deep, in
the cold and rain, as shells whistled overhead and occasionally blew them
up. They lived in abject terror of the prospect of having to attack the enemy
line, knowing that they would all almost certainly be slaughtered. Thousands
of new recruits showed up on the lines every month, many of whom would be
dead in the first attack. In 1915, in a vain attempt to break the stalemate, both
sides started using poison gas, which was completely horrific, burning the
lungs, eyes, and skin of combatants. The survivors of poison gas attacks were
considered to be the unlucky ones. By 1917, both sides had been locked in
place for three years, and the soldiers of both sides were known to remark
that only the dead would ever escape the trenches in the end.
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Soldiers in a trench in 1915.
had entire wars in past centuries. The Battle of Verdun, an enormous German
casualties among the French and 430,000 among the Germans. It achieved
nothing besides the carnage, with neither side winning significant territorial
concessions. The most astonishing death count of the war was at the Battle of
soldiers killed and wounded in the first three days of the battle of the Somme
than there were Americans killed in World War I, The Korean War, and the
German casualties. One British poet noted afterwards that “the war had won”
strategists concluded that the only way to win was to outspend the enemy,
churning out more munitions and supplies, drafting more men, committing
more civilians to the war effort at home, and sacrificing more soldiers than
could the other side. At its worst, commanders adopted an utterly ruthless
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thousands of deaths were signs of “progress” in the war effort, because they
implied that the other side must be running out of soldiers, too. This was a
war of attrition on a new level, one that both soldiers and lower-ranking
officers alike recognized was designed to kill them in the name of a possible
eventual victory.
static nature of trench warfare on the Western Front, the Russian, German,
and Austrian armies in the east were highly mobile, sometimes crossing
fought effectively in the early years of the war, especially against Austrian
forces, which it consistently defeated. While Russian soldiers were also the
industrial base and by its lack of rail lines and cars. The Germans were able to
outmaneuver the Russians, often surrounding Russian armies one by one and
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defeating them. A brilliant Russian general oversaw a major offensive in 1916
that crippled Austrian forces, but did not force Austria out of the war. In the
aftermath, a lack of support and coordination from the other Russian generals
By late 1916 the war had grown increasingly desperate for Russia. The
Tsar’s government was teetering and morale was low. The home front was in
dire straits, with serious food shortages, and there were inadequate munitions
(especially for artillery) making it to the front. Thus, the German armies
forces checked the German advance in the winter of 1916 - 1917, but the war
was deeply unpopular on the home front and increasing numbers of soldiers
deserted rather than face the Germans. It was in this context of imminent
defeat that a popular revolution overthrew the Tsarist state - that revolution
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expected. As described in the chapter on Imperialism, in 1909 a coup of army
officers and political leaders known as the Committee of Union and Progress,
but more often remembered as the “Young Turks,” seized control of the
the Empire’s other ethnicities). With war clouds gathering over Europe in
1914, the Young Turks threw in their lot with Germany, the one European
power that had never menaced Ottoman territories and which promised
Zealanders recruited to fight for “their” empire from half a world away) were
gunned down by Turkish machine guns. In the months that followed, British
forces failed to make headway against the Ottomans, with the Ottoman
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leadership rightly judging that the very survival of the Ottoman state was at
eastern stretch of the Ottoman Empire: Mesopotamia, the site of the earliest
civilization in human history (which became the country of Iraq in 1939). The
British made steady progress moving west from Mesopotamia while also
the Ottoman borders. By 1917 Ottoman forces were in disarray and the
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Even as British and French politicians began plans to divide up the
under their control, however, the Young Turk leader Mustafa Kemal launched
with the other ethnicities that had lived under Ottoman rule either pushed
aside or destroyed. In one of the greatest crimes of the war, Turkish forces
to die of abuse, exhaustion, hunger, and thirst when they were not slaughtered
outright. To this day, the Turkish government (while admitting that many
Armenians died) denies what historians have long since recognized: the
million killed.
roles. The total commitment to the war on the part of the belligerent nations
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left numerous professional positions vacant as men were dispatched to
fight. Women responded by taking on jobs that they had been barred from in
suspended their agitation for the vote in favor of using their existing
of women joined the war effort directly as nurses, in many cases serving near
or even in the trenches on the Western Front. The famous scientist Marie
Curie (the first women to win a Nobel Prize - she won a second a few years
later) drove an ambulance near the front lines during the war.
In many cases, the labor shortage led to breakthroughs for women that
simply could not be reversed at the war’s end. Having established the
precedent that a woman could work perfectly well at a “man’s job” (as a
partially open to women after the war concluded in 1918. Other changes
were cultural in nature rather than social. For example, the cumbersome,
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uncomfortable angle-length dresses of the pre-war period vanished (along
sensible, comfortable dresses and skirts. Women cut their hair short in “bobs”
for the first time both for fashion and because short hair was more practical
while working full-time for the war effort. The war, in short, required gender
roles to change primarily for economic reasons, but women embraced those
there is no doubt that women’s participation in the war effort did have a
direct link to voting rights after the war. One by one, most European
countries and the United States granted the vote to at least some women in
the years that followed the war. One striking example is Belgium, where only
women who were widowed, had lost sons, or had themselves been held
captive during the war were granted the vote initially. Some countries
until after the period of Nazi occupation in World War II - but there can be no
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doubt that, overall, the cause of women’s suffrage was aided immensely by the
World War I was fought primarily in Europe, along the Western Front
that stretched from the English Channel south along the French border to the
Alps, and on the Eastern Front across Poland, Galicia (the region
encompassing part of Hungary and the Ukraine) and Russia. It was a “world”
war, however, for two reasons. First, hundreds of thousands of troops from
around the world fought in it, the most numerous of which were citizens of
the British Empire drawn from as far away as India and New Zealand. Second,
smaller scale). Japan even supported the Entente war effort by taking a
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The other major power involved in the war, the United States, was a
sentiment until late in the war. Most Americans believed that the war was a
European affair that should not involve American troops. America, however,
was an ally of Britain and provided both military and civilian supplies to the
British, along with large amounts of low-interest loans to keep the British
economy afloat. In 1917, as the war dragged on and the German military
leadership under the Field Marshal Paul Von Hindenburg recognized that the
nation could not sustain the war much longer, the German generals decided to
use their new submarines, the U-Boats, to attack any vessel suspected of
The importance of the entrance of the United States in the war was not
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warfare. Instead, the key factor was that the US had a gigantic industrial
capacity, dwarfing all of the great powers of Europe put together, and millions
been totally committed to the war for almost three years, and its supplies (of
money, fuel, munitions, food, and people) were running very thin. Most
German civilians still believed that Germany was winning, but as the carnage
continued on the Western Front, the German general staff knew that they had
By 1918, it was clear to the German command that they were at risk of
losing, despite the military resources freed up when the Bolshevik Revolution
ended Russia’s commitment to the war. The Germans had been able to fight
the French and British to a standstill on the Western Front, but when the US
entered on the side of the British and French, it became impossible to sustain
the war in the long run. The only hope appeared to be one last desperate
offensive that might bring the French and British to the negotiating
table. Thus, German forces staged a major campaign in the spring of 1918 that
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succeeded in breaking through the western lines and coming within about 40
miles of Paris, but by then German troops had outpaced their supply lines, lost
cover, and were now up against the combined reserves of the French, British,
and Americans. Another attempted offensive in July failed, and the Entente
Back in Germany, criticism of the Kaiser appeared for the first time in
General Staff, Ludendorff, advised the Kaiser to sue for peace. A month later,
it instead of the Kaiser. Protest movements spread across Germany and the
Balkans.
led by the German Socialist Party (SPD) formally sued for peace. The Kaiser,
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blaming socialists and Jews for "stabbing Germany in the back," snuck away in
General Staff, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, themselves the authors of the myth
of the “stab in the back,” did their best to popularize the idea that Germany
German politicians had not sued for peace when they did, French, British, and
American troops would have simply invaded Germany and even more people
The Aftermath
The aftermath of the war was horrendous. Over twenty million people,
both soldiers and civilians, were dead. For Russia and France, of the twenty
million men mobilized during the war, over 76% were casualties (either dead,
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out, which had lasting demographic consequences for both countries. For
Germany, the figure was 65%, including 1.8 million dead. The British saw a
casualty rate of “only” 39%, but that figure still represented the death of
almost a million men, with far more wounded or missing. Even the smaller
nations like Italy, which had fought fruitlessly to seize territory from Austria,
lost over 450,000 men. A huge swath of Northeastern France and parts of
Politically, the war spelled the end of three of the most venerable, and
Empire, the Habsburg Empire of Austria, and the Ottoman Empire of the
Middle East. The Austrian Empire was replaced by new independent nations,
with Austria itself reduced to a “rump state”: the remnant of its former
imperial glory. France and Great Britain busily divided up control of former
Iraq) without the slightest concern for the identities of the people who
actually lived there, but Turkey itself achieved independence thanks to the
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ferocious campaign led by Mustafa Kemal, or “Atatürk,” meaning “father of the
Turks.” As noted above, revolution in Russia led to the collapse of the Tsarist
state and, after a bloody civil war, the emergence of the world’s first
had not been a major imperial power, it also lost its overseas territories in the
international body: the League of Nations. The idea behind the League was
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the Middle East to European imperialists instead of to the people who actually
lived there, and failing to attract the membership of the very country whose
leader had proposed it in the first place: the United States. Instead of inspiring
international dysfunction.
poison gas and artillery strikes. From the euphoria many felt at the start of
the war, the survivors were left psychologically shattered. The British term
for soldiers who survived but were unable to function in society was “shell
shock,” a vague diagnosis for what is now known as Post Traumatic Stress
depression. While the numbers of shell shock cases were so great that they
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could not be ignored by the medical community at the time, the focus of
“tough” their way back to normal behavior (something that is now recognized
applying the “talking cure,” an early form of therapy related to the practices of
the great early psychologist Sigmund Freud, but most of the medical
community held to the assumption that trauma was just a sign of weakness.
“weak” or “insane,” with all of the social and cultural stigma those terms
pension as well. Thus, many of the veterans of World War I were both pitied
and looked down on for not being able to re-adjust to civilian life, in
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trauma. The result was a profound sense of betrayal and disillusionment
among veterans.
This was the context in which Europeans dubbed the conflict "The War
to End All Wars." It was inconceivable to most that it could happen again; the
costs had simply been too great to bear. The European nations were left
indebted and depopulated, the maps of Europe and the Middle East were
redrawn as new nations emerged from old empires, and there was a profound
uncertainty about what the future held. Most hoped that, at the very least, the
bloodshed was over and that the process of rebuilding might begin. Some,
incomplete: there were still scores to be settled. It was from that sense of
dissatisfaction and a longing for continued violence that the most destructive
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Schlieffen Plan - Public Domain
Russian Revolutions
The last Tsar of Russia was Nikolai II (1868 - 1918). At the start of his
reign in 1894, at the death of his father Alexander III, Nikolai was among the
monarchs of the great powers, the Tsars had successfully resisted most of the
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the rest of Europe. Nikolai ruled in much the same manner as had his father,
Family resemblance: cousins Tsar Nikolai II (on the left) and King George V of Britain (on the
right).
It was, however, during his reign that modernity finally caught up with
Russia. The Russian state was able to control the press and punish dissent
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into the first years of the twentieth century, but then events outside of its
Russian society. The immediate cause of the downfall of Nikolai's royal line,
and the entire traditional order of Russian society, was war: The Russo -
Japanese War of 1904 - 1905 and, ten years later, World War I.
Japan shocked the world when it handily defeated Russia in the Russo-
Japanese War. To many Russians, the Tsar was to blame for the defeat in both
allowing Russia to remain so far behind the rest of the industrialized world
the war. Following the Russian defeat, 100,000 workers tried to present a
petition to the Tsar asking for better wages, better prices on food, and the end
sparking a nationwide wave of strikes. For months, the nation was rocked by
open rebellions in navy bases and cities, and radical terrorist groups managed
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Moscow. Nikolai finally agreed to allow a representative assembly, the Duma,
to meet, and after months of fighting the army managed to regain control.
The aftermath of this (semi-)revolution saw the Tsar still in power and
however, it was clear that the Duma was not going to serve as a counter-
balance to Tsarist power. The Tsar retained control of foreign policy and
actually governing, and quickly fell to infighting and petty squabbles, leaving
most actual decision making where it always had been: with the Tsar himself
and his circle of aristocratic advisors. Still, some things did change thanks to
the revolution: unions were legalized and the Tsar was not able to completely
dismiss the Duma. Most importantly, the state could no longer censor the
One of Nikolai's many concerns was that his only male heir, Prince
Alexei, was a hemophiliac (i.e. his blood did not clot properly when he was
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injured, meaning any minor scrape or cut was potentially lethal). Nikolai's
monk and faith healer named Grigorii Rasputin. Rasputin, definitely one of
the most peculiar characters in modern history, was somehow able (perhaps
through a kind of hypnotism) to stop Alexei's bleeding, and the Tsarina thus
believed that he had been sent by God to protect the royal family. Rasputin
moved in with the Tsar's family and quickly became a powerful influence,
despite being the son of Siberian peasants, and despite the fact that part of his
philosophy was that one was closest to God after engaging in sexual orgies
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Grigori Rasputin in 1916, shortly before his death.
When World War I began in 1914, the already fragile political balance
within the Russian state teetered on the verge of collapse. In the autumn of
1915, as Russian fortunes in the war started to worsen, Nikolai departed for
German armies were steadily pressing towards Russian territory, and tens of
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thousands of Russian troops were deserting to return to their home
The form of radical politics that had taken root in Russia in the late
socialism. Mikhail Bakunin was the exemplary figure in this regard - Bakunin
believed that the only way to create a perfect socialist future was to utterly
destroy the existing political and social order, after which "natural" human
tendencies of peace and altruism would manifest and create a better society
for all. By the late nineteenth century, this homegrown Russian version of
socialist theory was joined with Marxism, as various Russian radical thinkers
The problem with Marxist theory faced by Russian Marxists was that,
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society. The proletariat would recognize that it had "nothing to lose but its
and most of the population were still poor peasants in small villages. This did
not look like a promising setting for a revolution of the industrial working
class.
The key figure who saw a way out of this theoretical impasse was
uprising. Left to their own devices, he argued, workers alone would always
settle for slight improvements in their lives and working conditions (he called
this "trade union consciousness") rather than recognizing the need for a full-
scale revolutionary change. The vanguard party, however, could both instruct
workers and lead them in the creation of a new society. Led by the party, not
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but it could “skip” a stage of (the Marxist version of) history, jumping directly
In Lenin’s mind, the obvious choice of a vanguard party was his own
navy, and working classes of the major cities. When political chaos descended
Orthodox calendar still in use at the time - it was March in the west), women
protest the price of food, which had skyrocketed due to the war. Within days
the demands had grown to ending the war entirely and even calling for the
ouster of the Tsar himself, and a general strike was called. Comparable
demonstrations broke out in the other major cities in short order. The key
moment, as had happened in revolutions since 1789, was when the army
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refused to put down the uprisings and instead joined them. The Duma
demanded that the Tsar step aside and hand over control of the military. By
early March, just a few weeks after it had begun, the Tsar abdicated, realizing
In the aftermath of this event, power was split. The Duma appointed a
provisional government than enacted important legal reforms but did not
have the power to relieve the Russian army at the front or to provide food to
the hungry protesters. Likewise, the Duma itself represented the interests
and beliefs of the educated middle classes, still only a tiny portion of the
democratic republic like those of France, Britain, or the United States, but they
had no road map to bring it about. Likewise, the Duma had no way to enforce
the new laws it passed, nor could they compel Russian peasants to fight on
against the Germans. Most critically, the members of the Duma refused to sue
for peace with Germany, believing that Russia still had to honor its
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commitment to the war despite the carnage being inflicted on Russian soldiers
at the front.
Soon, in the industrial centers and in many of the army and naval bases,
councils of workers and soldiers (called soviets) sprang up and declared that
they had the real right to political power. There was a standoff between the
provisional government, which had no police force to enforce its will, and the
soviets, which could control their own areas but did not have the ability to
bring the majority of the population (who wanted, in Lenin’s words, “peace,
land, and bread”) over to their side. Many fled the cities for the countryside,
1917 fully 75% of the soldiers sent to the front against Germany deserted.
Thus, as of the late summer of 1917, there was a power vacuum created
by the war and by the incompetence of the Duma. No group had power over
October the Bolsheviks took control of the most powerful soviet, that of
Petrograd (former St. Petersburg). Next, the Bolsheviks seized control of the
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Duma, expelled the members of other political parties, and then stated their
intention to pursue the goals that no other major party had been willing to:
peace (Germany would lose those new territories when it lost the war itself
out. The Bolsheviks proved effective at rallying troops to their cause and
leading those troops in war. Their “Red Army” engaged the “White” counter-
revolutionaries all over western Russia and the Ukraine. For their part, the
Whites were an ungainly coalition of former Tsarists, the liberals who had
the Ukraine, and troops sent by foreign powers (including the United States),
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terrified of the prospect of a communist revolution in a nation as large and
potentially powerful as Russia. Despite the fact that very few Russians were
active supporters of communist ideology, the Red Army still proved both
Lenin making a speech in 1920 in support of the Red Army during the civil war.
The ensuing war was brutal, ultimately killing close to ten million
people (most were civilians who were massacred or starved), and lasting for
four years. In the end, however, the Bolsheviks prevailed in Russia itself,
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Ukraine, and Central Asia. Some Eastern European countries, including
Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states, did gain their independence thanks to
the war, but everywhere else in the former Russian Empire the Bolsheviks
represents perhaps the most striking political event of its time, but it occurred
across Europe and much of the world. The first few decades of the twentieth
century revolved around World War I in many ways, but even before the war
began Western society was riven with cultural and political conflict. It was an
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define itself in the face of scientific progress and social change that seemed to
Part of this phenomenon was the fact that the old order of monarchy
I. Never again would kings and emperors and noblemen share power over
European countries. At the same time, the great political project of the
that were helpless to prevent the Great War and its terrible aftermath. In that
these years, especially the interwar period between 1918 and 1939, as
nothing more than the staging ground for World War II, but a more accurate
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Modernism
and coming into its own in the 1920s. It expressed a set of common attitudes
messages in art and literature that were meant to edify and instruct. Socially,
and simply ignored moral issues. This was the era of l’art pour l’art ("art for
broke with the idea that art should “represent” something noble and beautiful,
1514
and instead many indulged in wild experiments and deliberately created
other times they were modern in that they were experimenting with entirely
and painters who celebrated speed, technology, violence, and chaos. Their
stated goal was to destroy the remnants of past art and replace it with the art
of the future, an art that reflected the modern, industrial world. Futurism
sought something new and better than what the Victorian bourgeoisie had
Manifesto. In it, he thundered that the Futurists wanted to “sing the love of
danger, the habit of energy and rashness,” and that “poetry must be a violent
1515
ominously, that “we want to glorify war - the only cure for the world” and that
War I, and its proponents were proud partisans of violence, elitism, and
misogyny.
Futurist art itself was often bizarre and provocative - one Futurist play
scream offstage, and the closing of the curtain. Futurist paintings often
depicted vast clouds of dark smoke with abstract images of trains and radio
murky as some of their art early on, after World War I most of the Futurists
desire for a politics that was new, virile, and contemptuous of democracy.
1516
The Futurists were just one branch of modernism in the In visual
the major cubist painter and sculptor, was one of the quintessential modernist
painters in that he portrayed objects, people, even the works of past masters,
Among the creators of the most striking, sometimes beautiful, but other
expressionists. The major point of expressionism was to put the artist's inner
concept was not to depict things "as they are," but instead to reflect the
disturbing realities of the artist's mind and spirit. The greatest Austrian
expressionist was Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918), who created beautiful but
haunting and often highly eroticized portraits, the most famous of which
1517
became one of the quintessential dorm room decorations of collegiate
1518
present, but was overshadowed by the grotesque depiction of either how it
clinging to one another over a starry abyss, with a sinister, translucent face
visible in the backdrop. The paintings were all beautiful and skillfully
rendered, but also dark and disturbing (the originals were destroyed by the
1519
Klimt’s Philosophy, from 1907.
One of Klimt's students was Egon Schiele (1890 - 1918), who subverted
Klimt's themes (which, although very dark, were also beautiful) and openly
himself in the nude looking emaciated, threatening, and grim. Whereas Klimt
1520
spirit and the mind that existed at the unconscious level, Schiele’s work
however. Some composers and musicians in the first decades of the twentieth
listeners by altering the very scales, notes, and tempos that western audiences
were used to hearing. Some of the resulting pieces eventually became classics
in their own right, while others tended to become part of the history of music
(1882 – 1971). A Russian composer, Stravinsky's was best known for his Rite
of Spring. The Rite of Spring was a ballet depicting the fertility rites of the
ancient Scythians, the nomadic people native to southern Russia in the ancient
the audience hissed at the dancers, and pelted the orchestra with debris, while
1521
the press described it as pornographic and barbaric. The dancers lurched
changed its tempo and abandoned its central theme. Within a few years,
however (and following a change in its wild choreography), the Rite became
among the first to defy the entire tradition of western music in his
basically the same set of scales. As a result, listeners were “trained” from
1522
deliberately subverted those expectations, inserting dissonance and
Similar in some ways to the innovations in the visual arts and music,
prose. Authors like Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and James
Joyce (whose places of origins spanned from Dublin to Prague) created a new
form of literature in which the nominal plot of a story was less important than
the protagonist’s inner life and experience of his or her surroundings and
single unremarkable day in the life of a man in Dublin, Ireland, focusing on the
vast range of thoughts, emotions, and reactions that passed through the man’s
consciousness rather than on the events of the day itself. Proust and Woolf
also wrote works focused on the inner life rather than the outside event, and
Woolf was also a seminal feminist writer. Kafka’s work brilliantly, and
tragically, satirized the experience of being lost in the modern world, hemmed
1523
most famous story, Metamorphosis, describes the experience of a young man
who awakens one day to discover that he has become a gigantic insect, but
hierarchy, and control. The inner life was not straightforward – it was a
violence. Certain modernist artists attacked the system, while others exposed
its vacuity, its emptiness or shallowness, against the darker, more complex
Freud
many ways, Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939). Freud was one of the founders of
1524
the concept of modern therapy itself and his theories, while now largely
importance derives from his work as a philosopher of the mind more so than
as a “scientist” per se, although it was precisely his drive for his work to be
Freud was born in Moravia (today’s Czech Republic) in 1856, and his
which Moravia was part. Freud was Jewish, and his family underwent a
Jews in the latter part of the nineteenth century, following legal emancipation
from anti-Semitic laws: his grandparents were unassimilated and poor, his
parents were able to create a successful business in a major city, and Freud
1525
rife with anti-Semitism - he sought to understand the inner psychological
1526
came to believe that the mind itself "evolved" from childhood into adulthood
conform to social pressure from outside while being enslaved to its own
pleasure. Freud wanted to be the "Darwin of the mind," the inventor of a true
disorders.
was a term invented to blame the female anatomy for physical symptoms, in
hysteria was the result not of some unknown physical problem among
1527
Freud built on the work of an earlier psychologist and employed the
"talking cure" with his hysterical patients, naming his version of the talking
cure "psychoanalysis." The talking cure was the process by which the
therapist and the patient recounted memories, dreams, and events, searching
identity. This culminated in his 1905 Three Essays in the Theory of Sexuality.
speculative, since it was about the conversation between the therapist and the
active role, above and beyond the medical diagnosis of disorder. Freud
believed that the human mind was almost always arrested in its progress
1528
very difficult to arrive at that position. In turn, he hoped that his theories
experience and can control are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Most
thoughts and feelings are buried in the unconscious. Within the unconscious
are stored repressed memories that trigger responses, verbal slips, and
one's desires and the requirements of socialization (of living in a society with
its own rules and laws) and that leads inevitably to inner conflict. Thus,
people form defense systems that may protect their emotions in the short
According to Freud, there are three basic areas or states that exist
simultaneously in the human mind. First, part of the unconscious is the “Id:”
the seat of the drives for pleasure (sexual lust, power, security, food, alcohol
and other drugs, etc.) and for what might be considered "obsession" - the
1529
seemingly irrational desires that have nothing to do with pleasure per se
activity). Freud called the drive for pleasure "eros," the Pleasure Principle,
and the obsessive and self-destructive drive "thanatos," the Death Drive.
authority, and the overwhelming sense of shame and inadequacy that can, and
usually does, result from facing all of the pressures of living in human
society. In the context of his own, deeply Victorian bourgeois society, Freud
Finally, the only aspect of the human psyche the mind is directly aware
of is the “Ego:” the embattled conscious mind, forced to reconcile the drives of
the Id and Superego with the "reality principle," the knowledge that to give in
the reason most people have so many psychological problems is that the Ego
1530
is perpetually beset by these powerful forces it is not consciously aware
of. The Id bombards the Ego with an endless hunger for indulgence, while the
In short, Freud described the mind itself as defying control: despite the
control. Freudian theory suggested that the life of the mind was complicated
and opaque, not rational and straightforward. The great dream of the
optimistic theorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been that
proper education and rational politics could create a perfect society. Freud,
however, cautioned that no one is completely rational, and that politics could
easily follow the path of the Death Drive and plunge whole nations, even
worst fears come to pass at the end of the life as he fled from the Nazi
1531
theories largely revolved around sexual instincts and their repression, and he
invented various specific concepts like the “Oedipus complex,” the idea that
young boys sexually desire their mothers and fear the authority of their
fathers, and “penis envy,” the claim that girls are psychologically wounded by
not having male genitalia, that he claimed were fundamental to the human
psyche. For all his insight, and all his clinical work with women patients,
“evolved” than men and were biologically destined for a secondary role. He
also admitted that he could not really figure out women’s motivations; he
famously asserted that the question that psychology could not answer was
“what does a woman want?” In the end, the irony of Freud’s take on gender
double standards, however important his other theories were in exploring the
around him, Freud remained embedded in the assumption that a male and
1532
female physiology dictated separate and unequal destinies for men and
women.
Gender Roles
discussion of World War I in the previous chapter, gender roles had been
transformed both economically and culturally during (and because of) the
war. Some of those changes were durable. The range of jobs available to
women was certainly larger than it had been before the war. Women
continued to wear more comfortable and practical clothing after the war than
before it, the restrictive ankle-length dress replaced by the looser, calf-length
dress or skirt. Some women continued to cut their hair short, and of course
most European countries and the United States over the course of the 1920s.
No sooner had the war ended, however, that men generally did
1533
had caused. Through a combination of legal restrictions and quasi-legal
practices, women were forced from traditional male jobs, prevented from
enrolling in universities and medical schools, and paid significantly less than
men for the same work. Fascist parties (described in a following chapter)
were explicitly devoted to enforcing traditional gender roles, and when some
countries were overtaken by fascist rule women were often forced out of the
that women were inherently biologically inferior to men and that it was the
“natural” role of men to serve as head of the household and head of the nation-
The exemplar of both the greater freedom enjoyed by women and male
resentment of that freedom was the “New Woman.” A stock figure in the
media of the time, the New Woman was independent, working at her own job
full time and living by herself, and able to enjoy a social life that included
drinking, dancing, and even the possibility of casual sex. The famous
“flappers” of the 1920s, young women in the latest fashion who danced to
1534
cutting-edge American jazz and wore scandalously short, knee-length dresses,
were the ultimate expression of the New Woman. While the image of the New
there was at least a kernel of truth to the archetype. Far more women were
independent by the 1920s than in the past, fashions really had changed, and
easier to have without fear of pregnancy. It would take at least another half-
century, however, for laws against sexual discrimination to come into being in
most countries, and of course the struggle for cultural equality remains
1535
The American actor Alice Joyce in 1926 in an extravagant “flapper” dress. Film stars of the day
were the most visible examples of the “New Woman” most people encountered outside of
advertising.
Modernism in the arts and modernist theory came of age before, during,
and after World War I; some of the most interesting writing and art of the
1536
Europe (Russia, as usual, was an exception) and the United States during the
1920s was beset by struggle and conflict, but while the economies of the west
struggled to recover from World War I, there was at least some economic
growth. That growth came crashing to a halt in 1929 with the advent of the
Great Depression.
The Great Depression has the dubious distinction of being the worst
disaster or to effectively deal with it. The Depression explains in large part
the appeal of extremist politics like Nazism, in that the average person was
The background to the Depression was the financial mess left by World
1537
members of the Triple Entente themselves owed enormous sums to the
United States for the loans they had received during the war, amounting to
approximately $10 billion. Over the course of the 1920s, as the German
economy struggled to recover (at one point the value of German currency
together the economies of the United States and Europe: US loans underwrote
German reparation payments to Britain and France, with Britain and France
then trying to pay off their debts to the US. None of the debts were anywhere
near settled by the end of the 1920s, not least because more loans were still
The Depression started in the United States with a massive stock market
crash on October 24, 1929. The ill-conceived cycle of debt described above
had worked well enough for most of the 1920s while the American economy
was stable and American banks were willing to underwrite new loans. When
1538
the European loans, from Germany and its former enemies alike. The capital
to repay those loans simply did not exist. Businesses shut down, governments
Germany’s industrial output dropped by almost 50% and millions were out of
policies of austerity, cutting back the already limited social programs that
existed, balancing state budgets, and slashing spending. The result was that
even less capital was available in the private sector. In the United States and
Western Europe, the Depression would drag on for a decade (1929 - 1939), at
Summing Up
1539
were all, in different ways, symptoms of disruption and (often) a profound
sense of unease that pervaded Western culture after World War I. European
civilization was powerful and self-confident before the war, master of over
80% of the globe, and at the forefront of science and technology. That
progress. It was in this uncertain context that the most destructive political
philosophy in modern history emerged: fascism, and its even more horrific
offshoot, Nazism.
1540
Freud - Public Domain
Chapter 9: Fascism
Disappointment
In many ways, World War I was what truly ended the nineteenth century. It
undermined the faith in progress that had grown, despite all of its setbacks, throughout the
nineteenth century among many, perhaps most, Europeans. The major political
nations replaced empires (nationalism). Europe controlled more of the world in 1920 than
it ever had or ever would again (imperialism). In the aftermath of the war, almost every
government in Europe, even Germany, was a republican democracy based on the rule of
law (liberalism). Even socialists had cause to celebrate: there was a nominally Marxist
state in Russia and socialist parties were powerful and militant all across Europe. The old
order of monarchs and nobles was rendered all but obsolete, with noble titles holding on as
1541
nothing more than archaic holdovers from the past in nearly every country. In addition, of
Despite the success of all of those movements, however, with all of the hopes and
aspirations of their supporters over the last century, Europe had degenerated into a
horrendous and costly war. The war had not purified and invigorated the great powers;
they were all left reeling, weakened, and at a loss for how to prevent a future war. Science
had advanced, but its most noteworthy accomplishment was the production of more
effective weapons. The global empires remained, but the seeds of their dissolution were
already present.
The results were bitterness and reprisals. The Treaty of Versailles that ended the
war imposed harsh penalties on Germany, returning Alsace and Lorraine to France and
imposing a massive indemnity on the defeated country. The Treaty also required Germany
to accept the "war guilt clause," in which it assumed full responsibility for the war having
started in the first place. Simultaneously, the Austrian Empire collapsed, with Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, and the new Balkan nation of Yugoslavia all becoming independent
countries and Austria a short-lived republic. Almost no one would have believed that
In other words, World War I did not resolve any of the problems or international
tensions that had started it. Instead, it made them worse because it proved how powerful
1542
and devastating modern weapons were, and it also demonstrated that no single power was
likely to be able to assert its dominance. France and Britain went out of their way in
blaming Germany for the conflict, while in Germany itself, those on the right believed in the
conspiracy theory in which communists and Jews had conspired to sabotage the German
war effort - this was later called the "Stab in the Back" myth. Thus, many Germans felt they
had been wronged twice: they had not “really” lost the war, yet they were forced to pay
It was in this context of anger and disappointment that fascism and its racially-
obsessed offshoot Nazism arose. World War I provided the trauma, the bloodshed, and the
skepticism toward liberalism and socialism that underwrote the rise of fascism. Fascism
was a modern conservatism, a conservatism that clung to its mania for order and hierarchy,
but which did not seek a return to the days of feudalism and monarchy. It was a populist
movement, a movement of the people by the people, but instead of petty democratic
bickering, it glorified the (imagined) nation, a nation united by a movement and an ethos.
Fascism
1543
movements sprung up right as the war ended. The term fascism was invented
by the Italian Fascist Party itself, based on the term fascii: a bundle of sticks
with an axe embedded in the middle. Symbolically, the sticks are weak
individually but strong as a group, and the axe represented the power over life
and death. In ancient Rome, the bodyguards of the Roman consuls carried
fascii as a badge of authority over war, peace, law, and death, and that
countries, all of them agitating for some kind of right-wing revolution against
democracy and socialism. One place of particular note in the early history of
Française had existed since the Dreyfus Affair, but it transformed itself into a
Catholic ideologies. When Germany defeated France in World War II, the
Nazis found a large contingent of right-wing Frenchmen who were all too
happy to create a home-grown French fascist state (a fact that many in France
1544
tried their best to forget after the war). Likewise, when the Nazis seized
power.
were firmly planted in the nineteenth century. Mostly obviously, fascism was
an extreme form of nationalism. The nation was not just the home of a
“people” in fascism, it was everything. The nation became a mythic entity that
had existed since the ancient past, and fascists claimed that the cultural traits
and patterns of the nation defined who a person was and how they regarded
the world.
The confusing jumble of what defined a nation in the first place often
took on explicitly racial, and racist, terms among fascist groups. Now,
Germans were not just people who spoke German in Central Europe; they
were the German (or “Aryan,” the term itself nothing more than a pseudo-
1545
fascists talked about the bloodlines of the ancient Gauls that supposedly
past. Likewise, Mussolini and the Italian Fascists claimed that “the Italians”
were the direct descendants of the most glorious tradition of the ancient
Roman Empire and were destined to create a new, even greater empire. The
was, among other things, a cultural movement that found in “scientific” racism
At first sight, one surprising aspect of fascism was that many fascists
were former communists – Benito Mussolini, the leader of the Italian Fascist
Party, had been a prominent member of the Italian Communist Party before
World War I. What fascism and communism had in common was a rejection
1546
compromise. The major difference between them was that fascists discovered
in World War I that most people were not willing to die for their social class,
but they were willing to die for their nation. Fascism was, in part, a kind of
collective movement that substituted nationalism for the class war. All classes
would be united in the nation, fascists believed, for the greater glory of the
Italian Fascism
As noted above, the very term “fascist” is a product of the first fascist
group to seize control of a powerful country: the Italian Fascist Party. Italian
them was Benito Mussolini, a combat veteran who had welcomed the war as a
joined with England and France against Germany and Austria in hopes of
seizing territory from the Austrians, was given very little land after the
1547
war. Thus, to Mussolini and many other Italians, the war had been especially
pointless.
The Fascists, who started out with a mere 100 members in the northern
Italian city of Milan, grew rapidly because of the incredible social turmoil in
Italy in 1919 and 1920. Italy had a powerful communist movement, one that
was inspired by and linked to the Soviet Union’s recent birth and the success
of the communist revolution in Russia. After the war, a huge strike wave
struck Italy and many poor Italians in the countryside seized land from the
semi-feudal landlords who still dominated rural society. There was genuine
the middle classes that Italy would undergo a communist revolution just as
had occurred in Russia - at the time Russia was still in the midst of its civil war
between the "Red" Bolsheviks and the anti-communist coalition known as the
1548
open street fighting against communists, breaking up strikes, attacking
communities. They were often tacitly aided by the police, who rounded up
for office in the Italian parliament while their gangs of thugs terrorized the
opposition.
Party). Fascists from all over Italy converged in a famous “March on Rome,” a
highly staged piece of political theater meant to demonstrate Fascist unity and
within. From 1922 to 1926 Mussolini and the Fascists manipulated the Italian
1549
parliament, intimidated political opponents or actually had them murdered,
and succeeded finally in eliminating party politics and a free press. The
Fascist party became the only legal party in Italy and the police apparatus
expanded dramatically. Mussolini's official title was Il Duce: "The Leader," and
his authority over every political decision was absolute. The Fascist motto
was “believe, obey, fight,” a distant parody of the French liberal motto (from
Mussolini (in the center) and Fascist Blackshirts during the March on Rome in 1922.
1550
Mussolini immediately understood the importance of appearances. The
1920s was the early age of mass media, especially radio, and an intrinsic part
and rallies and he carefully controlled how he was portrayed in the media –
the press was forbidden to mention his age or his birthday, to give the illusion
that he never aged. He was always on the move, usually in a race car, and
spoke about his own "animal magnetism" and often walked around without a
Officially, Italian Fascism promised to end the class conflict that lay at
committees to control work. In fact, the owners derived all of the benefits;
1551
trade unions were banned and the plight of workers degenerated without
representation.
What Italian Fascism did do for the Italian people was essentially
recreational clubs and sought the involvement of all Italians. It glorified the
idea of the Italian people and in turn many actual Italians did come to feel
and Fascist identity among Italian citizens, while Fascist-led police forces
internal exile in closed prison villages (not unlike some of the Russian gulags
that would exemplify a different but related totalitarian system to the east).
few) Italian trains run on time, in the long term the Fascist government
1552
convinced of his own genius, made arbitrary and often foolish decisions,
especially when it came to building up and training the Italian military. The
circle of Fascist leaders around him were largely corrupt sycophants who lied
to Mussolini about Italy's strength and prosperity to keep him happy. When
World War II began in 1939, the Italian forces were revealed to be poorly
Germany. Named after the resort town in which its constitution was written
liberalism. Its constitution guaranteed universal suffrage for men and women,
1553
unpopular among many groups, including right-wing army veterans like a
One great lie that poisoned the political climate of the Weimar Republic
World War I, Germany was losing. Its own General Staff informed the Kaiser
of this fact; with American troops and munitions flooding in, it was simply a
matter of time before the Allies were able to march in force on Germany. As
along with the Kaiser himself, concocted the idea that Germany could have
kept fighting, and won, but instead public commitment to the war wavered
because of agitators on the home front and saboteurs who crippled military
communists). This was an outright lie, but it was a convenient lie that the
political right in Germany could cling to, blaming “Jewish saboteurs” and
1554
The Versailles Treaty had also required Germany to disarm - the
German army went from millions of men to a mere 100,000 soldiers. It was
than a handful of warships. Given the social prestige and power associated
with the German military before the war, this was an enormous blow to
resolutions to their problems in the future, many Germans were still left with
Neither did the Weimar government itself inspire much confidence. Its
with the popular vote translated into a corresponding number of seats for the
parties, representing not just elements of the left - right political spectrum, but
1555
regional and religious identities as well. The most powerful parties were
those of the far left, the communists, and the far right, initially monarchists
and conservative Catholics, with the Nazis rising to prominence at the end of
the 1920s. Thus, it was nearly impossible for the Reichstag to govern, with
Diagram of electoral results over the course of the Weimar Republic. Note the lack of a
governing party, as well as the rise of the Nazis (the NSDAP, marked in dark maroon at the top
1556
Simultaneously, the Weimar Republic faced ongoing economic issues,
which fed into the resentment of most Germans toward the terms of the
Versailles Treaty and its reparation payments (set to 132 billion gold marks
annually, although that amount was renegotiated and lowered over the course
of the decade). The actual economic impact of those payments is still debated
unjust, since they felt that all of the countries of Europe were responsible for
possible solutions; to cite the most important example, the electoral fortunes
of the Nazi party rose and fell in an inverse relationship to the health of the
German economy.
The economy of Germany underwent a severe crisis less than five years
after the end of the war. In 1923, unable to make its payments, the Weimar
1557
government simply printed more money, thereby undermining its value. This,
currency, with one American dollar being worth nearly 10,000,000,000 marks
by the end of the year. Workers were paid in wheelbarrows full of cash at the
start of their lunch break so they had time to buy a few groceries before
In the course of a year, Germans who had spent their lives carefully
anger and resentment among common people who might otherwise not be
1558
attracted to extremist solutions. The situation stabilized in 1924 after
democracy thus far had been disastrous. It was in this context of economic
from the southern German state of Bavaria, the National Socialist German
The Nazis
Any discussion of the Nazis must start with Adolf Hitler. It is impossible
became state policy and were used as the justification for war and
maker, he remained central to the image of strength, vitality, and power that
1559
the Nazis associated with their state. Hitler was also one of the three
"greatest" murderers of the twentieth century, along with Josef Stalin of the
Soviet Union and Mao Tse-Tung of China. His obsession with a racialized,
power, however. Hitler was born in Austria in 1889, a citizen of the Austro-
rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in the Austrian capital of Vienna – many
adolescence of his own greatness, Hitler invented the idea that the rejection
was due not to his own lack of talent, but because of a shadowy conspiracy
For several years before the outbreak of World War I, Hitler lived in
Vienna in flophouses, cheap hotels for homeless men, and there he discovered
1560
right-wing politics and cultivated a growing hatred for Austria’s ethnic and
linguistic diversity. Hitler spent his days drifting around Vienna, absorbing
theories about Jews and other “foreign” influences. Likewise, he read popular
German history. It was in Vienna that he discovered his own talent for public
speeches about German greatness and the Jewish (and Slavic) peril were his
Hitler regarded the fact that Germany and Austria were separate
government and fled to Germany rather than serve his required military
service in Austria. Much to his delight, World War I broke out when he was
served at the western front, surviving both a poison gas attack and shrapnel
from an exploding shell. Unlike most veterans of the war, Hitler experienced
1561
combat and service in the trenches as exhilarating and fulfilling, and he was
Hitler, on the far right, and some of his fellow soldiers in his infantry regiment early in WWI. He
trimmed his moustache to its (in)famous length during the war in order to be able to securely
After the war, he was sent by the army to the southern German city of
Munich, which was full of angry, disenchanted army veterans like himself. His
1562
assignment was to investigate a small right-wing group, the German Workers
socialism and something they called “international Jewry” for the defeat of
Germany in the war. He swiftly rose in the ranks of the Nazis, becoming the
leadership, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers
Party (“Nazi” is derived from the German word for “national”), and it adopted
the swastika, long a favorite of racist pseudo-historians looking for the ancient
What made Nazi ideology distinct from that of their Italian Fascist
counterparts was its emphasis on biology. The Nazis believed that races were
biological entities, that there was something inherent in the blood of each
"race" that had a direct impact on its ability to create or destroy something as
1563
vague as “true culture.” According to Nazi ideology, only the so-called Aryan
race, Germans especially but also including related white northern Europeans
like the Danes, the Norwegians, and the English, had ever created culture or
been responsible for scientific progress. Other races, including some non-
European groups like the Persians and the Japanese, were considered
destroying” races, most importantly Jews but also including Slavs, like
Russians and Poles. In the great scheme for the Nazi new world order, Jews
would be somehow pushed aside entirely and the Slavs would be enslaved as
in his autobiography Mein Kampf (see below). He was obsessed with the idea
that the German race teetered on the brink of extinction, tricked into
interbreeding with lesser races. Behind all of this was, according to him, the
1564
Jews. Hitler claimed that the Jews were responsible for every disaster in
German history; the loss of World War I was just the latest in a long string of
catastrophes for which the Jews were responsible. The Jews had invented
inspired by the Italian Fascists' success in seizing power in Italy, Hitler led his
remembered as the “Beer-Hall Putsch.” It failed, but Hitler used his ensuing
German press. The court officials, who sympathized with his politics, gave
prisons, a sentence Hitler spent dictating his autobiography, Mein Kampf ("My
1565
The Nazi leadership on trial - note the degree to which the photo looks like a publicity stunt
rather than a criminal proceeding. Hitler is joined by Erich Ludendorff, in the center, one of the
top German commanders during WWI. Ludendorff flirted with Nazism early on, but abandoned
recognition of his good behavior), Hitler was a minor national celebrity on the
right. The Nazis were still a fringe group, but they were now a fringe group
that people had heard of. Nazi Stormtroopers harassed leftist groups and
1566
organizations, workers’ and farmers’ wings, and women’s groups. They held
issues that attracted the largest popular audience. Even so, they did not have
mass support in the 1920s - they only won 2.6% of the national vote in 1928.
German society into such turmoil that extremists like the Nazis suddenly
problems, and a restoration of German pride and power, the Nazis steadily
the seats in the Reichstag. In 1932 they won 37% of the national vote, the
That being noted, the Nazis never came close to winning an actual
Germans” than before were attracted to their message, but that message did
1567
not seem at the time to be greatly different than the messages of other right-
wing parties. That said, the Nazis were masters of fine-tuning their messages
for the electorate; most of their propaganda had to do with German pride,
unity, and the need for social and economic order and prosperity, not the
hatred of Jews or the need to launch attacks on other European nations. They
In fact, 1932 represented both the high point and what could have been
the beginning of the decline of the Nazis as a party. The presidential election
that year saw Hitler lose to Hindenburg, who had served as president since
1925, despite his own contempt for democracy. The Nazis lost millions of
votes in the subsequent Reichstag election, and Hitler even briefly considered
Papen, to use Hitler and the Nazis as tools to help dismantle the Weimar state
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appointed Hitler chancellor, the second-most powerful political position in the
state.
rights. That allowed the state to destroy the German Communist Party,
Stormtroopers, new elections saw the Nazis win 49% in the next
election. Soon, with the aid of other conservative parties, the Nazis pushed
through the Enabling Act, which empowered Hitler and the presidential
cabinet to pass laws by decree. In July, the Nazis outlawed all parties except
themselves. By the summer of 1933, the Nazis controlled the state itself, with
measures.
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The Nazi government that followed was a mess of overlapping
constitution was never officially repudiated, but the letter of laws became far
lieu of a rational political order, there was a kind of governing principle that
one Nazi party member described as “working towards the Führer”: trying to
specific rules or laws. The only unshakable core principle was the personal
obsessed with winning over “ordinary Germans” to the party’s outlook, and to
that end the state both bombarded the population with propaganda and
sought to alleviate the dismal economic situation of the early 1930s. The Nazi
state poured money into a debt-based recovery from the Depression (the
economics of the recovery were totally unsustainable, but the Nazi leadership
1570
collapse). Employment recovered somewhat as the state funded huge public
works and, after he publicly broke with the terms of the Versailles Treaty in
1935, rearmament. Even though there were still food and consumable
shortages, many Germans felt that things were better than they had been. The
Ultimately, the Nazi party controlled Germany from 1933 until Germany
as that of the Third Reich, the Nazis’ own term for what Hitler promised would
The Nazis targeted almost every conceivable social group with a specific
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specific Nazi league: workers were encouraged to work hard for the good of
paramilitary scouting organization, the Hitler Youth, and girls in the League of
German Girls, trained as future mothers and domestics. All vocations and
genders were united in the glorification of the military and, of course, of the
Führer himself (“Heil Hitler” was the official greeting used by millions of
German citizens, whether or not they ever joined the Nazi party itself). The
purpose of the campaigns was to win the loyalty of the population to the
regime and to Hitler personally, and nearly the entire population at least paid
1572
Hitler Youth and League of German Girls members at a rally in 1933.
The dark side of both the propaganda and the legal framework of the
Third Reich was the suspension of civil rights and the concomitant campaigns
against the so-called “enemies” of the German people. The Nazis vilified Jews,
as well as other groups like people with disabilities and the Romani (better
1573
sterilizations of disabled and mixed-race peoples. Jewish businesses were
targeted for vandalism and Jewish people were attacked. In 1935 the Nazis
passed the so-called “Nuremberg Laws” which outlawed Jews from working in
various professions, stripped Jews of citizenship, and made sex between Jews
Even as Germans were encouraged to identify with the Nazi state, and
joining the Nazi Party itself soon became an excellent way to advance one's
career, the Nazis also held out the threat of imprisonment or death for those
who dared defy them. The first concentration camp was opened within weeks
enormous force of dedicated Nazis with almost unlimited police powers. The
custody" in a concentration camp, and the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo,
were merely one part of the SS. This combination of incentives (e.g.
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propaganda, programs, incentives) and threats (e.g. the SS, concentration
camps) helps explain why there was no significant resistance to the Nazi
The first real war launched by fascist forces was not in Italy or Germany,
however, but in Spain. The greatest of the European powers in the sixteenth
century, Spain had long since sunk into obscurity, commercial weakness, and
backwardness. Its society in 1920 was very much like it had been a century
earlier: most of the country was populated by poor rural farmers and
laborers, and an alliance of the army, Catholic church, and old noble families
still controlled the government in Madrid. The king, Alfonso XIII, still held real
power, despite his own personal ineptitude. In many ways, Spain was the last
place in Europe that clung to the old order of the nineteenth century.
Socialists and liberals were increasingly militant by the early 1920s, and
1575
Spain. From 1923 to 1930, a general named Primo de Rivera acted as a virtual
dictator (with the support of the king) trying to drag Spain into the twentieth
liberals and moderate socialists. The parliament pushed through laws that
formally separated church and state (for the first time in Spanish history) and
redistributed land to the poor, seized from the enormous estates of the richest
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the far left gravitated away and the nobility and clergy joined with the army in
1935.
Popular Front to fight it. More chaos ensued, with Franco’s forces growing in
power and the Popular Front suffering from infighting (i.e. the anarchists,
fascists, the Falange, soon openly supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist
1577
Francisco Franco
The war began in earnest in that year. It was hugely bloody; probably
about 600,000 people died, of which 200,000 were “loyalists” (the blanket
the loyalists carried out atrocities of their own, targeting especially members
of the church. One of the iconic moments in the war was the arrival of over
20,000 foreign volunteers on the side of the loyalists, including the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade from the United States. Both the American writer Ernest
Hemingway and the English writer George Orwell fought in defense of the
republic.
Spain, Germany and Italy blatantly violated it and provided both troops and
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Italy or Germany came from the German air force, the Luftwaffe, which used
Spain as a training ground with real targets. The loyalists had no means to
fight against planes, so they suffered consistent defeats and setbacks from
German bombing raids. Overall, the Spanish Civil War allowed Italy and
Germany to "try out" their new armies before committing to a larger war in
well).
The nationalists triumphed in early 1939, having cut off the pockets of
loyalists off from one another. They were recognized as the legitimate
contrary, they immediately began carrying out reprisals against the now-
defeated loyalists. Franco adopted the title of Caudillo, or leader, in the same
manner as Mussolini and Hitler. Where Spain differed from the other fascist
powers was that Franco was well aware of its relative weakness and
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fruitless day trying to convince him to join the war once World War II was
underway.
Franco’s regime, which united the old nobles, the army, and the Catholic
church, controlled the country until Franco’s death in 1975. Just as Spain was
one of the last countries still tied to the old political order of kings and nobles
after World War I, it was among the last fascistic countries long after Hitler’s
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Chapter 10: World War II
World War II was the defining disaster of the twentieth century for
millions of people across the globe. It was the culmination of the vision of
total war the world had first encountered in World War I, but it was
generalized to vast stretches of the planet, not just parts of Europe, Africa, and
the Middle East. The promise of technology was realized in its most perverse
mass slaughter. World War II was also the setting for the Holocaust, the first
27 million were Soviets and 6 million were the Jewish victims of the
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to the war in some ways, as they had in World War I, the primary cause of
vastly expanded German empire. Europe had, in some ways, stumbled into
Japan, and their allies are referred to as "The Axis" in World War II. Britain,
the US, the USSR, and their allies are referred to as "The Allies" in World War
II.)
Leading up to War
September of 1939) saw a series of bold moves by Nazi leadership. Over the
course of the 1930s, the Nazi government steadily broke with the provisions
of the Versailles Treaty. While the (pre-Nazi) German state had already
suspended reparation payments, once the Nazis were in control they simply
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in secret, Germany began the process of re-arming, and then in 1935 it openly
moved toward building a military that would dwarf even its World War I
equivalent.
By 1938, Hitler felt that Germany was prepared enough that it could
sustain a limited war; by 1939 he felt confident that the German war machine
was ready for a full-scale effort to seize the space he imagined for the new
Reich. In a sense, this period consisted of Hitler "playing chicken" with the
see if the rest of Europe (meaning primarily France and Britain) would
respond with the threat of force or instead back down. The political
leadership of those nations did back down, repeatedly, until the invasion of
Poland in September of 1939 finally proved to the world beyond a doubt that
the policy adopted by the French and British governments in giving Hitler
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territory, political unions with closely related German territories, and the
growth of German military power were seen by desperate British and French
politicians as things that Germans might have legitimate grievances about, and
thus they played along with the idea that Germany, and more to the point
It was a popular critique long after the war to vilify the French and
strong militarized response might have cut the rug out from under the Nazi
war machine before it was ready for its full-scale assault. Arguably, one
should not be too quick to write off appeasement. World War I had been so
awful that it was very difficult for most Europeans, even most Germans, to
believe that Hitler could actually want to plunge Europe back into another
world war. It is certain that the French and British wanted to avoid full-scale
war at any cost; their civilian populations were totally opposed to war and,
1584
was. Thus, British and French political leaders did not think of their
Austrians welcomed the German tanks that rolled into Austrian cities, and
this blatant violation of both the Versailles Treaty and the sovereignty of
another nation would result in war, but instead it became a public relations
boost for Hitler and the Nazis when there was no foreign response. In one fell
swoop, Nazi laws and policies (most notably the entire edifice of anti-Semitic
1585
there, instead of defending Czech sovereignty (which the Czechs were
demanding), the French and British agreed that Germany should annex the
troops simply occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. The Czech lands were
Hitler greeting the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain at the Munich Peace Conference
1586
Even as Germany was expanding its territories against a backdrop of
Italy and Germany pledged alliance with one another, more or less a formality
Germany and the USSR signed a mutual non-aggression pact. This pact was
absolutely crucial for the Nazis, as they could not envisage a successful war
against Western and Northern Europe unless the major eastern threat, the
honoring the pact in the long term, the Soviet Premier Josef Stalin did,
believing both that Germany was not strong enough to threaten Soviet
territory and that the future war (which he accepted as inevitable) would be a
squabble among the capitalist nations that did not involve his own resolutely
communist state. To sweeten the deal for the Soviets, the pact secretly
included provisions to divide Poland between Germany and the USSR in the
immediate future.
1587
The Early War
Poles had been abusing and mistreating ethnic Germans in Poland, and Nazi
perpetrated against Germans. Using this excuse, the German army invaded in
September. France and Britain finally had to face the hard truth that there
was no appeasing Hitler, and they declared war on Germany. As part of the
pre-war agreement with Germany, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the
east as German forces invaded from the west, with the Soviets occupying
eastern Poland in the name of both territorial expansion for its own sake and
The most important lesson German strategists had learned from World
Germany had managed to break through the French and British lines on the
western front right at the end of the war, before they were pushed back by the
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flood of American troops. Military technology advanced rapidly between the
wars, equipping each of the major nations with fast-moving, heavily armored
strike much more quickly and much harder than had the ragged lines of
combatants in the Second World War recognized the key role of industrial
production itself. The winner in war would be not only the side that struck
first and hardest, but the side that could continue to churn out weapons and
equipment at the highest rates for the longest time. In that sense, industrial
all of these lessons, and the German army - the Wehrmacht - struck with
lengthy war.
Wehrmacht unleashed (what the Allies called) Blitzkrieg, lightning war, which
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consisted of fast-moving armored divisions supported by overwhelming air
support. Behind those armored divisions the main body of German infantry
military tactical plan regarding mobile warfare. It was rejected by the French
General Staff but was acquired by the Germans and implemented by the
the anti-Nazi Free French forces in the war after France itself surrendered).
The first stage of the war resulted in complete German victory. The
Polish army put up a valiant defense but was swiftly crushed. Over 1,300
planes attacked Poland at once in the early stage of the invasion, and Poland
the smaller nations in the region warily watched their own borders, most
global attention shifted to the border with France, the obvious next stage in
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While France had declared war on Germany immediately in September
of 1939, it did not actually attack. French plans for a future war with Germany
had revolved around defense, meaning awaiting a German attack, since the
end of World War I. After WWI, the French built a huge series of bunkers and
Line. There, from September of 1939 until May of 1940, the French military
essentially waited for Germany to invade - this was a period the French came
to refer to as the "drôle de guerre,” or “joke war” (the British called it the
“phony war,” the Germans Sitzkrieg or “sitting war”). The assumption had
been that Germany would be held back by the heavy fortifications and could
be pushed back, and the French army simply did not have any plans, or
Instead, the Germans had the (in hindsight, not entirely surprising) idea
to go around the Maginot Line. In April, German forces invaded and swiftly
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Belgium, and France, sending the bulk of their forces through a forest on the
French - Belgian border that the French had, wrongly, thought was impassable
to an army. The Germans proved far more effective than the French or British
at using tanks and artillery, and they immediately began driving the French
and British forces back. The Maginot Line, meanwhile, went unused, with the
German forces invaded France through southern Belgium, bypassing the Maginot Line’s “strong
fortifications” entirely.
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An infamous incident occurred in late May, when over 300,000 British
and French soldiers retreating from the Germans were pinned down on the
coast of the English Channel near the French town of Dunkirk. There, a flotilla
of navy and fishing vessels managed to evacuate them back to England while
the British Royal Air Force held off the opposing German Luftwaffe (air
force). This retreat was counted as a success by the standards of the Allies at
the time, although the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill reminded his
countrymen that successful retreats were not how wars were won.
The defeat of France and its allied British Expeditionary Force is, in
hindsight, all the more disappointing in that the combined Allied forces were
more numerous than their German enemies and could have, conceivably, put
up a stiff fight. Instead, the French sent their armored forces toward Holland
while the Germans smashed into France itself, the British and French proved
French in particular did not realize the potential of tank warfare: they treated
1593
tanks more as mobile artillery platforms than as weapons in their own right,
and they had no armored divisions, just tanks interspersed with infantry
divisions.
occupied the central and northern parts of France but allowed a group of
in the south. That state became known as the Vichy Regime, named after the
spa town of Vichy that served as its capital. There, the Vichy government
but Britain (the United States, while far more favorable to Britain than
Germany, remained neutral). Hitler had initially hoped that the British would
victory (and turned against the USSR). Instead, Britain refused to back down
1594
prime minister, Winston Churchill. Starting in July of 1940, the Luftwaffe
began a campaign to utterly destroy the Royal Air Force (RAF) of Britain and
to terrify the British into surrendering. German plans revolved around a naval
invasion of the British Isles across the English Channel, but German strategists
conceded that they would have to cripple the RAF for the invasion to be
The Battle of Britain. It was the “greatest” series of air battles ever fought,
The British were quite well prepared. They had the newly-created
addition to the RAF, the British had numerous batteries of anti-aircraft guns
that inflicted significant losses on the Luftwaffe. Many British pilots survived
crashes and were rescued, whereas German pilots who were shot down either
died or were captured. Most importantly, British factories churned out twice
as many new planes as did German ones over the course of the war. Thus, the
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RAF was able to counter German attacks with new, effective fighters and
Meanwhile, the United States stayed out of the war – “isolationism” was
still a very popular stance among many Americans. In part because of the
heroism of the British defense, however, the American Congress passed the
Britain, mostly taking the form of food and military supplies provided on
credit, “short of war.” Britain relied both on American supplies and complete
the pre-war amounts of food, every aspect of the British economy (especially
The specific decision by Hitler and the Nazi leadership that resulted in
the United States joining the Allies was the alliance between Germany and
1596
Japan. In September of 1941, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed the Tripartite
Pact. The Pact stipulated that any of the three powers would declare war on a
neutral country that declared war on one of the others. Practically speaking,
Germany hoped that the Pact would make American politicians think twice
Germany, since the Japanese attack on the United States led Germany to honor
its agreement and declare war on the US as well: Japan attacked Pearl Harbor
the US (Hitler was urged not to by his advisors, but gleefully claimed that
Japan had never lost a war and now victory was assured for the Axis).
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The sinking of the battleship USS Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
In the meantime, a series of events shifted the focus of the war to North
Africa, Greece, and the Balkans. Mussolini had ordered in the Italian army to
Yugoslavia and Greece in 1940. The Italians were largely ineffective, however,
and all their attack did was inspire a spirited British counter-offensive and a
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including both foodstuffs and natural resources like oil. It would be literally
unable to continue the war if the Allies managed to take over these regions.
Thus, Germany sent forces to the Balkans and Africa to support their
Italian allies. By the spring of 1941 the Germans held all of southeastern
Europe and had pushed the British back in Africa – yet more important
victories for the Nazis but also a delay in their plans. Another setback was
that Hitler’s attempt to get the Spanish to join the war fell flat, when the
Spanish dictator Franco indicated that Spain was simply too poor and weak,
especially after its civil war, to join the Axis, despite the obvious political
affinity between fascist Spain and Nazi Germany (Hitler said that he would
rather have teeth extracted than endure another meeting like the one he
Despite those setbacks, to many, World War II seemed like it was over
1599
Denmark, France, and Belgium, all within nine months of the initial attack on
Poland. As noted above, its forces were soon making headway in the Balkans
and North Africa as well. Hitler had first conceived of the war against the
thus the planned invasion of Britain was to be the final step before the Soviet
invasion. The fact that Britain was not only holding out, but holding on,
however, led to a change in German plans: the Soviet invasion would have to
In the overall context of the war, by far the largest and most important
target for Germany was the Soviet Union. The non-aggression pact signed just
before the beginning of the war between the USSR and Germany had given the
Nazis the time to concentrate on subduing the rest of Europe. By the spring of
1941, Hitler felt confident that an all-out attack on the USSR was certain to
the east. He was spurred on by the fact that, according to his own racial
ideology, the Slavs of Eastern Europe (most obviously the Russians) were so
1600
inferior to the "Aryan" Germans that they would be unable to mount an
effective resistance. Thus, Hitler anticipated the conquest of the Soviet Union
For his part, Stalin did not think Hitler would be foolish enough to try to
invade Soviet Union, especially before Germany had truly “won” in the west. In
1939, Stalin reported to his advisers that “The war will be fought between two
weaken each other. It would be no bad thing if Germany were to knock the
invasion of Russia in 1812, and thus the sheer size of Soviet territory seemed
like a logical impediment to invasion (in fact, the German invasion was
invasion - in the minds of the Nazis, where the French had failed, Germany
1601
buildup that preceded the invasion, remaining convinced that, at the very
intentions, Stalin had good reason for not thinking that Germany would dare
attack - the USSR had one-sixth of the land surface of the earth, with a
population of about 170,000,000. Its standing army as of 1941 was 5.5 million
(albeit not quality) of equipment at the start of the war. Indeed, by the end of
the war, the Soviets had mobilized 30.6 million soldiers (of whom 800,000
were women: the USSR was the only nation to rely on women in front-line
effectiveness). Given that vast strength, Stalin was astonished when the
armed response.
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German king who warred with the Slavs. The first few months were a
horrendous disaster for the Soviets. The Soviet air force was utterly
Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner. Stalin had spent the late 1930s "purging"
various groups within the Soviet state and the army, and his purges had
areas, the locals actually welcomed the Germans as a better controlling force
than the Bolsheviks had been, putting up no resistance at all. Even though
conquest was inaccurate, the first months of the invasion still amounted to an
winter. The initial welcome German soldiers received vanished when it was
revealed that the German army and the Nazi SS were at least as bad as had
been the communists, pressing people into work gangs, murdering resisters,
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and most importantly, shipping everything that could possibly be useful for
the German war effort back to Germany, including both equipment and
resistance movements that cost the Germans men and resources. Likewise,
German forces had advanced so quickly that they were often bogged down in
transit, with German supply lines stretched to the breaking point. Thus, just as
guerrilla fighters were able to strand and kill the foreign invaders.
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The German advance between June and December 1941 opened a front stretching from the
Baltic to the Black Sea, representing a terrible loss of territory and life to the Soviets.
key role in freezing the German invasion in its tracks. Mud initially slowed the
German advance in autumn, then the bitter cold of winter set in. The Germans
were not equipped for winter conditions, having set out in their summer
horses extensively for the transportation of supplies, with many of the horses
1605
dying from the cold. Even machines could not stand up to the conditions; it
got so cold that engines broke down and tanks and armored cars were
rendered immobile. Thus, the German army, while still huge and powerful,
Incredibly, the Soviets were able to use this breathing room to literally
dismantle their factories and transport them to the east, outside of the range
stripped of motors, turbines, and any other useful equipment that could be
moved, and sent hundreds of miles away from the front lines. There, they
were rebuilt and put back to work. By 1943, a year and a half after the initial
invasion, the Soviets were producing more military hardware than were the
Germany lost over 1.4 million men as casualties in the first year.
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World War II was unprecedented in its effects on civilian
populations. Many prior wars of the modern era had largely spared civilians,
with most casualties limited to the men who fought or logistically supported
the fighting. The range of bombers in World War II, however, ensured that
civilians were at risk even when they lived hundreds of miles from the front
lines. From the Battle of Britain onward, while military targets were given
bombers, and when the war began to turn against Germany the Allies eagerly
returned the favor by raining bombs on German cities. What Nazi strategists
Union was specifically aimed at destroying the Soviet population, not just its
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Thus, the experience of the war by civilians in the countries in or near
the fighting often revolved around terror and hardship. Everyone, including
shortages of food and supplies that grew worse over time. As an example,
that grew ever more stringent as the war went on: the weekly 8 oz. (about two
sticks) ration of butter per person at the start of the war was down to 2 oz.
(about half a stick) by 1945. Rationing ensured that only civilian populations
in actual war zones were likely to face outright famine, but hunger was
war effort that they were excluded from conscription and were hailed as
on the home front during World War II. Millions of women worked in war
replacing men in Soviet agriculture by the war’s end. Both Britain and the
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USSR conscripted women to work in various ways and war industries were
characters like the American “Rosie the Riveter” created to inspire women to
acknowledgment, women were still paid as little as half of men’s wages for the
an effort led by women teachers, and supported by parliament, for equal pay).
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In comparison to World War I, there was a major difference in how
the Second World War was perceived by most civilians on the homefront: it
was an existential battle for democracy and freedom for most Americans,
but for most of the European nations it was a war for survival itself. One of
the major factors that contributed to the loyalty of German civilians to the
Nazi regime until the bitter end was the simple, pragmatic understanding
that if Germany lost it would be at the mercy of the Soviet Union, a country
that the German military had set out to utterly obliterate. For the Soviets, of
nation and their lives. Even in countries that Germany had not set out to
sought out scraps of information that might indicate that the war was finally
1610
For its part, Nazi Germany persisted in the war effort by relying on a
and non-Jews alike) were all, by definition, slaves of the regime, put to work
captured and sent into the Reich as slaves, with some 8 million slaves toiling
within the German borders by the end of 1944. Even when German
factories were crippled by Allied bombs the war machine held together
thanks to its massive reliance on slavery. In short, it was not mere “slave
labor” (a phrase that weakens the horror of the institution) that powered
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Despite the power of Britain, the US, and the USSR, the Axis war effort
continued with amazing success well into 1942. A German army under the
general Erwin Rommel ("the Desert Fox") in North Africa pushed to within a
few hundred miles of the Suez Canal in Egypt, threatening to cut the Allies off
from much of their oil supply. Once the winter of 1941 - 1942 was over, the
factories and Soviet oil fields in the Caucuses. Japan, meanwhile, took
advantage of the success of the Pearl Harbor attack and occupied dozens of
islands across the Pacific. A series of Allied victories in 1942 and 1943,
Japan. In May of 1942, at the Battle of the Coral Sea, American forces defeated
a Japanese invasion force targeting Australia and drove the Japanese fleet
back. In June of 1942, at the Battle of Midway, American forces sank four
Japanese aircraft carriers. The importance of Midway was not the loss itself,
which was less severe than the losses the American navy had already
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sustained. Instead, it was the fact that the Americans had the industrial
capacity to rebuild, whereas there was no way that Japan could do so. From
that point on, American forces slowly but steadily "island hopped" across the
Pacific, driving Japanese forces from the islands they had occupied.
push back the Germans in October of 1942. An American army soon landed to
help them, and the Allies forced the Germans to retreat by November. By July
of 1943, the Allies were poised to bring the fight to Italy itself. Vichy French
November 1942, which led Hitler to order the complete occupation of France
the same month; the fascist puppet state of the Vichy Regime thus only lasted
The “real” turn of the tide occurred in the Soviet Union, however. In late
1942, a huge German army was dispatched against the city of Stalingrad near
the Black Sea. For months, Russian and Ukrainian civilians and soldiers alike
fought the Germans in brutal street battles, with the people of Stalingrad often
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engaging German tanks armed only with grenades, handguns, and Molotov
cocktails. The Germans were held at bay until the main Soviet army was
assembled. By November, the Germans were being beaten, and the German
1943. Here, the Germans were not in their element – urban warfare was not
the same as Blitzkrieg, and the fanatical resistance of the Soviets (who paid
Later that year an enormous Soviet army led by 9,000 tanks defeated a
German army near the city of Kursk, 500 miles south of Moscow. Kursk is
often considered to be the “real” turning point in the Soviet war, since the
Germans were consistently on the retreat after it. The importance of Kursk
was the fact that the Germans were beaten “at their own game” – they were
able to employ Blitzkrieg tactics, but the Russians now had anti-tank military
role of the Soviet Union in World War II. In its aftermath, Americans often
1614
looked on World War II as "the good war," the war that was fought for the
right reasons against countries whose leadership were truly villainous. There
is a lot of truth to that idea - American troops fought as bravely as any, and US
however, to recognize that it was really the USSR that broke the back of the
Nazi war machine. At the cost of at least 25,000,000 lives (some estimates are
as high as thirty million), the Soviets first stopped, then pushed back, then
comparison between the war in the west and the war in the east, the Battle of
Alamein in Egypt that turned the tide against German forces there involved
about 300,000 troops, while Stalingrad saw over 2 million troops and
were always committed to the eastern front after the invasion of the USSR in
June of 1941, and without the incredible sacrifice of the Soviet people, the US
and Britain would have been forced to take on the full strength not just of
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Germany and Italy, but of the various German puppet states and allies (e.g.
Back in the west, with Italian forces in shambles and the Fascist
1943. The new Italian government quickly made peace with the Allies,
the south. For over a year, the Allies pushed north against the German forces
occupying central and northern Italy. The fighting was brutal, but Allied
forces made steady headway in driving German forces back toward the Reich
itself.
forces pushed north through Italy as the Soviets closed from the east. On June
troops (over 150,000 on the first day alone). After securing the coastline, the
Allies steadily pushed against the Germans, suffering serious casualties in the
1616
process as the Germans refused to give up ground without brutal fighting. By
April of 1945, the Allies were within striking distance of Berlin. The western
Allies agreed to let the Soviets carry out the actual invasion of Berlin, a
surrendered, a week after Hitler had committed suicide in his bunker, and the
of 1945, American planes could bomb Japan itself, and civilian as well as
military targets were destroyed, often with incendiary bombs. One attack
Americans. It took about two months for American forces to take the island of
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but at a horrendous loss of life. This ultimately led to the deployment of the
most terrible weapons ever invented by the human species: nuclear arms.
boarding school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, succeeded in creating and then
Japan that it faced “prompt and utter destruction” if it did not surrender;
and Nagasaki (August 8). Hundreds of thousands, the large majority civilians,
died either in the initial blasts or from radiation poisoning in the months that
on September 2.
1618
A photograph of the infamous “mushroom cloud” following the atomic blast that destroyed
Hiroshima.
The Aftermath
The death toll of the war was unprecedented, and most of the dead were
Central and Eastern Europe. As a whole, Europe was in shambles, with whole
cities destroyed, and even the victorious Allied nations were economically
crippled. In addition, much to the world's growing horror, the true costs of
Nazi rule were revealed in the closing months of the war and in the months to
1619
discovered. Simultaneously, the world was forced to grapple with the fact that
human beings now had the ability to extinguish all life on earth through
atomic weapons. These two traumas - the Holocaust and The Bomb - forced
1620
Chapter 11: The Holocaust
War II out of the need to designate, to name, the most horrendous crime
European Jews. The word itself means “murder of a people,” and while the act
have occurred since the ancient world - never before had a government
or as focused as the Holocaust. While much of the Holocaust took the form of
inchoate state of Turkey in the early 1920s or the various mass killings of
Europeans, the Holocaust was also distinct from other genocides in that much
1621
chambers built by Nazi agents or private firms contracted to do the work. In
not for the Holocaust. The term itself refers to early Jewish rituals of sacrifice
by fire, in which offerings were made to God and burned in the ancient
Jerusalem. Today, the term is mostly used in the United States; the rest of the
world largely uses the term Shoah, which means "catastrophe" in Hebrew. Its
Europe’s Jewish population at the time, and one-third of the entire global
stands out among the history of genocides for its shocking “success” from the
perspective of the Nazi leadership: they set out to kill every Jew, theoretically
1622
In addition to the murder of the Jews, millions more were killed by the
Nazis in the name of their ideology. While estimates vary, at least 250,000
addition, while not normally considered part of the Holocaust per se, almost
ideology. Slavs too were “racial inferiors” and “subhumans” according to the
Nazi racial hierarchy, and thus civilian populations in the Slavic countries
murder. Thus, while the Holocaust is, and must be, defined primarily as the
whole.
1623
Before the Holocaust
Nuremberg Laws, in 1935. Those laws defined “full” Jews as having three or
four practicing Jews as grandparents, and those with two or one as being
citizenship and banned from various professions. For the next four years
leading up to the war, the goal of the Nazi government was to force Jews to
emigrate from the Reich, while extracting as much wealth from them as
possible. The state imposed a “Reich Flight Tax,” meant to fleece fleeing Jews
of as much of their wealth as possible, and in 1938, the Nazis forced all Jews to
“Aryanization.”
the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) in which some 90 Jews were killed
1624
and 177 synagogues burned to the ground, after which 20,000 Jewish men
were arrested for “disrupting the peace” and incarcerated in prison camps -
this represented the first mass roundup of Jews simply for being
Jewish. Hermann Göring, at the time the second most powerful Nazi leader
after Hitler, then demanded one billion Marks from the German Jewish
population for the damage caused by the riots. After Kristallnacht, many of
but were all too often rebuffed by countries which, in the midst of the Great
flee before the war despite the incredible difficulty of doing so at the time.
1625
The aftermath of Kristallnacht in Munich: the gutted remains of the Ohel-Jakob Synagogue.
permanent options for ridding the Reich of Jews. Serious thought and
plan to ship all of the Jews in German-held territory to the African island of
began in 1941, many Nazis were still looking for some way to transport and
dump the Jews of Europe somewhere far from Germany. The stated goal of
1626
these schemes was to render the entire face of Europe, and possibly the world,
Judenrein: "Jew-Free." In the end, the “final solution to the Jewish question” -
the Nazi’s euphemism for the Holocaust - was decided to consist not of
deportation, but of systematic murder, but that decision does not appear to
Jews in detail is that the large majority of the victims of the Holocaust were
not from Germany. The bulk of the Jewish population of Europe was in the
east, concentrated in Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine. Poland alone had a
Poland as a whole. Unlike the Jews of Central and Western Europe, most of
1627
Union). Thus, the Jews of the east had almost nowhere to run and few who
When the war began, even Polish Jews were not systematically
murdered right away: they were beaten, humiliated, and sometimes murdered
outright, but there was not yet a campaign of focused, organized murder
against them. Instead, the initial task of Nazi murder squads was the
cities. Ghettos were neighborhoods of a town or city that were usually fenced-
off, surrounded with barbed wire, and then filled with the Jews of the
surrounding areas. The ghettos were built almost immediately, from late
1939 to early 1940, and ended up housing millions of people in areas that
1628
were meant to hold perhaps a few hundred thousand at most. The largest
were in the large Polish cities of Warsaw and Lodz; the Warsaw Ghetto alone
housed over 400,000 Jews at its height in late 1941. Conditions were
atrocious: the official food ration “paid” to Jewish workers who worked as
slave laborers for the Nazi war effort consisted of about 600 - 800 calories a
day (an adult should consume about 2,000 a day to remain healthy). Potato
peels were “as precious as diamonds” to ghetto inhabitants. The ghettos alone
and disease.
1629
The Holocaust Begins
The Holocaust itself began with the invasion of the Soviet Union in the
summer of 1941. As German armies advanced into Soviet territory, they were
with killing “Jews, Gypsies, and the disabled.” The Einsatzgruppen's technique
for murdering their victims consisted of marching Jews into the woods or
fields and systematically shooting them. The victims would be forced to dig
mass graves or ditches, to strip, and to watch as their entire community was
watch their children be murdered, and then join them in the mass graves. The
Einsatzgruppen and the local helpers they recruited were responsible for
by battalions of the Order Police, a hybrid of police force and national guard
mobilized for the war effort. In other words, many “regular soldiers,” not just
Nazi party members, were responsible for killing innocent men, women, and
1630
children, often for days at a time and at point-blank range. This aspect of the
Members of the Einsatzgruppen about to murder the Jewish woman and child, with Jewish men
was hard to generalize it in urban areas already under Nazi control. Many
murdering innocent people day after day. There were never very many
1631
Einsatzgruppen to begin with: four teams with about 6,000 soldiers assigned
to them in total. Out of necessity, they made heavy use of auxiliary troops to
the SS’s army, the Waffen SS, as well as regular soldiers of the Wehrmacht
At some point between the late summer and fall of 1941, the top Nazi
murder, which resulted in Nazi technicians devising “gas vans” that killed
their victims through carbon monoxide poisoning. By late fall of 1941, killing
Auschwitz, both of which had been built as slave labor camps in 1940. There,
1632
the first experiments with the infamous pesticide Zyklon B were carried out
on Russian POWs.
Based on the experiments with gas vans and temporary gas chambers at
most efficient and (for the killers) psychologically viable form of mass
murder. Thus, as of early 1942, the Nazis embarked on the most notorious
during the first weeks of Nazi rule in 1933. There were literally tens of
designed for one purpose: to kill people. There were only six of them in total,
and most were very small - often about a quarter of a square mile in size. All
1633
were located in occupied Poland, near rail lines and hidden in forests away
from major population centers. They were not meant to house prisoners for
slave labor; new arrivals to an extermination camp were typically dead within
The height of the Holocaust was thus shockingly short. It lasted from
early 1942, when the extermination facilities were put into operation, until
the late summer of 1943, a period of just over a year that saw 50% of the
Jewish victims of the Holocaust itself murdered. The major reason for that
incredible speed is that the ghettos of Poland were emptied into the
800,000 people, most of whom were sent from the enormous ghetto of
Warsaw. The millions of Jews who had been in Poland and the Russian
unprecedented rate.
1634
The most infamous of the camps is unquestionably
immediately to their deaths in the gas chambers, while the other 20% were
survived the war, although "relative" in this case still means "far less than
1%." Likewise, the infamous tattoos issued to prisoners were only performed
Within Auschwitz, not just Jews but regular criminals, enemies of the
Nazi regime, Romani, and various other groups were housed in grossly
and auxiliary guards based on who they were and where they were from, and
they were actively encouraged to treat each other differently based on those
1635
distinctions as well. Non-Jewish German criminals were given important
200,000 Jews who were spared immediate murder on arrival, the large
majority were either worked to death or murdered in the gas chambers after
1636
Three of the survivors of Buchenwald concentration camp, likely transferred from Auschwitz in
The five death camps besides Auschwitz operated from early 1942 until
the fall or winter of 1943 (one, Madjanek, was operational until the summer of
1944). They were used primarily to murder the Jews of Poland and their total
death toll was close to 2 million victims. In turn, they were never meant to be
1637
permanent: there were no large-scale slave labor facilities and only a handful
of Jews were kept alive on arrival to work as slaves for the guards and to burn
the bodies of their fellow victims after they were gassed (the survival rate
from the three major camps besides Auschwitz was one one-thousandth of
1%, or .0001 to 1, representing the 150 people who survived and the 1.5
million who did not). Slave revolts occurred at two camps in August and
October of 1943, which explains the fact that anyone survived these camps,
but by then the camps had already succeeded: almost the entire Polish Jewish
camps. Afterwards, the SS destroyed the remains of the camps to hide the
were large and made of concrete and steel (unlike the wood sheds used to
destination for every Jew captured by the Nazis in the years to come, and thus
most Jews from the western European countries occupied by Germany were
1638
sent to die in Auschwitz. The Nazis continued to prioritize the "final solution"
Auschwitz as the Allies steadily pressed against them in the east and south.
One of the most bizarre and chilling episodes of the Holocaust was the
German ally, over 700,000 Jews had survived the war, “protected” in the sense
that the Hungarian government had resisted the demands of the Germans to
turn over its Jews for murder. When the Germans learned that the
Hungarians were negotiating with the Soviets to switch allegiances, now that
the German defeat was all but assured by early 1944, they supported a coup
by Hungarian fascists under the direction of the Nazi state. That summer, at
deported over 500,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. The vast majority were
killed on arrival; in the Fall of 1944 Auschwitz was operated at its maximum
Holocaust was regarded by the top Nazi leadership as being a priority that
1639
was at least as high as actually fighting the war. Even after the war was
evidently lost, tremendous efforts were made to kill every Jew then in German
hands.
In early 1945, as the Soviet army closed from the east and the western
Allies from the west, the Nazis initiated a series of death marches from the
camps in Poland. Jewish prisoners that had survived up to that point, against
incredible odds, were forced to march up to twenty miles through the Polish
winter, then loaded into cattle cars and shipped into Germany. The western
Allies - mostly Britain and the US - discovered the first evidence of the
the gas chambers and the smattering of survivors who had been left behind
when the Germans fled. Ultimately, the Holocaust ended because the war
ended. The Nazis had been intent on "winning the Holocaust" even after it
1640
The Aftermath
The liberation of the camps was horrifying to the Allied soldiers who
discovered them in the closing months of the war. Dwight Eisenhower, the
Supreme Allied Commander of the forces that had carried out the D-Day
invasion, ordered that British and American troops alike document what they
discovered - the huge mounds of corpses, the open graves, the emaciated
the war in Europe finally ended, Allied troops and agents immediately
1641
Bodies at the Gusen Concentration Camp being transported for burial by German civilians
pressed into the work by Allied soldiers, in an attempt to force the Germans to confront the
category of crime designed by the victorious Allies to try to deal with the
1642
enormity of what they still called “Nazi atrocities.” Thanks to SS
documentation, the Allies correctly calculated that the death toll of Jews
murdered by the Third Reich amounted to roughly six million individuals, and
the basic mechanisms of deportation, slavery, and gassing were also clear.
Even though Allied authorities were able to piece together the basic
decades. Most survivors were deeply hesitant to talk about what they had
been through, and even in the newly-founded Jewish state of Israel, most of
uprising of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1944, rather than on the millions
who were killed. For decades, most survivors tried to make new lives, often
thousands of miles from their former homes, and most non-Jews were
genocide.
American Jewish historian, Raul Hilberg, who published his The Destruction of
1643
the European Jews in 1961, containing the first highly detailed study of the
number of victims, the methods used by the Nazis, and the breadth of the
a major subfield of history, political science, and sociology. Today, while the
The event that brought the Holocaust to world attention was not
scholarship, however, but the capture of the Nazi SS leader Adolf Eichmann in
Mossad. Eichmann was taken to Jerusalem and tried for his work in
overseeing the logistics of the Holocaust. His major job during the war had
been to make sure the trains carrying victims ran on time and efficiently
murderer,” a man who (apparently) never personally harmed anyone, but was
1644
still responsible for the deaths of millions through his actions. The trial was
highly publicized and it began the process of transforming the Holocaust from
historians and the general public, to being perhaps the most infamous event of
brought the history of the Holocaust to audiences around the western world,
survivors was the emergence of Holocaust Denial in the 1970s: the hateful,
disingenuous, and utterly false claim that the Holocaust never happened
became much more widespread by the 1980s. One of the most significant
1645
memorials to the victims of the Holocaust is the US Holocaust Memorial
Clinton in 1993. Certainly, by the 1990s, the Holocaust was an integral part of
possible not to know many of the details, even people with only a cursory
understanding of modern history are usually aware that the Nazis carried out
Conclusion
The Holocaust was one of the great traumas associated with World War
II. It forced the Western World to confront the fact that a highly advanced,
"civilized" nation at the heart of Europe - Germany - had been responsible not
just for a initiating a horrendously bloody war, but for carrying out the
"Western Civilization" was the most just and desirable matrix of law, politics,
1646
and culture was permanently undermined in the process. Since the ancient
Greeks, the proud distinction between civilization and barbarism had been
upheld in the minds of the social and political elites of the “West,” and yet it
was some of those very elites who perpetrated the ultimate act of barbarism
Image Citations:
1647
Chapter 12: The Soviet Union and the Cold War
At the height of Soviet power in the late 1960s, one-third of the world’s
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the People’s Republic of China
sympathetic to the “Soviet Bloc” (i.e. countries allied with or under the control
of the USSR) as they were to the United States and the other major capitalist
apparent mismatch between the Utopian promise of Marxism and the reality
This global split between communist and capitalist was only possible
because of the vast might of the USSR. The threat of world war terrified every
sane person on the planet, but beyond that, the threat of conventional military
1648
intervention by the Soviets was almost as threatening. The USSR controlled
in the globe. Its factories churned out military hardware at an enormous rate,
even as its scientists proved themselves the equal of anything the west could
produce and its athletes often defeated all challengers at the Olympics every
four years.
Behind the façade of strength and power, however, the USSR was one of
the strangest historical paradoxes of all time. It was a country whose official
everyone enjoyed the fruits of science and industrialism and no one was left
with its citizens enjoying dramatically lower standards of living than their
contemporaries in the west and workers toiling harder and for fewer benefits
1649
imperialism, and yet the USSR controlled the governments of most of its
“allied” nations after World War II. Of all forms of government, communism
the people instead of false representatives bought with the money of the rich,
Stalinism
The Bolshevik party rose to power against the backdrop of the anarchy
War I. Once the Bolsheviks were firmly in power by 1922, they embarked on a
experiments. After all, no country in the history of the planet to that point had
1650
how a socialist society was supposed to be organized. Facing a terrible
economic crisis from the years of war, the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin
launched the New Economic Policy, which allowed limited market exchange of
goods and foodstuffs, even as the state supported a renaissance in the arts and
literature. For a few years, not only did standards of living rise, but there was
Lenin had driven the revolution forward, and he oversaw the social and
1927, Joseph Stalin politically defeated his enemies (most importantly the
Bolshevik leaders Trotsky and Zinoviev, two of Lenin’s closest allies before his
death) and consolidated total control of the state. Officially, Stalin was the
“Premier” of the communist party - “the first” - overseeing its central decision-
making committee, the Politburo. Unofficially, Stalin’s control of the top level
1651
of the party translated into pure autocracy, not hugely dissimilar in nature to
Party had been relatively innocuous; he was its secretary, a position of little
appointment to a given position within the party, other members of the party
make a power grab himself. Lenin suffered a series of strokes in the early
1920s, giving Stalin the opportunity to build up his power base without
opposition, even though Lenin himself was worried about Stalin’s dictatorial
tendencies.
compared thanks to their respective legacies of mass murder. Stalin did not
write manifestos about his beliefs, nor did he leave behind many documents
1652
have had to rely on the accounts of people who knew Stalin rather than having
access to troves of personal records. He also changed his mind frequently and
difficult to pin down his essential beliefs or goals. His only overarching
is not easy to recognize the enemy, the goal is achieved even if only five
1653
Stalin
end of the 1920s, Stalin forced through massive change to the Soviet economy
and society while periodically killing off anyone he could imagine being a
after an initial revolutionary outburst, but instead it was stuck in one place,
massive industrial buildup. The only thing that benefited from Stalin’s
1654
oversight was the military, which grew dramatically and, for the first time
since the Napoleonic Wars, achieved a level of parity with the west.
communist party, the army, or even the police forces themselves. Normally,
Stalin's agents would use torture to force the hapless victims to confess to
outlandish charges like conspiring with Germany or (later) the United States
to bring down the Soviet Union from within. His secret police force, the NKVD
(its Russian acronym - it was later changed to KGB) often following direct
orders from Stalin himself, eliminated uncounted thousands more. Thus, even
at the highest levels of power in the USSR, no one was safe from Stalin's
paranoia.
Stalin relied on the NKVD to carry out the purges, targeting better-off
peasants known as kulaks, then the Old Bolsheviks (who had taken part in the
1655
machinery of accusation and punishment that plagued the country in the
second half of the 1930s. Every purge was designed to, at least in part, purge
the past purgers, blaming them for “excesses” that had killed innocent people -
this of course simply led to the murder of more innocents. So many people
disappeared that most Soviets came to believe that the NKVD was
labor camps known as gulags, almost all of which were located in the frigid
While emblematic of Stalin’s tyranny, the purges did not result in nearly
as many deaths as did his other policies. Beginning in 1928, Stalin ordered a
definitive break with the limited market exchange of the New Economic
1656
imposed the collectivization of agriculture, forcing millions of peasants to
abandon their farms and villages and move to gigantic new collective farms.
particular, peasants across the USSR (and especially in the Ukraine) starved to
those who were executed for resisting. Thus, the total deaths were probably
over 10 million. Despite falling abysmally short of its production goals, where
peasants and the land. In the future, Soviet peasants would be a resentful and
inefficient class of farm workers rather than peasants rooted in the land who
capacity and that of the west, Stalin also introduced the Five-Year Plans, in
which sky-high production quotas were set for heavy industry. While those
1657
quotas were never actually met and thousands died in the frenzy of industrial
buildup, the Five-Year Plans (three of which took place before World War II
began) were successful as a whole in achieving near parity with the western
ideology that was reflected in reality in the USSR was that industrial workers,
while obliged to toil in conditions far from a “worker’s paradise,” were at least
spared the worst depredations of the purges and did not face outright
starvation.
1658
Soviet propaganda consistently mythologized the supposed fervor of industrial workers. The
Stalin’s overriding goals were twofold: secure allies abroad against the
growing power of Germany (and, to an extent, Japan), and drag the USSR into
powers, the Soviet state under Stalin did end the Soviet Union’s pariah status,
receiving official diplomatic recognition from the US and France in 1933. The
Five-Year Plans were part of the USSR’s new “command economy,” one in
planning was disastrous in the long run, but in the short run it did succeed in
industrializing the USSR. On the eve of World War II, the USSR had become
the third-largest industrial power in the world after the United States and
Germany, and was counted among the major political powers of not just
Thus, at a terrible human cost, Stalin’s policies did transform the USSR
into a semblance of a modern state by the eve of World War II - “just in time”
as it turned out. During the war the USSR bore the brunt of German military
power. More than 25 million Soviets died on the eastern front, soldiers and
civilians alike, and it was through the incredible sacrifice of the Soviet people
that the German army was finally broken and driven back. In the aftermath of
World War II, Stalin’s power was unshakable. During the war, he had played
the role of the powerful, protective "uncle" of the Soviet people, and after
During the war, the one thing that tied Britain, the US, and the USSR
compromises that would in some cases haunt the postwar period. In 1943,
1660
after the tide of the war had shifted against Germany but well before the end
was in sight, the "Big Three" leaders of Britain, the US, and the USSR met in
Tehran to discuss the war and what would be done afterwards. There, Stalin
insisted that the territory seized from Poland by the USSR in 1939 would
remain in Soviet hands: Poland would thus shrink enormously. Roosevelt and
Churchill, well aware of the critical role then being played by Soviet troops,
The Tehran Conference in 1943 represented the first in-person meeting of the “Big
Three.” From left: Josef Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill.
1661
In 1944, a team of politicians and economists from several Allied
nations met in New Hampshire and devised the basis of the postwar economic
order, the Bretton Woods Agreement. That agreement fixed the dollar as the
Fund and the World Bank to stabilize the international economy, and fixed
currency exchange rates. This plan initially included the Soviets, who would
Germany (as noted below, however, the USSR pulled out in 1948, thereby
driving home an economic as well as political divide between east and west).
In January of 1945, when the end was finally in sight and Soviet forces
already occupied most of Eastern Europe, Stalin stipulated that the postwar
1662
allow. The leaders also agreed to divide Germany into different zones until
such time as they could determine how to allow the Germans, purged of
incredible sacrifice of the Soviet people in the war; 90% of the casualties on
the Allied side up to 1944 were Soviets (mostly Russians, but including
assumed the United States would need Soviet help in bringing about the final
defeat of Japan as well. Each side tried to avoid antagonizing the other,
especially while the war continued, even though they privately recognized
stake.
citizens) across the globe hoped that the postwar order would be
was the creation of an official international body whose purpose was the
1663
prevention of armed conflict and the pursuit of peaceful and productive
policies around the world: the United Nations, the second attempt at an
of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s. The UN was founded in 1945 as a body of
policies, seeing its first major role in the Nuremberg Trials of the surviving
Nazi leaders. Its Security Council was authorized to deploy military force
when necessary, but its very reason to be was to prevent war from being used
powers as a founding member of the UN, and there were at least some hopes
Despite the foundation of the UN, and the fact that both the US and USSR
were permanent members of the Security Council, the divide between them
undermined the possibility of global unity. Instead, by the late 1940s, the
1664
world was increasingly split into the two rival “camps” of the Cold War. The
term itself refers to the decades-long rivalry between the two postwar
“superpowers,” the United States and the Soviet Union. This was a conflict
that, fortunately for the human species, never became a "hot" war. Both sides
had enormous nuclear arsenals by the 1960s that would have ensured that a
and including the actual possibility of the extinction of the human species (the
collective self-preservation instinct that the conflict worked itself out in the
race, and "proxy wars" fought elsewhere that did not directly draw both sides
and plans. In 1947 the US issued the Truman Doctrine, which pledged to help
1665
was about the defense of free people who were threatened by foreign agents,
but as became very clear over the next few decades, it was more important
that people were not communists than they were “free” from
communist takeovers had already occurred. The immediate impetus for the
doctrine was a conflict raging in Greece after WWII, in which the communist
resistance movement that had fought the Nazis during the war sought to
aftermath. Importantly, while both the British and then the US supported the
Greek government, the USSR did not lend any aid to the communist rebels,
rightly fearing that doing so could lead to a much larger war. Furious at what
Stalin pulled the USSR out of the Bretton Woods economic agreement in early
1948.
1666
The Truman Doctrine was closely tied to the fear of what American
American foreign policy during the entire period of the Cold War. That theory
was central to American policy from the 1950s through the 1980s, deciding
the course of politics, conflicts, and wars from Latin America to Southeast
Asia.
Along with the Truman Doctrine, the United States introduced the
Marshall Plan in 1948, named for the American secretary of state at the
countries trying to rebuild from the war. European states also founded a
Cooperation that any country accepting loans was obliged to join. Stalin
regarded the OEEC as a puppet of the US, so he banned all countries under
1667
Soviet influence from joining, and hence from accepting
loans. Simultaneously, the Soviets were busy extracting wealth and materials
from their new puppets in Eastern Europe to help recover from their own war
losses. The legacy of the Marshall Plan, the OEEC, and Soviet policy was to
from the war, the East remained poor and comparatively backwards.
had truly fallen across Eastern Europe. Everywhere, local communist parties
at first ruled along with other parties, following free elections. Then, with the
parties out through terror tactics and legal bans on non-communist political
pledged to cooperate with the USSR. Practically speaking, this meant that
took its orders directly from Moscow - there was no independent political
decision-making allowed.
1668
The major exception was Yugoslavia. Ironically, the one state that had
already been taken over by a genuine communist revolution was the one that
was not a puppet of the USSR. During the war, an effective anti-German
succeeded in seizing power over the entire country. Tito, the communist
leader of Yugoslavia, had great misgivings about the Soviet takeover of the
rest of Eastern Europe, and he and Stalin angrily broke with one another after
the war. Thus, Yugoslavia was a communist country, but not one controlled
by the USSR.
In turn, it was Stalin's anger that Yugoslavia was outside of his grasp
that inspired the Soviets to carry out a series of purges against the communist
1953 more communists were killed by other communists than had died at the
hands of the Nazis during the war (i.e. in terms of direct Nazi persecution of
1669
communists, not including casualties of World War II itself). Communist
leaders were put on show trials, both in their own countries and sometimes
after being hauled off to Moscow, where they were first tortured into
that this period, especially the first few years of the 1950s, saw anti-Semitism
Simultaneously, the world was dividing into the two “camps” of the Cold
War. The zones of occupation of Germany controlled by the US, France, and
Britain became the new nation of the Federal Republic of Germany, known as
joined the US in forming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, whose
1670
stated purpose was the defense of each of the member states from invasion –
tested its first atomic bomb in August of 1949, thereby establishing the stakes
of the conflict: the total destruction of human life. And, finally, by 1955 the
Soviets had formalized their own military system with the Warsaw Pact,
comparable to NATO.
aggressive in the early years of the Cold War, making no overt attempts to
confrontation between the two camps took place between May of 1948 and
June of 1949, when the Soviets blockaded West Berlin. The city of Berlin was
in East Germany, but its western “zones” remained in the hands of the US,
aftermath of the war. As Cold War tensions mounted, Stalin ordered the
blockade of all supplies going to the western zones. The US led a massive
1671
ongoing airlift of food and supplies for nearly a year while both sides
the blockade, and West Berlin became a unique pocket of the western camp in
A US Air Force transport plane dropping candy (part of a morale-boosting campaign) to children
It is worth considering the fact that Europe had been, scant years
earlier, the most powerful region on Earth, ruling the majority of the surface
of the globe. Now, it was either under the heel of one superpower or
had divided the former “great powers” in the past seemed insignificant
of death and imprisonment that touched nearly every family in the USSR, with
millions still trapped in the gulags of Siberia. After a power struggle between
the top members of the communist party, Stalin’s successor emerged: Nikita
Khrushchev, a former coal miner and engineer who rose in the ranks of the
party to become its leader. Khrushchev was a “true believer” in the Soviet
system, genuinely believing that the USSR would overtake the west
economically and that its citizens would in turn eventually enjoy much better
1673
Khrushchev broke with Stalinism soon after securing power. In 1956,
he gave a speech to the leaders of the communist party later dubbed the
“secret speech” - it was not broadcast to the general public, but Khrushchev
Stalin for bringing about a “cult of personality” that was at variance with true
the Siberian prison camps and summary executions. Shortly after the speech,
Khrushchev had four million prisoners released from the gulags as a practical
Soviet history. For a brief period, there was another flowering of literary and
ubiquitous censorship was relaxed, with a few accurate accounts of the gulags
This hope of a new beginning was not limited to the Soviet Union
1674
party inspired a mass uprising calling for not just a reformed, more
completely. That led to a full-scale invasion by the Soviet army that killed
aftermath. It was clear that Khrushchev might not want to follow directly in
dissent with the Soviet system in the USSR itself, Khrushchev reasserted
control. A few noteworthy works of art that hinted at dissent were allowed to
trickle out (until Khrushchev was ousted by hardliners in 1964, at any rate),
but larger-scale change was out of the question. The state instead
1675
products and materials no one wanted, and whole regions were polluted to
to be alive as it had been under Stalin, but people recognized that the system
was not "really" about the pursuit of communism. Instead, for most, the only
bureaucracy. The USSR went from a murderous police state under Stalin to a
bloated, corrupt police state under Khrushchev and the leaders who followed
him.
It was also under Khrushchev that the Cold War reached its most
sincerely believed in the possibility of the USSR “winning” the Cold War by
outstripping the western world economically and winning over the nations of
1676
Stalinist focus on building up heavy industry and, especially, military
hardware, but he also devoted huge energies toward science and engineering.
During Khrushchev’s tenure as premier the “space race” joined the arms
race as a major centerpiece of Cold War policy. Despite the limited practical
and the first superpower to reach a given breakthrough in the space race had
thus “won” a major symbolic victory in the eyes of the world. In addition,
since the space race was based on the mastery of rocket technology, the
military implications were obvious. In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the
first satellite to orbit the earth, an event which was perceived as a major
Soviet triumph in the Cold War. Khrushchev claimed that the USSR had also
developed missiles that could strike targets on the other side of the world, and
thus the west feared that the Soviets could as easily detonate a nuclear
1677
A commemorative Soviet postage stamp depicting Sputnik’s orbit.
The resulting fear and resentment between the two sides saw even
greater emphasis on both the space race and the buildup of nuclear arms
going into the 1960s. The American President John F Kennedy was a hard-line
1678
revolutionaries overthrew the right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista (who had
themselves with the USSR. Thus, as Kennedy took office in 1960, he faced not
only the growing technological and military power of the USSR itself, but what
known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion. In the aftermath, Castro and Khrushchev
installed missile batteries in its allied nations of Italy and Turkey within
striking distance of the USSR. American spy planes, however, detected the
construction of the missile site in Cuba and the shipments of missiles en route
1679
to Cuba, leading to the point in history when the human race stood closest to
could have led directly to nuclear war. Many American military leaders
missile sites would be destroyed quickly enough to prevent the Soviets from
stakes of the conflict and, thankfully for world history, not wanting to destroy
the world in the name of national pride. The American and Soviet navies
faced off in the Atlantic while frenzied diplomacy sought an end to the
crisis. After thirteen panicked days, both sides agreed to withdraw their
missiles, but not before an incident in which a Soviet submarine very nearly
1680
Vasili Arkhipov - called off the strike that could have led directly to nuclear
war.
In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US and USSR agreed to
crises. The United States dropped the very idea of “limited” nuclear war from
its tactical repertoire and instead recognized that any nuclear strike was the
between the superpowers continued, spiking again during the 1980s, both
sides did enter into various treaties that limited the pace of nuclear arms
production as well.
Leninism, would remain in place, but even elites abandoned the idea that
1681
“real” communism was achievable. Instead, life in the USSR was about trying
to find a place in the system, rather than pursuing the more far-reaching goals
of communist theory. The state and the economy - deeply wedded in any case
- were rife with corruption and nepotism, and a deep-seated, bitter cynicism
became the outlook of most Soviet citizens toward their government and their
lot in life. Arguably, this pattern had already emerged under Khrushchev, but
Dubcek (who had fought against the Nazis in the war and had been a staunch
ally and trusted underling of the Soviets up to that point) received permission
1682
industry. Dubcek relaxed censorship and allowed workers to organize into
Russia. These reforms were eagerly embraced by the Czechs and Slovaks.
Predictably, the reforms proved too radical for Moscow. Brezhnev sent
in the Soviet military, and all of the other Warsaw Pact countries (except
Romania) also sent in troops. This reaction was regarded around the world as
especially crude and disproportionate, given that the Czechs and Slovaks did
not rise up in any kind of violent way (as the Hungarians had done, at least
briefly, twelve years earlier). Instead, the message was clear: no meaningful
eventually come, but not until the 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev.
profoundly failed to realize its stated goals of freedom, equality, and justice,
1683
has led many people (not just historians) to speculate about what was
inherently flawed with the Soviet system. There are many theories, three of
circumstances. It was largely cut off from the aid of the rest of the world until
after World War II, and the Bolsheviks inherited control of a backwards,
their methods, to catch up with the nations of the west and to create at least
the possibility of a better life for future Soviet citizens. This thesis is
supported by the success of the Red Army: if Stalin had not industrialized
Russia and the Ukraine by force, the theory goes, the results of World War II
level of Soviet society: the huge black market and the nepotism and infighting
1684
present in everything from getting a job to getting an apartment in one of the
positions - better food, better housing, vacations - that were never available
to rank-and-file citizens.
decades, after all), but the Soviet system went mad with trying to control
everything. The Soviet economy was the ultimate expression of the idea of a
set by huge bureaucracies within the Soviet state, and every industry was
goods and services people actually needed (or wanted) and equally vast
1685
machinery. To cite a single example (noted by the historian Tony Judt), party
supplies from stores in order to meet their yearly quotas; those quotas were
that there had never been anything like a democratic or liberal society in
Russia. There was no tradition of what the British called the “loyal
opposition” of political parties who may disagree on particulars but who are
still accepted as legitimate expressions of the will and opinion of parts of the
either, and by the Brezhnev era political connections were far more important
than was any kind of heartfelt devotion to Marxist theory. Thus, the kinds of
decisions made by the Soviet leadership were inspired by a pure, ruthless will
In the end, perhaps the biggest problem with the Soviet system was the
fact that it was more important to fit into the system than to speak the
1686
truth. The essential threat of violence and imprisonment during the Stalinist
exist - as an example, famous Russian scientists lived under house arrest for
decades because they could not be disposed of, but neither could they be
It also bears consideration that not everything about Soviet society was,
actually, a failure. After the “Thaw” in the early 1950s, almost no one was
executed for simply disagreeing with the state, and prison terms were much
shorter. Standards of living were mediocre, but medical care, housing, and
food was either free or cheap because of state subsidies. The kind of “leveling-
out” associated with communist theory did happen, in a sense, because most
1687
Union represented one of the most profound, albeit often blood-soaked and
II was the shift in the locus of power from Europe to the United States and the
Soviet Union. It was American aid or Soviet power that guided the
1688
themselves more than capable of making policy decisions for the countries
with the height of European power still being a living memory. One issue of
most of which were still intact in the immediate postwar period. Many
Europeans felt that, with all their flaws, colonies still somehow proved the
thought that their colonies could somehow keep them on the same level as the
1689
There were a host of problems with imperialism by 1945, however, that
were all too evident. Colonial troops had played vital roles in the war, with
millions of Africans and Asians serving in the allied armies (well over two
fascism and tyranny, yet back in their home countries they did not have access
to aid in the war effort as a result. Once the war was over, troops returned
home to societies that were still governed not only as political dependencies,
but were divided starkly along racial lines. The contrast between the
ostensible goals of the war and the obvious injustice in the colonies could not
superpowers themselves. At its worst, the Cold War led to “proxy wars”
1690
between American-led or at least American-supplied anti-communists and
Union or communist (as of 1949) China. There was thus a complex matrix of
colonies on the one hand and proxy conflicts and wars between factions
caught in the web of the Cold War on the other. Sometimes, independence
movements like those of India and Ghana managed to avoid being ensnared in
the Cold War. Other times, however, countries like Vietnam became
outbreak of war despite its nominal goal of arbitrating peaceful solutions for
Council, the body that was charged with authorizing the use of force when
necessary. Likewise, the two “camps” of the Cold War generally remained
1691
loyal to their respective superpower leaders, ensuring that there could be no
rights. Here, again, the United Nations was generally unable to prevent
Fortunately for the human species, the Cold War never turned into a
“hot” war between the two superpowers, despite close calls like that of the
Cuban Missile Crisis. It did, however, lead to wars around the world that were
part of the Cold War setting but also involved conflicts between colonizers
1692
and the colonized. In other words, many conflicts in the postwar era
empires and proxy wars between the two camps of the Cold War.
The first such war was in Korea. Korea had been occupied by Japan
since 1910, one of the first countries to be conquered during Japan’s bid to
create an East Asian and Pacific empire that culminated in the Pacific theater
of World War II. After the defeat of Japan, Korea was occupied by Soviet
troops in the north and US troops in the south. In the midst of the confusion
in the immediate postwar era, the two superpowers ignored Korean demands
for independence and instead divided the country in two. In 1950, North
Korean troops supported with Soviet arms and allied Chinese troops invaded
the south in the name of reuniting the country under communist rule. This
was a case in which both the Soviets and the Chinese directly supported an
1693
mostly of American soldiers, sailors, and pilots fought alongside South Korean
independence from France, and French forces (such as they were following
colony of Indochina. When the Korean War exploded a few years later, the
involvement grew, orders for munitions and equipment from the US to Japan
1694
revitalized the Japanese economy and, ironically given the carnage of the
Pacific theater of World War II, began to forge a strong political alliance
Chinese army in support of the northern forces, the Korean War ended in a
Korea in 1953, and both sides agreed to a cease fire. Technically, however, the
war has never officially ended - both sides have simply remained in a tense
state of truce since 1953. The war itself tore apart the country, with three
ideological and economic divide between north and south that only grew
1695
The Korean War energized the American obsession with preventing the
protests of the British and French, that West Germany be allowed to rearm in
country to country seemed entirely plausible at the time, and across the
the American War). The Vietnam War is among the most infamous in modern
American history (for Americans) because America lost it. In turn, American
commitment to the war only makes if it is placed in its historical context, that
resolve in the face of the spread of communism. The conflict was, in fact, as
1696
much about colonialism and imperialism as it was communism: the essential
motivation of the North Vietnamese forces was the desire to seize genuine
independence from foreign powers. The war itself was an outgrowth of the
conflict between the Vietnamese and their French colonial masters, one that
The war “really” began with the end of World War II. During the war,
the Japanese seized Vietnam from the French, but with the Japanese defeat the
French tried to reassert control, putting a puppet emperor on the throne and
moving their forces back into the country. Vietnamese independence leaders,
communist North Vietnamese forces (the Viet Minh) in a vicious guerrilla war
Ho Chi Minh once prophesied that “you will kill ten of our men, but we will kill
one of yours and you will end up by wearing yourselves out.” The Soviet
1697
Union and China both provided weapons and aid to the North Vietnamese,
while the US anticipated its own (later) invasion by supporting the South.
The French period of the conflict reached its culminating point in 1954
when the French were soundly defeated at Dien Bien Phu, a French fortress
that was overwhelmed by the Viet Minh. The French retreated, leaving
Vietnam torn between the communists in the north and a corrupt but anti-
1698
allow the national elections that had been planned for 1956, the US instead
over the entire country. An insurgency, labeled the Viet Cong (“Vietnamese
In 1964, pressured by both Soviet and Chinese advisers and with the US
stepping up pressure on the Viet Cong, the Viet Minh leadership launched a
the Viet Minh and the Viet Cong insurgents. Over time, thousands of American
Lyndon Johnson called for a full-scale armed response, which opened the
floodgates for a true commitment to the war (technically, war was never
1699
declared, however, with the entire conflict constituting a “police action” from
Ultimately, Ho Chi Minh was proven right in his predictions about the
war. American and South Vietnamese forces were fought to a standstill by the
Viet Minh and Viet Cong, with neither side winning a definitive victory. All the
while, however, the war was becoming more and more unpopular in America
itself and in its allied countries. As the years went by, journalists catalogued
home. Despite the vast military commitment, US and South Korean forces
The entire youth movement of the 1960s and 1970s was deeply
1700
about the war carried on by the US government, by atrocities committed
1973, with American approval for the war hovering at 30%, President Richard
Nixon oversaw the withdrawal of American troops and the end of support for
the South Vietnamese. The Viet Minh finally seized the capital of Saigon and
ended the war in 1975. The human cost was immense: over a million
A Pulitzer-Prize winning photo from 1972 depicting the aftermath of a napalm attack on a South
Vietnamese village suspected of harboring Viet Cong forces. The girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, is
naked after stripping off her burning clothes. She survived and ultimately became a peace
1701
activist as an adult. Images like the above helped to inspire fervent anti-war sentiments in the
was the relative restraint of the Soviet Union. The USSR provided both
military supplies and financial aid to North Vietnamese forces, but it fell far
short of any kind of sustained intervention along the American model in the
south. Likewise, the People’s Republic of China supported the Viet Minh, but it
did so in direct competition with the USSR (following a historic break between
focusing on maintaining power and control in the eastern bloc and avoiding
That being noted, not all Cold War conflicts were so lopsided in terms of
the center of the single most dangerous nuclear standoff in history in part
1702
because the USSR was willing to confront American interests
doing so.
Egypt had been part of the British empire since 1882 when it was seized
World War I, but remained squarely under British control in terms of its
foreign policy. Likewise, the Suez Canal - the crucially important link between
the Mediterranean and Red Sea completed in 1869 - was under the direct
control of a Canal Company dominated by the British and French. In 1952 the
sought to bring him into the American camp by offering funds for a massive
1703
new dam on the Nile, but then Nasser made an arms deal with (communist)
Czechoslovakia. The funds were denied, and Nasser announced that he would
instead seize the Suez Canal (which flowed directly through Egyptian
Canal. Henceforth, all of the traffic going through the vitally important canal
and France plotted to reassert control. The British and French were joined by
Israeli politicians who saw Nasser’s bold move as a direct threat to Israeli
Cold War conflict as well. Concerned both at the imperial posturing of Britain
and France and at the prospect of the invasion sparking Soviet involvement,
1704
French, and British withdraw, threatening economic boycotts (all while
attempting to reduce the volatility with the Soviets). Days later Khrushchev
threatened nuclear strikes if the French, Israeli, and British forces did not pull
back. Cowed, the Israeli, French, and British forces retreated. The Suez Crisis
demonstrated that the US dominated the policy decisions of its allies almost as
completely as did the Soviets theirs. The US might not run its allied
governments as puppet states, but it could directly shape their foreign policy.
In the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, Egypt's control of the canal was
assured. While generally closer to the USSR than the US in its foreign policy, it
also tried to initiate a genuine "third way" between the two superpowers, and
Egyptian leaders called for Arab nationalism and unity in the Middle East as a
way to stay independent of the Cold War. Despite that intention, however, the
Suez Crisis saw both superpowers take a more active interest in maintaining
commitments of those states. This led to the strange spectacle of the United
1705
autocratic monarchy of Saudi Arabia and other states resolutely uncommitted
within the Cold War. For the most part, the simplest way in which an
ideology were targeted by the US, whereas those that avoided it rarely drew
the ire of either superpower. The exceptions were countries like Iran that
assert Iranian ownership of its own oil fields, replacing him with a corrupt
1706
interests. Still, in general it was possible for a country to fight for its
independence and still stay in the good graces of the USSR (as with Egypt)
country to embrace socialism and stay out of the crosshairs of the US thanks
Thus, while there were only a handful of true proxy wars over the
of the nineteenth century, they collapsed in the decades following World War
the end of the 1960s. Likewise, European possessions in Asia all but vanished
1707
Given the rapidity with which the empires collapsed it is tempting to
imagine that the European states simply acknowledged the moral bankruptcy
inhumane as had been the establishment of empire in the first place. In some
geopolitical relevance. In others, such as the British in Kenya and the French
being noted, there were also major (soon to be former) colonies that achieved
independence without the need for violent insurrection against their imperial
masters. (Note: given the very large number of countries that achieved
1708
The case of India is iconic in that regard. Long the "jewel in the crown of
the British empire," India was both an economic powerhouse and a massive
symbol of British prestige. By World War II, however, the Indian National
astonishing 2.5 million Indian troops served the British Empire during World
War II despite the growth in nationalist sentiment, but returned after victory
in Europe was achieved to find a social and political system still designed to
administration. Peaceful protests before the war grew in intensity during it,
and in the aftermath (in part because of the financial devastation of the war), a
critical mass of British politicians finally conceded that India would have to be
granted independence in the near future. The British state established the
The British government, however, made it clear that the actual logistics
Indians. A conflict exploded between the Indian Muslim League and the
1709
Hindu-dominated Congress Party, with the former demanding an independent
Muslim state. The British came to support the idea and finally the Congress
driven from India and millions of Hindus and Sikhs were driven from
Muslims and Hindus from what had been their homes. Hundreds of
thousands, and possibly more than a million people died, and the states of
Pakistan and India remain at loggerheads to the present. Gandhi himself, who
1710
Refugees during the Partition.
Religious (and ethnic) divides within former colonies were not unique
imperialism in the first place - the “national” borders of states like Iraq, Ghana,
and Rwanda had been arbitrarily created by the imperial powers decades
earlier with complete disregard for the religious and ethnic differences of the
people who lived within the borders. In the Iraqi example, both Sunni and
Shia Muslims, Christian Arabs (the Assyrians, many of whom claim a direct
1711
line of descent from ancient Assyria), different Arab ethnicities, and Kurds all
state under British domination. Iraq’s ethnic and religious diversity did not
homeland. The British had held the “mandate” (political governorship) of the
territory of Palestine before WWII, having seized it after the collapse of the
Palestine since around the turn of the century, fleeing anti-Semitism in Europe
and hoping to create a Jewish state as part of the Zionist movement founded
1712
During World War I, the British had both promised to support the
leaders that Britain would aid them in creating independent states in the
aftermath of the Ottoman Empire’s expected demise. Even the official British
of Palestine (both Muslim and Christian) support in ensuring their own “civil
and religious rights.” In other words, the dominant European power in the
area at the time, and the one that was to directly rule it from 1920 – 1947,
After World War I, however, the British established control over a large
swath of territory that included the future state of Israel, frustrating Arab
hopes for their own independence. Countries like Iraq, Transjordan, and the
thrones in the process. Meanwhile, between 1918 and 1939, the Jewish
1713
population of Palestine went from roughly 60,000 to 650,000 as Jews
attracted to Zionism moved to the area. The entire period was replete with
riots and growing hostility between the Arab and Jewish populations, with the
British trying (and generally failing) to keep the peace. As war loomed in
1939 the British even tried to restrict Jewish immigration to avoid alienating
After World War II, the British proved unable and unwilling to try to
manage the volatile region, turning the territory over to the newly-created
United Nations in April of 1947. The UN’s plan to divide the territory into two
states – one for Arabs and one for Jews – was rejected by all of the countries in
the region, and Israel’s creation as a formal state in May of 1948 saw nine
months of war between the Jews of the newly-created state of Israel and a
coalition of the surrounding Arab states: Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, along
ensuing war, as the Arab states were in their infancy as well, and Jewish
1714
settlers in Palestine had spent years organizing their own militias. When the
dust settled, there were nearly a million Palestinian refugees and a state that
Since the creation of Israel, there have been three more full-scale
regional wars: the 1956 Suez War (noted above in the discussion of Egypt),
which had no lasting consequences besides adding fuel to future conflicts, the
Six-Day War of 1967, that resulted in great territorial gains for Israel, and the
Yom Kippur War of 1973 that undid some of those gains. In addition to the
Africa
While the cases of India and Israel were, and are, of tremendous
was the wave of independence movements across Africa in the 1950s and
1960s. Africa had been the main target of the European imperialism of the
1715
late nineteenth century. The Scramble for Africa was both astonishingly quick
(lasting from the 1880s until about 1900) and amazingly complete, with all of
Africa but Liberia and Ethiopia taken over by one European state or
collapsed as rapidly as it had arisen a bit over a half century earlier. In turn, in
some places this process was peaceful, but in many it was extremely violent.
In West Africa, the former colony of the Gold Coast became well known
for its charismatic independence leader Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah not only
movement and negotiations with the British, but founded a movement called
a “United States of Africa” that would achieve parity with the other great
powers of the world to the betterment of Africans everywhere. His vision was
power, wealth, and influence would ensure that outside powers would never
1716
again dominate Africans. While that vision did not come to pass, the concept
fighters plunged the country into a civil war. The British and native white
rebels and slowly starving them to death in the hills. The rebels, disparagingly
attacked white civilians, in many cases murdering them outright. Finally, after
11 years of war, Kenya was granted its independence and elected a former
insurgent leader as its first president. Ironically, while British forces were in a
1717
While most former colonies adopted official policies of racial equality,
and for the first time since the Scramble black Africans achieved political
Africa. South Africa had always been an unusual British colony. 21% of the
British settlers and the older Dutch colony of Afrikaners who had been
conquered and then incorporated by the British at the end of the nineteenth
unwilling to share power with the black majority. As early as 1950 white
and blacks and the complete subordination of the latter to the former.
racist laws were repealed elsewhere - not least in the United States as a result
1718
of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s - Apartheid remained resolutely
intact. That system would remain in place until 1991, when the system finally
Mandela was released, soon becoming South Africa’s first black president.
nor in the legacy of racial division that remained from the period of
colonization. One of the most violent struggles for independence of the period
Algerians died, along with tens of thousands of French and pieds-noires ("black
feet," the pejorative term invented by the French for the white residents of
Algeria). The heart of the conflict had to do with a concept of French identity:
particularly on the political right, many French citizens felt that France’s
power. Likewise, many in France were ashamed of the French defeat and
1719
occupation in World War II and refused to simply give up France’s empire
without a struggle. This sentiment was felt particularly acutely by the French
officer corps, with many French officers having only ever been on the losing
side of wars (World War II and Indochina). They were thus determined to
On the other hand, many French citizens realized all too well that the
values the Fourth French Republic supposedly stood for – liberty, equality,
and fraternity - were precisely what had been denied the native people of
Algeria since it was first conquered by France during the restored monarchy
under the Bourbons in the early nineteenth century. In fact, “native” Algerians
were divided legally along racial and religious lines: Muslim Arab and Berber
Algerians were denied access to political power and usually worked in lower-
paying jobs, while white, Catholic Algerians (descendents of both French and
1720
independence from France and launched a campaign of attacks on both
The French response was brutal. French troops, many fresh from the
suspected of having information that could aid the French. Algerian civilians
were often caught in the middle of the fighting, with the French army
targeting the civilian populace when it saw fit. While the torture campaign
was kept out of the press, rumors of its prevalence soon spread to continental
on to Algeria. The war grew in Algeria even as France itself was increasingly
1721
French soldiers next to the bodies of Algerian insurgents.
itself, many soldiers both in Algeria and in other parts of France and French
spoke out against the war (the most prominent French philosopher at the
1722
attack). Troops launched an attempted coup in Algeria in 1958 and briefly
dictatorship all too real, that the leader of the Free French forces in World
predicament, with the support of the army. He placated the army temporarily,
president. De Gaulle opened negotiations with the FLN in 1960, leading to the
voters. Despite being an ardent believer in the French need for “greatness,”
De Gaulle was perceptive enough to know that the battle for Algeria was lost
1723
In the aftermath of the Algerian War, millions of white Algerians moved
to France, many of them feeling betrayed and embittered. They became the
right wing coalesced in the first openly fascistic party in France since the end
of World War II: the Front National. Racist, anti-Semitic, and obsessed with a
notion of French identity embedded in the culture of the Vichy Regime (i.e. the
French fascist puppet state under Nazi occupation), the National Front
In the context of the Cold War, many struggles over decolonization were
tied closely to the attitudes and involvement of the US and USSR. Vietnam
provides perhaps the most iconic example. What was “really” a struggle for
1724
countries, however, rejected the idea that they had to choose sides in the Cold
War and instead sought a truly independent course. The dream of many
domination was that former colonies around the world, but especially those in
Africa and Asia, might create a new “superpower” through their alliance. The
in Africa, Asia, and South America met to discuss the possibility of forming a
coalition that might push back against superpower dominance. This was the
above, and in turn non-aligned countries earnestly hoped that their collective
world” to describe the bloc of nations: neither the first world of the US and
1725
western Europe, nor the second world of the USSR and its satellites, but the
While the somewhat utopian goal of a truly united third world proved
the United Nations. The Nonaligned Movement ended up with over 100
Movement also served as inspiration for millions around the world who
sought not only independence for its own sake, but in the name of creating a
Europe (described in the next chapter) created a huge market for labor,
1726
especially in fields of unskilled labor. Thus, Africans, Caribbeans, Asians, and
people from the Middle East from former colonies all came in droves to work
at jobs Europeans did not want, because those jobs still paid more than even
the parlance of the time, who were expected to work for a time, send money
white Europe into a genuinely multi-ethnic society. For the first time, many
European societies grew ethnically and racially diverse, and within a few
European countries.
Germany, the official stance of governments and most people alike was that
European culture was colorblind, and that anyone who culturally assimilated
1727
could be a productive part of society. The problem was that it was far easier
to maintain that attitude before many people not born in Europe made their
whites. In addition, in cases like France, former colonists who had fled to the
metropole were often hardened racists who openly called for exclusionary
practices and laws. Europeans were forced to grapple with the idea of cultural
and racial diversity in a way that was entirely new to them (in contrast to
countries like the United States, which has always been highly racially diverse
strikes back”: having seized most of the world’s territory by force, Europeans
were now left with a legacy of racial and cultural diversity that many of them
1728
Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):
Once the Cold War began in 1947, Europe was just one of the stages on
which it was played out around the world. Cold War divisions were perhaps
subcontinent was geographically divided along the lines of the Cold War: in
the west the prevailing political and economic pattern was a combination of
1729
democracy and a regulated market capitalism, while in the east it was of
was all the more striking in that both sides of the Cold War divide began in
west was in the midst of an unprecedented economic boom while the east
Social Democracy
In the aftermath of the war, the most important and noticeable political
change in the west was the nearly universal triumph of democratic forms of
all too often ended in the disaster of fascism, stable democratic governments
emerged in the postwar era that are still present today, albeit in modified
forms in some cases like that of France. All of the governments of Western
Europe except Spain and Portugal granted the right to vote to all adult citizens
after the war. And, for the first time, this included women almost
1730
everywhere. (Although one bizarre holdout was Switzerland, where women
part of government to ensure not just the legal rights of its citizens, but a base
well. Social democracy was born of the experience of the war. The people of
Europe had simply fought too hard in World War II to return to the conditions
west was recompense for the people who had endured and suffered through
compromise” between governments and elites on the one hand and working
welfare state came into being. The principle behind the welfare state is that it
1731
is impossible to be happy and productive without certain basic needs being
met. Among the most important of those needs are adequate healthcare and
embraced. By the end of the 1950s, 37% of the income of Western European
end of the 1960s, most Western European states provided free high-quality
medical care, free education from primary school through university, and
leftist (both communist and socialist) parties, trade unions won considerable
rights as well, with workers entitled to pensions, time off, and regulated
expanded after the end of the war, their citizens enjoyed standards of living
1732
higher than any generation before them, in large part because wealth was
The welfare state was paid for by progressive taxation schemes and a
Europe’s alliance with the US, and European commitment to the UN, was that
it was politically feasible to greatly reduce the size of each country’s military,
with the understanding that it was the US that would lead the way in keeping
spending skyrocketed for the US and the Soviet Union, it dropped to less than
10% of the GDP of the UK by the early 1960s and steadily declined from there
between the former colonial masters and their former colonial possessions.
Also in stark contrast to the political situation of the interwar years was
the power of the political center. Simply put, the far right had been
1733
completely compromised by the disastrous triumph of fascism. Just about all
major far-right parties had either been fascistic themselves or allied with
fascism before the war, and in the war’s aftermath far-right politicians were
forced into political silence by the shameful debacle that had resulted in their
prewar success. Fascistic parties did not re-emerge in earnest until the 1960s,
and even then they remained fringe groups until the 1990s.
In turn, the far left, namely communists, were inextricably tied to the
Soviet Union. This was a blessing for communist parties in the immediate
aftermath of the war, but became a burden when the injustices of Soviet
society became increasingly well known in the west. The problem for western
communists was that communist parties were forced to publicly support the
policies of the Soviet Union. In the immediate postwar period that was not a
problem, since the USSR was widely admired for having defeated the Nazis on
the eastern front at tremendous cost to its people. In the postwar period,
however, the USSR quickly came to represent nothing more than the threat of
1734
countries of the eastern bloc. The existence of Soviet gulags became
increasingly well known, although the details were often unclear, and thus
in the working class. Around 30% of the electorate in France and Italy voted
communist in the immediate aftermath of the war, but that percentage shrank
center-right, usually parties that fell under the categories of “Socialists” (or, in
Britain, Labour) and “Christian Democrats.” In turn, at least for the thirty
years following the war, neither side deviated significantly from support for
social democracy and the welfare state. The ideological divisions between
these two major party categories had to do with social and cultural issues, of
1735
The “socialists” in this case were only socialistic in their firm
onto the traditional Marxist rhetoric of revolution as late as the early 1970s,
but it was increasingly obvious to observers that revolution was not in fact a
practical goal that the parties were pursuing. Instead, socialists tended to
champion a more diffuse, and prosaic, set of goals: workers’ rights and
sympathy and support for cultural issues surrounding feminism and sexuality.
decolonization was in full swing by the 1960s. While willing to support the
more far-reaching demands of labor unions. Against the cultural tumult of the
1736
traditional cultural and social values. Arguably, the most important political
for the first time. There were no further mainstream political parties or
Market. They created a free trade zone and coordinated economic policies in
such a manner that trade between them increased fivefold in the years that
1737
followed. Britain opted not to join, and tellingly its growth rates lagged
significantly.
European countries were able to vault to higher and higher levels of wealth
and productivity less than a decade after the end of the war. Real Wages grew
between 1938 and 1959, and West Germany’s exports grew by 600% in one
decade: the 1950s. The years between 1945 and 1975 were described by a
French economist as the trente glorieuses: the thirty glorious years. It was a
With the welfare state in place, many people were willing to spend on
1738
items like cars, appliances, and fashion. In short, the postwar boom
represented the birth of the modern consumer society in Europe, the parallel
of that of the United States at the same time. Increasingly, only the very poor
were not able to buy consumer goods that they did not need for survival. Most
people were able to buy clothes that followed fashion trends, middle-class
families could afford creature comforts like electric appliances and televisions,
and increasingly working families could even afford a car, something that
Part of this phenomenon was the baby boom. While not as extreme in
Europe as in the US, the generation of children born in the first ten years after
WWII was very large, pushing Europe’s population from 264 million in 1940
to 320 million by the early 1970s.. A child born in 1946 was a teenager by the
early 1960s, in turn fueling the massive explosion of popular music that
roll. The “boomers” were eager consumers as well, fueling the demand for
1739
Meanwhile, the sciences saw breakthroughs of comparable importance
to those of the second half of the nineteenth century. Scientists identified the
basic structure of DNA in 1953. Terrible diseases were treated with vaccines
for the first time, including measles and polio. Organ transplants became a
reality in the 1950s. Thus, life itself could be extended in ways hitherto
One stark contrast between American and European culture at this time
(in a way) replaced religiosity in Europe. The postwar period saw church
1970s. In an effort to combat this decline, Pope John XXIII called a council in
1958 that stretched on for five years. Known as “Vatican II,” this council
1740
appeal to more people. One of the noteworthy changes that came out of
Vatican II was that the Mass was conducted in vernacular languages instead of
in Latin - over four centuries after that practice had first emerged during the
Protestant Reformation.
period focused not on the promise of a better future, but on the premise that
life was and probably would remain alienating and unjust. Despite the real,
Europe between 1945 - 1975, there was a marked insecurity and pessimism
that was reflected in postwar art and philosophy. Major factors behind this
pessimism were the devastation of the war itself, the threat of nuclear war
between the superpowers, and the declining power of Europe on the world
stage. New cultural struggles emerged against the backdrop not of economic
1741
uncertainty and conventional warfare, but of economic prosperity and the
The postwar era began in the shadow of the war and the fascist
nightmare that had preceded it; the British writer George Orwell noted that
“since about 1930, the world had given no reason for optimism
ignorance.” Some of the most important changes in art and philosophy in the
postwar era emerged from the moral exhaustion that was the result of the
war, something that lingered over Europe for years and grew with the
discovery of the extent of the Holocaust. There was also the simple fact that
the world itself could not survive another world war; once the Cold War began
in earnest in the late 1940s, the world was just a few decisions away from
Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. Sartre and Beauvoir had
1742
played minor roles in the French Resistance against the Nazis during the war,
while Camus had played a more significant role in that he wrote and edited a
the most elite schools and universities in France, while Camus was an
background. Even before the war, Sartre was famous for his philosophical
work and for his novel Nausea, which depicted a "hero" who tried
unsuccessfully to find meaning in life after realizing that his actions were all
ultimately pointless.
1743
Lifelong companions and fellow philosophers Beauvoir and Sartre.
they are born, they do things while alive, then they die. During life, however,
people are forced to constantly make choices - Sartre wrote that humans "are
make choices frightening and difficult, so they pretend that something greater
ideologies, the pursuit of wealth, and so on. Sartre and Beauvoir called this
"bad faith," the pretense that individual decisions are dictated by an imaginary
1744
living in this manner "authenticity" - a kind of courageous defiance of the
part of a shared project with others, but only if that project did not succumb to
A large part of the impetus behind not just the actual theories of the
existentialists, but its popular reception, was the widespread desire for a
war. Appropriately, existentialism had its heyday from 1945 until about
frequenting cafes and jazz clubs on the Left Bank of the Seine River in
1745
philosophy eventually went out of fashion in favor of various kinds of theory
describe many different things and it often lacks a core definition or even
which those “meanings” had been constructed, usually in order to support the
desires of the people doing the storytelling. In other words, to claim that
minded notions of the civilizing mission, the culmination of the liberal and
1746
overseas territories. The postmodern historical critique of imperialism was
more than just an attack on Western hypocrisy, however, instead arguing that
the very notion of history moving “forward” to a better future was obviously
culture in the West, covering everything from the concept of insanity to state
power, and from crime to sexuality, demonstrating the ways that ideas about
society and culture had always been shaped to serve power. Foucault’s most
evocative analyses had to do with how the definition of crime and the
“criminality” was an invention of the social and political system itself that
1747
Postmodernism came under fire at the time, and since, for sometimes
context. Theorists like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida (both, again,
French) argued that authorial intent in writing was meaningless, because the
text became entirely separate from the author at the moment of being written
nothing more or less than elaborate word games, with any implied “meaning”
inherently meaningless, but even a person’s intentions and actions (the only
That being noted, much of postmodern theory was not itself pessimistic
or dour. Instead, there was often a joyful, irreverent play of ideas and words
postmodern art, which often both satirized and embraced the breakdown
1748
between mainstream culture and self-understood “avant-gardes.” Especially
during the Modernist period in the decades before and after the turn of the
twentieth century, artists and writers had often staged their work in
opposition to the mainstream culture and beliefs of their societies, but artists
in the postmodern era could play with the stuff of the mainstream without
In turn, the iconic example of postmodern art was pop art. The most
famous pop artist was the New York-based Andy Warhol. Pop art consisted of
portraits of Marilyn Monroe to the Campbell's Soup can - and making it into
"fine art." In fact, much of pop art consisted of blurring the line between
1749
Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup, 1968
very different ways, they critiqued many aspects of western culture, from the
irony in that forms of philosophy that were often radical in their orientation
grew along with, even in spite of, the expansion of economic opportunity for
many people. Part of the explanation for the fertile reception of radical
generation that had survived World War II and that generation’s children: the
baby boomers.
Much more significant in terms of its cultural and social impact than
postwar philosophy was the global youth movement of the 1960s and
1970s. The baby boom generation came of age in the 1960s, with
families to ever attend universities, and the contentious political climate of the
1751
There were essentially two distinct, but closely related, manifestations
experimenting with the various drugs that became increasingly common and
1752
The album cover from The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967. An iconic
expression of the youth culture of the day, the individuals pictured behind the band members
include everyone from their fellow musical pioneer Bob Dylan to the “godfather of the beat
generation,” William S. Burroughs, to the Beatles’ younger selves (on the left).
were more highly-educated young people than ever before. As late as the
students who formed the core of the politicized youth movement of the time:
taught to think critically, globally aware, and well informed, many students
1753
There was much to critique. The Cold War, thanks to nuclear weapons,
threatened the human species with annihilation. The wars associated both
human rights violations and bloodshed. The American-led alliance in the Cold
War claimed to represent the side of freedom and prosperity, but it seemed to
many young people in the West that American policy abroad was as unjust
and violent as was Soviet policy in Eastern Europe. On the domestic front,
many young people also chafed at what they regarded as outdated rules, laws,
government was a much more visible oppressor than was the Soviet Union to
of capitalism and imperialism, especially because the Viet Minh was such a
1754
juggernaut. Vietnam thus served as a symbolic rallying point for the youth
movement the world over, not just in the United States itself.
movement called the New Left associated with it, was on the life of individuals
in the midst of prosperity. Leftist thinkers came to reject both the obvious
capitalist societies. The key term for many New Left theorists, as well as rank-
and-file members of the youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s, was
“liberation” – sexual, social, and cultural. Liberation was meant to break down
social mores as much as effect political change. For example, the idea that it
was perfectly acceptable to live with a romantic partner before marriage went
widespread acceptance.
Likewise, elements of the youth movement and the New Left came to
champion aspects of social justice that had often been neglected by earlier
radical thinkers. In the United States, many members of the youth movement
1755
(black and white alike) campaigned for the end of both racist laws and the
rights before the law, but the idea that the objectification and oppression of
the idea that homosexuality was a legitimate sexual identity, not a mental
The youth movement reached its zenith in May of 1968. From Europe
become the most iconic uprising against authority by the European youth
1756
university in France: the Sorbonne. Soon, the entire Latin Quarter of Paris
was taken over by thousands of student radicals (many of whom flocked from
calling for revolution and engaging in street battles with riot police. Workers
occupying their factories and in some cases kidnapping their supervisors and
managers. Students traveled to meet with workers and offer support. At its
Leftist workers outside of their occupied factory during the Events of May.
1757
The student movement had extremely radical, and sometimes very
sympathized with the students at first, especially since it was well known that
French schools and universities were highly authoritarian and often unfair,
but as the strikes and occupations dragged on, public opinion drifting away
from the uprisings. The movement ebbed by late June, with workers
off the strike. The students finally agreed to leave the occupied
universities and high schools; this was the beginning of the (relative)
in general. Likewise, and not just in France, the more stultifying rules and
policies associated with gender and sexuality within schools and universities
1758
The “Events of May” (as they became known in France) were the
emblematic high point of the European youth movement itself, at least in its
economic boom ended in the early 1970s, and the optimism of the youth
movement tended to ebb along with it. Likewise, the end of the Vietnam War
in 1975, while understandably welcomed by the youth movement, did rob the
That being noted, the youth movement’s legacy was profound. While no
the lines imagined by radicals at the time, there is no question that Western
general. Likewise, the youth movement’s focus on social justice would acquire
1759
Second-Wave Feminism
culture of the late 1960s was second-wave feminism (the first was that of the
enormous (over 1,000 pages long) book about the status of women in
Western societies. Titled The Second Sex, the book argued that throughout the
entire history of Western Civilization, women had been the social and cultural
the default: men. In other words, when men wrote about "human history"
they were actually writing about the history of men, with women lurking
(in English, consider phrases like “since the dawn of mankind” or “man’s
species). Likewise, historically, every state, empire, and nation in history had
1760
been controlled by men, and women were legal and political non-entities until
patronized, and often violently abused women, it was that to be a woman was
heart of human existence. While she did not set out to start a political
movement per se - her political involvement in the 1950s and early 1960s was
focused on decolonization and a kinship with Marxism - The Second Sex would
decade.
From the end of World War II until the late 1960s, there were only small
feminist movements in most western countries. While women had won the
vote after the war (with some exceptions such as Switzerland), and most of
1761
the other legal goals of first-wave feminism had been achieved as well, the
postwar social order still operated under the assumption that women were to
focus on domestic roles. Women were taught as girls that the world of politics
and paid work was for men, and that only in motherhood and marriage could
largely cut off from the sense of political solidarity that had sustained first-
widespread dissatisfaction and unhappiness with the social role into which
they were forced, along with both overtly sexist laws and oppressive cultural
codes. To cite a few examples, it was perfectly legal (and commonplace) for
were routinely fired at age 30 for being too old to maintain the standards of
termination, and unmarried women were generally paid fair less than men
1762
since it was assumed they would eventually marry and quit their jobs. White
women in the United States made 60% of the earnings of men doing the same
work, with black women earning a mere 42%. Rape charges were routinely
dismissed if a victim had “asked for it” by being alone at night or being
generally only held accountable by the law if the violence seemed excessive
from the perspective of police and judges. In short, while the first-wave
feminist movement had succeeded in winning key legal battles, a vast web of
sexist laws and cultural codes ensured that women were held in precisely the
movement came into existence to combat precisely these forms of both legal
and cultural oppression and discrimination. Most of the women who joined
culture described above, but they arrived at feminism in part because most
1763
male “rebels” were just as sexist and repressive as the conservative politicians
were expected to do the dishes and clean up after the men). Beauvoir herself
joined the French Women's Liberation Movement, joining many women who
were one-third of her age at that point. Likewise, in the United States, second-
wave feminism was often referred to as the "Women's Lib" movement, with
1764
Everywhere that second-wave feminism emerged as a movement, its
goals were the creation of laws that expressly forbid sexual discrimination in
the workplace and schools and a broader cultural shift that saw women
treated as true social equals of men. This latter focus on equitable culture
sexist cultural norms, had focused on overcoming the most serious legal
the movement was not simply about women having access to the same forms
of employment and equal wages as men (although those were obviously very
important goals), but about attacking the sexual objectification and sexual
double standards to which women were held. For instance, why were
men were celebrated for their virility? The essential injustice of sexual double
The demand for sexual liberation was part of the Youth Movement in
general, and members of the counterculture fought against the idea that
1765
sexuality was inherently sinful and “dirty” (an attitude that had only come of
took the demand for liberation a step further and advocated for reliable, legal
the western world through the 1950s, and even in countries like Britain and
fields of medicine - the birth control pill was approved for contraceptive use
end of the 1970s, although abortion rights remain a highly charged political
While the battle for sexual equality is obviously far from over, second-
wave feminism did achieve many important goals. Legally, many countries
1766
violence were often strengthened and more stringently enforced. Culturally,
social roles were all called into question. As with racism, the numerous forms
feminist assaults, but arguably they did weaken as compared to the past.
Conclusion
decades following World War II. Perhaps the most important changes had to
essential dignity, and to possess the right to protest the conditions of their
education, employment, or even their simple existence (in the case of women
1767
facing misogyny and harassment, for example). The legacy of the cultural
revolution that began with the youth movement of the 1960s remains strong
1768
Chapter 15: Toward the Present
turned out) Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev had begun a series of reforms
1989, the communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc crumbled as it became clear
that the USSR would not intervene militarily to prop them up as it had in the
1991, Russia itself reemerged as a distinct country in the process rather than
Francis Fukuyama published a book entitled The End of History and the Last
Man. Put briefly, The End of History’s central argument is that humanity was
entering into a new stage in which the essential political and economic
1769
questions of the past had been resolved. Henceforth, market capitalism and
rights would be guaranteed by the political system that also provided the legal
already been tried and failed, after all, from the old order of monarchy and
dictatorships would (if they had not already) join the fold of American-style
former members of the Eastern Bloc: East and West Germany were reunited,
economies. So, too, did Russia initially, although almost immediately its
advisors: the rapid imposition of a market economy and the dismantling of the
1770
social safety net that had been the one meaningful benefit of the former Soviet
In the long run, however, countries all over the globe in the post-Soviet
the time, there is nothing about market economics that requires a democratic
to function, a capitalist economy could thrive despite the absence of civil and
political rights. This pattern was (and remains) true even of those states that
Russia would soon adopt the model of authoritarian capitalism, with a single
political party controlling the state and exercising enormous influence, if not
Western Europe in which battles over economics and politics had finally been
1771
resolved in favor of the democracy/capitalism hybrid in the postwar era,
social and cultural problems developed by the 1970s that remain largely
screeching halt in the early 1970s, when OPEC, the international consortium
support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Gas prices skyrocketed, and
the incredible economic growth of the postwar era simply stopped, never to
regain the momentum it had from 1945 - 1973. Those critical decades of the
baby boom and economic boom had left their mark in several ways, however,
1772
Politically and socially, one of the most difficult legacies of the postwar
years has been immigration. While racism was always a factor in Europe,
during the boom years immigrants were generally regarded as at the very
least “useful” for European countries and their economies. They did the jobs
that Europeans did not want and formed a vital part of the economy of
Western Europe as a whole. When the economic boom ended, however, they
were rapidly castigated for their supposed laziness, penchant for criminality,
and failure to assimilate – in a word, they were the scapegoats for everything
going wrong with economics and social issues in the post-boom era. Thus, the
far right in Europe was reborn, a generation after the defeat of fascism, in the
fascistic and anti-Semitic rhetoric mixed in (France’s National Front was the
The new European far right called for extremely limited quotas for
(most importantly, those associated with Islam), and a broader cultural shift
1773
rejecting the tolerance and cosmopolitanism of mainstream European culture
after the war. They also attacked non-white citizens of European countries,
immigrant ancestry were legally the same as any other citizen, but the far
European identity was simply factually wrong by the 1960s and 1970s: there
were hundreds of thousands of Europeans of color who had been born and
immigrated, but it remained the basis of the appeal of far right politics to
While the far right has gained strength in many European countries
over time, of greater overall impact was the changed identity of mainstream
right politics. By far the most important change within neo-conservatism was
1774
that the center-right belatedly came to reject the welfare state. The
compromise between left and right that had seen a broad endorsement of
nationalized industry, free health care and education, subsidies for housing,
exacerbating the economic crisis of the 1970s, arguing that the state was
Margaret Thatcher, who held office from 1979 to 1990. Thatcher acquired the
nickname "the Iron Lady" for her blunt manner of speaking and her refusal to
industries in Britain, most importantly the railways. She took a hard line with
unions, shutting down northern English coal mines rather than giving in to the
demands of the coal miners' union (the English mining industry simply shut
1775
down as a result - it has never recovered). She slashed government subsidies
manufacturing areas.
were dropped and banks were legally allowed to pursue vast profits through
present: the dynamic, wealthy financial and commercial center that is London
1776
surrounded by an economically stagnant and often politically resentful
nation. Thatcher herself was a polarizing figure in British society - while she
was reviled by her opponents, millions of Britons adored her for her British
Darwinist contempt for the poor - she once advised the English that they
smart succeeding.
The British economy began to recover as a whole in the early 1980s, but
the major reason that Thatcher stayed in power was her success in selling an
reached the height of their influence in the mid-1970s. A brief war over the
between Argentina and Britain in 1982 also buoyed her popularity with
patriotic citizens. Finally, the British Labour party was in disarray, split
between its still genuinely socialist left wing and a new more moderate reform
1777
straightforward liberalism. Thus, Thatcher remained in power until 1990,
when her own party decided she was no longer palatable to the electorate and
Major.
politics were in place by the 1980s that remain to this day. Center-right
parties from Italy to Germany and from France to Britain correspond to the
limit the extent of the welfare state (although none of these parties advocate
people who vote for center right parties, expect free health care, education,
and social benefits). Most center-right parties outside of Britain have been
less willing to truly gut the welfare state than was Thatcher and her
conservatives, but the general focus on the market remains their defining
characteristic overall.
1778
On the other side of the political spectrum, the major change within left-
ideology. Again, Britain provides the iconic example: the triumph within the
philosophy that supports the welfare state but also accepts the position that
the free market is the essential motor of economic growth. The iconic figure
of New Labour was the prime minister Tony Blair, who held office from 1997 -
2007. Even in countries whose major leftist parties had the word "socialist" in
their titles - France's Socialist Party, for example - the whole notion of
revolution was gone by the 1990s. Instead, the center-left parties came to be
the custodians of the welfare state while belatedly joining the center-right in
and mainstream rightist parties leading up to the present is about how much
to the far-right parties mentioned above as much because the two sides of
1779
mainstream politics are almost indistinguishable; to many Europeans, the far-
right seems like the only "real" alternative. In turn, with revolution off the
agenda, the far left in Europe is represented now by the Green parties. Green
environmental legislation and are the most hostile to free market deregulation
of any political faction, but they remain limited in their electoral impact.
Eastern Europe
number of changes in the decades following World War II, they nevertheless
communism and single-party, authoritarian rule held true almost through the
1780
1980s, that entire system imploded in the end, with lasting consequences for
As of the 1970s, the economic stagnation of the east was far worse than
that of the west. Real growth rates were lost in a haze of fudged statistics, and
technology had failed to keep up with western standards. By the 1980s the
only profitable industries in Russia were oil and vodka, and then oil prices
the USSR). The USSR’s politburo, the apex of political power in which
who had spent their entire lives working within this system.
Then, the old men of the order simply started dying off. Brezhnev died
in 1982, then the next two leaders of the Soviet communist party died one
1781
after the other in 1984 and 1985. Mikhail Gorbachev, who took power in
1985, was a full generation younger, and he brought with him a profoundly
different outlook on the best path forward for the USSR and its “allies.” Unlike
the men of the older generation, Gorbachev was convinced that the status quo
was increasingly untenable - the Soviet economy staggered along with meager
masquerading as fact, and the state could barely keep up its spending on the
arms race with the United States (especially after the American president
Ronald Reagan came to office in 1980 and poured resources into the American
military).
Gorbachev was convinced that the only way for the Soviet system to
survive was through real, meaningful reforms - the kinds flirted with by
relaxation of censorship within the Soviet system, one that was most
1782
dramatically demonstrated in 1986 when Gorbachev allowed an accurate
plant. The idea behind Glasnost was to allow frank and honest discussion, to
end the ban on truth, in an effort to win back the hearts and minds of Soviet
modernizing industry and allowing limited market exchange. The two policies
economy and create a dynamic, truthful political and social system. What
Gorbachev had not anticipated, however, was that once Soviet citizens
realized that they could publish views critical of the state, an explosion of
pent-up anger and resentment swept across Soviet society. From merely
calls to move away from Marxism-Leninism as the state’s official doctrine, for
1783
truly free and democratic elections, and for the national minorities to be able
finances were in such disarray by the second half of the 1980s that Gorbachev
simply ended the arms race with the United States, conceding the USSR could
not match the US's gigantic arsenal. Starting cautiously in 1988, he also
1784
announced to the governments of Eastern Europe that they would be "allowed
to go their own way" without Soviet interference. Never again would columns
Germany, where the threat of Soviet intervention had always been the
bulwark against the threat of reform. When Gorbachev made good on his
grow, it was the beginning of the end for the entire Soviet Bloc.
The result was a landslide of change across Eastern Europe. Over the
course of 1989, one country after another held free elections and communists
up. The Berlin Wall fell in November of 1989 and Germany was reunified less
than a year later. Likewise, the USSR itself fell apart by 1991, torn apart by
1785
by Soviet hardliners failed in the face of mass protest in Moscow, and the first
free elections since the February Revolution of 1917 were held in Russia.
Since the collapse of the USSR, some Eastern European countries (e.g.
Russia itself, the 1990s were an unmitigated economic and social disaster as
the entire country tried to lurch into a market economy without the slightest
industries did not suddenly materialize to fill the enormous gaps in the
1786
The result was an economy that was often synonymous with the black
market, gigantic and powerful organized crime syndicates, and the rise of a
shocking statistic is that fewer than forty individuals controlled about 25% of
the Russian economy by the late 1990s. Just as networks of contacts among
the Soviet apparatchiks had once been the means of securing a job or
strongman. Vladimir Putin, a former agent of the Soviet secret police force
(the KGB), was elected president of Russia in 2000. Since that time, Putin has
Russian nationalism to buoy popular support for his regime, run by “his”
political party, United Russia. While opposition political parties are not illegal,
and indeed consistently try to make headway in elections, United Russia has
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been in firm control of the entire Russian political apparatus since shortly
imprisoned, and many opposition figures have also been murdered (although
1990s were also reined in, while some oligarchs were instead incorporated
Unlike many of the authoritarian rulers of Russia in the past, Putin was
(and remains) hugely popular among Russians. Media control has played a
large part in that popularity, of course, but much of Putin’s popularity is also
tied to the wealth that flooded into Russia after 2000 as oil prices rose. While
most of that wealth went to enrich the existing Russian elites (along with
some of Putin’s personal friends, who made fortunes in businesses tied to the
state), it also served as a source of pride for many Russians who saw little
direct benefit. Further boosts to his popularity came from Russia’s invasion of
the small republic of Georgia in 2008 and, especially, its invasion and
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subsequent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from the Ukraine in
2014. While the latter prompted western sanctions and protests, it was
At the start of the postwar boom, most of the nations of western Europe
relations and trade between the member nations. Those culminated in the
Europe. Despite various setbacks, not the least the enmity between French
and British politicians that achieved almost comic levels at times, the EC
steadily added new members into the 1980s. Its leadership also began to
discuss the possibility of moving toward an even more inclusive model for
Europe, one in which not just trade but currency, law, and policy might be
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more closely aligned between countries. That vision of a united Europe was
two superpowers of the Cold War, but it also encompassed a moral vision of
following years. Over time, passport controls at borders between the member
overall prosperity. Most spectacularly, at the start of 2002, the Euro became
the official currency of the entire EU except for Great Britain, which clung
The period between 2002 and 2008 was one of relative success for the
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particular accelerated, along with a few unexpected western countries like
Ireland (called the “Celtic Tiger” at the time for its success in bringing in
Mediterranean, meant that none of the countries of the “Eurozone” lagged too
far behind. While the end of passport controls at borders worried some, there
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Unfortunately, especially since the financial crisis of 2008, the EU has
been fraught with economic problems. The major issue is that the member
nations cannot control their own economies past a certain point – they cannot
devalue currency to deal with inflation, they are nominally prevented from
allowing their own national debts to exceed a certain level of their Gross
Domestic Product (3%, at least in theory), and so on. The result is that it is
terrifically difficult for countries with weaker economies such as Spain, Italy,
up serving as the EU’s banker and also its inadvertent political overlord,
issuing loan after loan to other EU states while dictating economic and even
political policy to them. This led to the surprising success of far-left political
stability of the EU as a whole, Great Britain narrowly voted to leave the Union
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entirely in 2016. In what analysts largely interpreted as a protest vote against
not just the EU itself, but of complacent British politicians whose interests
seemed squarely focused on London’s welfare over that of the rest of the
the Union. Years of bitter political struggle ensued, but the country finally left
in early 2020. The political and economic consequences remain unclear: the
British economy has been deeply enmeshed with that of the EU nations since
the end of World War II, and it is simply unknown what effect its “Brexit” will
The Middle East has been one of the most conflicted regions in the
world in the last century, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in
World War I. In the recent past, much of that instability has revolved around
three interrelated factors: the Middle East’s role in global politics, the Israeli-
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Palestinian conflict, and the vast oil reserves of the region. In turn, the United
States played an outsize role in shaping the region’s politics and conflicts.
During the Cold War the Middle East was constantly implicated in
question or that regime’s relationship with its neighbors. First and foremost,
the US drew close to Israel because of Israel’s antipathy to the Soviet Union
and its own powerful military. Israel’s crushing victory in the 1967 Six-Day
American - Israeli relations was that Israel was the most reliable powerful
partner supporting American interests. Part of that sympathy was also born
out of respect for the fact that Israel’s government is democratic and that it
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Simultaneously, however, the US supported Arab and Persian regimes
that were anything but democratic. The Iranian regime under the Pahlavi
expelled from office. The Iranian Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi ruled Iran as
a loyal American client for the next 26 years while suppressing dissent
through a brutal secret police force. The Iranian regime purchased enormous
quantities of American arms (50% of American arms sales were to Iran in the
mid-1970s) and kept the oil flowing to the global market. Iranian society was
highly educated and its economy thrived, but its government was an
oppressive autocracy.
the third “pillar” in the US’s Middle Eastern clientage system. Despite its
religious policy being based on Wahhabism, the most puritanical and rigid
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produce a vast quantity of oil. Clearly, opposition to Soviet communism and
access to oil proved far more important from a US policy perspective than did
This status quo was torn apart in 1979 by the Iranian Revolution. What
the oppressive regime of the Shah was overtaken by the most fanatical branch
of the Iranian Shia clergy under the leadership of the Ayatollah (“eye of God”)
Ruhollah Khomeini. When the dust settled from the revolution, the Ayatollah
had become the official head of state and Iran had become a hybrid
(significantly, women enjoy full political rights in Iran, unlike in some other
Middle Eastern nations like Saudi Arabia), but the Ayatollah had final say in
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latter’s long support of the Shah’s regime became official policy in the new
state, and in turn the US was swift to vilify the new regime.
ongoing military debacle for the Sovet Union in Afghanistan, and a full-scale
war between the new Islamic Republic of Iran and its neighbor, Iraq. Ruled by
a secular nationalist faction, the Ba’ath Party, since 1968, Iraq represented yet
another form of autocracy in the region. Saddam Hussein, The military leader
during the war at different points despite its avowed opposition to the Iranian
regime. In the end, the war sputtered to a bloody stalemate in 1988 after over
Just two years later, Iraq invaded the neighboring country of Kuwait and
the United States (fearing the threat to oil supplies and now regarding
Nations forces to expel it. The subsequent Gulf War was an easy victory for
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the US and its allies, even as the USSR spiralled toward its messy demise as
communism collapsed in Eastern Europe. The early 1990s thus saw the
East, with every country either its client and ally (e.g. Saudi Arabia, Israel) or
hostile but impotent to threaten US interests (e.g. Iran, Iraq). American elites
global market economy and holding rogue states in check with the vast
not agents of a nation, hijacked and crashed airliners into the World Trade
Center towers in New York City and into the Pentagon (the headquarters of
the American military) on September 11, 2001. Fueled by hatred toward the
US for its ongoing support of Israel against the Palestinian demand for
sovereignty and for the decades of US meddling in Middle Eastern politics, the
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terrorist attacks in modern history. President George W. Bush (son of the first
President Bush) vowed a global “War on Terror” that has, almost two decades
Taliban, for sheltering Al Qaeda. American forces easily toppled the Taliban
business” in Iraq as well. Despite the complete lack of ties between Hussein’s
regime and Al Qaeda, and despite the absence of the “weapons of mass
destruction” used as the official excuse for war, the US launched a full scale
once again the Iraqi military proved completely unable to hold back American
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ethnic groups led rival insurgencies against both the occupying American
military and their own Iraqi rivals. The Iraq War thus became a costly
military occupation rather than an easy regime change, and in the following
insurgents led to well over a million deaths (estimates are notoriously difficult
to verify, but the death toll might actually be over two million). A 2018 US
Army analysis of the war glumly concluded that the closest thing to a winner
to emerge from the Iraq War was, ironically, Iran, which used the anarchic
political instability since the 1980s, that instability pales in comparison to the
instability of other world regions. In particular, the Middle East entered into a
turn, the shock waves of Middle Eastern conflict have reverberated around the
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globe, inspiring the growth of international terrorist groups on the one hand
citizens of Middle Eastern and North African ancestry). The Arab Spring of
2010 led to a brief moment of hope that new democracies might take the place
of military dictatorships in countries like Libya, Egypt, and Syria, only to see
civilians to flee the country. Turkey, one of the most venerable democracies in
the region since its foundation as a modern state in the aftermath of World
War I, has seen its president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan steadily assert greater
authority over the press and the judiciary. The two other regional powers,
Iran and Saudi Arabia, carry on a proxy war in Yemen and fund rival
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meanwhile, continues to face both regional hostility and internal threats from
the nominally autonomous Palestinian regions of the West Bank and Gaza
Strip.
them abroad have brought about a resurgence of far-right and, in many cases,
openly neo-fascist politics. While fascistic parties like France’s National Front
have existed since the 1960s, they remained basically marginal and
demonized for most of their history. Since 2010, far right parties have grown
openly racist views have come to be attracted to the new right, since
mainstream political parties often seem to represent only the interests of out-
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of-touch social elites (again, Brexit serves as the starkest demonstration of
century will necessarily vary, what seems clear is that both the postwar
error that is, fortunately, now dead and gone; it has lurched back onto the
That being noted, there are also indications that the center still holds. In
Macron. Contemporary far-right parties have yet to enjoy the kind of electoral
breakthrough that set the stage for (to cite one obvious example) the Nazi
seizure of power in 1933. Even those countries that have proved most willing
to use military force in the name of their ideological and economic agendas,
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namely Russia and the United States, have not launched further wars on the
particular are generally loathe to engage in. That said, if nothing else, history
the past that can, and should, serve as warnings for the present. As this text
to human suffering, and the lust for power. It can be hoped that studying the
consequences of those factors and the actions inspired by them might prove to
political motivations.
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