The Making of The West Peoples and Cultures Compress

How to Improve Your Grade in Your History Class START Great. Start by prereading the chapter. Start with the Chapter Focus question at the end of the introduction.

Did you buy the book?

Yes

Buy the book and/or LaunchPad (launchpadworks.com). Now, read the chapter carefully. Stay focused.

Once you have read the chapter, go back and review the chapter. Answer the Making Connections Questions.

Yes

Did your instructor assign or did you buy LaunchPad with your book?

Great. Go to the book’s LaunchPad site and complete the adaptive, interactive LearningCurve activity for the chapter.

Yes Great. You’ll find that LaunchPad provides a lot of support for completing your assignments.

As you read, take notes. Focus on the main ideas of each section, usually found in the first paragraph of the section. Focus on each section’s Review Question.

no Focus on the Chapter Review section at the end of each chapter.

Did your instructor give you any assignments to complete in LaunchPad?

Review the main ideas of each section and the Key Terms listed at the end of the chapter.

You are on Your waY to a better Grade In Your HIstorY Class!

launchpadworks.com At Macmillan Education, we are committed to providing online resources that meet the needs of instructors and students in powerful yet simple ways. LaunchPad, our course space, offers our trusted content and student-friendly approach, organized for easy assignability in a simple user interface. • Interactive e-Book: The e-book for The Making of the West comes with powerful study tools, multimedia content, and easy customization for instructors. Students can search, highlight, and bookmark, making it easier to study. • LearningCurve: Game-like adaptive quizzing motivates students to engage with their course, and reporting tools help teachers identify the needs of their students. • Easy to Start: Pre-built, curated units are easy to assign or adapt with additional material, such as readings, videos, quizzes, discussion groups, and more. LaunchPad also provides access to a gradebook that offers a window into students’ performance — either individually or as a whole. Use LaunchPad on its own or integrate it with your school’s learning management system so your class is always on the same page. To learn more about LaunchPad for The Making of the West or to request access, go to launchpadworks.com. If your book came packaged with an access card to LaunchPad, follow the card’s login instructions.

‘The Orrery’, c.1766 (oil on canvas), Wright of Derby, Joseph (1734–97) / Derby Museum and Art Gallery, UK / Bridgeman Images.

FIFTH EDITION

The Making of the West Peoples and Cultures

Lynn Hunt University of California, Los Angeles

Thomas R. Martin College of the Holy Cross

Barbara H. Rosenwein Loyola University Chicago

Bonnie G. Smith Rutgers University

Bedford/St. Martin’s A Macmillan Education Imprint Boston • New York

For Bedford / St. Martin’s Vice President, Editorial, Macmillan Higher Education Humanities: Edwin Hill Publisher for History: Michael Rosenberg Senior Executive Editor for History and Technology: William J. Lombardo Director of Development for History: Jane Knetzger Developmental Editor: Kathryn Abbott Senior Production Editor: Kerri A. Cardone Senior Production Supervisor: Jennifer Wetzel Executive Marketing Manager: Sandra McGuire Associate Editor: Emily DiPietro Editorial Assistant: Lexi DeConti Copyeditor: Lisa Wehrle Indexer: Leoni Z. McVey, McVey & Associates, Inc. Cartography: Mapping Specialists, Limited Photo Researcher: Bruce Carson Director of Rights and Permissions: Hilary Newman Senior Art Director: Anna Palchik Text Designer: Lisa Buckley Cover Designer: William Boardman Composition: Jouve Printing and Binding: RR Donnelley and Sons Copyright © 2016, 2013, 2010, 2007 by Bedford / St. Martin’s. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except as may be expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the Publisher. Manufactured in the United States of America. 0 9 8 7 6 5 f e d c b a For information, write: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 75 Arlington Street, Boston, MA 02116 (617-399-4000) ISBN 978–1-4576-8143-1 (Combined Edition) ISBN 978–1-4576-8152-3 (Volume I) ISBN 978–1-4576-8153-0 (Volume II)

ISBN 978-1-319-02752-0 (Combined Loose-leaf Edition) ISBN 978-1-319-02753-7 (Loose-leaf Edition, Volume 1) ISBN 978-1-319-02754-4 (Loose-leaf Edition, Volume 2)

Acknowledgments and copyrights appear on the same page as the text and art selections they cover; these acknowledgments and copyrights constitute an extension of the copyright page. It is a violation of the law to reproduce these selections by any means whatsoever without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Preface: Why This Book This Way

e are delighted to present the fifth edition of The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures. With this edition, The Making of the West moves fully into the digital age, and we are proud and excited to offer a whole new way of teaching and learning western civilization. At the same time, we have stayed true to the fundamental approach that has made this book a popular choice for instructors and students alike. We continue to link the history of the West to wider developments in the world. We continue to offer a synthetic approach to history — from military to gender — that integrates different approaches rather than privileging one or two. And we continue to believe that students benefit from a solid chronological framework when they are trying to understand events of the past. This new editionis priced affordably, to save your students money and keep your overall course budget manageable. If you have been a user of the comprehensive edition of The Making of the West, you will find the complete feature program available in LaunchPad, as described below. If you were previously a user of the concise edition, you and your students also have access to the full feature program in LaunchPad. In addition to the features, LaunchPad is loaded with the full-color e-book plus LearningCurve, an adaptive learning tool; the popular Sources of the Making of the West documents collection; additional primary sources; a wealth of assessment tools; chapter summative quizzes; and more.

A Book for the Digital Age Because we know that the classroom and the world are changing rapidly, we are excited to offer The Making of the West along with a full feature program in Bedford’s learning platform, known as LaunchPad, an intuitive new interactive e-book and course space. LaunchPad is ready to use as is, or can be edited and customized with your own material, and assigned right away. Developed with extensive feedback from history instructors and students, LaunchPad includes the complete narrative of the print book, the companion reader Sources of the Making of the West, by Katharine Lualdi, LearningCurve adaptive quizzing, and v

Preface: Why This Book This Way

a full suite of skill-building features, all of which will be familiar to users of the comprehensive edition of The Making of the West and are now made available for the first time to users of the concise edition The adaptive learning tool known as LearningCurve is designed to get students to read before they come to class. With LearningCurve students move through questions based on the narrative text at their own pace and accumulate points as they go in a game-like fashion. Feedback for incorrect responses explains why the answer is incorrect and directs students back to the text to review. The end result is a better understanding of the key elements of the text. The LaunchPad e-book features five unique skill-building features. Four of these features appear in every chapter in LaunchPad. They extend the narrative by revealing the process of interpretation, providing a solid introduction to historical argument and critical thinking, and capturing the excitement of historical investigation. ■

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Primary Sources — at least two per chapter — give students a more direct experience of the past through original voices. Whether it is Frederick Barbaraossa replying to the Romans when they offer him the emperor’s crown, Marie de Sévigne’s description of the French court, or an ordinary person’s account of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, primary documents offer a window into thethoughts and actions of the past. Each document is accompanied by a short, auto-graded multiple-choice quiz. Contrasting Views compares two or more often conflicting primary sources focused on a central event, person, or development — such as Roman attitudes toward Cleopatra, the Mongols, the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century, and decolonization in Africa — enabling students to understand history from a variety of contemporaneous perspectives. Each feature contains analyticalquestions along with an auto-graded multiple-choice quiz. Seeing History guides students through the process of reading images as historical evidence. Each one provides either a single image or paired images for comparison and contrast, with background information, and questions that encourage visual analysis. It also has an auto-graded multiple-choice quiz. Taking Measure introduces students to quantitative analysis in every chapter. Each highlights a chart, table, graph, or map of historical statistics that illuminates an important political, social, or cultural development. Topics include the distances covered by Alexander the Great’s army, the expansion of the printing press to 1500, and wartime production of the major powers during the Second World War. Each comes with a question for analysis and an auto-graded multiplechoice quiz. Terms of History appears in 11 of the chapters and looks not only at the origin of a term — such as civilization, renaissance, progress, and globalization — but alsoat the changing meaning of the term over time, which further underscores historical skill building. The feature comes with an auto-graded multiple-choice quiz.

Preface: Why This Book Contents This Way

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About The Making of the West Even with all the exciting digital changes, our primary goal remains the same: to demonstrate that the history of the West is the story of an ongoing process, not a finished result with one fixed meaning. No one Western people or culture has existed from the beginning until now. Instead, the history of the West includes many different peoples and cultures. To convey these ideas, we have written a sustained story of the West’s development in a broad, global context that reveals the cross-cultural interactions fundamental to the shaping of Western politics, societies, cultures, and economies. Indeed, the first chapter opens with a section on the origins and contested meaning of the term Western civilization.

Chronological Framework We know from our own teaching that introductory students need a solid chronological framework, one with enough familiar benchmarks to make the material easy to grasp. Each chapter is organized around the main events, people, and themes of a period in which the West significantly changed; thus, students learn about political and militaryevents and social and cultural developments as they unfolded. This chronological integration also makes it possible for students to see the interconnections among varieties of historical experience — between politics and cultures, between public events and private experiences, between wars and diplomacy and everyday life. For teachers, our chronological approach ensures a balanced account and provides the opportunity to present themes within their greater context. But perhaps best of all, this approach provides a text that reveals history as a process that is constantly alive, subject to pressures, and able to surprise us.

An Expanded Vision of the West Cultural borrowing between the peoples of Europe and their neighbors has characterized Western civilization from the beginning. Thus, we have insisted on an expanded vision of the West that includes the United States and fully incorporates Scandinavia, eastern Europe, and the Ottoman Empire. Now this vision encompasses an even wider global context than before, as Latin America, Africa, China, Japan, and India also come into the story. We have been able to offer sustained treatment of crucial topics such as Islam and to provide a more thorough examination of globalization than any competing text. Study of Western history provides essential background to today’s events, from debates over immigration to conflicts in the Middle East. Instructors have found this synthesis essential for helping students understand the West amid today’s globalization.

Updated Scholarship As always, we have also incorporated the latest scholarly findings throughout the book so that students and instructors alike have a text on which they can confidently rely. In

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the fifth edition, we have included new and updated discussions of topics such as fresh archaeological evidence for the possible role of religion in stimulating the major changes of the Neolithic Revolution; the dating of the Great Sphinx in Egypt, the scholarly debate that could radically change our ideas of the earliest Egyptian history; the newest thinking on the origins of Islam; the crucial issues in the Investiture Conflict between pope and emperor; the impact of the Great Famine of the fourteenth century; the slave trade, especially its continuation into the nineteenth century; and the ways in which scholars are considering recent events within the context of the new digital world.

Study Aids to Support Active Reading and Learning We know from our own teaching that students need all the help they can get in absorbing and making sense of information, thinking analytically, and understanding that history itself is often debated and constantly revised. With these goals in mind, we retained the class-tested learning and teaching aids that worked well in the previous editions, but we have also done more to help students distill the central story of each age.

Focused Reading Each chapter begins with a vivid anecdote that draws readers into the atmosphere of the period and introduces the chapter’s main themes, accompanied by a full-page illustration. The Chapter Focus poses an overarching question at the start of the narrative to help guide students’ reading. Strategically placed at the end of each major section, a Review Question helps students assimilate core points in digestible increments. Key Terms and names that appear in boldface in the text have been updated to concentrate on likely test items; these terms are defined in the Glossary of Key Terms and People at the end of the book.

Reviewing the Chapter At the end of each chapter, the Conclusion further reinforces the central developments covered in the chapter. The newly designed Chapter Review begins by asking students to revisit the key terms, identifying each and explaining its significance. Review Questions are also presented again so that students can revisit the chapter’s core points. Making Connections questions then follow and prompt students to think across the sections of a given chapter. A chronology of Important Events enables students to see the sequence and overlap of important events in a given period and asks students a guiding question that links two or more events in the chapter. Finally, a list of author-selected Suggested References directs students to print and online resources for further investigation.

Geographic Literacy The map program of The Making of the West has been praised by reviewers for its comprehensiveness. In each chapter, we offer three types of maps, each with a distinct role

Preface: Why This Book Contents This Way

in conveying information to students. Up to five full-size maps show major developments, up to four “spot” maps — small maps positioned within the discussion right where students need them — serve as immediate locators, and Mapping the West summary maps at the end of each chapter provide a snapshot of the West at the close of a transformative period and help students visualize the West’s changing contours over time. In this edition, we have added new maps and carefully considered each of the existing maps, simplifying where possible to better highlight essential information, and clarifying and updating borders and labels where needed.

Images and Illustrations We have integrated art as fully as possible into the narrative. Over 240 images and illustrations were carefully chosen to reflect this edition’s broad topical coverage and geographic inclusion, reinforce the text, and show the varieties of visual sources from which historians build their narratives and interpretations. All artifacts, illustrations, paintings, and photographs are contemporaneous with the chapter; there are no anachronistic illustrations. The captions for the maps and art help students learn how to read visuals, and we have frequently included specific questions or suggestions for comparisons that might be developed.

Acknowledgments In the vital process of revision, the authors have benefited from repeated critical readings by many talented scholars and teachers. Our sincere thanks go to the following instructors, whose comments often challenged us to rethink or justify our interpretations and who always provided a check on accuracy down to the smallest detail: Stephen Andrews, Central New Mexico Community College; David Bachrach, University of New Hampshire; Curtis Bostick, Southern Utah University; Fedja Buric, Bellarmine University; Marie Therese Champagne, University of West Florida; Sviatoslav Dmitriev, Ball State University; Gabrielle Everett, Jefferson College; William Grose, Wytheville Community College; Elizabeth Heath, Baruch College-CUNY; Kevin Herlihy, University of Central Florida; Renzo Honores, High Point University; Chris Laney, Berkshire Community College; Christina Bosco Langert, Suffolk Community College; Elizabeth Lehfeldt, Cleveland State University; James Martin, Campbell University; Walter Miszczenko, College of Western Idaho; Yvonne Rivera, Montgomery County Community College; David Pizzo, Murray State University; Kevin Robbins, Indiana University/Purdue University; James Robertson, College of San Mateo; Brian Rutishauser, Fresno City College; Charles Levine, Mesa Community College; Lisa Ossian, Des Moines Area Community College; Ruma Salhi, Northern Virginia Community College; Christopher Sleeper, Mira Costa College; Allison Stein, Pellissippi State Community College; Pamela Stewart, Arizona State University; Nancy Vavra, University of Colorado at Boulder; K. Steven Vincent, North Carolina State University; and Joanna Vitiello, Rockhurst University.

ContentsWhy This Book This Way Preface:

Many colleagues, friends, and family members have made contributions to this work. They know how grateful we are. We also wish to acknowledge and thank the publishing team at Bedford/St. Martin’s who did so much to bring this revised edition to completion: editorial director Edwin Hill; publisher for history Michael Rosenberg; director of development for history Jane Knetzger; developmental editor Kathryn Abbott; associate editor Emily DiPietro; editorial assistant Lexi DeConti; senior marketing manager Sandra McGuire; senior production editor Kerri Cardone; art researcher Bruce Carson; text designer Lisa Buckley; cover designer Billy Boardman; and copyeditor Lisa Wehrle. Our students’ questions and concerns have shaped much of this work, and we welcome all our readers’ suggestions, queries, and criticisms. Please contact us at our respective institutions or via [emailprotected].

Versions and Supplements

dopters of The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures and their students have access to abundant print and digital resources and tools, the acclaimed Bedford Series in History and Culture volumes, and much more. The LaunchPad course space for The Making of the West provides access to the narrative as well as a wealth of primary sources and other features, along with assignment and assessment opportunities at the ready. See below for more information, visit the book’s catalog site at macmillanhighered.com/hunt/catalog, or contact your local Bedford/St. Martin’s sales representative.

Get the Right Version for Your Class To accommodate different course lengths and course budgets, The Making of the West is available in several different formats, including 3-hole-punched loose-leaf Budget Books versions and low-priced PDF e-books. And for the best value of all, package a new print book with LaunchPad to get the best each format offers — a print version for easy portability and reading with a LaunchPad interactive e-book and course space with loads of additional assignment and assessment options. ■

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Combined Volume (Chapters 1–29): available in paperback, loose-leaf, and e-book formats and in LaunchPad. Volume 1: To 1750 (Chapters 1–17): available in paperback, loose-leaf, and e-book formats and in LaunchPad Volume 2: Since 1500 (Chapters 14–29): available in paperback, loose-leaf, and e-book formats and in LaunchPad

As noted below, any of these volumes can be packaged with additional titles for a discount. To get ISBNs for discount packages, see the online catalog at macmillanhighered.com/hunt/catalog or contact your Bedford/St. Martin’s representative. xi

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Versions and Supplements

Assign LaunchPad — an Assessment-Ready Interactive e-book and Course Space. Available for discount purchase on its own or for packaging with new books, LaunchPad is a breakthrough solution for today’s courses. Intuitive and easy-to-use for students and instructors alike, LaunchPad is ready to use as is, and can be edited, customized with your own material, and assigned in seconds. LaunchPad for The Making of the West includes Bedford/St. Martin’s high-quality content all in one place, including the full interactive e-book and the companion reader Sources of The Making of the West, by Katharine Lualdi, plus LearningCurve formative quizzing, guided reading activities designed to help students read actively for key concepts, additional primary sources, including auto-graded source-based questions to build skill development, chapter summative quizzes, and more. Through a wealth of formative and summative assessments, including the adaptive learning program of LearningCurve (see the full description ahead), students gain confidence and get into their reading before class. In addition to LearningCurve, we are delighted to offer a full skill-building feature program to accompany the print book. Each chapter in LaunchPad has at least two primary source documents, a “Contrasting Views” feature that compares two or more primary sources, a “Seeing History” visual analysis of one or more images, and “Taking Measure” focuses on quantitative analysis. Each of these features is accompanied by analytical questions and autograded quizzes. These LaunchPad features do for skill development what LearningCurve does for content mastery and reading comprehension. LaunchPad easily integrates with course management systems, and with fast ways to build assignments, rearrange chapters, and add new pages, sections, or links, it lets teachers build the courses they want to teach and hold students accountable. For more information, visit launchpadworks.com or to arrange a demo, contact us at history@ macmillanhighered.com.

Assign LearningCurve So Your Students Come to Class Prepared Students using LaunchPad receive access to LearningCurve for The Making of the West. Assigning LearningCurve in place of reading quizzes is easy for instructors, and the reporting features help instructors track overall class trends and spot topics that are giving students trouble so they can adjust their lectures and class activities. This online learning tool is popular with students because it was designed to help them rehearse content at their own pace in a nonthreatening, game-like environment. The feedback for wrong answers provides instructional coaching and sends students back to the book for review. Students answer as many questions as necessary to reach a target score, with repeated chances to revisit material they haven’t mastered. When LearningCurve is assigned, students come to class better prepared.

Versions and Supplements Contents

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Take Advantage of Instructor Resources Bedford/St. Martin’s has developed a rich array of teaching resources for this book and for this course. They range from lecture and presentation materials and assessment tools to course management options. Most can be found in LaunchPad or can be downloaded or ordered at macmillanhighered.com/hunt/catalog. Bedford Coursepack for Blackboard, Canvas, D2L, or Moodle. We can help you inte-

grate our rich content into your course management system. Registered instructors can download coursepacks that include our popular free resources and book-specific content for The Making of the West. Visit macmillanhighered.com/cms to find your version or download your coursepack. Instructor’s Resource Manual. The instructor’s manual offers both experienced and

first-time instructors tools for presenting textbook material in engaging ways. It includes content learning objectives, annotated chapter outlines, and strategies for teaching with the textbook, plus suggestions on how to get the most out of LearningCurve and a survival guide for first-time teaching assistants. Online Test Bank. The test bank includes a mix of fresh, carefully crafted multiple-

choice, matching, short-answer, and essay questions for each chapter. All questions appear in Microsoft Word format and in easy-to-use test bank software that allows instructors to add, edit, re-sequence, and print questions and answers. Instructors can also export questions into a variety of course management systems. The Bedford Lecture Kit: Lecture Outlines, Maps, and Images. Look good and save time with The Bedford Lecture Kit. These presentation materials are downloadable individually from the Instructor Resources tab at macmillanhighed.com/huntconcise/catalog. They include fully customizable multimedia presentations built around chapter outlines that are embedded with maps, figures, and images from the textbook and are supplemented by more detailed instructor notes on key points and concepts.

Package and Save Your Students Money For information on free packages and discounts up to 50%, visit macmillanhighered .com/hunt/catalog, or contact your local Bedford/St. Martin’s sales representative. The products that follow all qualify for discount packaging. Sources of The Making of the West, Fourth Edition. This companion sourcebook pro-

vides written and visual sources to accompany each chapter of The Making of the West. Political, social, and cultural documents offer a variety of perspectives that complement the textbook and encourage students to make connections between narrative history and primary sources. To aid students in approaching and interpreting documents,

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each chapter contains an introduction, document headnotes, and questions for discussion. Now with a chapter organization that matches the textbook, this reader is available free when packaged with the print text. Sources of The Making of the West e-Book. The reader is also available as an e-book.

When packaged with the print or electronic version of the textbook, it is available forfree. The Bedford Series in History and Culture. More than 100 titles in this highly praised

series combine first-rate scholarship, historical narrative, and important primary documents for undergraduate courses. Each book is brief, inexpensive, and focused on a specific topic or period. For a complete list of titles, visit bedfordstmartins.com /history/series. Rand McNally Atlas of Western Civilization. This collection of almost seventy full-

color maps illustrates the eras and civilizations in world history from the emergence of human societies to the present. Trade Books. Titles published by sister companies Hill and Wang; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Henry Holt and Company; St. Martin’s Press; Picador; and Palgrave Macmillan are available at a 50% discount when packaged with Bedford/St. Martin’s textbooks. For more information, visit macmillanhighered.com/tradeup.

A Pocket Guide to Writing in History. This portable and affordable reference tool by

Mary Lynn Rampolla provides reading, writing, and research advice useful to students in all history courses. Concise yet comprehensive advice on approaching typical history assignments, developing critical reading skills, writing effective history papers, conducting research, using and documenting sources, and avoiding plagiarism — enhanced with practical tips and examples throughout — have made this slim reference a best-seller. A Student’s Guide to History. This complete guide to success in any history course

provides the practical help students need to be successful. In addition to introducing students to the nature of the discipline, author Jules Benjamin teaches a wide range of skills from preparing for exams to approaching common writing assignments, and explains the research and documentation process with plentiful examples.

Brief Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Early Western Civilization, 400,000–1000 b.c.e. 3 Near East Empires and the Reemergence of Civilization in Greece, 1000–500 b.c.e. 41 The Greek Golden Age, c. 500–c. 400 b.c.e. 77 From the Classical to the Hellenistic World, 400–30 b.c.e. 113 The Rise of Rome and Its Republic, 753–44 b.c.e. 143 The Creation of the Roman Empire, 44 b.c.e.–284 c.e. 175 The Transformation of the Roman Empires, 284–600 c.e. 211 The Heirs of Rome: Islam, Byzantium, and Europe, 600–750 249 From Centralization to Fragmentation, 750–1050 279 Commercial Quickening and Religious Reform, 1050–1150 313 The Flowering of the Middle Ages, 1150–1215 347 The Medieval Synthesis — and Its Cracks, 1215–1340 379 Crisis and Renaissance, 1340–1492 409 Global Encounters and the Shock of the Reformation, 1492–1560 441 Wars of Religion and the Clash of Worldviews, 1560–1648 473 Absolutism, Constitutionalism, and the Search for Order, 1640–1700 505 The Atlantic System and Its Consequences, 1700–1750 541 The Promise of Enlightenment, 1750–1789 575 The Cataclysm of Revolution, 1789–1799 607 Napoleon and the Revolutionary Legacy, 1800–1830 639 Industrialization and Social Ferment, 1830–1850 673 Politics and Culture of the Nation-State, 1850–1870 709 Empire, Industry, and Everyday Life, 1870–1890 745 Modernity and the Road to War, 1890–1914 783 World War I and Its Aftermath, 1914–1929 821 The Great Depression and World War II, 1929–1945 859 The Cold War and the Remaking of Europe, 1945–1960s 899 Postindustrial Society and the End of the Cold War Order, 1960s–1989 937 A New Globalism, 1989 to the Present 973 xv

Contents

‘The Orrery’, c.1766 (oil on canvas), Wright of Derby, Joseph (1734–97) / Derby Museum and Art Gallery, UK / Bridgeman Images.

Preface v Versions and Supplements Maps and Figures LaunchPad Features

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Authors’ Note: The b.c.e./c.e. Dating System World Map lviii Map of Europe lx

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Contents

Egyptian Museum, Cairo / Alfredo Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.

Chapter 1

Early Western Civilization, 400,000–1000 b.c.e.

From the Stone Age to Mesopotamian Civilization, 400,000–1000 b.c.e. 4 Life and Change in the Stone Age 4 ■ The Emergence of Cities in Mesopotamia, 4000–2350 b.c.e. 8 ■ Metals and Empire Making: The Akkadians and the Ur III Dynasty, c. 2350–c. 2000 b.c.e. 12 ■ The Achievements of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Canaanites, 2000–1000 b.c.e. 13 Egypt, the First Unified Country, 3050–1000 b.c.e. 15 From the Unification of Egypt to the Old Kingdom, 3050–2190 b.c.e. 16 The Middle and New Kingdoms in Egypt, 2061–1081 b.c.e. 22 The Hittites, the Minoans, and the Mycenaeans, 2200–1000 b.c.e. 26 The Hittites, 1750–1200 b.c.e. 27 ■ The Minoans, 2200–1400 b.c.e. 28 ■ The Mycenaeans, 1800–1000 b.c.e. 31 ■ The Violent End to Early Western Civilization, 1200–1000 b.c.e. 34 Conclusion 36 Chapter 1 Review 38

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Chapter 2

Near East Empires and the Reemergence of Civilization in Greece, 1000–500 b.c.e. 41 From Dark Age to Empire in the Near East, 1000–500 b.c.e. 42 The New Empire of Assyria, 900–600 b.c.e. 43 ■ The Neo-Babylonian Empire, 600–539 b.c.e. 43 ■ The Persian Empire, 557–500 b.c.e. 44 ■ The Israelites, Origins to 539 b.c.e. 46 The Reemergence of Greek Civilization, 1000–750 b.c.e. 50 The Greek Dark Age 50 ■ The Values of the Olympic Games 52 Homer, Hesiod, and Divine Justice in Greek Myth 53

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The Creation of the Greek City-State, 750–500 b.c.e. 54 The Physical Environment of the Greek City-State 55 ■ Trade and “Colonization,” 800–580 b.c.e. 55 ■ Citizenship and Freedom in the Greek City-State 56 New Directions for the Greek City-State, 750–500 b.c.e. 64 Oligarchy in the City-State of Sparta, 700–500 b.c.e. 64 ■ Tyranny in the City-State of Corinth, 657–585 b.c.e. 67 ■ Democracy in the City-State of Athens, 632–500 b.c.e. 68 ■ New Ways of Thought and Expression in Greece, 630–500 b.c.e. 70 Conclusion 73 Chapter 2 Review 74

Contents

The Triptolemos Painter / © National Museums of Scotland / Bridgeman Images.

Chapter 3

The Greek Golden Age, c. 500–c. 400 b.c.e.

Wars between Persia and Greece, 499–479 b.c.e. 78 From the Ionian Revolt to the Battle of Marathon, 499–490 b.c.e. 78 TheGreat Persian Invasion, 480–479 b.c.e. 80

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Athenian Confidence in the Golden Age, 478–431 b.c.e. 81 The Establishment of the Athenian Empire 81 ■ Radical Democracy andPericles’ Leadership, 461–431 b.c.e. 83 ■ The Urban Landscape in Athens 85 Tradition and Innovation in Athens’s Golden Age 89 Religious Tradition in a Period of Change 89 ■ Women, Slaves, and Metics 90 ■ Innovative Ideas in Education, Philosophy, History, andMedicine 93 ■ The Development of Greek Tragedy 99 ■ TheDevelopment of Greek Comedy 102 The End of Athens’s Golden Age, 431–403 b.c.e. 104 The Peloponnesian War, 431–404 b.c.e. 104 ■ Athens Defeated: Tyranny andCivil War, 404–403 b.c.e. 107 Conclusion 108 Chapter 3 Review 110

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Art Resource, NY.

Chapter 4

From the Classical to the Hellenistic World, 400–30 b.c.e. 113 Classical Greece after the Peloponnesian War, 400–350 b.c.e. 114 Athens’s Recovery after the Peloponnesian War 114 ■ The Execution of Socrates, 399 b.c.e. 116 ■ The Philosophy of Plato 116 ■ Aristotle, Scientist and Philosopher 118 ■ Greek Political Disunity 118 The Rise of Macedonia, 359–323 b.c.e. 119 Macedonian Power and Philip II, 359–336 b.c.e. 119 Alexander the Great, 336–323 b.c.e. 120

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The Rule of

The Hellenistic Kingdoms, 323–30 b.c.e. 122 Creating New Kingdoms 123 ■ The Layers of Hellenistic Society 126 The End of the Hellenistic Kingdoms 128

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Hellenistic Culture 129 The Arts under Royal Support 129 ■ Philosophy for a New Age 131 ■ Scientific Innovation 133 ■ Cultural and Religious Transformations 135 Conclusion 138 Chapter 4 Review 140

Contents

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Musei Capitolini, Rome, Italy / Scala / Art Resource, NY.

Chapter 5

The Rise of Rome and Its Republic, 753–44 b.c.e.

143

Roman Social and Religious Traditions 144 Roman Moral Values 144 ■ The Patron-Client System 145 ■ The Roman Family 146 ■ Education for Public Life 148 ■ Public and Private Religion 148 From Monarchy to Republic 150 Roman Society under the Kings, 753–509 b.c.e. 150 Republic, 509–287 b.c.e. 152

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The Early Roman

Roman Imperialism and Its Consequences 156 Expansion in Italy, 500–220 b.c.e. 156 ■ Wars with Carthage and in the East, 264–121 b.c.e. 158 ■ Greek Influence on Roman Literature and the Arts 160 ■ Stresses on Society from Imperialism 161 Civil War and the Destruction of the Republic 163 The Gracchus Brothers and Violence in Politics, 133–121 b.c.e. 163 ■ Marius and the Origin of Client Armies, 107–100 b.c.e. 164 ■ Sulla and Civil War, 91–78 b.c.e. 165 ■ Julius Caesar and the Collapse of the Republic, 83–44 b.c.e. 167 Conclusion 170 Chapter 5 Review 172

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Museo Arqueologico Nacional, Madrid, Spain / De Agostini Picture Library / Gianni Dagli Orti / Bridgeman Images.

Chapter 6

The Creation of the Roman Empire, 44 b.c.e.–284 c.e. 175 From Republic to Empire, 44 b.c.e.–14 c.e. 176 Civil War, 44–27 b.c.e. 176 ■ The Creation of the Principate, 27 b.c.e.– 14c.e. 177 ■ Daily Life in the Rome of Augustus 179 ■ Changes in Education, Literature, and Art in Augustus’s Rome 182 Politics and Society in the Early Roman Empire 184 The Perpetuation of the Principate after Augustus, 14–180 c.e. 184 Life in the Roman Golden Age, 96–180 c.e. 188 The Emergence of Christianity in the Early Roman Empire 193 Jesus and His Teachings 193 ■ Growth of a New Religion 196 Competing Religious Beliefs 199

■

From Stability to Crisis in the Third Century c.e. 202 Threats to the Northern and Eastern Frontiers of the Early Roman Empire 202 ■ Uncontrolled Spending, Natural Disasters, and Political Crisis, 193–284 c.e. 203 Conclusion 205 Chapter 6 Review 208

Contents

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Basilica di San Giovanni Battista, Monza, Italy / Bridgeman Images.

Chapter 7

The Transformation of the Roman Empire, 284–600 c.e. 211 From Principate to Dominate in the Late Roman Empire, 284–395 212 The Political Transformation and Division of the Roman Empire 212 ■ The Social Consequences of Financial Pressures 215 ■ From the Great Persecution to Religious Freedom 217 The Official Christianization of the Empire, 312–c. 540 218 Polytheism and Christianity in Competition 218 ■ The Struggle for Clarification in Christian Belief 221 ■ The Emergence of Christian Monks 226 Non-Roman Kingdoms in the Western Roman Empire, c. 370–550s 229 Non-Roman Migrations into the Western Roman Empire 229 ■ Social and Cultural Transformation in the Western Roman Empire 234 The Roman Empire in the East, c. 500–565 236 Imperial Society in the Eastern Roman Empire 236 ■ The Reign of Emperor Justinian, 527–565 239 ■ The Preservation of Classical Traditions in the Late Roman Empire 241 Conclusion 244 Chapter 7 Review 246

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Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

Chapter 8

The Heirs of Rome: Islam, Byzantium, and Europe, 600–750 249 Islam: A New Religion and a New Empire 250 Nomads and City Dwellers 250 ■ The Prophet Muhammad and the Faith of Islam 251 ■ Growth of Islam, c. 610–632 252 ■ The Caliphs, Muhammad’s Successors, 632–750 253 ■ Peace and Prosperity in Islamic Lands 255 Byzantium Besieged 257 Wars on the Frontiers, c. 570–750 257 ■ From an Urban to a Rural Way of Life 259 ■ New Military and Cultural Forms 260 ■ Religion, Politics, and Iconoclasm 260 Western Europe: A Medley of Kingdoms 262 Frankish Kingdoms with Roman Roots 262 ■ Economic Activity in a Peasant Society 266 ■ The Powerful in Merovingian Society 267 ■ Christianity and Classical Culture in the British Isles 270 ■ Unity in Spain, Division in Italy 272 ■ Political Tensions and the Power of the Pope 273 Conclusion 274 Chapter 8 Review 276

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From the First Bible of Charles the Bald, c. 843–851 / Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France / Bridgeman Images.

Chapter 9

From Centralization to Fragmentation, 750–1050

279

The Byzantine Emperor and Local Elites 280 Imperial Power 281 ■ The Macedonian Renaissance, c. 870–c. 1025 282 The Dynatoi: A New Landowning Elite 283 ■ The Formation of Eastern Europe and Kievan Rus 283

■

The Rise and Fall of the Abbasid Caliphate 285 The Abbasid Caliphate, 750–936 285 ■ Regional Diversity in Islamic Lands 286 ■ Unity of Commerce and Language 288 ■ The Islamic Renaissance, c. 790–c. 1050 289 The Carolingian Empire 289 The Rise of the Carolingians 290 ■ Charlemagne and His Kingdom, 768–814 291 ■ The Carolingian Renaissance, c. 790–c. 900 293 ■ Charlemagne’s Successors, 814–911 294 ■ Land and Power 295 ■ Viking, Muslim, and Magyar Invasions, c. 790–955 297 After the Carolingians: The Emergence of Local Rule 299 Public Power and Private Relationships 299 ■ Warriors and Warfare 302 Efforts to Contain Violence 303 ■ Political Communities in Italy, England, and France 304 ■ Emperors and Kings in Central and Eastern Europe 306 Conclusion 309 Chapter 9 Review 310

■

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South Portal, Church of St. Pierre, Moissac, France / Bridgeman Images.

Chapter 10

Commercial Quickening and Religious Reform, 1050–1150 313 The Commercial Revolution 314 Fairs, Towns, and Cities 314 ■ Organizing Crafts and Commerce 318 Communes: Self-Government for the Towns 319 ■ The Commercial Revolution in the Countryside 320 Church Reform 321 Beginnings of Reform 321 Conflict, 1075–1122 324 ■ Orders of Poverty 329

■

The Gregorian Reform and the Investiture The Sweep of Reform 327 ■ New Monastic

The Crusades 331 Calling the Crusade 332 ■ The First Crusade 334 States 335 ■ The Disastrous Second Crusade 336 Impact of the Crusades 337

■ ■

The Crusader The Long-Term

The Revival of Monarchies 337 Reconstructing the Empire at Byzantium 338 ■ England under Norman Rule 338 ■ Praising the King of France 340 ■ Surviving as Emperor 341 Conclusion 344 Chapter 10 Review 344

Contents

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Ingram Publishing / Newscom.

Chapter 11

The Flowering of the Middle Ages, 1150–1215 New Schools and Churches 348 The New Learning and the Rise of the University 348 From Romanesque to Gothic 351

■

347

Architectural Style:

Governments as Institutions 355 England: Unity through Common Law 355 ■ France: Consolidation and Conquest 359 ■ Germany: The Revived Monarchy of Frederick Barbarossa 360 ■ Eastern Europe and Byzantium: Fragmenting Realms 363 The Growth of a Vernacular High Culture 364 The Troubadours: Poets of Love and Play 364 Romance Literature 366

■

The Birth of Epic and

Religious Fervor and Crusade 367 New Religious Orders in the Cities 368 ■ Disastrous Crusades to the Holy Land 370 ■ Victorious Crusades in Europe and on Its Frontiers 371 Conclusion 374 Chapter 11 Review 376

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Opening page of the Metaphysics of Artistotle, 13th century / Bibliotheque Mazarine, Paris, France / Archives Charmet / Bridgeman Images.

Chapter 12

The Medieval Synthesis — and Its Cracks, 1215–1340 379 The Church’s Mission 380 Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council 380 ■ Lay Piety 382 ■ Jews and Lepers as Outcasts 383 Reconciling This World and the Next 385 The Achievement of Scholasticism 385 Music 387 ■ Gothic Art 389

■

The Inquisition 382

New Syntheses in Writing and

The Politics of Control 390 The Weakening of the Empire 392 ■ Louis IX and a New Ideal of Kingship 393 ■ The Birth of Representative Institutions 396 ■ The Weakening of the Papacy 397 ■ The Rise of the Signori 399 The Mongol Takeover 400 ■ The Great Famine 402 Conclusion 404 Chapter 12 Review 406

■

Contents

xxix

National Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.

Chapter 13

Crisis and Renaissance, 1340–1492

409

Crisis: Disease, War, and Schism 410 The Black Death, 1347–1352 410 ■ The Hundred Years’ War, 1337–1453 413 ■ The Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople, 1453 417 ■ The Great Schism, 1378–1417 418 The Renaissance: New Forms of Thought and Expression 421 Renaissance Humanism 422 ■ The Arts 423 Consolidating Power 428 New Political Formations in Eastern Europe 429 ■ Powerful States in Western Europe 430 ■ Power in the Republics 432 ■ The Tools of Power 435 Conclusion 436 Chapter 13 Review 438

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Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

Chapter 14

Global Encounters and the Shock of the Reformation, 1492–1560 441 The Discovery of New Worlds 442 Portuguese Explorations 442 ■ The Voyages of Columbus 444 ■ A New Era in Slavery 444 ■ Conquering the New World 445 ■ The Columbian Exchange 446 The Protestant Reformation 447 The Invention of Printing 447 ■ Popular Piety and Christian Humanism 448 ■ Martin Luther’s Challenge 450 ■ Protestantism Spreads and Divides 452 ■ The Contested Church of England 453 Reshaping Society through Religion 455 Protestant Challenges to the Social Order 455 Discipline 457 ■ Catholic Renewal 459 Striving for Mastery 461 Courtiers and Princes 461 ■ Divided Realms 466 Conclusion 468 Chapter 14 Review 470

■

New Forms of

Dynastic Wars 463

■

Financing War 465

Contents

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akg-images.

Chapter 15

Wars of Religion and the Clash of Worldviews, 1560–1648 473 Religious Conflicts Threaten State Power, 1560–1618 474 French Wars of Religion, 1562–1598 474 ■ Dutch Revolt against Spain 476 ■ Elizabeth I’s Defense of English Protestantism 479 ■ The Clash of Faiths and Empires in Eastern Europe 481 The Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648 482 Origins and Course of the War 482 ■ ■ The Peace of Westphalia, 1648 484

The Effects of Constant Fighting 483

Economic Crisis and Realignment 487 From Growth to Recession 487 ■ Consequences for Daily Life 488 The Economic Balance of Power 490 The Rise of Science and a Scientific Worldview 492 The Scientific Revolution 493 ■ The Natural Laws of Politics 496 The Arts in an Age of Crisis 497 ■ Magic and Witchcraft 499 Conclusion 500 Chapter 15 Review 502

■

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Chateau de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles, France / © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

Chapter 16

Absolutism, Constitutionalism, and the Search for Order, 1640–1700 505 Louis XIV: Absolutism and Its Limits 506 The Fronde, 1648–1653 506 ■ Court Culture as an Element of Absolutism 508 ■ Enforcing Religious Orthodoxy 509 ■ Extending State Authority at Home and Abroad 510 Constitutionalism in England 514 England Turned Upside Down, 1642–1660 514 ■ Restoration and Revolution Again 518 ■ Social Contract Theory: Hobbes and Locke 520 Outposts of Constitutionalism 521 The Dutch Republic 521 ■ Freedom and Slavery in the New World 524 Absolutism in Central and Eastern Europe 525 Poland-Lithuania Overwhelmed 525 ■ Brandenburg-Prussia: Militaristic Absolutism 526 ■ An Uneasy Balance: Austrian Habsburgs and Ottoman Turks 527 ■ Russia: Setting the Foundations of Bureaucratic Absolutism 528 The Search for Order in Elite and Popular Culture 530 Freedom and Constraint in the Arts and Sciences 530 Manners 533 ■ Reforming Popular Culture 535 Conclusion 536 Chapter 16 Review 538

■

Women and

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Basilica di San Giovanni Battista, Monza, Italy / Bridgeman Images.

Chapter 17

The Atlantic System and Its Consequences, 1700–1750 541 The Atlantic System and the World Economy 542 Slavery and the Atlantic System 542 ■ World Trade and Settlement 546 The Birth of Consumer Society 548 New Social and Cultural Patterns 550 Agricultural Revolution 550 ■ Social Life in the Cities 551 in the Arts 554 ■ Religious Revivals 555

■

New Tastes

Consolidation of the European State System 556 A New Power Alignment 556 ■ British Rise and Dutch Decline 557 Russia’s Emergence as a European Power 560 ■ Continuing Dynastic Struggles 563 ■ The Power of Diplomacy and the Importance of Population 564

■

The Birth of the Enlightenment 566 Popularization of Science and Challenges to Religion 566 ■ Travel Literature and the Challenge to Custom and Tradition 568 ■ Raising the Woman Question 570 Conclusion 571 Chapter 17 Review 572

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Contents

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Chartes, France / Bridgeman Images.

Chapter 18

The Promise of Enlightenment, 1750–1789

575

The Enlightenment at Its Height 576 Men and Women of the Republic of Letters 576 ■ Conflicts with Church and State 578 ■ The Individual and Society 580 ■ Spreading the Enlightenment 582 ■ The Limits of Reason: Roots of Romanticism and Religious Revival 584 Society and Culture in an Age of Enlightenment 585 The Nobility’s Reassertion of Privilege 586 ■ The Middle Class and the Making of a New Elite 587 ■ Life on the Margins 590 State Power in an Era of Reform 592 War and Diplomacy 592 ■ State-Sponsored Reform 595 Reform 597

■

Limits of

Rebellions against State Power 598 Food Riots and Peasant Uprisings 598 ■ Public Opinion and Political Opposition 599 ■ Revolution in North America 601 Conclusion 603 Chapter 18 Review 604

Contents

Chapter 19

The Cataclysm of Revolution, 1789–1799 The Revolutionary Wave, 1787–1789 608 Protesters in the Low Countries and Poland 608 Revolution, 1787–1789 609 From Monarchy to Republic, 1789–1793 614 The Revolution of Rights and Reason 614

■

607

Origins of the French

The End of Monarchy 617

Terror and Resistance 619 Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety 620 ■ The Republic of Virtue, 1793–1794 621 ■ Resisting the Revolution 624 ■ The Fall of Robespierre and the End of the Terror 625 Revolution on the March 628 Arms and Conquests 628 ■ Poland Extinguished, 1793–1795 630 ■ Revolution in the Colonies 631 ■ Worldwide Reactions to Revolutionary Change 633 Conclusion 634 Chapter 19 Review 636

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Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin, Germany / Bridgeman Images.

Chapter 20

Napoleon and the Revolutionary Legacy, 1800–1830 639 The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte 640 A General Takes Over 640 ■ From Republic to Empire 641 ■ The New Paternalism: The Civil Code 644 ■ Patronage of Science and Intellectual Life 645 “Europe Was at My Feet”: Napoleon’s Conquests 646 The Grand Army and Its Victories, 1800–1807 646 ■ The Impact of French Victories 649 ■ From Russian Winter to Final Defeat, 1812–1815 652 The “Restoration” of Europe 654 The Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815 654 ■ The Emergence of Conservatism 657 ■ The Revival of Religion 658 Challenges to the Conservative Order 659 Romanticism 659 ■ Political Revolts in the 1820s 662 Reform, 1830–1832 666 Conclusion 668 Chapter 20 Review 670

■

Revolution and

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By Salvatore Fergola, Museum San Martino, Naples, Italy / photo © Roger Viollet / The Image Works.

Chapter 21

Industrialization and Social Ferment, 1830–1850

673

The Industrial Revolution 674 Roots of Industrialization 674 ■ Engines of Change 676 ■ Urbanization and Its Consequences 680 ■ Agricultural Perils and Prosperity 682 Reforming the Social Order 683 Cultural Responses to the Social Question 683 ■ The Varieties of Social Reform 687 ■ Abuses and Reforms Overseas 689 Ideologies and Political Movements 691 The Spell of Nationalism 691 ■ Liberalism in Economics and Politics 693 Socialism and the Early Labor Movement 695 The Revolutions of 1848 697 The Hungry Forties 698 ■ Another French Revolution 698 ■ Nationalist Revolution in Italy 700 ■ Revolt and Reaction in Central Europe 700 ■ Aftermath to 1848: Reimposing Authority 702 Conclusion 703 Chapter 21 Review 706

■

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Chapter 22

Politics and Culture of the Nation-State, 1850–1870 709 The End of the Concert of Europe 710 Napoleon III and the Quest for French Glory 711 1853–1856: Turning Point in European Affairs 712

■ ■

The Crimean War, Reform in Russia 713

War and Nation Building 716 Cavour, Garibaldi, and the Process of Italian Unification 717 ■ Bismarck and the Realpolitik of German Unification 719 ■ Francis Joseph and the Creation of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy 722 ■ Political Stability through Gradual Reform in Great Britain 723 ■ Nation Building in North America 724 Nation Building through Social Order 726 Bringing Order to the Cities 726 ■ Expanding Government Bureaucracy 727 ■ Schooling and Professionalizing Society 728 ■ Spreading National Power and Order beyond the West 729 ■ Contesting the Nation-State’s Order at Home 731 The Culture of Social Order 733 The Arts Confront Social Reality 734 ■ Religion and National Order 736 From the Natural Sciences to Social Science 739 Conclusion 740 Chapter 22 Review 742

■

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Chapter 23

Empire, Industry, and Everyday Life, 1870–1890 The New Imperialism 746 The Scramble for Africa — North and South 747 in Asia 750 ■ Japan’s Imperial Agenda 751 ■ Imperialism 752 The Industry of Empire 755 Industrial Innovation 755 in Business Practices 759

■

745

Acquiring Territory The Paradoxes of

Facing Economic Crisis 758

■

Revolution

Imperial Society and Culture 761 The “Best Circles” and the Expanding Middle Class 761 ■ Working People’s Strategies 762 ■ National Fitness: Reform, Sports, and Leisure 764 ■ Artistic Responses to Empire and Industry 765 The Birth of Mass Politics 767 Workers, Politics, and Protest 768 ■ Expanding Political Participation in Western Europe 770 ■ Power Politics in Central and Eastern Europe 773 Conclusion 778 Chapter 23 Review 780

Contents

The Scream, 1893 (oil, tempera and pastel on cardboard) by Edvard Munch (1863–1944) / Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo, Norway / Bridgeman Images / © 2015 The Munch Museum / The Munch-Ellingsen Group. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Chapter 24

Modernity and the Road to War, 1890–1914

783

Public Debate over Private Life 784 Population Pressure 785 ■ Reforming Marriage 786 ■ New Women, New Men, and the Politics of Sexual Identity 787 ■ Sciences of the Modern Self 788 Modernity and the Revolt in Ideas 790 The Opposition to Positivism 791 ■ The Revolution in Science 791 Modern Art 792 ■ The Revolt in Music and Dance 794

■

Growing Tensions in Mass Politics 794 The Expanding Power of Labor 795 ■ Rights for Women and the Battle for Suffrage 796 ■ Liberalism Tested 798 ■ Anti-Semitism, Nationalism, and Zionism in Mass Politics 799 European Imperialism Challenged 803 The Trials of Empire 803 ■ The Russian Empire Threatened 807 Growing Resistance to Colonial Domination 808 Roads to War 810 Competing Alliances and Clashing Ambitions 810 ■ 1914: War Erupts 814 Conclusion 816 Chapter 24 Review 818

■

The Race to Arms 813

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Contents

Chapter 25

World War I and Its Aftermath, 1914–1929 The Great War, 1914–1918 822 Blueprints for War 822 ■ The Battlefronts 825 Protest, Revolution, and War’s End, 1917–1918 830 War Protest 830 ■ Revolution in Russia 830

■

821

The Home Front 827 Ending the War, 1918 834

The Search for Peace in an Era of Revolution 835 Europe in Turmoil 835 ■ The Paris Peace Conference, 1919–1920 836 Economic and Diplomatic Consequences of the Peace 838

■

A Decade of Recovery: Europe in the 1920s 840 Changes in the Political Landscape 841 ■ Reconstructing the Economy 844 ■ Restoring Society 845 Mass Culture and the Rise of Modern Dictators 847 Culture for the Masses 847 ■ Cultural Debates over the Future 849 The Communist Utopia 851 ■ Fascism on the March in Italy 852 Conclusion 854 Chapter 25 Review 856

■

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Hugo Jaeger / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images.

Chapter 26

The Great Depression and World War II, 1929–1945 859 The Great Depression 860 Economic Disaster Strikes 860 ■ Social Effects of the Depression 862 The Great Depression beyond the West 862 Totalitarian Triumph 864 The Rise of Stalinism 865 of German Politics 868 ■

■

Hitler’s Rise to Power 867 Nazi Racism 870

Democracies on the Defensive 871 Confronting the Economic Crisis 871

■

The Nazification

Cultural Visions in Hard Times 874

The Road to Global War 875 A Surge in Global Imperialism 875 ■ The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 877 ■ Hitler’s Conquest of Central Europe, 1938–1939 878 World War II, 1939–1945 881 The German Onslaught 881 ■ War Expands: The Pacific and Beyond 883 ■ The War against Civilians 883 ■ Societies at War 886 ■ From Resistance to Allied Victory 887 ■ An Uneasy Postwar Settlement 892 Conclusion 893 Chapter 26 Review 896

Contents

MGM / The Kobal Collection at Art Resource, NY.

Chapter 27

The Cold War and the Remaking of Europe, 1945–1960s 899 World Politics Transformed 900 Chaos in Europe 901 ■ New Superpowers: The United States and the Soviet Union 902 ■ Origins of the Cold War 903 ■ The Division of Germany 906 Political and Economic Recovery in Europe 908 Dealing with Nazism 908 ■ Rebirth of the West 910 ■ The Welfare State: Common Ground East and West 913 ■ Recovery in the East 915 Decolonization in a Cold War Climate 917 The End of Empire in Asia 918 ■ The Struggle for Identity in the Middle East 920 ■ New Nations in Africa 921 ■ Newcomers Arrive in Europe 923 Daily Life and Culture in the Shadow of Nuclear War 925 Restoring “Western” Values 925 ■ Cold War Consumerism and Shifting Gender Norms 927 ■ The Culture of Cold War 930 ■ The Atomic Brink 931 Conclusion 932 Chapter 27 Review 934

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Chapter 28

Postindustrial Society and the End of the Cold War Order, 1960s–1989 937 The Revolution in Technology 938 The Information Age: Television and Computers 938 ■ The Space Age 940 ■ The Nuclear Age 941 ■ Revolutions in Biology and Reproductive Technology 942 Postindustrial Society and Culture 943 Multinational Corporations 944 ■ The New Worker 944 ■ The Boom in Education and Research 945 ■ Changing Family Life and the Generation Gap 946 ■ Art, Ideas, and Religion in a Technocratic Society 947 Protesting Cold War Conditions 949 Cracks in the Cold War Order 949 ■ 1968: Year of Crisis 954

■

The Growth of Citizen Activism 953

The Testing of Superpower Domination and the End of the Cold War 957 A Changing Balance of World Power 957 ■ The Western Bloc Meets Challenges with Reform 959 ■ Collapse of Communism in the Soviet Bloc 963 Conclusion 968 Chapter 28 Review 970

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Chapter 29

A New Globalism, 1989 to the Present

973

Collapse of the Soviet Union and Its Aftermath 974 The Breakup of Yugoslavia 975 ■ The Soviet Union Comes Apart 977 Toward a Market Economy 979 ■ International Politics and the New Russia 980

■

The Nation-State in a Global Age 981 Europe Looks beyond the Nation-State 981 ■ Globalizing Cities and Fragmenting Nations 984 ■ Global Organizations 985 An Interconnected World’s New Challenges 986 The Problems of Pollution 986 ■ Population, Health, and Disease 988 North versus South? 989 ■ Radical Islam Meets the West 990 ■ The Promise and Problems of a World Economy 993 Global Culture and Society in the Twenty-First Century 996 Redefining the West: The Impact of Global Migration 997 ■ Global Networks and the Economy 998 ■ A New Global Culture? 999 Conclusion 1005 Chapter 29 Review 1008

■

Maps and Figures

MAPS Chapter 1 MAP 1.1 The Ancient Near East,

4000–3000 b.c.e. 6 SPOT MAP The Akkadian Empire, 2350–2200 b.c.e. 12 MAP 1.2 Ancient Egypt 17 MAP 1.3 Greece and the Aegean Sea, 1500 b.c.e. 31 MAPPING THE WEST The Violent End to Early Western Civilization, 1200–1000 b.c.e. 37

MAPPING THE WEST Greece, Europe,

and the Mediterranean, 400 b.c.e. 109

Chapter 4 SPOT MAP Athens’s Long Walls as

Chapter 2

Rebuilt after the Peloponnesian War 115 MAP 4.1 Conquests of Alexander the Great, r. 336–323 b.c.e. 121 MAP 4.2 Hellenistic Kingdoms, 240 b.c.e. 123 MAPPING THE WEST Roman Takeover of the Hellenistic World, to 30b.c.e. 139

MAP 2.1 Expansion of the Persian

Chapter 5

Empire, c. 550–490 b.c.e. 45 MAP 2.2 Phoenician and Greek Expansion, 750–500 b.c.e. 57 SPOT MAP Sparta and Corinth, 750–500 b.c.e. 64 SPOT MAP Ionia and the Aegean, 750–500 b.c.e. 72 MAPPING THE WEST Mediterranean Civilizations, c. 500 b.c.e. 73

MAP 5.1 Ancient Italy, 500 b.c.e.

Chapter 3

151 MAP 5.2 The City of Rome during the Republic 154 SPOT MAP Roman Roads, 110 b.c.e. 157 MAP 5.3 Roman Expansion, 500– 44b.c.e. 159 MAPPING THE WEST The Roman World at the End of the Republic, 44b.c.e. 171

MAP 3.1 The Persian Wars, 499–479

Chapter 6

b.c.e. 79 MAP 3.2 Fifth-Century b.c.e. Athens 86 MAP 3.3 The Peloponnesian War, 431–404 b.c.e. 105 xlvi

MAP 6.1 The Expansion of the Roman

Empire, 30 b.c.e.–117 c.e. 187 MAP 6.2 Natural Features and

Languages of the Roman World 190

Maps and Figures

xlvii

MAP 6.3 Christian Populations in the

SPOT MAP The Kingdom of the Franks

Late Third Century c.e. 198 SPOT MAP The Fragmented Roman Empire of the Third Century 205 MAPPING THE WEST The Roman Empire in Crisis, 284 c.e. 207

under Hugh Capet 987–996 306 MAPPING THE WEST Europe and the Mediterranean, c. 1050 309

Chapter 7 MAP 7.1 Diocletian’s Reorganization

of293 214 SPOT MAP The Empire’s East/West

Division, 395 215 MAP 7.2 The Spread of Christianity, 300–600 220 MAP 7.3 Migrations and Invasions of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries 231 MAPPING THE WEST Western Europe and the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire, c. 600 245

Chapter 8

Chapter 10 SPOT MAP The Walls of Placenza

317 SPOT MAP The World of the Investiure Conflict, c. 1070–1122 324 MAP 10.1 The First Crusade, 1096– 1099 333 SPOT MAP The Crusader States in 1109 336 SPOT MAP Norman Conquest of England, 1066 338 MAPPING THE WEST Europe and the Mediterranean c. 1150 343

Chapter 11 MAP 11.1 Europe in the Age of Henry II

750 254 MAP 8.2 Byzantine and Sasanid Empires, c. 600 258 MAP 8.3 The Merovingian Kingdoms in the Seventh Century 263 SPOT MAP Tours, c. 600 265 SPOT MAP The British Isles 270 SPOT MAP Lombard Italy, Early Eighth Century 273 MAPPING THE WEST Rome’s Heirs, c.750 275

and Frederick Barbarossa, 1150– 1190 356 SPOT MAP The Consolidation of France under Phillip Augustus, 1180–1223 360 MAP 11.2 Crusades and Anti-Heretic Campaigns, 1150–1215 371 MAP 11.3 The Reconquista, 1150– 1212 372 SPOT MAP The Albigensian Crusade, 1209–1229 374 MAPPING THE WEST Europe and Byzantium, c. 1215 375

Chapter 9

Chapter 12

MAP 9.1 The Byzantine Empire,

SPOT MAP Italy at the End of the

1025 281 MAP 9.2 Islamic States, c. 1000 286 MAP 9.3 Expansion of the Carolingian Empire under Charlemagne 292 SPOT MAP England in the Age of King Alfred, 871–899 304

Thirteenth Century 393 MAP 12.1 France under Louis IX, r.1226–1270 395 MAP 12.2 The Mongol Invasions to 1259 401 MAPPING THE WEST Europe, c.1340 405

MAP 8.1 Expansion of Islam to

xlviii

Maps and Figures

Chapter 13

MAP 16.3 State Building in Central and

MAP 13.1 Advance of the Black Death,

Eastern Europe, 1648–1699 527 MAPPING THE WEST Europe at the End of the Seventeenth Century 537

1346–1353 411 MAP 13.2 The Hundred Years’ War,

1337–1453 415 MAP 13.3 Ottoman Expansion in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries 417 SPOT MAP Italy at the Peace of Lodi, 1454 433 MAPPING THE WEST Europe, c.1492 437

Chapter 14 MAP 14.1 Early Voyages of World

Exploration 443 MAP 14.2 The Peasants’ War of 1525 456 MAPPING THE WEST Reformation Europe, c. 1560 469

Chapter 15 MAP 15.1 The Empire of Philip II,

r.1556–1598 476 SPOT MAP Retreat of the Spanish

Armada, 1588 480 SPOT MAP Russia, Poland-Lithuania, and Sweden in the Late 1500s 481 MAP 15.2 The Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia, 1648 485 MAP 15.3 European Colonization of the Americas, c. 1640 492 MAPPING THE WEST The Religious Divisions of Europe, c. 1648 501

Chapter 16 MAP 16.1 Louis XIV’s Acquisitions,

1668–1697 513 MAP 16.2 Dutch Commerce in the

Seventeenth Century 522 SPOT MAP Poland-Lithuania in the Seventeenth Century 525

Chapter 17 MAP 17.1 European Trade Patterns,

c.1740 543 MAP 17.2 Europe, c. 1715 558 MAP 17.3 Russia and Sweden after the Great Northern War, 1721 563 SPOT MAP Austrian Conquest of Hungary, 1657–1730 564 MAPPING THE WEST Europe in 1750 571

Chapter 18 MAP 18.1 The Seven Years’ War,

1756–1763 593 SPOT MAP The First Partition of

Poland, 1772 595 SPOT MAP The Pugachev Rebellion, 1773 599 MAPPING THE WEST Europe and the World, c. 1780 603

Chapter 19 MAP 19.1 Redrawing the Map of

France, 1789–1791 616 MAP 19.2 French Expansion, 1791–

1799

630 MAP 19.3 The Second and Third Partitions of Poland, 1793 and 1795 631 SPOT MAP St. Dominque on the Eve ofthe Revolt, 1791 632 MAPPING THE WEST Europe in 1799 635

Chapter 20 MAP 20.1 Napoleon’s Empire at Its

Height, 1812 647

Maps and Figures

xlix

MAP 20.2 Europe after the Congress

MAP 23.2 Expansion of Russia In Asia,

ofVienna, 1815 656 MAP 20.3 Revolutionary Movements ofthe 1820s 663 SPOT MAP Nationalistic Movements inthe Balkans, 1815–1830 664 MAP 20.4 Latin American Independence, 1804–1830 666 MAPPING THE WEST Europe in 1830 669

1865–1895 751 MAP 23.3 Expansion of Berlin to 1914 773 MAP 23.4 The Balkans, c. 1878 776 MAPPING THE WEST The West and the World, c. 1890 779

Chapter 21 MAP 21.1 Industrialization in Europe,

c.1850 677 SPOT MAP The Opium War, 1839–

1842 690 MAP 21.2 The Spread of Cholera, 1826–1855 681 MAP 21.3 Languages of NineteenthCentury Europe 692 SPOT MAP The Divisions of Italy, 1848 700 MAPPING THE WEST Europe in 1850 705

Chapter 22 MAP 22.1 The Crimean War, 1853–

1856 712 MAP 22.2 Unification of Italy, 1859–

1870 718 MAP 22.3 Unification of Germany, 1862–1871 721 SPOT MAP The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, 1867 723 MAP 22.4 U.S. Expansion, 1850– 1870 725 MAPPING THE WEST Europe and the Mediterranean, 1871 741

MAP 24.1 Jewish Migrations In the Late

Nineteenth Century 802 SPOT MAP The Struggle for Ethiopia, 1896 803 MAP 24.2 Africa In 1914 805 MAP 24.3 Imperialism In Asia, 1894– 1914 806 MAP 24.4 The Balkans, 1908– 1914 812 MAPPING THE WEST Europe at the Outbreak of World War I, August 1914 817

Chapter 25 MAP 25.1 The Fronts of World War I,

1914–1918 823 MAP 25.2 The Russian Civil War, 1917–1922 833 MAP 25.3 Europe and the Middle East after the Peace Settlements of 1919–1920 837 SPOT MAP National Minorities in Postwar Poland 842 SPOT MAP The Irish Free State and Ulster, 1921 843 MAPPING THE WEST Europe and the World In 1929 855

Chapter 26 MAP 26.1 The Spanish Civil War,

Chapter 23 MAP 23.1 Africa, c. 1890

Chapter 24

748

SPOT MAP British Colonialism in the

Malay Peninsula and Burma, 1826–1890 750

1936–1939 878 MAP 26.2 The Growth of Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 880

Maps and Figures

SPOT MAP The Division of France,

Chapter 29

1940 882 MAP 26.3 Concentration Camps and Extermination Sites in Europe 884 MAP 26.4 World War II in Europe and Africa 889 MAP 26.5 World War II in the Pacific 890 MAPPING THE WEST Europe at War’s End, 1945 895

MAP 29.1 The Former Yugoslavia,

Chapter 27 MAP 27.1 The Impact of World War II

on Europe 902 SPOT MAP Yugoslavia after the

Revolution 906 MAP 27.2 Divided Germany and the Berlin Airlift, 1946–1949 907 MAP 27.3 European NATO Members and the Warsaw Pact in the 1950s 908 SPOT MAP The Korean War, 1950– 1953 919 SPOT MAP Indochina, 1954 919 MAP 27.4 The Partition of Palestine and the Creation of Israel, 1947– 1948 920 MAP 27.5 The Decolonization of Africa, 1951–1990 922 MAPPING THE WEST The Cold War World, c. 1960 933

Chapter 28 MAP 28.1 The Vietnam War, 1954–

1975 951 SPOT MAP Prague Spring, 1968 955 SPOT MAP Israel after the Six-Day War, 1967 958 SPOT MAP Nationalist Movements of the 1970s 960 MAPPING THE WEST The Collapse ofCommunism in Europe, 1989– 1990 969

c.2000 976 MAP 29.2 Countries of the Former

Soviet Union, c. 2000 978 MAP 29.3 The European Union in 2015 983 MAP 29.4 The Middle East in the Twenty-First Century 991 SPOT MAP Tigers of the Pacific Rim, c.1995 994 MAPPING THE WEST The World’s TopFifteen Economies as of 2015 1007

FIGURES FIGURE 1.1 Cuneiform Writing

FIGURE 1.2 Egyptian Hieroglyphs

FIGURE 3.1 Triremes, the Foremost

Classical Greek Warships

FIGURE 3.2 Styles of Greek

Capitals

87 FIGURE 6.1 Cutaway Reconstruction of the Forum of Augustus 179 FIGURE 9.1 Diagram of a Manor and Its Three-Field System 297 FIGURE 10.1 Plan of Fountains Abbey 331 FIGURE 11.1 Plan of a Romanesque Church 353 FIGURE 11.2 Troubadour Song: “I Never Died for Love” 366 FIGURE 13.1 The Valois Succession 414 FIGURE 17.1 African Slaves Imported Into American Territories, 1701– 1810 544 FIGURE 17.2 Annual Imports In the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1450– 1870 545 FIGURE 28.1 Fluctuating Oil Prices, 1955–1985 959

LaunchPad Features

Chapter 1

CONTRASTING VIEWS The Nature of

DOCUMENT 1.1 Hammurabi’s Laws for

Women and Marriage SEEING HISTORY How to Look Like a Man in Ancient Greece TAKING MEASURE Military Forces of Athens and Sparta at the Beginning of the Peloponnesian War (431 b.c.e.)

Physicians DOCUMENT 1.2 Declaring Innocence

on Judgment Day in Ancient Egypt CONTRASTING VIEWS The Gains and the Losses of Life in Civilization vs. Life in Nature SEEING HISTORY Remembering the Dead in Ancient Egypt TAKING MEASURE The Rate of Population Growth to 1000 b.c.e. TERMS OF HISTORY Civilization

Chapter 2 DOCUMENT 2.1 Excerpt from a Gatha DOCUMENT 2.2 Zaleucus’s Law Code

for a Greek City-State in SeventhCentury b.c.e. Italy CONTRASTING VIEWS Persians Debate Democracy, Oligarchy, and Monarchy SEEING HISTORY The Shift in Sculptural Style from Egypt to Greece TAKING MEASURE Greek Family Size and Agricultural Labor in the Archaic Age

Chapter 3 DOCUMENT 3.1 Athenian Regulations

for a Rebellious Ally DOCUMENT 3.2 Sophists Argue Both Sides of a Case

Chapter 4 DOCUMENT 4.1 Aristotle on the

Nature of the Greek Polis DOCUMENT 4.2 Epigrams by Women

Poets CONTRASTING VIEWS Roman

Attitudes Toward Cleopatra VII, theLast Hellenistic Queen SEEING HISTORY Showing Struggle and Pain in Hellenistic Sculpture TAKING MEASURE The March of Alexander the Great’s Army

Chapter 5 DOCUMENT 5.1 The Rape and Suicide

of Lucretia DOCUMENT 5.2 Polybius on Roman

Military Discipline CONTRASTING VIEWS What Was

Julius Caesar Like? SEEING HISTORY Visualizing the Connection between War and Religion in the Roman Republic

lii

LaunchPad Features

TAKING MEASURE Census Records

during the First and Second Punic Wars

Chapter 6 DOCUMENT 6.1 Augustus, Res Gestae

(My Accomplishments) DOCUMENT 6.2 The Scene at a Roman

Bath DOCUMENT 6.3 A Roman Stoic

Philosopher on the Capabilities of Women CONTRASTING VIEWS Christians in the Empire: Conspirators or Faithful Subjects? SEEING HISTORY The Symbolism of Augustus as Ruler of the World TAKING MEASURE The Value of Roman Imperial Coinage, 27 b.c.e.– 300 c.e.

Chapter 7 DOCUMENT 7.1 Diocletian’s Edict on

Maximum Prices and Wages DOCUMENT 7.2 The Edict of Milan on

Religious Freedom CONTRASTING VIEWS Debate: Did

Romans or Huns Better Protect Life, Law, and Freedom? SEEING HISTORY Changing Religious Beliefs: Pagan and Christian Sarcophagi TAKING MEASURE Peasants’ Use of Farm Produce in the Roman Empire

Chapter 8 DOCUMENT 8.1 The Fatihah of the

Qur’an DOCUMENT 8.2 The Pact of Umar CONTRASTING VIEWS Icons: Idols or

Aids to Worship SEEING HISTORY Who Conquered Whom? A Persian and an Arabic Coin Compared

TAKING MEASURE Papal Letters Sent

from Rome to Northern Europe, c.600–c. 700 TERMS OF HISTORY Medieval

Chapter 9 DOCUMENT 9.1 A Portrait of BasilII DOCUMENT 9.2 When She Approached CONTRASTING VIEWS Charlemagne:

Roman Emperor, Father of Europe, or the Chief Bishop? SEEING HISTORY The Many Styles of the Macedonian Renaissance TAKING MEASURE Sellers, Buyers, and Donors, 800–1000 TERMS OF HISTORY Feudalism

Chapter 10 DOCUMENT 10.1 Peppercorns as

Money DOCUMENT 10.2 Opposition to the

Norman Conquest CONTRASTING VIEWS Henry IV SEEING HISTORY Two Faces of

Monasticism TAKING MEASURE English Livestock

in 1086

Chapter 11 DOCUMENT 11.1 Frederick I’s Reply to

the Romans DOCUMENT 11.2 Bertran de Born,

“Ilove the joyful time of Easter” DOCUMENT 11.3 The Children’s Crusade (1212) CONTRASTING VIEWS Magna Carta SEEING HISTORY Romanesque versus Gothic: The View Down theNave TAKING MEASURE The Bureaucratization of the French Monarchy

LaunchPad Features

Chapter 12 DOCUMENT 12.1 Thomas Aquinas

Writes about Sex DOCUMENT 12.2 The Debate between

Reason and the Lover CONTRASTING VIEWS The Mongols: Instruments of God or Cruel Invaders? SEEING HISTORY The Agony and the Ecstasy TAKING MEASURE Grain Prices during the Great Famine

Chapter 13 DOCUMENT 13.1 Wat Tyler’s Rebellion

(1381) DOCUMENT 13.2 The Ducal Entry into

Ghent (1458) CONTRASTING VIEWS Joan of Arc:

Who Was “the Maid”? SEEING HISTORY Facades from Gothic to Renaissance TAKING MEASURE Population Losses and the Black Death TERMS OF HISTORY Renaissance

Chapter 14 DOCUMENT 14.1 Columbus Describes

His First Voyage (1493) DOCUMENT 14.2 Ordinances for Calvinist Churches (1547) CONTRASTING VIEWS Martin Luther: Holy Man or Heretic SEEING HISTORY Expanding Geographic Knowledge: World Maps in an Age of Exploration TAKING MEASURE The Printing Press in Europe c. 1500

Chapter 15 DOCUMENT 15.1 The Horrors of the

Thirty Years’ War, 1626 DOCUMENT 15.2 Sentence Pronounced against Galileo (1633)

liii

CONTRASTING VIEWS Political

Authority and Religion: What Happened When Subjects Held Different Beliefs? SEEING HISTORY Religious Differences in Painting of the Baroque Period: Rubens and Rembrandt TAKING MEASURE Precious Metals andthe Spanish Colonies, 1550– 1800

Chapter 16 DOCUMENT 16.1 Marie de Sévigné,

Letter Describing the French Court (1675) DOCUMENT 16.2 John Milton, Defense of Freedom of the Press (1644) CONTRASTING VIEWS The English Civil War SEEING HISTORY Symbols and Power in the Age of Louis XIV TAKING MEASURE The SeventeenthCentury Army

Chapter 17 DOCUMENT 17.1 European Views of

Indian Religious Practices (1731) DOCUMENT 17.2 Montesquieu, Persian Letters: Letter 37 (1721) CONTRASTING VIEWS The Consumer Revolution SEEING HISTORY The “Invisibility” of Slavery TAKING MEASURE Relationship of Crop Harvested to Seed Used, 1400–1800 TERMS OF HISTORY Progress

Chapter 18 DOCUMENT 18.1 Denis Diderot,

“Encyclopedia” (1755) DOCUMENT 18.2 Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776)

liv

LaunchPad Features

CONTRASTING VIEWS Women and

the Enlightenment SEEING HISTORY Pottery and Social Distinction TAKING MEASURE European Urbanization, 1750–1800 TERMS OF HISTORY Enlightenment

SEEING HISTORY Visualizing Class

Differences TAKING MEASURE Railroad Lines,

1830–1850

Chapter 22 DOCUMENT 22.1 Mrs. Seacole: The

Minorities (1789) DOCUMENT 19.2 Address on Abolishing the Slave Trade (February5, 1790) CONTRASTING VIEWS Perspectives on the French Revolution SEEING HISTORY The Cutting Edge of Caricature TAKING MEASURE Naval Power TERMS OF HISTORY Revolution

Other Florence Nightingale DOCUMENT 22.2 Education of a Mathematical Genius in Russia DOCUMENT 22.3 Bismarck Tricks the Public to Get His War SEEING HISTORY Photographing the Nation: Domesticity and War CONTRASTING VIEWS The NationState in the Mid-Nineteenth Century TAKING MEASURE Literacy and Illiteracy in the Nineteenth Century TERMS OF HISTORY Nationalism

Chapter 20

Chapter 23

DOCUMENT 20.1 Napoleon’s Army

DOCUMENT 23.1 An African King

Chapter 19 DOCUMENT 19.1 The Rights of

Retreats from Moscow (1812) DOCUMENT 20.2 Wordsworth’s Poetry (1798) CONTRASTING VIEWS Napoleon: For and Against SEEING HISTORY The Clothing Revolution: The Social Meaning of Changes in Postrevolutionary Fashion TAKING MEASURE Power Capability ofthe Leading States, 1816–1830

Chapter 21 DOCUMENT 21.1 Marx and Engels,

TheCommunist Manifesto (1848) DOCUMENT 21.2 Alexis de Tocqueville

Describes the June Days in Paris (1848) CONTRASTING VIEWS The Effects of Industrialization

Describes His Government DOCUMENT 23.2 Henrik Ibsen, From

A Doll’s House CONTRASTING VIEWS Experiences of

Migration SEEING HISTORY Anglo-Indian Polo

Team TAKING MEASURE European

Emigration, 1870–1890

Chapter 24 DOCUMENT 24.1 Leon Pinsker Calls

for a Jewish State DOCUMENT 24.2 Turkish Nationalism DOCUMENT 24.3 Vietnamese Resistance and the Importance of Becoming Modern CONTRASTING VIEWS Debating the Revolt in Art, Ideas, and Lifestyles SEEING HISTORY Outrage and Consumption in Modern Art

LaunchPad Features

TAKING MEASURE The Growth in

CONTRASTING VIEWS Decolonization

Armaments, 1890–1914 TERMS OF HISTORY Modern

SEEING HISTORY The Soviet System

Chapter 25

TAKING MEASURE Military Spending

DOCUMENT 25.1 Outbreak of the

Russian Revolution DOCUMENT 25.2 Memory and Battlefield Tourism CONTRASTING VIEWS The Middle East at the End of World War I: Freedom or Subjugation? SEEING HISTORY Portraying Soldiers in World War I TAKING MEASURE The Victims of Influenza, 1918–1919

Chapter 26 DOCUMENT 26.1 A Family Copes with

Unemployment DOCUMENT 26.2 The Greater East Asia

Co-Prosperity Sphere CONTRASTING VIEWS Nazism and Hitler: For and Against SEEING HISTORY Militarization of the Masses TAKING MEASURE Wartime Production of the Major Powers, 1939–1945 TERMS OF HISTORY Fascism

Chapter 27 DOCUMENT 27.1 The Schuman Plan

onEuropean Unity (1950) DOCUMENT 27.2 Torture in Algeria DOCUMENT 27.3 Popular Culture,

Youth Consumerism, and the Birth of the Generation Gap

in Africa and Consumer Goods and the Cold War Arms Race, 1950–1970

Chapter 28 DOCUMENT 28.1 Margaret Thatcher’s

Economic Vision DOCUMENT 28.2 A Citizen’s

Experience of Gorbachev’s Reforms CONTRASTING VIEWS Feminist Debates SEEING HISTORY Critiquing the Soviet System: Dissident Art in the 1960s and 1970s TAKING MEASURE Postindustrial Occupational Structure, 1984

Chapter 29 DOCUMENT 29.1 Václav Havel,

“Czechoslovakia Is Returning to Europe” DOCUMENT 29.2 The Green Parties Unite Transnationally and Announce Common Goals (2006) CONTRASTING VIEWS The Dutch Debate Globalization, Muslim Immigrants, and Turkey’s Admission to the EU SEEING HISTORY World Leaders and Citizens Come Together After Murders in Paris TAKING MEASURE World Population Growth, 1950–2010 TERMS OF HISTORY Globalization

Authors’ Note

The b.c.e./c.e. Dating System

hen were you born? What year is it? We customarily answer questions like these with a number, such as “1991” or “2008.” Our replies are usually automatic, taking for granted the numerous assumptions Westerners make about how dates indicate chronology. But to what do numbers such as 1991 and 2008 actually refer? In this book the numbers used to specify dates follow a recent revision of the system most common in the Western secular world. This system reckons the dates of solar years by counting backward and forward from the traditional date of the birth of Jesus Christ, over two thousand years ago. Using this method, numbers followed by the abbreviation b.c.e., standing for “before the common era” (or, as some would say, “before the Christian era”), indicate the number of years counting backward from the assumed date of the birth of Jesus Christ. b.c.e. therefore indicates the same chronology marked by the traditional abbreviation b.c. (“before Christ”). The larger the number preceding b.c.e. (or b.c.), the earlier in history is the year to which it refers. The date 431 b.c.e., for example, refers to a year 431 years before the birth of Jesus and therefore comes earlier in time than the dates 430 b.c.e., 429 b.c.e., and so on. The same calculation applies to numbering other time intervals calculated on the decimal system: those of ten years (a decade), of one hundred years (a century), and of one thousand years (a millennium). For example, the decade of the 440s b.c.e. (449 b.c.e. to 440 b.c.e.) is earlier than the decade of the 430s b.c.e. (439 b.c.e. to 430 b.c.e.). “Fifth century b.c.e.” refers to the fifth period of 100 years reckoning backward from the birth of Jesus and covers the years 500 b.c.e. to 401 b.c.e. It is earlier in history than the fourth century b.c.e. (400 b.c.e. to 301 b.c.e.), which followed the fifth century b.c.e. Because this system has no year “zero,” the first century b.c.e. covers the years 100 b.c.e. to 1 b.c.e. Dating millennia works similarly: the second millennium b.c.e. refers to the years 2000 b.c.e. to 1001 b.c.e., the third millennium to the years 3000 b.c.e. to 2001 b.c.e., and so on. To indicate years counted forward from the traditional date of Jesus’s birth, numbers are followed by the abbreviation c.e., standing for “of the common era” (or “of the Christian era”). c.e. therefore indicates the same chronology marked by the traditional abbreviation a.d., which stands for the Latin phrase anno Domini (“in the year of the Lord”). a.d. properly comes before the date being marked. The date a.d. 1492, for example, translates as “in the year of the Lord 1492,” meaning 1492 years after the birth of Jesus. Under the b.c.e./c.e. system, this date would be written as 1492 c.e. For dating centuries, the term “first century c.e.” refers to the period from 1 c.e. to 100 c.e. (which is the same period as a.d. 1 to a.d. 100). For dates c.e, the smaller the number, the earlier the date in history. The fourth century c.e. (301 c.e. to 400 c.e.) comes before the fifth century c.e. (401 c.e. to 500 c.e.). The year 312 c.e. is a date in the early fourth

lvi

Authors’ Note

lvii

century c.e., while 395 c.e. is a date late in the same century. When numbers are given without either b.c.e. or c.e., they are presumed to be dates c.e. For example, the term eighteenth century with no abbreviation accompanying it refers to the years 1701 c.e. to 1800 c.e. No standard system of numbering years, such as b.c.e./c.e., existed in antiquity. Different people in different places identified years with varying names and numbers. Consequently, it was difficult to match up the years in any particular local system with those in a different system. Each city of ancient Greece, for example, had its own method for keeping track of the years. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides, therefore, faced a problem in presenting a chronology for the famous Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, which began (by our reckoning) in 431 b.c.e. To try to explain to as many of his readers as possible the date the war had begun, he described its first year by three different local systems: “the year when Chrysis was in the forty-eighth year of her priesthood at Argos, and Aenesias was overseer at Sparta, and Pythodorus was magistrate at Athens.” A Catholic monk named Dionysius, who lived in Rome in the sixth century c.e., invented the system of reckoning dates forward from the birth of Jesus. Calling himself Exiguus (Latin for “the little” or “the small”) as a mark of humility, he placed Jesus’s birth 754 years after the foundation of ancient Rome. Others then and now believe his date for Jesus’s birth was in fact several years too late. Many scholars today calculate that Jesus was born in what would be 4 b.c.e. according to Dionysius’s system, although a date a year or so earlier also seems possible. Counting backward from the supposed date of Jesus’s birth to indicate dates earlier than that event represented a natural complement to reckoning forward for dates after it. The English historian and theologian Bede in the early eighth century was the first to use both forward and backward reckoning from the birth of Jesus in a historical work, and this system gradually gained wider acceptance because it provided a basis for standardizing the many local calendars used in the Western Christian world. Nevertheless, b.c. and a.d. were not used regularly until the end of the eighteenth century. b.c.e. and c.e. became common in the late twentieth century. The system of numbering years from the birth of Jesus is far from the only one in use today. The Jewish calendar of years, for example, counts forward from the date given to the creation of the world, which would be calculated as 3761 b.c.e. under the b.c.e./c.e. system. Under this system, years are designated a.m., an abbreviation of the Latin anno mundi, “in the year of the world.” The Islamic calendar counts forward from the date of the Prophet Muhammad’s flight from Mecca, called the Hijra, in what is the year 622 c.e. The abbreviation a.h. (standing for the Latin phrase anno Hegirae, “in the year of the Hijra”) indicates dates calculated by this system. Anthropology commonly reckons distant dates as “before the present” (abbreviated b.p.). History is often defined as the study of change over time; hence the importance of dates for the historian. But just as historians argue over which dates are most significant, they disagree over which dating system to follow. Their debate reveals perhaps the most enduring fact about history—its vitality.

80°N

Greenland (Den.) Alaska (U.S.)

ICELAND

60°N

UNITED KINGDOM

C A NA DA

IRELAND FRANCE SPAIN

40°N

UNITED STATES

PORTUGAL

Azores (Port.)

AT L A N T I C OCEAN

(Port.)

MOROCCO

Canary Is. (Sp.)

BAHAMAS

Hawaii (U.S.)

20°N

MEXICO

PAC I F I C

HAITI

Western Sahara

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Puerto Rico (U.S.)

(Mor.)

ST. KITTS AND NEVIS CAPE MAURITANIA JAMAICA ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA Guadeloupe (Fr.) BELIZE VERDE DOMINICA SENEGAL Martinique (Fr.) HONDURAS ST. VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES GUATEMALA MALI ST. LUCIA BARBADOS GAMBIA NICARAGUA EL SALVADOR GRENADA GUINEA-BISSAU TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO COSTA RICA GUINEA VENEZUELA GUYANA SURINAME PANAMA SIERRA LEONE French Guiana (Fr.)

OCEAN

COLOMBIA

Equator

0°

CUBA

Madeira

Galápagos Is. (Ec.)

LIBERIA CÔTE D’IVOIRE BURKINA FASO GHANA

ECUADOR

BRAZIL

PERU

SAMOA

BOLIVIA

TONGA

20°S

PARAGUAY Easter I.

CHILE

(Chile)

0 40°S

1,500

AT L A N T I C OCEAN

URUGUAY

3,000 miles

ARGENTINA

3,000 kilometers

N Falkland Is.

(U.K.)

E S

60°S

80°S

160°W

140°W

120°W

100°W

80°W

60°W

40°W

20°W

FINLAND

R U S S I A N

ESTONIA LATVIA LITHUANIA

DEN. NETH. GERMANYPOLAND BELARUS BEL. LUX. CZ. REP. UKRAINE SLK. MOLDOVA AUS. HUNG. SLN. ROMANIA CR. SERB. A SWITZ. LY B.H. KOS.BULGARIA GEORGIA MONT.MAC. ARMENIA ALB. GREECE TURKEY

KAZAKHSTAN MONGOLIA

UZ BE KI KYRGYZSTAN ST AN TURKMENI ST TAJIKISTAN AN AZERBAIJAN SYRIA LEBANON AFGHANISTAN CYPRUS IRAQ ISRAEL IRAN

TUNISIA

MALTA

ALGERIA LIBYA

JORDAN KUWAIT

EGYPT

BAHRAIN

SAUDI ARABIA QATAR UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

SUDAN

CHAD

ERITREA

NIGERIA BENIN TOGO

CENTRAL SOUTH AFRICAN REP.SUDAN CAMEROON

CO NG

EQ. GUINEA

GABON

E YEM

SÃO TOMÉ & PRÍNCIPE

PAC I F I C

MYANMAR

INDIA

(BURMA)

LA VIE

THAILAND

DJIBOUTI

Mariana Is. (U.S.)

PHILIPPINES

MALDIVES

SRI LANKA

(U.S.)

BRUNEI

SOMALIA

PALAU

M A L AY S I A

FEDERATED STATES OF MICRONESIA NAURU

SINGAPORE

BURUNDI TANZANIA COMOROS SEYCHELLES

I N D O N E S I A

INDIAN

MARSHALL IS.

Guam

CAMBODIA

ETHIOPIA

OCEAN

TAIWAN

BANGLADESH OMAN

JAPAN

BHUTAN NE PAL

UGANDA RWANDA KENYA

DEM. REP. OF THE CONGO

N. KOREA S. KOREA

C H I N A

AM TN S O

NIGER

F E D E R A T I O N

PA KI STA N

OR W A S W ED Y EN

A RC T I C O C E A N

OCEAN

PAPUA NEW GUINEA

KIRIBATI

TUVALU SOLOMON IS.

EAST TIMOR

ANGOLA ZAMBIA

MALAWI

ZIMBABWE NAMIBIA BOTSWANA

VANUATU

MADAGASCAR MAURITIUS

New Caledonia (Fr.)

A U S T R A L I A SOUTH AFRICA

MOZAMBIQUE SWAZILAND LESOTHO NEW ZEALAND

Abbreviations

A N TA RC T I C A 20°E

40°E

60°E

80°E

100°E

ALB. AUS. BEL. B.H. CR. CZ. REP. DEN. HUNG. KOS. 120°E LUX. 140°E MAC. MONT. NETH. SERB. SLK. SLN. SWITZ.

ALBANIA AUSTRIA BELGIUM BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA CROATIA CZECH REPUBLIC DENMARK HUNGARY KOSOVO 160°E LUXEMBOURG MACEDONIA MONTENEGRO NETHERLANDS SERBIA SLOVAKIA SLOVENIA SWITZERLAND

Tasmania (Aust.)

FIJI

NORWAY

Bergen

SWEDEN

Oslo

E S

Stockholm

SCOTLAND

NORTHERN IRELAND

Göteborg

Edinburgh

North Sea

Belfast

Aarhus

UNITED

Dublin

IRELAND

Glasgow

DENMARK

Copenhagen

RUSSIA

Liverpool

Kaliningrad

KINGDOM

Cork

WALES

Gdansk

Birmingham

ENGLAND

Thames R.

El be

NETHERLANDS Amsterdam Rotterdam

London

Vi stu Warsaw la R .

Berlin

Antwerp Brussels

BELGIUM

POLAND

GERMANY

ne Rhi

nel English Chan

Od er

Frankfurt

Prague

Paris Se in Luxembourg eR .

Bay of Biscay

Rhôn e

L GA

Corsica

Barcelona

Split Sarajevo

Madrid

MONACO

Rome

SPAIN

ITALY

Naples Seville

Sardinia

Balearic Is.

Gibraltar (Br.)

Zagreb Belgrade

BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

MARINO A

RTU

Andorra la Vella Marseille

CROATIA

San MarinoSAN

R ro

Ljubljana Po R.

ANDORRA

HUNGARY

SLOVENIA

Milan

Budapest

Graz

Oporto

Bratislava

AUSTRIA

Innsbruck

SWITZERLAND

SLOVAKIA

Munich D Vienna anube R.

Vaduz

Zürich Bern

Lyon

Lisbon

Brno

LIECHTENSTEIN

FRANCE

Cracow

CZECH REP.

LUXEMBOURG

Loire R.

AT L A N T I C O C E A N

Podgorica

MONTENEGRO Tirana

ALBANIA

Tyrrhenian Sea Palermo

Algiers

Sicily

Ionian Sea

Tunis Rabat Valletta

MALTA

ALGERIA MOROCCO

TUNISIA

Elevation Feet Meters Over 13,120 6,561–13,120 1,641–6,560 661–1640 0–660 Below sea level

Tripoli

Over 4,001 2,001–4,000 501–2,000 201–500 0–200 Below sea level

National capital Major city

M e d i t e r r a n e a n

LIBYA 0 0

150 150

300 miles 300 kilometers

FINLAND A L U R

Helsinki

St. Petersburg

Tallinn

S . M T

ESTONIA Pärnu Moscow

Riga

LATVIA

R U S S I A N

al Ur

F E D E R A T I O N Vo l ga

LITHUANIA

Kaunas Vilnius

KAZAKHSTAN

Minsk

BELARUS Gomel

Brest

Kharkiv

Kiev

UKRAINE CA RP A

e r R.

MOLDOVA

I TH

Tiraspol

ia n

TS.

Odessa

GEORGIA

Black

Danube R.

Pristina

KOSOVO

Bucharest

C A U C A S U S

ROMANIA

SERBIA

Chisinau

M AN

Cluj

Dnie p

M T S .

Baku

Tbilisi

Sea ARMENIA

BULGARIA

Yerevan

Sofia Plovdiv

Skopje

Istanbul

AZERBAIJAN

MACEDONIA Ankara

Salonica

TURKEY

IRAN

Izmir

ri Tig

Aegean Sea GREECE

Athens

SYRIA Crete

Beirut

Damascus

LEBANON

S e a

IRAQ Eu

CYPRUS

Baghdad

rate s R.

ISRAEL Tel Aviv

Amman

KUWAIT

Jerusalem

JORDAN

Alexandria

Cairo Nile R.

EGYPT

SAUDI ARABIA

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The Making of the West Peoples and Cultures

Early Western Civilization

400,000–1000 b.c.e.

ings in ancient Egypt believed the gods judged them in the afterlife. In Instructions for Merikare, written around 2100–2000 b.c.e., a king advises his son: “Secure your place in the cemetery by being upright, by doing justice, upon which people’s hearts rely. . . . When a man is buried and mourned, his deeds are piled up next to him as treasure.” Being judged pure of heart led to an eternal reward: “abiding [in the afterlife] like a god, roaming [free] like the lords of time.” Ordinary Egyptians, too, believed they should live justly by worshipping the gods and obeying the king. A guidebook instructing mummies about the underworld, the Book of the Dead, said the jackal-headed god Anubis would weigh the dead person’s heart against the goddess Maat and her feather of Truth, with the bird-headed The Afterlife in Egyptian Religion god Thoth recording the result. Pictures in the This illustration comes from the book show the Swallower of the Damned — ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, with a crocodile’s head, a lion’s body, and a acollection of illustrated instruchippopotamus’s hind end — crouching ready tions and magic spells buried with to eat the heart of anyone who failed. Egyptian dead people to help them in the afterlife. It shows the deceased mythology thus taught that living a just life standing in front of offerings made was the most important human goal because to Osiris, the god of the underworld. it won a blessed existence after death. He is seated on a throne with his This belief — that there is a divine world sister and wife, the goddess Isis, more powerful than the human — goes back to and her sister standing behind him. The myth of Osiris, who died and the time before civilization, when people in was cut up into pieces but then the Stone Age lived as hunter-gatherers. Ten to reassembled and resurrected by twelve thousand years ago, when a global warmIsis, expressed Egyptians’ belief in ing led to the invention of agriculture and the an eternal life after death. (Egyptian domestication of animals, human life changed Museum, Cairo / Alfredo Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.) in revolutionary ways that still affect our lives today. Civilization first emerged around 4000– 3000 b.c.e. in cities in Mesopotamia (the region between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, today Iraq). Historians define civilization as a way of life based on agriculture and trade, with cities containing large buildings for religion and government; technology to produce metals, textiles, pottery, and 3

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other manufactured objects; and knowledge of writing. Current archaeological research indicates that those conditions first existed in Mesopotamia. Civilization always arose with religion at its core. In Mesopotamian civilization, rulers believed they were judged for maintaining order on earth and honoring the gods. Egyptian civilization, which began about 3100–3000 b.c.e., built enormous temples and pyramids. Civilizations emerged starting about 2500 b.c.e. in India, China, and the Americas. By 2000 b.c.e., civilizations appeared in Anatolia (today Turkey), on islands in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, and in Greece. The formation of civilization produced intended and unintended consequences. The spread of metallurgy (using high heat to extract metals from ores), for example, created better tools and weapons but also increased preexisting social hierarchy (ranking people as superiors or inferiors). The peoples of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean, and Greece created Western civilization by exchanging ideas, technologies, and objects through trade, travel, and war. Building on concepts from the Near East, Greeks originated the idea of the West as a separate region, identifying Europe as the West (where the sun sets) and different from the East (where the sun rises). The making of the West depended on cultural, political, and economic interaction among diverse groups. The West remains CHAPTER FOCUS What changes did Western an evolving concept, not a fixed region with civilization bring to human life? unchanging borders and members.

From the Stone Age to Mesopotamian Civilization, 400,000–1000 b.c.e. People in the Stone Age developed patterns of life that still exist. The most significant of those early developments were (1) the evolution of hierarchy in society and (2) the invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals. Those inventions allowed people to stay in one place and raise their own food instead of wandering around to find things to eat in the wild. This change in how human beings met their most basic need — nutrition — led them to settle down in permanent communities for the first time. Eventually, some of these communities grew large enough in population and area to be considered cities. The conditions of life in these populous settlements incubated civilization, beginning in the fertile plains of the two great rivers of the Near East, the Euphrates and the Tigris. There, the Mesopotamians learned to work metals, and their rulers’ desire to acquire and control the sources of these increasingly precious resources generated the drive to create empires. That drive in turn set the world on a course that extends to the modern age.

Life and Change in the Stone Age About four hundred thousand years ago, people whose brains and bodies resembled ours appeared first in Africa. Called Homo sapiens (“wise human beings”), they were the immediate ancestors of modern people. Spreading out from Africa, they grad-

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From the Stone Age to Mesopotamian Civilization, 400,000–1000 b.c.e.

ually populated the rest of the earth. Anthropologists call this time the Stone Age because people made tools and weapons from stone as well as from bone and wood; they did not yet know how to work metals. The Stone Age is divided into an early part, the Paleolithic (“Old Stone”), and a later part, the Neolithic (“New Stone”). In the Paleolithic Age, people existed as hunter-gatherers who originally lived in mostly egalitarian bands (meaning all adults enjoyed a rough equality in making group decisions). They roamed in groups of twenty to fifty, hunting animals, catching fish and shellfish, and gathering plants, fruits, and nuts. Women with young children foraged for plants close to camp; they provided the group’s most reliable supply of nourishment. Men did most of the hunting of wild animals far from camp, although recent archaeological evidence shows that women also participated, especially in hunting with nets. Objects from distant regions found in burials show that hunter-gatherer bands traded with one another. Trade spread knowledge — especially technology, such as techniques for improving tools, and art for creating beauty and expressing beliefs. The use of fire for cooking was a major innovation because it allowed people to eat wild grains that they could not digest raw. Evidence from graves shows that hierarchy emerged in Paleolithic times. Some Paleolithic burial sites contain weapons, tools, animal figurines, ivory beads, seashells, and bracelets alongside the corpses; the objects indicate that certain dead persons had greater status and wealth than others. Hierarchy probably began when men acquired prestige from bringing back meat after long hunts and from fighting in wars. (The many traumatic wounds seen in male skeletons show warfare was frequent.) Older women and men also earned status from their experience and longevity, in an age when illness or accidents killed most people before age thirty. The decoration of corpses with red paint and valuable objects suggests that Paleolithic people thought about the mystery of death and perhaps believed in an afterlife. Paleolithic artists also sculpted statuettes of human figures, probably for religious purposes. Climate and geography — the fundamental features of our natural environment — defined a new way of life for human beings beginning about 10,000 b.c.e. A slow process of transformation started when climate change in the late Paleolithic period brought warmer temperatures and more rainfall at higher elevations. This weather increased the amount of wild grains people could gather in the foothills of the Near East’s Fertile Crescent, an arc of territory extending up from the Jordan valley in Israel, through eastern Turkey, and down into the foothills and plains of Iraq and Iran (Map 1.1).* Paleolithic hunter-gatherers came to settle where wild grains grew abundantly and game animals grazed. Recent archaeological excavation in Turkey suggests that around eleven thousand years ago, groups organized to erect stone monuments to worship gods who they believed helped them to survive, and they started growing food nearby. A more reliable food supply allowed people to raise *In this book, we observe the common usage of the term Near East to mean the lands of southwestern Asia and Egypt.

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MAP 1.1 The Ancient Near East, 4000–3000 b.c.e.

The diverse region we call the ancient Near East included many different landscapes, climates, peoples, and languages. Kings ruled its independent city-states, the centers of the world’s first civilizations, beginning around 4000–3000 B.C.E. Trade by land and sea for natural resources, especially metals, and wars of conquest kept the peoples of the region in constant contact and conflict with one another. How did geography facilitate — or hinder — the development of civilization in the Near East?

more children, and increased social organization promoted larger settlements. The more people that were born, however, the greater the need for food became. After thousands of years of trial and error, people in the Fertile Crescent invented reliable agriculture by sowing seeds from wild grains to produce harvests year after year. This marked the start of the Neolithic Age. Since women had the most experience gathering plants, they probably played the major role in developing farming, while men continued to hunt. Recent research suggests that people also learned to domesticate animals about the same time. By nine thousand years ago, keeping herds for food was widespread in the Near East, which was home to wild animals that could be domesticated, such as sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle. Historians call agriculture and the domestication of animals the “farming package”; this package created the Neolithic Revolution. The farming package had revo-

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From the Stone Age to Mesopotamian Civilization, 400,000–1000 b.c.e.

Model of a House at Çatalhöyük Archaeologists built this model of a house to show how Neolithic villagers lived in Çatalhöyük (today in central Turkey) from around 6500 to 5500 B.C.E. The wall paintings and bull-head sculpture had religious meaning, perhaps linked to the graves that the residents dug under the floor for their dead. The main entrance to the house was through the ceiling, as the houses were built right next to one another without streets in between, only some space for dumping refuse; the roofs served as walkways. Why do you think the villagers chose this arrangement fortheir settlement? (Çatalhöyük Research Project.)

lutionary effects because it produced many permanent settlements and food surpluses. Some Neolithic people lived as pastoralists (herders moving around to find grazing land for their animals), while others were farmers who had to reside in a settled location to raise crops. Fixed settlements marked a turning point in the relation between human beings and the environment, as farmers increasingly channeled streams for irrigation. DNA evidence from ancient bones and modern populations shows that by 4000 b.c.e., immigrants and traders from the Fertile Crescent had helped spread knowledge of agriculture and domestication as far as the European shores of the Atlantic Ocean. When farmers began producing more food than they needed, the surpluses allowed other people in the settlement to specialize in architecture, art, crafts, metalwork, textile production, and trade.

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The Neolithic Revolution generated more hierarchy because positions of authority were needed to allow some people to supervise the complex irrigation system that supported agricultural surpluses, and because greater economic activity created a stricter division of labor by gender. Men began to dominate agriculture following the invention of heavy wooden plows pulled by oxen, sometime after 4000 b.c.e. Not having to bear and nurse babies, men took over long-distance trade. Women and older children mastered new domestic tasks such as turning milk from domesticated animals into cheese and yogurt and making clothing for themselves and their families. This gendered division of labor arose as an efficient response to the conditions and technologies of the time, but it had the unintended consequence of increasing men’s status.

The Emergence of Cities in Mesopotamia, 4000–2350 b.c.e. Significant changes in human society took place when the first cities — and therefore the first civilization — emerged in Mesopotamia about 4000–3000 b.c.e. on the plains bordering the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (see Map 1.1, page 6). Cities developed there because the climate and the land could support large populations. Mesopotamian farmers operated in a challenging environment: temperatures soared to 120 degrees Fahrenheit and little rain fell in the low-lying plains, yet the rivers flooded unpredictably. They maximized agricultural production by devising the technology and administrative arrangements necessary to irrigate the arid flatlands with water diverted from the rivers. A vast system of canals controlled flooding and turned the desert green with food crops. The need to construct and maintain a system of irrigation canals in turn led to the centralization of authority in Mesopotamian cities, which controlled the farmland and irrigation systems outside their fortified walls. This political arrangement — an urban center exercising control over the surrounding countryside — is called a city-state. Mesopotamian city-states were independent communities competing with each other for land and resources. The people of Sumer (southern Mesopotamia) established the earliest city-states. Unlike other Mesopotamians, the Sumerians did not speak a Semitic language (the group of languages from which Hebrew and Arabic came); the origins of their language remain a mystery. By 3000 b.c.e., the Sumerians had created twelve independent city-states — including Uruk, Eridu, and Ur — which repeatedly battled each other for territory. By 2500 b.c.e., most of the cities had expanded to twenty thousand residents or more. The rooms in Sumerians’ mud-brick houses surrounded open courts. Large homes had a dozen rooms or more. Agricultural surpluses and trade in commodities and manufactured goods made the Sumerian city-states prosperous. Their residents bartered grain, vegetable oil, woolens, and leather with one another, and they acquired metal, timber, and precious stones from foreign trade. The invention of the wheel for use on transport wagons around 3000 b.c.e. strengthened the Mesopotamian economy. Traders traveled as far as India, where the cities of Indus civilization emerged about 2500 b.c.e. Two groups dominated the Sumerian economy: religious officials controlled the temples, and

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From the Stone Age to Mesopotamian Civilization, 400,000–1000 b.c.e.

The Ziggurat at Ur in Sumer Sumerian royalty built this massive temple (called a ziggurat) in the twenty-first century B.C.E. Toconstruct its three huge terraces (connected with stairways), workers glued bricks together with tar around a central core. The walls had to be more than seven feet thick to hold the weight of the building, whose original height is uncertain. The first terrace reached forty-five feet above the ground. Still, the Great Pyramid in Egypt dwarfed even this large monument. (© Michael S. Yamashita / Corbis.)

ruling families controlled large farms and gangs of laborers. Some private households also became rich. Increasingly rigid forms of hierarchy evolved in Sumerian society. Slaves, owned by temple officials and by individuals, had the lowest status. People were enslaved by being captured in war, being born to slaves, voluntarily selling themselves or their children (usually to escape starvation), or being sold by their creditors when they could not repay loans (debt slavery). Children whose parents dedicated them as slaves to the gods could rise to prominent positions in temple administration. In general, however, slaves existed in near-total dependence on other people and were excluded from normal social relations. They usually worked without pay and lacked almost all legal rights. Considered as property, they could be bought, sold, beaten, or even killed by their masters. Slaves worked in domestic service, craft production, and farming, but historians dispute whether slaves or free laborers were more important to the economy. Free persons performed most government labor, paying their taxes with work rather than with money, which was measured in amounts of food or precious metal (currency was not invented until much later). Although some owners liberated slaves in their wills and others allowed slaves to keep enough earnings to purchase their freedom, most slaves had little chance of becoming free.

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Hierarchy became so strong in Mesopotamian society that it led to monarchy — the political system that became the most widespread form of government in the ancient world. In a monarchy, the king was at the top of the hierarchy, like the ruler of the gods. His male descendants inherited his position. To display their exalted status, royal families lived in elaborate palaces that served as administrative centers and treasure houses. Archaeologists excavating royal graves in Ur have revealed the rulers’ dazzling riches — spectacular possessions crafted in gold, silver, and precious stones. These graves also have yielded grisly evidence of the top-ranking status of the king and queen: servants killed to care for their royal masters after death. Patriarchy — domination by men in political, social, and economic life — already existed in Mesopotamian city-states, probably as an inheritance from the development of hierarchy in Paleolithic times. A Sumerian queen was respected because she was the king’s wife and the mother of the royal children, but her husband held supreme power. The king formed a council of older men as his advisers, but he publicly acknowledged the gods as his rulers; this concept made the state a theocracy (government by gods) and gave priests and priestesses public influence. The king’s greatest responsibility was to keep the gods happy and to defeat attacks from rival cities. The king collected taxes from the working population to support his family, court, palace, army, and officials. The kings, along with the priests of the large temples, regulated most of the economy in their kingdoms by controlling the exchange of food and goods between farmers and craft producers in a system known as a redistributive economy. In religion, Mesopotamians continued earlier traditions by practicing polytheism: worshipping many gods thought to control different aspects of life, including the weather, fertility, and war. People believed that their safety depended on the goodwill of the gods, and each city-state honored a deity as its special protector. To please the gods, city dwellers offered sacrifices and built ziggurats (temple towers) soaring as high as ten stories. Mesopotamians believed that if human beings angered the gods, divinities such as the sky god, Enlil, and the goddess of love and war, Inanna (also called Ishtar), would punish them by sending disease, floods, famine, and defeats in war. Myths told in long poems such as the Epic of Creation and the Epic of Gilgamesh expressed Mesopotamian ideas about the challenges and violence that human beings faced in struggling with the natural environment and creating civilization. Gilgamesh was a legendary king of Uruk who forced the young men of Uruk to labor like slaves and the young women to sleep with him. When his subjects begged the mother of the gods to grant them a protector, she created Enkidu, “hairy all over . . . dressed as cattle are.” A week of sex with a prostitute tamed this brute, preparing him for civilization: “Enkidu was weaker; he ran slower than before. But he had gained judgment, was wiser.” After wrestling to a draw, Gilgamesh and Enkidu became friends; together they defeated Humbaba (the ugly giant of the Pine Forest) and the Bull of Heaven. The gods doomed Enkidu to die soon after these triumphs. Depressed about the human condition and longing to cheat death, Gilgamesh sought the secret of immortality, but a thieving snake ruined his quest. He decided that the only immortality for mortals was winning fame for deeds. Only memory and gods could live forever.

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From the Stone Age to Mesopotamian Civilization, 400,000–1000 b.c.e.

Mesopotamian myths told in poetry, song, and art greatly influenced other peoples. A version of the Gilgamesh story recounted how the gods sent a huge flood over the earth. They warned one man, instructing him to build a boat. He loaded his vessel with his relatives, workers, and possessions; domesticated and wild animals; and “everything there was.” After a week of torrential rains, they left the boat to repopulate the earth and regenerate civilization. This story recalled the frequent floods of the Mesopotamian environment and was echoed later in the biblical account of the great flood covering the globe and Noah’s ark. The invention of writing in Mesopotamia transformed the way people exchanged stories and ideas. Sumerians originally invented this new technology to do accounting. Before writing, people drew small pictures on clay tablets to keep count of objects or animals. Writing developed when people created symbols to represent the sounds of speech instead of pictures to represent concrete things. Sumerian writing did not use an alphabet (a system in which each symbol represents the sound of a letter), but rather a system of wedge-shaped marks pressed into clay tablets to represent the sounds of syllables and entire words (Figure 1.1). Today this form of writing is called cuneiform (from cuneus, Latin for “wedge”). For a long time, writing was

SAG Head NINDA bread GU7 eat AB2 cow APIN plough )

SUHUR carp c. 3100 B.C.E. c. 3000 B.C.E. c. 2500 B.C.E. c. 2100 B.C.E. c. 700 B.C.E. (NeoAssyrian)

Sumerian reading + meaning

FIGURE 1.1 Cuneiform Writing

The earliest known form of writing developed in different locations in Mesopotamia in 4000– 3000 B.C.E. when people began linking meaning and sound to signs such as those shown in thechart. Some scribes who mastered the system used sticks or reeds to press dense rows ofsmall wedge-shaped marks into damp clay tablets; others used chisels to engrave them on stone. Cuneiform was used for at least fifteen Near Eastern languages and continued to be written for three thousand years.

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a professional skill for accounting mastered by only a few men and women known as scribes. The possibilities for communication over time and space exploded when people began writing down nature lore, mathematics, foreign languages, and literature. In the twenty-third century b.c.e., Enheduanna, the daughter of King Sargon of the city of Akkad, composed the oldest written poetry whose author is known. Written in Sumerian, her poetry praised the life-giving goddess of love, Inanna: “The great gods scattered from you like fluttering bats, unable to face your intimidating gaze . . . knowing and wise queen of all the lands, who makes all creatures and people multiply.” Later princesses who wrote love songs, lullabies, dirges, and prayers continued the Mesopotamian tradition of royal women becoming authors.

Metals and Empire Making: The Akkadians and the Ur III Dynasty, c. 2350–c. 2000 b.c.e.

M TA

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The riches for which people now fought had a new component: metal. Early metallurgy demonstrates how technological innovation can generate social and political change. Pure copper, which people had long been using, lost its shape and edge quickly. So craftsmen were motivated to invent ways to smelt ore and to make metal alloys at high temperatures. The invention of bronze, a copper-tin alloy hard enough to hold a razor edge, enabled metalsmiths to produce durable and deadly swords, daggers, and spearheads. The period from about 4000 to 1000 b.c.e. is called the Bronze Age because at this time bronze was the most important metal for weapons and tools; iron was not yet commonly used. The ownership of metal objects strengthened visible status divisions in society between men and women and rich and poor. This new technology allowed the Mesopotamian social elite to acquire new luxury goods in metal, improved tools for agriculture and construction, and bronze weapons. The desire to accumulate wealth and status symbols stimulated demand for decorated weapons and elaborate jewelry. Rich men ordered bronze swords and daggers with expensive inlays. Such weapons increased visible social differences between men and women because they marked the status of the masculine roles of hunter and warrior. Mesopotamian rulers fought to capture terriAKKADIAN Caspian tory containing ore mines. The desire to acquire Sea EMPIRE Syria GUTIANS metals led the kings of Akkad to create by force the Eu Ebla phra tes world’s first empire (a political state in which a R. Akkad? Presumed ancient single power rules formerly independent peoples). coastline It began around 2350 b.c.e., when Sargon, king of SUMERIAN Uruk CIVILIZATION Akkad, launched invasions north and south of his 0 125 250 miles central Mesopotamian homeland. He conquered Red lf 0 125 250 kilometers Sea Sumer and the regions all the way westward to the Mediterranean Sea, creating the Akkadian Empire. The Akkadian Empire, 2350–2200 b.c.e. A poet of around 2000 b.c.e. credited Sargon’s Per

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From the Stone Age to Mesopotamian Civilization, 400,000–1000 b.c.e.

success to the favor of the god Enlil: “To Sargon the king of Akkad, from below to above, Enlil had given him lordship and kingship.” Sargon’s grandson Naram-Sin also conquered distant places to gain resources and glory. By around 2250 b.c.e., he had reached Ebla, a large city in Syria. Archaeologists have unearthed many cuneiform tablets at Ebla; these discoveries suggest that the city was a center for learning and trade. The process of building an empire by force had the unintended consequence of spreading Mesopotamian literature and art and promoting cultural interaction. The Akkadians spoke a language unrelated to Sumerian, but in conquering Sumer they adopted much of that region’s religion, literature, and culture. Other peoples conquered by the Akkadians were then exposed to Sumerian beliefs and traditions, which they in turn adapted to suit their own purposes. Civil war ended the Akkadian Empire. A newly resurgent Sumerian dynasty called Ur III (2112–2004 b.c.e.) seized power in Sumer. The Ur III rulers created a centralized economy, presided over a flourishing of Sumerian literature, published the earliest preserved law code, and justified their rule by proclaiming their king tobe divine. The best-preserved ziggurat was built in their era. Royal hymns, a new literary form, glorified the king; one example reads: “Your commands, like the word of a god, cannot be reversed; your words, like rain pouring down from heaven, are without number.” Mesopotamia remained politically unstable, however. When civil war weakened the Ur III kingdom, nearby Amorite marauders conducted damaging raids. The UrIII dynasty collapsed after only a century of rule.

The Achievements of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Canaanites, 2000–1000 b.c.e. New kingdoms emerged in Assyria and Babylonia in the second millennium b.c.e. At the time, Mesopotamia was experiencing extended economic troubles caused by climate change and agricultural pollution. By around 2000 b.c.e., intensive irrigation had unintentionally raised the soil’s salt level so high that crop yields declined. When decreased rainfall made the situation worse, economic stress generated political instability lasting for centuries. The Assyrians, who inhabited northern Mesopotamia, took advantage of their geography to create a kingdom whose rulers permitted long-distance trade conducted by private entrepreneurs. Assyrians became prosperous by acting as intermediaries in the trade for wood and metals between Anatolia and Mesopotamia. They exported woolen textiles to Anatolia in exchange for raw materials, which they sold to the rest of Mesopotamia. Centralized state monopolies in which the government controlled international trade and redistributed goods had previously dominated the Mesopotamian economy. This kind of redistributive economy persisted in Mesopotamia, but by 1900 b.c.e. Assyrian kings were allowing individuals to transact commerce. This market-based

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system let private entrepreneurs maximize profits in successful ventures. Private Assyrian investors, for example, financed traders to export cloth. The traders then formed donkey caravans to travel hundreds of miles to Anatolia, where, if they survived the dangerous journey, they could make huge profits to be split with their investors. Royal regulators settled any complaints of trader fraud or losses in transit. To maintain social order, Mesopotamians established written laws made known to the people. Private commerce and property created a need to guarantee fairness in contracts. Mesopotamians believed that the king had a sacred duty to make divine justice known to his subjects by rendering judgments in all sorts of cases, from commercial disputes to crime. Once written down, the record of the king’s decisions became what historians today call a law code. Hammurabi, king of Babylon (r. c. 1792– c.1750 b.c.e.), became the most famous lawgiver in Mesopotamia. His laws for his kingdom straddling the Euphrates River drew on earlier Mesopotamian codes, such as that of the Ur III dynasty, and reveal details on city life in particular. Hammurabi proclaimed that he was supporting “the principles of truth and equity” and protecting the weak. His law code was based on an ideal of justice. Its “eye-for-an-eye” principle matched the crime and punishment as literally as possible. The code punished fraudulent prosecutions by imposing the death penalty on anyone failing to prove a serious accusation. It also relied on “nature-decided justice” by allowing accused persons to leap into a river: if they sank, they were guilty; ifthey floated, they were innocent. As king, Hammurabi emphasized relieving the poor’s burdens as crucial to royal justice. His laws divided society into free persons, commoners, and slaves. These categories reflected a social hierarchy in which some people were assigned a higher value than others. An attacker who caused a pregnant woman of the free class to miscarry, for example, paid twice the fine levied for the same offense against a commoner. Between social equals, the code specified “an eye for an eye.” A member of the free class who killed a commoner, however, was not executed, only fined. Many of Hammurabi’s laws concerned the king’s interests as a property owner leasing land to tenants. His laws were harsh for offenses against property, including mutilation or a gruesome death for crimes ranging from theft to wrongful sales and careless construction. Women had limited legal rights, but they could make contracts and appear in court. Marriages were arranged between the bride’s father and the groom and sealed with a legal contract. A wife could divorce her husband for cruelty; a husband could divorce his wife for any reason. The law protected the wife’s interests by requiring a husband to restore his divorced wife’s property. Hammurabi’s laws were not always strictly followed, and penalties were often less severe than specified. The people themselves assembled in courts to determine most cases by their own judgments. Why, then, did Hammurabi have his laws writtendown? He explained that it was to show Shamash, the Babylonian sun god and god of justice, that he had fulfilled his responsibility as a divinely installed king — to ensure justice and the moral and material welfare of his people: “So that the powerful may not oppress the powerless, to provide justice for the orphan and the

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Egypt, the First Unified Country, 3050–1000 b.c.e.

widow . . . let the victim of injustice see the law which applies to him, let his heart be put at ease.” The laws on surgery reveal that doctors treated patients in the cities. Because people believed that angry gods or evil spirits caused serious diseases, Mesopotamianmedicine included magic: a doctor might prescribe an incantation along with potions and diet recommendations. Magicians or exorcists offered medical treatmentthat depended on spells and interpreting signs, such as the patient’s dreams or hallucinations. Babylonian cities had many taverns and wine shops, often run by women proprietors. Contaminated drinking water caused many illnesses because sewage disposal was rudimentary. Citizens found relief from a city’s odors and crowding in its open spaces. The world’s oldest known map, an inscribed clay tablet showing the outlines of the city of Nippur about 1500 b.c.e., indicates a large park. Cities involved large numbers of people from different places in many different interactions, which stimulated intellectual developments. Mesopotamian achievements in mathematics and astronomy had an enduring effect. Mathematicians devised algebra, including the derivation of roots of numbers. They invented placevalue notation, which makes a numeral’s position in a number indicate ones, tens, hundreds, and so on. The system of reckoning based on sixty, still used in the division of hours and minutes and in the degrees of a circle, also comes from Mesopotamia. Mesopotamian expertise in recording the paths of the stars and planets probably arose from the desire to make predictions about the future, following the astrological belief that the movement of celestial bodies directly affects human life. The charts and tables compiled by Mesopotamian stargazers underlay later advances in astronomy. In Canaan (ancient Palestine), west of Mesopotamia, the population grew by absorbing foreign merchants. The interaction of traders and travelers from many different cultures encouraged innovation in recording business transactions. This multilingual business environment produced the alphabet about 1600 b.c.e. In this new writing system, a simplified picture — a letter — stood for only one sound in the lanREVIEW QUESTION How did life change for guage, a large change from cuneiform. The people in and nearby Mesopotamia, first after Canaanite alphabet later became the basis the Neolithic Revolution and then when they for the Greek and Roman alphabets and began to live in cities? therefore of modern Western alphabets.

Egypt, the First Unified Country, 3050–1000 b.c.e. The other earliest example of Western civilization arose in Egypt, in northeastern Africa. The Egyptians built a wealthy, profoundly religious, and strongly centralized society ruled by kings. Unlike the separate Mesopotamian city-states, Egypt became unified. Its prosperity and stability depended on the king maintaining strong central authority and defeating enemies. Egypt was located close enough to Mesopotamia

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to learn from peoples there but was geographically separate enough to develop its own distinct culture, which Egyptians believed was superior to any other. The Egyptians believed that a just society respected the gods, preserved hierarchy, and obeyed the king. The Egyptian rulers’ belief in the soul’s immortality and a happy afterlife motivated them to construct the largest tombs in history, the pyramids. Egyptian architecture, art, and religious ideas influenced later Mediterranean peoples, especially the Greeks.

From the Unification of Egypt to the Old Kingdom, 3050–2190 b.c.e. When climate change dried up the grasslands of the Sahara region of Africa about 5000–4000 b.c.e., people slowly migrated from there to the northeast corner of the continent, settling along the Nile River. Recent radiocarbon dating of skeletons, hair, and plants has confirmed that Egypt became a united political state by about 3050b.c.e., when King Narmer (also called Menes)* united the previously separate territories of Upper (southern) and Lower (northern) Egypt. (Upper and Lower refer to the direction of the Nile River, which begins south of Egypt and flows northward to the Mediterranean.) The Egyptian ruler therefore referred to himself as King of the Two Lands. By around 2687 b.c.e., its monarchs had created a large centralized state, called the Old Kingdom. It lasted until around 2190 b.c.e. (Map 1.2). Egyptian kings built only a few large cities. The first capital, Memphis (south of modern Cairo), grew into a metropolis packed with mammoth structures. The most spectacular — and most mysterious — of the Old Kingdom architectural marvels is the so-called Great Sphinx. The world’s oldest monumental sculpture, this stone statue has a human head on the body of a lion lying on its four paws. It is nearly 250 feet long and almost 70 feet high. A temple was built in front of it, perhaps to worship the sun as a god. The Sphinx’s purpose and date remain hotly debated. No records exist to explain its original meaning. Most scholars believe that it was erected sometime in the Old Kingdom. A few, however, citing its weathering and erosion patterns, argue that it is as old as 5000 b.c.e. If clear evidence supporting this date is ever discovered, then the history of early Egypt will have to be completely rewritten. This is just one of the many controversies about ancient Egypt that archaeology may someday settle. The Old Kingdom’s costly architecture demonstrates the prosperity and power of Narmer’s unified state. Its territory consisted of a narrow strip of fertile land running along both sides of the Nile River. This ribbon of green fields zigzagged for *Since the Egyptians did not include vowel sounds in their writing, we are not sure how to spell their names. The spelling of names here is taken from The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, edited by Donald B. Redford (2001), with alternate names given in cases where they seem more familiar. Dates are approximate and uncertain, and scholars bitterly disagree about them. (For an explanation of the problems, see Redford, “Chronology and Periodization,” The Oxford Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 264–68.) The dates appearing in this book are compiled with as much consistency as possible from articles in The Oxford Encyclopedia and in the “Egyptian King List” given at the back of each of its volumes.

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CANAAN/ PALESTINE

LOWER EGYPT

.1 66

NILE DELTA

.C.

E .)

Mediterranean Sea

Avaris Hy

Giza

k s o s i n va s

ion

Memphis

Nile

Saqqara

SINAI PENINSULA

ER N DE

Tell el-Amarna

SE RT

WESTERN DESERT

MAP 1.2 Ancient Egypt

Thebes

Deir el-Bahri

UPPER EGYPT

Old Kingdom (c. 2687–2190 B.C.E.) Middle Kingdom (c. 2061–1665 B.C.E.) New Kingdom (c. 1569–1081 B.C.E.) Major pyramid sites Other ancient sites

NUBIA 0 0

100 100

200 miles 200 kilometers

NU B I AN D ES E RT

Large deserts enclosed the Nile River on the west and the east. The Nile provided Egyptians with water to irrigate their fields and a highway for traveling north to the Mediterranean Sea and south to Nubia. The only easy land route into and out of Egypt lay through the northern Sinai peninsula into the coastal area of the eastern Mediterranean; Egyptian kings always fought to control this region to secure their land.

seven hundred miles southward from the Mediterranean Sea. The deserts flanking the fields on the west and the east protected Egypt; invasion was possible only through the northern Nile delta and from Nubia in the south. The deserts also were sources of wealth because they contained large deposits of metal ores. Egypt’s geography also contributed to its prosperity by supporting seaborne commerce in the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, as well as overland trade with central Africa. Agriculture was Egypt’s most important economic resource. Usually, the Nile River overflowed its channel for several weeks each year, when melting snow from central African mountains swelled its waters. This predictable annual flood enriched the soil with nutrients from the river’s silt and diluted harmful mineral salts, thereby making farming more productive and supporting strong population growth. Unlike the unpredictable floods that harmed Mesopotamia, the regular flooding of the Nile benefited Egyptians. Trouble came in Egypt only if the usual flood did not take place, as happened when too little winter precipitation fell in the mountains. The plants and animals raised by Egypt’s farmers fed a fast-growing population. Egypt had expanded to perhaps several million people by around 1500 b.c.e. Date

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The Great Sphinx of Egypt This enormous stone sculpture of a sphinx, a mythical female creature with a human head and torso and lion’s body, was built near the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Since no inscriptions tell us which king or kings ordered it built, or when or why, scholars still debate its place in ancient Egyptian history and thought. It remains the largest stone monument in the world. (Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.)

palms, vegetables, grass for pasturing animals, and grain grew in abundance. The Egyptians loved beer, which people of all ages consumed. Thicker and more nutritious than modern brews, Egyptian beer was such an important food that it could be used to pay workmen’s wages. Egyptians, like other ancient societies, often flavored their beer with fruits. Egypt’s population included people whose skin color ranged from light to dark. Although many ancient Egyptians would be regarded as black by modern racial classification, ancient peoples did not observe such distinctions. The modern controversy over whether Egyptians were people of color is therefore not an issue that ancient Egyptians would have considered. If asked, they would probably have identified themselves by geography, language, religion, or traditions rather than skin color. Like many other ancient groups, the Egyptians called themselves simply The People. Later peoples, especially the Greeks, recognized the ethnic and cultural differences

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between themselves and the Egyptians, but they deeply admired Egyptian civilization for its long history and strongly religious character. Although Egyptians absorbed knowledge from both the Mesopotamians and the Nubians, their African neighbors to the south, they developed their own written scripts. For official documents they used a pictographic script known as hieroglyphic (Figure 1.2). They developed other, simpler scripts for everyday purposes.

Hieroglyph

Meaning

Sound value

vulture

glottal stop

flowering reed

consonantal I

forearm and hand

ayin

quail chick

foot

stool

horned viper

owl

water

mouth

reed shelter

twisted flax

slightly guttural

placenta (?)

H as in “loch”

animal’s belly

slightly softer than h

door bolt

folded cloth

pool

hill

basket with handle

jar stand

loaf

FIGURE 1.2 Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Ancient Egyptians used pictures such asthese to develop their own system ofwriting around 3000 B.C.E. Egyptian hieroglyphs include around seven hundred pictures in three categories: ideograms (signs indicating things or ideas), phonograms (signs indicating sounds), and determinatives (signs clarifying the meaning of the other signs). Because Egyptians employed this formal script mainly for religious inscriptions on buildings and sacred objects, Greeks referred to it as ta hieroglyphica (“the sacred carved letters”), from which comes the modern word hieroglyphic, used to designate this system of writing.Eventually, Egyptians also developed thehandwritten cursive script called demotic (Greek for “of the people”), amuch simpler and quicker form of writing. The hieroglyphic writing system continued until about 400 C.E., when itwas replaced by the Coptic alphabet. Compare hieroglyphs with cuneiform shapes (see page 11).

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Some scholars believe that Nubian society was the outside influence that most deeply affected early Egypt. A Nubian social elite lived in dwellings much grander than the small huts housing most of the population. Egyptians interacted with Nubians while trading for raw materials such as gold, ivory, and animal skins, and Nubia’s hierarchical political and social organization possibly influenced the development of Egypt’s politically centralized Old Kingdom. Eventually, however, Egypt’s greater power led it to dominate its southern neighbor. Keeping Egypt unified and stable was difficult. When the kings were strong, asduring the Old Kingdom, the country was peaceful, with flourishing international trade. Regional governors rebelling against weak kings, however, could create political turmoil. Kings gained strength by fulfilling their public religious obligations. Egyptians worshipped a great variety of gods, often shown in paintings and sculptures as creatures with both human and animal features, such as the head of a jackal or a bird atop a human body. These images reflected the belief that the gods each had aparticular animal through which they revealed themselves to human beings. Egyptian gods were associated with powerful natural objects, emotions, qualities, and technologies — examples are Re, the sun god; Isis, the goddess of love and fertility; and Thoth, the god of wisdom and the inventor of writing. People worshipped the gods with rituals, prayers, and festivals that expressed their respect and devotion to these divine powers. Egyptians regarded their king as a helpful divinity in human form, identified with the hawk-headed god Horus. They saw the king’s rule as divine because he helped generate maat (“what is right”), the supernatural force that brought order and harmony to human beings if they maintained a stable hierarchy. The goddess Maat — the embodiment of the divine force of justice — therefore oversaw a society that the Egyptians believed would fall apart violently if the king ruled unjustly. The kingtherefore had the duties of pleasing the gods, making law, and waging war on enemies. Art expressed the king’s legitimacy as ruler by representing him doing his religious and military duties. The requirement to show piety (proper religious belief and behavior) demanded strict regulation of the king’s daily activities: he had specific times to take a bath, go for a walk, and make love to his wife. Most important, he had to ensure the country’s fertility and prosperity. If the Nile flood failed to occur, this was seen as the king’s fault and weakened his authority by leaving many people hungry and angry, thus encouraging rebellions by rivals. Successful Old Kingdom rulers used expensive building programs to demonstrate their piety and status. They erected huge tombs — the pyramids — in the desert outside Memphis. Temples and halls accompanied the tombs for religious ceremonies and royal funerals. Although the pyramids were not the first monuments built from enormous worked stones (the temples, admittedly enormously smaller in scale, on the Mediterranean island of Malta are earlier), they rank as the grandest, much larger even than the Great Sphinx.

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The Pyramids at Giza in Egypt The kings of the Egyptian Old Kingdom built massive stone pyramids for their tombs. The largest pyramid shown here is the Great Pyramid of King Khufu (Cheops). Erected at Giza in the desert outside what is today Cairo in the twenty-sixth century B.C.E., it stands almost 480 feet high, not much shorter than the 550-foothigh Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. The pyramids formed the centerpieces of large complexes of temples and courtyards stretching down to the banks of the Nile River or along acanal leading there. The hidden burial chambers of the kings lay at the end of narrow tunnels snaking deep into the pyramids’ interiors. (Guido Alberto Rossi / Tips Images RM / age footstock.)

Old Kingdom rulers spent vast resources on these giant complexes to proclaim their divine status and protect their mummified bodies for existence in the afterlife. King Khufu (r. 2609–2584 b.c.e.; also known as Cheops) commissioned the hugest monument of all — the Great Pyramid at Giza. Taller than a forty-story skyscraper at 480 feet high, it covered thirteen acres and stretched 760 feet long on each side. It required more than two million blocks of limestone, some of which weighed fifteen tons. Its exterior blocks were quarried along the Nile, floated down the river on barges, and pulled to the site on sleds over sand dampened to reduce friction. Free workers then dragged the blocks up ramps into position using rollers and wooden pads. The Old Kingdom rulers’ expensive preparations for death reflected their belief in the afterlife. One text says: “O [god] Atum, put your arms around King Neferkare Pepy II [r. c. 2300–2206 b.c.e.], around this construction work, around this pyramid. . . . May you guard lest anything happen to him evilly throughout the

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course of eternity.” The royal family equipped their tombs with many comforts to use in the underworld. The kings had gilded furniture, sparkling jewelry, and precious objects placed alongside the coffins holding their mummies. Archaeologists have even uncovered two full-sized cedar ships buried next to the Great Pyramid, meant to carry King Khufu on his journey into eternity. The Old Kingdom ranked Egyptians in a strict hierarchy to preserve their kings’ authority and support what they regarded as the proper order of a just society. Egyptians, believing their ordered society was superior to any other, despised foreigners. The king and queen headed the hierarchy. Brothers and sisters in the royal family could marry each other, perhaps because such matches were thought to preserve the purity of the royal line and imitate the gods’ marriages. The priests, royal administrators, provincial governors, and army commanders ranked second. Then came the free common people, most of whom worked in agriculture. Free workers had heavy obligations to the state. In a system called corvée labor, the kings commanded commoners to work on the pyramids during slack times in farming. The state fed, housed, and clothed the workers while they performed this seasonal work; their labor was a way of paying taxes. Taxation reached 20 percent on the farmers’ produce. Slaves captured in foreign wars served the royal family and the priests; privately owned slaves became numerous only after the Old Kingdom. The king hired mercenaries, many from Nubia, to form the majority of the army. Egyptians preserved more of the gender equality of the early Stone Age than did their neighbors. Women generally enjoyed the same legal rights as free men. They could own land and slaves, inherit property, pursue lawsuits, transact business, and initiate divorces. Portrait statues show the equal status of wife and husband: each figure is the same size and sits on the same kind of chair. Men dominated public life, while women devoted themselves mainly to private life, managing their households and property. When their husbands went to war or were killed in battle, however, women often took on men’s work. Women could serve as priestesses, farm managers, or healers in times of crisis. The formal style of Egyptian art illustrates the high value placed on order and predictability. Statues represent the subject either standing stiffly with the left leg advanced or sitting on a chair or throne, stable and poised. The concern for decorum (suitable behavior) also appears in the Old Kingdom literature called wisdom literature — texts giving instructions for appropriate behavior. One text instructs a young man to seek advice from ignorant people as well as the wise, and to avoid arrogant overconfidence. This kind of literature had a strong influence on later civilizations, especially the ancient Israelites.

The Middle and New Kingdoms in Egypt, 2061–1081 b.c.e. The Old Kingdom began to disintegrate in the late third millennium b.c.e. Climate change perhaps caused the annual Nile flood to shrink, making people believe the kings had betrayed Maat. Rivalry for power erupted among leading families, and

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civil war between a northern and a southern dynasty ripped the country apart. This disunity allowed regional governors to increase their power, and some now seized independence for their regions. Famine and civil unrest during the so-called First Intermediate Period (2190–2061 b.c.e.) prevented the reestablishment of political unity. The kings of the Middle Kingdom (2061–1665 b.c.e.) restored the strong central authority their Old Kingdom predecessors had lost. They waged war to extend Egypt’s southern boundaries, and they expanded diplomatic and trade contacts in the eastern Mediterranean region and with the island of Crete. Middle Kingdom literature reveals that restored unity contributed to a deeply felt pride in the homeland. The Egyptian narrator of The Story of Sinuhe, for example, reports that he lived luxuriously during a forced stay in Syria but still longed to return: “Whichever god you are who ordered my exile, have mercy and bring me home! Please allow me to see the land where my heart dwells! Nothing is more important than that my body be buried in the country where I was born!” For this lonely man, love for Egypt outranked personal riches and comfort in a foreign land. The Middle Kingdom lost its unity during the Second Intermediate Period (1664–1570 b.c.e.), when the kings proved too weak to control foreign migrants who had established independent communities in Egypt. By 1664 b.c.e., diverse bands of a Semitic people originally from the eastern Mediterranean coast seized power. The Egyptians called these foreigners Hyksos (“rulers of the foreign countries”). Hyksos settlers transplanted foreign cultural elements to Egypt: their capital, Avaris, boasted wall paintings done in the Minoan style of the island of Crete. The Hyksos promoted frequent contact between Egypt and other Near Eastern states and possibly introduced bronze-making technology, new musical instruments, humpbacked cattle, and olive trees. Hyksos rulers strengthened Egypt’s military capacity by increasing the use of war chariots and more powerful bows. The leaders of Thebes, in southern Egypt, reunited the kingdom after long struggles with the Hyksos. The series of dynasties they founded is called the New Kingdom (1569–1081 b.c.e.). Thebes may have drawn strength from its connections with prosperous settlements that emerged far out in the western desert, such as at Kharga Oasis. Oases featured abundant water from underground aquifers in the middle of a scorching environment. Oasis settlements flourished by providing stopping points for the caravans of merchants who endured dangerously harsh desert conditions to profit from commerce. Thebes’s expansion of contact with the western desert settlements reveals that Egyptian society did not remain unchanged by completely shutting itself off behind its natural boundaries along the Nile. Similarly, contacts with peoples to the east across the Red Sea and along the Indian Ocean expanded in the New Kingdom. The kings of the New Kingdom, known as pharaohs, rebuilt central authority by restricting the power of regional governors and promoting national identity. To prevent invasions, the pharaohs created a standing army, another significant change in Egyptian society. These kings still employed mercenaries, but they formed an

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Egyptian military elite as commanders. Recognizing that knowledge of the rest of the world was necessary for safety, the pharaohs promoted diplomacy with neighboring monarchs to increase their international contacts. The pharaohs exchanged official letters with their “brother kings,” as they called them, in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the eastern Mediterranean region. The New Kingdom pharaohs sent their army into foreign wars to gain territory and show their superiority. Their imperialism has earned them the title “warrior pharaohs.” They waged many campaigns abroad and presented themselves in official propaganda and art as the incarnations of warrior gods. They invaded lands to the south to win access to gold and other precious materials, and they fought up and down the eastern Mediterranean coast to control that crucial land route into Egypt. Massive riches supported the power of these aggressive pharaohs. Egyptian traders exchanged local fine goods, such as ivory, for foreign luxury goods, such as wine and olive oil transported in painted pottery from Greece. Egyptian rulers displayed their wealth most conspicuously in the enormous sums spent to build stone temples. Queen Hatshepsut (r. 1502– 1482 b.c.e.), for example, built her massive mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, near Thebes, including a temple dedicated to the god Amun (or Amen), to express her claim to divine birth and the right to rule. After her husband (who was also her half brother) died, Hatshepsut proclaimed herself “female king” as co-ruler with her young stepson. In this way, she sidestepped the restrictions of Egyptian political tradition, which did not recognize the right of a queen to reign by herself. Hatshepsut also had herself represented in official art as a king, with a

Hatshepsut as Pharaoh Offering Maat This granite statue, eight and a half feet tall, portrayed Hatshepsut, queen of Egypt in the early fifteenth century B.C.E., as pharaoh wearing a beard and male clothing. She is performing her royal duty of offering maat (the divine principle of order and justice) to the gods. Egyptian religion taught that the gods “lived on maat” and that the land’s rulers were responsible for providing it. Hatshepsut had this statue, and many others, placed in a huge temple she built outside Thebes, in Upper Egypt. Why do you think Hatshepsut is shown as calm and relaxed, despite having her toes severely flexed? (Egypt, 18th dynasty, c.1473–1458 B.C.E. Granite, h. 261.5 cm [10215∕16 in.]; w. 80 cm. [31½ in.]; d. 137 cm [5315∕16 in.]. Rogers Fund, 1929 [29.3.1]. TheMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Resource, NY.)

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royal beard and male clothing. Hatshepsut succeeded in her unusual rule because she demonstrated that a woman could ensure safety and prosperity by maintaining the goodwill of the gods toward the country and its people. Egyptians believed that the gods oversaw all aspects of life and death and built large temples and festivals to honor them. A calendar based on the moon governed the dates of religious ceremonies. (The Egyptians also developed a calendar for administrative and fiscal purposes that had 365 days, divided into 12 months of 30 days each, with the extra 5 days added before the start of the next year. Our modern calendar comes from this source.) The early New Kingdom pharaohs promoted their state god Amun-Re (a combination of Thebes’s patron god and the sun god) so energetically that he became far more important than the other gods. This Theban cult subordinated the other gods, without denying their existence or the continued importance of their priests. The pharaoh Akhenaten (r. 1372–1355 b.c.e.) went a step further, however: he proclaimed that official religion would concentrate on worshipping Aten, who represented the pure power of the sun. Akhenaten made the king and the queen the only people with direct access to the cult of Aten; ordinary people had no part in it. Some scholars identify Akhenaten’s religious reform as a step toward monotheism, with Aten meant to be the state’s sole god. To showcase the royal family and the concentration of power that he desired, Akhenaten moved 40,000 Egyptians to construct a new capital for Aten at Tell elAmarna (Map 1.2, page 17). Archaeology shows that the workers had very hard lives, suffering from poor nutrition and dangerous labor conditions. The pharaoh tried to force his revised religion on the priests of the old cults, who resisted fiercely. Historians have blamed Akhenaten’s religious zeal for leading him to neglect his kingdom’s defense, but international correspondence found at Tell el-Amarna has shown that the pharaoh tried to use diplomacy to turn foreign enemies against one another so that they would not become strong enough to threaten Egypt. His policy failed, however, when the Hittites from Anatolia defeated the Mitanni, Egypt’s allies in eastern Syria. Akhenaten’s religious reform also died with him. During the reign of his successor, Tutankhamun (r. 1355–1346 b.c.e.) — famous today through the discovery in 1922 of his rich, unlooted tomb — the cult of Amun-Re reclaimed its leading role. The crisis created by Akhenaten’s attempted reform emphasizes the overwhelming importance of religious conservatism in Egyptian life and the control of religion by the ruling power. Most New Kingdom Egyptians’ lives revolved around their labor and the annual flood of the Nile. During the months when the river stayed between its banks, they worked their fields, rising early in the morning to avoid the searing heat. When the flooding halted agricultural work, the king required laborers to work on his building projects. They lived in workers’ quarters erected next to the construction sites. Although slaves became more common as household workers in the New Kingdomthan they had been before, free workers — who were obliged to perform a certain amount of labor for the king — did most of the work on this period’s mammoth

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royal construction projects. Workers lightened their burden by singing songs, telling adventure stories, and drinking a lot of beer. They accomplished a great deal: the majority of the ancient temples remaining in Egypt today were built during the New Kingdom. Ordinary people worshipped many different gods, especially those believed to protect them in their daily existence. They venerated Bes, for instance, a dwarf with the features of a lion, as a protector of the household. They carved his image on amulets, beds, headrests, and mirror handles. By this time, ordinary people believed that they could have a blessed afterlife and put great effort into preparing for it. Those who could afford it arranged to have their tombs outfitted with all the goods needed for the journey in the underworld. Most important, they paid burial experts to turn their corpses into mummies so that they could have a complete body for eternity. Making a mummy required removing the brain (through the nose with a long-handled spoon), cutting out the internal organs to store separately in stone jars, drying the body with mineral salts to the consistency of old leather, and wrapping the shrunken flesh in linen soaked with ointments. Every mummy had to travel to the afterlife with a copy of the Book of the Dead, which included magic spells for avoiding dangers along the way, as well as instructions on how to prepare for the judgment-day trial before the gods. To prove that they deserved a good fate, the dead had to convincingly recite claims such as the following: “I have not committed crimes against people; I have not mistreated cattle; I have not robbed the poor; I have not caused pain; I have not caused tears.” Magic played a large role in the lives of Egyptians. Professional magicians sold spells and charms, both written and oral, which the buyers used to promote eternal salvation, protect against demons, smooth the rocky course of love, exact revenge on enemies, and find relief from disease and injury. Egyptian doctors knew many medicinal herbs (knowledge they passed on to later civilizations) and could perform major surgeries, including opening the skull. Still, no doctor could cure severe REVIEW QUESTION How did religion guide infections; as in the past, sick people conthelives of both rulers and ordinary people in tinued to rely on the help of supernatural ancient Egypt? forces through prayers and spells.

The Hittites, the Minoans, and the Mycenaeans, 2200–1000 b.c.e. The first examples of Western civilization to emerge in the central Mediterranean region were located in Anatolia, dominated by the warlike Hittite kingdom (Map 1.1, page 6); on the large island of Crete and nearby islands, home to the Minoans; and on the Greek mainland, where the Mycenaeans grew rich from raiding and trade. As early as 6000 b.c.e., people from southwestern Asia, especially Anatolia, began migrating westward and southward to inhabit islands in the Mediterranean Sea.

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The Hittites, the Minoans, and the Mycenaeans, 2200–1000 b.c.e.

From this migration, the rich civilization of the Minoans gradually emerged on Crete and other islands in the Aegean Sea by around 2200 b.c.e. In mainland Greece, civilization eventually arose among peoples who had moved into the area thousands of years before, again most likely from southwestern Asia. The Hittites, the Minoans, and the Mycenaeans had advanced military technologies, elaborate architecture, striking art, a desire for luxury, and extensive trade contacts with Egypt and the Near East. The Hittites, like the Egyptians, created a unified state under a single central authority. The Minoans and the Mycenaeans, like the Mesopotamians, established separate city-states. All three peoples inhabited a dangerous world in which repeated raids and violent disruptions lasting from around 1200 to 1000 b.c.e. ultimately destroyed their prosperous cultures. Nevertheless, their accomplishments paved the way for the later civilization of Greece, which greatly influenced Western civilization.

The Hittites, 1750–1200 b.c.e. By around 1750 b.c.e., the Hittites had made themselves the most powerful people of central Anatolia. They had migrated from the Caucasus area, between the Black and Caspian Seas, and defeated indigenous Anatolian peoples to found their centralized kingdom. It flourished because they inhabited a fertile upland plateau in the peninsula’s center, excelled in war and diplomacy, and controlled trade in their region and southward. The Hittites’ military campaigns eventually threatened Egypt’s possessions on the eastern Mediterranean coast, bringing them into conflict with the pharaohs of the New Kingdom. Since the Hittites spoke an Indo-European language, they belonged to the linguistic family that over time populated most of Europe. The original Indo-European speakers, who were pastoralists and raiders, had migrated as separate groups into Anatolia and Europe, including Greece, most likely from western Asia. Archaeological discoveries in that region have revealed graves of women buried with weapons. These burials suggest that women in these groups originally occupied positions of leadership in war and peace alongside men; the prominence of Hittite queens in documents, royal letters, and foreign treaties perhaps sprang from that tradition. As in other early civilizations, rule in the Hittite kingdom depended on religion for its legitimacy. Hittite religion combined worship of Indo-European gods with worship of deities inherited from the original Anatolian population. The king served as high priest of the storm god, and Hittite belief demanded that he maintain a strict purity in his life as a demonstration of his justice and guardianship of social order. His drinking water, for example, always had to be strained. The king’s water carrier was executed if so much as one hair was found in the water. Like Egyptian kings, Hittite rulers felt responsible for maintaining the gods’ goodwill toward their subjects. King Mursili II (r. 1321–1295 b.c.e.), for example, issued a set of prayers begging the gods to end a plague: “What is this, o gods, that you have done? Our land is dying. . . .

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We have lost our wits, and we can do nothing right. O gods, whatever sin you behold, either let a prophet come forth to identify it . . . or let us see it in a dream!” The kings conducted many religious ceremonies in their capital, Hattusas. Ringed by massive defensive walls and stone towers, it featured huge palaces aligned along straight, gravel-paved streets. Sculptures of animals, warriors, and, especially, the royal rulers decorated public spaces. Hittite kings maintained their rule by forging personal alliances — cemented by marriages and oaths of loyalty — with the noble families of the kingdom. These rulers aggressively employed their troops to expand their power. In periods when ties between kings and nobles remained strong and the kingdom therefore preserved its unity, they launched far-reaching military campaigns. In 1595 b.c.e., for example, the royal army raided as far southeast as Babylon in Mesopotamia, destroying that kingdom. Although Hittite craftsmen did smelt iron, from which they made ceremonial implements, scholars no longer accept the idea that the kingdom owed its success in war to a special knowledge of making weapons from iron. Weapons made from iron did not become common in the Mediterranean world until well after 1200 b.c.e. — at the end of the Hittite kingdom. The Hittite army excelled in the use of chariots, a tactic that gave it an edge on the battlefield. The economic strength of the Hittite kingdom came from control over longdistance trade routes for raw materials, especially metals. The Hittites dominated the lucrative trade moving between the Mediterranean coast and inland northern Syria, despite the New Kingdom pharaohs’ resistance against Hittite expansion to the south toward the Mediterranean coast and the benefits that access to the sea brought. In the bloody battle of Kadesh, around 1274 b.c.e., the Hittites fought the Egyptians to a standstill in Syria, leading to a political stalemate in the eastern Mediterranean. Fear of neighboring Assyria eventually led the Hittite king to negotiate with his Egyptian rival, and the two war-weary kingdoms became allies sixteen years after the battle of Kadesh by agreeing to a treaty that is a landmark in the history of international diplomacy. In it, the two monarchs pledged to be “at peace and brothers forever.” The alliance lasted, and thirteen years later the Hittite king gave his daughter in marriage to his Egyptian “brother.”

The Minoans, 2200–1400 b.c.e. Study of early Greek civilization traditionally begins with the people today known as Minoans, who inhabited Crete and other islands in the Aegean Sea by the latethird millennium b.c.e. The word Minoan comes from the archaeologist Arthur Evans (1851–1941), who was searching the island for traces of King Minos, famous in Greek myth for building the first great navy and keeping the half-human/half-bull Minotaur in a labyrinth at his palace. Scholars today, however, are not sure whether to count the Minoans as the earliest Greeks because they are uncertain whether the Minoan language, written in a script called Linear A, was related to Greek or belongs to another linguistic tradition. If research confirms that Minoan was a member of

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The Hittites, the Minoans, and the Mycenaeans, 2200–1000 b.c.e.

Palace at Knossos The Minoans on the island of Crete and neighboring islands in the Mediterranean Sea south of mainland Greece constructed large, multilevel buildings called palaces containing many rooms, corridors, worship spaces, and porches. They housed royal families, servants, administrators, and managers of enormous storage complexes. The walls were decorated with colorful paintings showing diverse scenes of nature, elaborately dressed people, and ceremonies. Urban settlements grew up around these palaces. The palace at Knossos is the largest known. It controlled a fertile agricultural area that provided the rulers with a luxurious lifestyle. (DEA / A. VERGANI / De Agostini Editore / age footstock.)

the Indo-European family of languages (the ancestor of many languages, including Greek, Latin, and, much later, English), then, based on the criterion of language, Minoans can be seen as the earliest Greeks. In any case, Minoans’ interactions with the mainland deeply influenced later Greek civilization. By around 2200 b.c.e., Minoans on Crete and nearby islands had created a palace society, a name pointing to its sprawling multichambered buildings housing not only the rulers, their families, and their servants but also the political, economic, and religious administrative offices of the state. Minoan rulers combined the functions of ruler and priest, dominating both politics and religion. The palaces seem to have been independent, with no single Minoan community imposing unity on the others. The general population clustered around each palace in houses adjacent to one another; some of these settlements reached the size and density of small cities. The Cretan site Knossos is the most famous such palace complex. Other, smaller settlements dotted outlying areas of the island, especially on the coast. The Minoans’ numerous ports supported extensive international trade, above all with the Egyptians and the Hittites.

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The most surprising feature of Minoan communities is their lack of strong defensive walls. Palaces, towns, and even isolated country houses had no fortifications. The remains of the newer palaces — such as the one at Knossos, with its hundreds of rooms in five stories, indoor plumbing, and colorful scenes painted on the walls — have led some historians to the controversial conclusion that Minoans avoided war among themselves, despite their having no single central authority over their independent settlements. Others object to this vision of peaceful Minoans as mistaken, arguing that the most powerful Minoans on Crete dominated some neighboring islands. Recent discoveries of tombs on Crete have revealed weapons caches, and a find of bones cut by knives has even raised the possibility of human sacrifice. The prominence of women in palace frescoes and the numerous figurines of large-breasted goddesses found on Minoan sites have also prompted speculation that women dominated Minoan society, but no texts so far discovered have verified this. Minoan art certainly depicts women prominently and respectfully, but the same is true of other civilizations of the time controlled by men. More research is needed to resolve the controversies concerning gender roles in Minoan civilization. Scholars agree, however, that the development of Mediterranean polyculture — the cultivation of olives, grapes, and grains in a single, interrelated agricultural system — greatly increased the health and wealth of Minoan society. This innovation made the most efficient use of a farmer’s labor by combining crops that required intense work at different seasons. This system of farming, which still characterizes Mediterranean agriculture, had two major consequences. First, the combination of crops provided a healthy way of eating (the “Mediterranean diet”), which in turn stimulated population growth. Second, agriculture became both more diversified and more specialized, increasing production of the valuable products olive oil and wine. Agricultural surpluses on Crete and nearby islands spurred the growth of specialized crafts. To store and transport surplus food, Minoan artisans manufactured huge storage jars (the size of a modern refrigerator) and in the process created another specialized industry. Craft workers, producing sophisticated goods using timeconsuming techniques, no longer had time to grow their own food or make the things, such as clothes and lamps, they needed for everyday life. Instead, they exchanged the products they made for food and other goods. In this way, Minoan society experienced increasing economic interdependence. The vast storage areas in their palaces suggest that the Minoan rulers, like some Mesopotamian kings before them, controlled their society’s exchanges through a redistributive economic system. The Knossos palace, for example, held hundreds of gigantic jars capable of storing 240,000 gallons of olive oil and wine. Bowls, cups, and dippers crammed storerooms nearby. Palace officials would have decided how much each farmer or craft producer had to contribute to the palace storehouse and how much of those contributions would then be redistributed to each person in the community for basic subsistence or as an extra reward. In this way, people sent the products of their labor to the central authority, which redistributed them according to its own priorities.

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The Hittites, the Minoans, and the Mycenaeans, 2200–1000 b.c.e.

The Mycenaeans, 1800–1000 b.c.e. Ancestors of the Greeks had moved into the mainland region of Greece by perhaps 8000 b.c.e., yet the first civilization definitely identified as Greek because of its IndoEuropean language arose only in the early second millennium b.c.e. These first Greeks are called Mycenaeans, a name derived from the hilltop site of Mycenae, famous for its many-roomed palace, rich graves, and massive fortification walls. Located in the Peloponnese (the large peninsula forming southern Greece, Map 1.3), Mycenae dominated its local area, but no one settlement ever ruled all of Bronze Age Greece. Instead, the independent communities of Mycenaean civilization vied with one another in a fierce competition for natural resources and territory. The nineteenth-century German millionaire Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890) was the first to discover treasure-filled graves at Mycenae. The burial objects revealed a warrior culture organized in independent settlements and ruled by aggressive

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MAP 1.3 Greece and the Aegean Sea, 1500 b.c.e.

A varied landscape of mountains, islands, and seas defined the geography of Greece. The distances between settlements were mostly short, but rough terrain and seasonally stormy sailing made travel a chore. The distance from the mainland to the largest island in this region, Crete, where Minoan civilization arose, was long enough to keep Cretans isolated from the wars of most of later Greek history.

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kings. Constructed as stone-lined shafts, the graves contained entombed dead who had taken hordes of valuables with them: golden jewelry, including heavy necklaces loaded with pendants; gold and silver vessels; bronze weapons decorated with scenes of wild animals inlaid in precious metals; and delicately painted pottery. In his excitement at finding treasure, Schliemann proudly announced that he had found the grave of Agamemnon, the legendary king who commanded the Greek army against Troy, a city in northwestern Anatolia, in the Trojan War. Homer, Greece’s first and most famous poet, immortalized this war in his epic poem The Iliad. Archaeologists now know the shaft graves date to around 1700–1600 b.c.e., long before the Trojan War could have taken place. Schliemann, who paid for his own excavation at Troy to prove to skeptics that the city had really existed, was wrong on this point, but his discoveries provided the most spectacular evidence for mainland Greece’s earliest civilization. Since the hilly terrain of Greece had little fertile land but many useful ports, settlements tended to spring up near the coast. Mycenaean rulers enriched themselves by dominating local farmers, conducting naval raids, and participating in seaborne trade. Palace records inscribed on clay tablets reveal that the Mycenaeans operated under a redistributive economy. On the tablets scribes made detailed lists of goods received and goods paid out, recording everything from chariots to livestock, landholdings, personnel, and perfumes, even broken equipment taken out of service. Like the Minoans, the Mycenaeans did not use writing to record the oral literature that scholars believe they created. Tholos tombs — massive underground burial chambers built in beehive shapes with closely fitted stones — reveal that some Mycenaeans had become very rich by about 1500 b.c.e. The architectural details of these tombs and the style of the burial goods placed in them testify to the far-flung expeditions for trade and war that Mycenaean rulers conducted throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Above all, however, their many decorative patterns clearly inspired by Minoan art indicate a close connection with Minoan civilization. Underwater archaeology has revealed the influence of international commerce during this period in promoting cultural interaction as a by-product of trade. Divers have discovered, for example, that a late-fourteenth-century b.c.e. shipwreck off Uluburun in Turkey carried a mixed cargo and varied personal possessions from many locations in the eastern Mediterranean, including Canaan, Cyprus, Greece, Egypt, and Babylon. The variety confirms that merchants and consumers involved in this sort of long-distance trade were exposed directly to the goods produced by others and indirectly to their ideas. The sea brought the Mycenaean and Minoan civilizations into close contact, but they remained different in significant ways. The Mycenaeans spoke Greek and made burnt offerings to the gods; the Minoans did neither. The Minoans extended their religious worship outside their centers, establishing sacred places in caves, on mountaintops, and in country villas, while the mainlanders concentrated the worship of their

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The Hittites, the Minoans, and the Mycenaeans, 2200–1000 b.c.e.

gods inside their walled communities. When the Mycenaeans started building palaces in the fourteenth century b.c.e., they (unlike the palace-society Minoans) designed them around megarons — rooms with prominent ceremonial hearths and thrones for the rulers. Some Mycenaean palaces had more than one megaron, which could soar two stories high with columns to support a roof above the second-floor balconies. Documents found in the palace at Knossos reveal that by around 1400 b.c.e. the Mycenaeans had acquired dominance over Crete, possibly in a war over commerce in the Mediterranean. The documents were tablets written in Linear B, a pictographic script based on Linear A (which scholars still cannot fully decipher). The twentiethcentury architect Michael Ventris (1922–1956) proved that Linear B was used to write not Minoan, but Greek. Because the Linear B tablets date from before the final destruction of Knossos in about 1370 b.c.e., they show that the palace administration had been keeping its records in this foreign language for some time and therefore that Mycenaeans were controlling Crete well before the end of Minoan civilization. By the middle of the fourteenth century b.c.e., then, the Mycenaeans had displaced the Minoans as the Aegean region’s preeminent civilization. By the time Mycenaeans took over Crete, war at home and abroad was theprincipal concern of well-off Mycenaean men, a tradition that they passed on to laterGreek civilization. Contents of Bronze Age tombs in Greece reveal that no wealthy man went to his grave without his war equipment. Armor and weapons were so central to a Mycenaean man’s identity that he could not do without them, even in death. Warriors rode into battle on revolutionary transport — lightweight two-wheeled chariots pulled by horses. These expensive vehicles, perhaps introduced by IndoEuropeans migrating from Central Asia, first appeared in various Mediterranean and

Decorated Dagger from Mycenae The hilltop fortress and palace at Mycenae was the capital of Bronze Age Greece’s most famous kingdom. The picture of a lion hunt inlaid in gold and silver on this sixteenth-century B.C.E. dagger expressed how wealthy Mycenaean men saw their roles in society: as courageous hunters and warriors overcoming the hostile forces of nature. The nine-inch blade was found ina circle of graves inside Mycenae’s walls, where the highest-ranking people were buried with their treasures as evidence of their status. (National Archeological Museum, Athens, Greece / De Agostini Picture Library / Gianni Dagli Orti / Bridgeman Images.)

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400,000–1000 b.c.e.

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Near Eastern societies not long after 2000 b.c.e.; the first picture of such a chariot in the Aegean region occurs on a Mycenaean grave marker from about 1500 b.c.e. Wealthy people evidently desired this new and costly equipment not only for war but also as proof of their social status. The Mycenaeans seem to have spent more on war than on religion. In any case, they did not construct any giant religious buildings like Mesopotamia’s ziggurats or Egypt’s pyramids. Their most important deities were male gods concerned with war. The names of gods found in the Linear B tablets reveal that Mycenaeans passed down many divinities to the Greeks of later times, such as Dionysus, the god of wine.

The Violent End to Early Western Civilization, 1200–1000 b.c.e. A state of political equilibrium, in which kings corresponded with one another and traders traveled all over the area, characterized the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world around 1300 b.c.e. Within a century, however, violence and, perhaps, climate change had destroyed or weakened almost every major political state in the region, including Egypt, some kingdoms of Mesopotamia, and the Hittite and Mycenaean kingdoms. Neither the civilizations united under a single central authority nor the ones with independent states survived. This period of international violence from about 1200 to 1000 b.c.e. remains one of the most difficult puzzles in the history of Western civilization. Recent research on fossilized pollen suggests that a prolonged period of severe drought around this time weakened the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean region by drastically reducing agricultural food production. Egyptian and Hittite records also reveal destructive military conflict. They document many foreign attacks in this period, especially from the sea. According to one inscription, in about 1190 b.c.e. a warrior pharaoh defeated a powerful coalition of seaborne invaders from the north, who had fought their way to the edge of Egypt. These Sea Peoples, as historians call them, were made up of many different groups operating separately. No single, unified group of peoples originated the tidal wave of violence starting around 1200 b.c.e. Rather, many different bands devastated the region. A chain reaction of attacks and flights in a recurring and expanding cycle put even more bands on the move. Some were mercenary soldiers who had deserted the rulers who had employed them; some were raiders by profession. Many may have been Greeks. The story of the Trojan War probably recalls this period of repeated violent attacks from abroad: it portrays an army from Greece crossing the Aegean Sea to attack and plunder Troy and the surrounding coastal region. The attacks also reached far inland. As a result, the Babylonian kingdom collapsed, the Assyrians were confined to their homeland, and much of western Asia and Syria was devastated. It remains mysterious how so many attackers could be so successful over such a long time, but the consequences for the eastern Mediterranean region are clear. The once mighty Hittite kingdom fell around 1200 b.c.e., when raiders cut off its

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The Hittites, the Minoans, and the Mycenaeans, 2200–1000 b.c.e.

trade routes for raw materials. Invaders razed its capital city, Hattusas, which never revived. Egypt’s New Kingdom turned back the Sea Peoples after a tremendous military effort, but the raiders destroyed the Egyptian long-distance trade network. By the end of the New Kingdom, around 1081 b.c.e., Egypt had shrunk to its original territorial core along the Nile’s banks. These problems ruined the Egyptian state’s credit. For example, when an eleventh-century b.c.e. Theban temple official traveled to Phoenicia to buy cedar for a ceremonial boat, the city’s ruler demanded cash in advance. Although the Egyptian monarchy hung on, power struggles between pharaohs and priests, made worse by frequent attacks from abroad, prevented the reestablishment of centralized authority. No Egyptian dynasty ever again became an expansionist international power. In Greece, homegrown conflict apparently generated a tipping point for Mycenaean civilization at the time when the Sea Peoples became a threat. The Mycenaeans reached the zenith of their power around 1400–1250 b.c.e. The enormous domed tomb at Mycenae, called the Treasury of Atreus, testifies to the riches of this period. The tomb’s elaborately decorated front and soaring roof reveal the pride and wealth of the Mycenaean warrior princes. The last phase of the extensive palace at Pylos on the west coast of the Peloponnese also dates from this time. It boasted vivid wall paintings, storerooms bursting with food, and a royal bathroom with a built-in tub and intricate plumbing. But these prosperous Mycenaeans did not escape the widespread violence that began around 1200 b.c.e. Linear B tablets record the disposition of troops to the coast to guard the palace at Pylos from raids from the sea. The palace inhabitants of eastern Greece constructed defensive walls so massive that the later Greeks said giants had built them. These fortifications would have protected coastal palaces against seafaring attackers, who could have been either outsiders or Greeks. The wall around the inland palace at Gla in central Greece, however, which foreign raiders could not easily reach, confirms that Mycenaean communities also had to defend themselves against other Mycenaean communities. The internal conflict probably did more damage to Mycenaean civilization than the raids of the Sea Peoples. Major earthquakes also struck at this time, spreading further destruction among the Mycenaeans. Archaeology offers no evidence for the ancient tradition that Dorian Greeks invading from the north caused this damage. Rather, nearconstant civil war by jealous local Mycenaean rulers overburdened the complicated administrative balancing system necessary for the palaces’ redistributive economies and hindered recovery from earthquake damage. The violence killed many Mycenaeans, and the disappearance of the palace-based redistributive economy put many others on the road to starvation. The rulers’ loss of power left most Greeks with no organized way to defend or feed themselves and forced them not only to wander abroad in search REVIEW QUESTION How did war determine of new places to settle but also to learn to the fate of early Western civilization in Anatolia, farm. Like people from the earliest times, Crete, and Greece? they had to move to build a better life.

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400,000–1000 b.c.e.

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Conclusion The best way to create a meaningful definition of Western civilization is to study its history, which begins in Mesopotamia and Egypt; early societies there influenced the later civilization of Greece. Cities first arose in Mesopotamia around 4000 to 3000 b.c.e. Hierarchy had characterized society from the very beginning, but it, along with patriarchy, grew more prominent once civilization, larger populations, and political states with centralized authority became widespread. Trade and war were constants, both aiming in different ways at profit and glory. Indirectly, they often generated cultural interaction by putting civilizations into close contact. Technological innovation was also a prominent characteristic of this long period. The invention of metallurgy, monumental architecture, mathematics, and alphabetic writing greatly affected people’s lives. Religion was at the center of society; people believed that the gods demanded everyone, from king to worker, to display just and righteous conduct. But not even their faith could protect the people of the early civilizations of the Mediterranean from the destruction inflicted by the Sea Peoples and from their own internal conflicts in a period of prolonged violence. Neither hierarchy nor central authority could preserve their prosperity, and a Dark Age began around 1000 b.c.e.

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Conclusion

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MAPPING THE WEST The Violent End to Early Western Civilization, 1200–1000 b.c.e.

Bands of wandering warriors and raiders set the eastern Mediterranean aflame at the end of the Bronze Age. This violence displaced many people and ended the power of the Egyptian, Hittite, and Mycenaean kingdoms. Even some of the Near Eastern states well inland from the eastern Mediterranean coast felt the effects of this period of unrest, whose causes remain mysterious. The Mediterranean Sea was a two-edged sword for the early civilizations that grew up around and near it: as a highway for transporting goods and ideas, it was a benefit; as an easy access corridor for attackers, it was a danger. The raids of the Sea Peoples smashed the prosperity of the eastern Mediterranean region around 1200–1000 B.C.E. and set in motion the forces that led to the next step in our story, the reestablishment of civilization in Greece. Internal conflict among Mycenaean rulers turned the regional unrest of those centuries into a local catastrophe; fighting each other for dominance, they so weakened their monarchies that their societies could not recover from the effects of battles and earthquakes.

Chapter 1 Review Key Terms and People Be sure that you can identify the term or person and explain its historical significance. civilization (p.3)

polytheism (p.10)

wisdom literature (p.22)

hierarchy (p.4)

cuneiform (p.11)

palace society (p.29)

hunter-gatherers (p.5)

empire (p.12)

city-state (p.8)

Hammurabi (p.14)

Mediterranean polyculture (p.30)

patriarchy (p.10)

hieroglyphic (p.19)

Linear B (p.33)

redistributive economy (p.10)

Maat (p.20)

Sea Peoples (p.34)

Review Questions 1. How did life change for people in and nearby Mesopotamia, first after the Neolithic Revolution and then when they began to live in cities? 2. How did religion guide the lives of both rulers and ordinary people in ancient Egypt? 3. How did war determine the fate of early Western civilization in Anatolia, Crete, and Greece?

Making Connections 1. Compare and contrast how the environmental factors in Mesopotamia and Egypt affected the emergence of the world’s first civilizations. 2. What were the advantages and disadvantages of living in a unified country under a single central authority compared to living in a region with separate city-states? 3. Which were more important in influencing the development of early Western civilization: theintentional or the unintentional consequences of change?

Suggested References The combination of archaeological and linguistic research informs scholarship on the history of the ancient Near East, Egypt, and Greece. New discoveries and new ideas both help historians achieve a clearer understanding of these earliest societies of Western civilization. Bertman, Stephen. Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. 2003. Bryce, Trevor. Life and Society in the Hittite World. 2004. ——— The Routledge Handbook of the Peoples and Places of Ancient Western Asia. 2009. *Chavalas, Mark W., ed. The Ancient Near East. Historical Sources in Translation. 2006. Cline, Eric H. 1171 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed. 2010. Crouch, Carly L. War and Ethics in the Ancient Near East. 2009. *Dalley, Stephanie, trans. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. 1991. Ikram, Salima. Ancient Egypt: An Introduction. 2010. Mieroop, Marc Van De. King Hammurabi of Babylon: A Biography. 2005. Partridge, Robert B. Fighting Pharaohs: Weapons and Warfare in Ancient Egypt. 2002. Podany, Amanda H. Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East. 2010. *Primary source.

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Chapter 1 Review

Important Events 50,000–45,000 B.C.E.

Homo sapiens migrate from Africa into southwest Asia and Europe

10,000–8000 B.C.E.

Neolithic Revolution in Fertile Crescent and Sahara

4000–3000 B.C.E.

Mesopotamians invent writing and establish first cities

4000–1000 B.C.E.

Bronze Age in southwestern Asia, Egypt, and Europe

3050 B.C.E.

Narmer (Menes) unites Upper and Lower Egypt into one kingdom

2687–2190 B.C.E.

Old Kingdom in Egypt

2350 B.C.E.

King Sargon of Akkad establishes world’s first empire

2300–2200 B.C.E.

Enheduanna, princess of Akkad, composes poetry

2200 B.C.E.

Minoans build their first palaces

2061–1665 B.C.E.

Middle Kingdom in Egypt

1792–1750 B.C.E.

Hammurabi rules Babylon and issues his law code

1569–1081 B.C.E.

New Kingdom in Egypt

1400 B.C.E.

Mycenaeans build their first palaces in Greece and take over Minoan Crete

1200–1000 B.C.E.

Period of violence ends many kingdoms

Consider three events: Mesopotamians invent writing and establish first cities (4000– 3000 B.C.E.), King Sargon of Akkad establishes the world’s first empire in Akkadia (2350 B.C.E.), and Enheduanna composes poetry (2300–2200 B.C.E.). How might the invention of writing have promoted the growth of stronger city-states and the first empire? How might the creation of the Akkadian Empire have fostered the development of literature?

Sanders, N. K. The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the Ancient Mediterranean, 1250–1150 B.C. Rev. ed. 1985. Scarre, Chris. The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies. 2009. *Simpson, William Kelly, ed. The Literature of Ancient Egypt. An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, and Poetry. 3rd ed. 2003. Szapakowska, Kasia. Daily Life in Ancient Egypt: Recreating Lahun. 2008. Tyldesley, Joyce. Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh. 1998.

Near East Empires and the Reemergence of Civilization inGreece

1000–500 b.c.e.

n The Iliad, the eighth-century b.c.e. Greek poet Homer narrates bloody tales of the Trojan War. The story is rich with legends born from Greek and Near Eastern traditions, such as that of the Greek hero Bellerophon. Driven from his home by a false charge of sexual assault, Bellerophon has to serve as an enforcer for a foreign king, fighting his most dangerous enemies. In his most famous combat, BelBlack-Figure Vase from Corinth lerophon is pitted against “the Chimera, an This vase was made in Corinth about inhuman freak created by the gods, horrible 600 B.C.E., painted in the so-called black-figure style, in which artists with its lion’s head, goat’s body, and dragon’s carved details into the dark-baked clay. tail, breathing fire all the time.” Bellerophon In the late sixth century B.C.E., this style triumphs by mounting the winged horse gave way to red-figure, in which artists Pegasus and swooping down on the Chimera painted details in black on a reddish with an aerial attack. To reward such herobackground instead of engraving them; the result was finer detail (compare this ics, the king gives Bellerophon his daughter vase painting with that on page 58). in marriage and half his kingdom. The animals and mythical creatures Homer’s story provides evidence for the onthe vase shown here follow Near intercultural contact between the Near East Eastern models, which inspired Archaic and Greece that helped Greek civilization Age Greek artists to put people and reemerge after 1000 b.c.e. Both the Chimera animals into their designs again after their absence during the Dark Age. and the winged beast painted on the vase Whydo you think the artist depicted from Corinth shown in the chapter-opening theanimal at the lower right with two illustration were creatures from Near Eastern bodies but only one head? (© The Trustmyth that Greeks adapted. Greece’s geograees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY.) phy allowed it many ports, which promoted contacts by sea through trade, travel, and war with the Near East. From 1000 to 500 b.c.e., these contacts — combined with the Greeks’ value of competitive individual excellence, their sense of a communal identity, and their belief that people in general were responsible for maintaining 41

Chapter 2

Near East Empires

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justice and the goodwill of the gods toward the community — aided Greeks in reinventing their civilization. Western peoples’ desire for trade and cross-cultural contact increased as conditions improved after 1000 b.c.e. The Near East, which retained monarchy as its traditional form of government, recovered more quickly than Greece. Near Eastern kings extracted surpluses from subject populations to fund their palaces and armies. They also pursued new conquests to win glory, exploit the labor of conquered peoples, seize raw materials, and conduct long-distance trade. During Greece’s initial recovery from poverty and depopulation from 1000 to 750 b.c.e., new political and social traditions arose that rejected the rule of kings. In this period, Greeks maintained trade and cross-cultural contact with the Near East. Their mythology, as in Homer, and their art, as on the Corinthian vase, reveal that Greeks imported ideas and technology from that part of the world. By the eighth century b.c.e., Greeks had begun to create their own kind of city-state, the polis. The polis was a radical innovation because it made citizenship — not subjection to kings — the basis for society and politics, and included the poor as citizens. Women in the polis had legal, though not political, rights; slaves still had neither. With the exception of occasional tyrannies, Greek city-states governed themselves by having male citizens share political power. In some places, small groups of upper-class men dominated, but in other city-states the polis shared power among all free men, even the poor, eventually creating the world’s first democracies. The Greeks’ invention of democratic politics, limited though it might have been by modern standards, stands as a landmark in the history of Western civilization. New ways of belief and thought also developed in the Near East and Greece that deeply influenced Western civilization. In religion, the Persians developed beliefs that saw human life as a struggle between good and evil, and the Israelites evolved CHAPTER FOCUS How did the forms of their monotheism. In philosophy, the political and social organization that Greece Greeks began to use reason and logic to developed after 1000 B.C.E. differ from those replace mythological explanations of ofthe Near East? nature.

From Dark Age to Empire in the Near East, 1000–500 b.c.e. The widespread violence in 1200–1000 b.c.e. had damaged many communities and populations in the eastern Mediterranean. Historians have traditionally used the term Dark Age to refer to the times following the period of violence, both because economic conditions were so gloomy for so many people and because the surviving evidence is so limited. By 900 b.c.e., the Neo-Assyrian Empire had emerged in Mesopotamia. It inspired first the Babylonians and then the Persians to form empires after Assyrian power collapsed. By comparison, the Israelites had little military power, but they established a new path for civilization during this period by changing their religion. They devel-

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oped monotheism and produced the Hebrew Bible (as it is known today), later called the Old Testament by Christians.

The New Empire of Assyria, 900–600 b.c.e. By 900 b.c.e., Assyrian armies had punched westward all the way to the Mediterranean coast. The Neo-Assyrian kings conquered Babylon and then Egypt. Foot soldiers were the Assyrians’ main strike force. They deployed siege towers and battering rams, while chariots carried archers. Foreign wars brought in revenues to supplement agriculture, herding, and long-distance trade. Neo-Assyrian kings treated conquered peoples brutally. Those allowed to stay in their homelands had to make annual payments to the Assyrians. The kings also deported many defeated people to Assyria for work on huge building projects. One unexpected consequence of this policy was the undermining of the kings’ native language: so many Aramaeans, for example, were deported from Canaan to Assyria that Aramaic had largely replaced Assyrian as the land’s everyday language by the eighth century b.c.e. Neo-Assyrian men displayed their status and masculinity in waging war and inhunting wild animals. The king hunted lions to demonstrate his vigor and power and thus his capacity to rule. Practical technology and knowledge also mattered to the kings. One boasted that he invented new irrigation equipment and a novel method of metal casting. Another one proclaimed, “I have read complicated texts, whose versions in Sumerian are obscure and in Akkadian hard to understand. I do research on the cuneiform texts on stone from before the Flood.” Women of the social elite could become literate, but they were excluded from the male dominions of war and hunting. Public religion reflected the prominence of war in Assyrian culture: the cult of Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, glorified warfare. The Neo-Assyrian rulers’ desire to demonstrate their respect for the gods motivated them to build huge temples. These shrines’ staffs of priests and slaves grew so large that the revenues from temple lands were insufficient; the kings had to supply extra funds from the spoils of conquest. The Neo-Assyrian kings’ harsh rule and demand for revenue made their own people, especially the social elite, resentful. Rebellions therefore became common, and a seventh-century b.c.e. revolt fatally weakened the kingdom. The Medes, an Iranian people, and the Chaldeans, a Semitic people who had driven the Assyrians from Babylonia, combined forces to defeat the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

The Neo-Babylonian Empire, 600–539 b.c.e. The Chaldeans seized the lion’s share of territory. Originating among semi-nomadic herders along the Persian Gulf, the Chaldeans had by 600 b.c.e. established the NeoBabylonian Empire. The Neo-Babylonians increased the splendor of Babylon, rebuilding the great temple of Marduk, the chief god, and constructing an elaborate city gate

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dedicated to the goddess Ishtar. Blue-glazed bricks and lions molded in yellow, red, and white decorated the gate’s walls, which soared thirty-six feet high. The Neo-Babylonians preserved much Mesopotamian literature, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. They also created many new works of prose and poetry, which the educated minority would often read aloud publicly to the illiterate. Particularly popular were fables, proverbs, essays, and prophecies teaching morality and proper behavior. This so-called wisdom literature, a tradition going back at least to the Egyptian Old Kingdom, was a Near Eastern tradition that was also prominent in the religious writings of the Israelites. The Neo-Babylonians passed their knowledge to others outside their region. Their advances in astronomy became so influential that the Greeks later used the word Chaldean to mean “astronomer.” The primary motivation for observing the stars was the belief that the gods communicated their will to humans through natural phenomena like celestial movements and eclipses. (Other such phenomena included abnormal births, patterns of smoke curling upward from a fire, and the trails of ants.)

The Persian Empire, 557–500 b.c.e. Cyrus (r. c. 557–530 b.c.e.) founded the Persian Empire in what is today Iran through his skills as a general and a diplomat who saw respect for others’ religious practices as good imperial policy. He conquered Babylon in 539 b.c.e. Cyrus won support by proclaiming himself the restorer of traditional religion. Cyrus’s successors expanded Persian rule on the same principles of military strength and cultural tolerance. At its height, the Persian Empire extended from Anatolia (today Turkey), the eastern Mediterranean coast, and Egypt on the west to present-day Pakistan on the east (Map 2.1). Believing they had a divine right to rule everyone in the world, Persian kings continually tried to expand their empire. Everything about the king emphasized his magnificence. His robes of purple outshone everyone else’s; only he could step on the red carpets spread for him; his servants held their hands before their mouths so that he would not have to breathe the same air as they. As in other Near Eastern royal art, the Persian king was shown as larger than any other person in the sculpture adorning his immense palace at Persepolis. To display his concern for his loyal subjects as well as the gigantic scale of his resources, the king provided meals for fifteen thousand nobles and other guests every day — although he ate hidden from their view. The king punished criminals by mutilating their bodies and executing their families. So long as his subjects — numbering in the millions and of many different ethnicities — remained peaceful, the king let them live and worship as they pleased. The empire’s satraps (regional governors) ruled enormous territories with little interference from the king. In this decentralized system, the governors’ duties included keeping order, enrolling troops when needed, and sending revenues to the royal treasury. Darius I (r. 522–486 b.c.e.) extended Persian power eastward to the western edge of India and westward to Thrace, northeast of Greece, creating the Near East’s

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Aral Sea

D a nube R .

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ANATOLIA L. Van

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d Re

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Arabian Sea Persian homeland, c. 550 B.C.E. Persian Empire under Darius I, 490 B.C.E.

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MAP 2.1 Expansion of the Persian Empire, c. 550–490 b.c.e.

Cyrus founded the Persian Empire, which his successors expanded to be even larger than the Neo-Assyrian Empire that it replaced. The Persian kings made war outward from their inland center to gain coastal possessions for access to seaborne trade and naval bases. By late in the reign of Darius I, the Persian Empire had expanded eastward as far as the western edge of India, while to the west it reached Thrace, the eastern edge of Europe. Unlike their imperial predecessors, the Persian kings won their subjects’ loyalty with tolerance of local customs and religion, although they treated rebels harshly.

greatest empire. Darius assigned each region taxes payable in precious metals, grain, horses, and slaves. Royal roads and a courier system provided communication among the far-flung provincial centers. The Greek historian Herodotus reported that neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor darkness slowed the couriers from completing their routes as swiftly as possible. Persian kings ruled as the agents of Ahura Mazda, the supreme god of Persia. Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, made Ahura Mazda the center of its devotion and took its doctrines from the teachings of the legendary prophet Zarathustra. Zarathustra taught that Ahura Mazda demanded purity from his worshippers and helped

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The Great King of Persia Like their Assyrian predecessors, the Persian kings decorated their palaces with large relief sculptures emphasizing royal dignity and success. This one from Persepolis shows officials andpetitioners giving the king proper respect when entering his presence. To symbolize their elevated status, the king and his son, who stands behind the throne, are shown larger than everyone else, as is done in other Near Eastern royal art. Do you think the way the sculptors portrayed the figures from the side is more or less artistic than the technique used by the Egyptian painters in the image from the Book of the Dead on page 2? Why? (Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.)

those who lived truthfully and justly. The most important doctrine of Zoroastrianism was moral dualism, which saw the world as a battlefield between the divine forces of good and evil. Ahura Mazda, the embodiment of good and light, struggled against the evil darkness represented by the Satan-like figure Ahriman. Human beings had to choose between the way of the truth and the way of the lie, between purity and impurity. In Persian religion only those judged righteous after death made it across “the bridge of separation” to heaven and avoided falling from its narrow span into hell. Persian religion’s emphasis on ethical behavior and on a supreme god had a lasting influence on others, especially the Israelites.

The Israelites, Origins to 539 b.c.e. The Israelites never rivaled the political and military power of the great empires inthe Near East. Their influence on Western civilization comes from their religion, Judaism. It originally reflected influences from the Israelites’ polytheistic neighbors in Canaan (ancient Palestine), but the Israelites’ development of monotheism became a turning point in the history of religions. The Israelites’ scripture, the Hebrew Bible, deeply affected not only Judaism but also Christianity and, later, Islam. No source provides definitive evidence for the historical background of the Israelites. According to the Bible’s account, Abraham and

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his followers migrated from the Mesopotamian city of Ur to Canaan, perhaps around 1900 b.c.e. Traditionally believed to have been divided into twelve tribes, the Israelites never formed a political state in this period. The Canaanites remained the political and military power in the region. Abraham’s grandson Jacob, the story continues, moved to Egypt when his son Joseph brought his family there to escape famine. Joseph had previously used his intelligence and charisma to rise to an important position in the Egyptian administration. In fact, Israelites had probably drifted into Egypt during the seventeenth or sixteenth century b.c.e. as part of the movement of peoples there under Hyksos rule. By the thirteenth century b.c.e., the pharaohs had forced the Israelite men into slavelabor gangs. According to the biblical Book of Exodus, the Israelite deity, Yahweh, instructed Moses to lead the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt against the will of the pharaoh, perhaps around the mid-thirteenth century b.c.e. Yahweh sent ten plagues to compel the Egyptian king to free the Israelites, but he still tried to recapture them during their flight. Yahweh therefore miraculously parted the sea to allow them to escape eastward; the water swirled back together and drowned the pharaoh’s army as it tried to follow. Next in the biblical narrative comes the crucial event in the history of the Israelites: the formalizing of a contractual agreement (a covenant) between them and their deity, who revealed himself to Moses on Mount Sinai in the desert northeast of Egypt. This contract between the Israelites and Yahweh specified that, in return for their worshipping him exclusively as their only god and living by his laws, Yahweh would make them his chosen people and lead them into a promised land of safety and prosperity. The form of the covenant with Yahweh followed the ancient Near Eastern tradition of treaties between a superior and subordinates, but its content differed from that of other ancient Near Eastern religions because it made Yahweh the exclusive deity of his people. This binding agreement demanded human obedience to divine law and promised punishment for unrighteousness. Yahweh described himself to Moses as “compassionate and gracious, patient, ever constant and true . . . forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin,” yet he also declared that he was “one who punishes sons and grandsons to the third and fourth generation for their fathers’ iniquity” (Exod. 34:6–7). The Hebrew Bible sets forth the religious and moral code the Israelites had to follow. The Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, called the Pentateuch by Christians) recorded laws for righteous living. Most famous are the Ten Commandments, which required Israelites to worship Yahweh exclusively; make no idols; keep from misusing Yahweh’s name; honor their parents; refrain from work on the seventh day of the week (the Sabbath); and abstain from murder, adultery, theft, lying, and covetousness. Many of the Israelites’ laws shared the traditional form and content of earlier Mesopotamian laws, such as those of Hammurabi. Like his code, Israelite law protected the lower classes and people without power, including strangers, widows, and orphans.

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Israelite law and thus Israelite justice differed significantly from their Mesopotamian precedent, however, in applying the same rules and punishments to everyone regardless of social rank. Israelite law also eliminated eye-for-an-eye punishment — a Mesopotamian tradition ordering, for example, that a rapist’s wife be raped, or that the son of a builder be killed if his father’s negligent work caused the death of someone else’s son. Crimes against property did not carry the death penalty, as in other Near Eastern societies. Israelite laws also protected slaves against flagrant mistreatment. Slaves who lost an eye or a tooth from a beating were to be freed. Like free people, slaves enjoyed the right to rest on the Sabbath. Israelite women and children, however, had fewer legal rights than men did. According to the Bible, the Israelites who fled from Egypt with Moses made their way back to Canaan, joining their relatives who had remained there and somehow carving out separate territories for themselves. The twelve Israelite tribes remained politically distinct under the direction of separate leaders, called judges, until the eleventh century b.c.e., when according to tradition their first monarchy emerged. Their monotheism gradually developed over the succeeding centuries. Controversy rages about the accuracy of the biblical account, which reports that the Israelites created a monarchy in the late eleventh century b.c.e. when Saul became the Israelites’ first king. His successors David (r. 1010–970 b.c.e.) and Solomon (r.c.961– 922 b.c.e.) brought the Israelite kingdom to the height of its prosperity. The kingdom’s wealth, based on international commerce, supported the great temple that Solomon built in Jerusalem as the house of Yahweh. The temple, richly decorated with gold leaf, and the daily animal sacrifices to God that priests performed on the altar there became the center of the Israelites’ religion. After Solomon’s death, the monarchy split into two kingdoms: Israel in the north and Judah in the south. The Assyrians destroyed Israel in 722 b.c.e. and deported its population to Assyria. In 597 b.c.e., the Babylonians conquered Judah and captured its capital, Jerusalem. In 586 b.c.e., they destroyed the temple to Yahweh and banished the Israelite leaders, along with much of the population, to Babylon. In exile the Israelites learned about Persian religion. Zoroastrianism and Judaism came to share ideas, such as the existence of God and Satan, angels and demons, God’s day of judgment, and the arrival of a messiah (an “anointed one,” that is, a divinely chosen leader with special powers). When the Persian king Cyrus overthrew the Babylonians in 539 b.c.e., he permitted the Israelites to return to their part of Canaan. The Bible proclaimed Cyrus a messiah of the Israelites chosen by Yahweh as his “shepherd . . . to accomplish all his purpose” in restoring his people to their previous home (Isa. 44:28–45:1). This region was called Yehud, from the name of the southern Israelite kingdom, Judah. From this geographical term came the word Jew, a designation for the Israelites after their Babylonian exile. Cyrus allowed them to rebuild their main temple in Jerusalem and to practice their religion. Jewish prophets, both men and women, preached that their defeats were divine punishment for neglecting the Sinai covenant and mistreating their poor. Some

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Goddess Figurines from Judah These figurines perhaps represent Astarte, a goddess of Canaan, or related female deities. Archaeologists have found many small statues of this kind in private houses in Judah. They appear to date from about 800 to 600 B.C.E. Israelites probably kept them in their homes as religious objects promoting fertility and prosperity. The Israelites’ prophets fiercely condemned the worship of images such as these as part of their support of the development of monotheism and the abandonment of polytheism, the long-established type of religion in the ancient world. (Astarte Figurines, Judah / The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel / Bridgeman Images.)

prophets also predicted the end of the present world following a great crisis, a judgment by Yahweh, and salvation leading to a new and better world. This apocalypticism (“uncovering,” or revelation), recalling Babylonian prophetic wisdom literature, would later provide the worldview of Christianity. Jewish leaders developed complex religious laws to maintain ritual and ethical purity. Marrying non-Jews and working on the Sabbath were forbidden. Fathers had legal power over the household, subject to intervention by the male elders of the community; women gained honor as mothers. Only men could initiate divorce proceedings. Jews had to pay taxes and offerings to support and honor the sanctuary of Yahweh, and they had to forgive debts every seventh year. Gradually, Jews created their monotheism by accepting that Yahweh was the only god and that they had to obey his laws. Jews retained their identity by following this religion regardless of their personal fate or their geographical location. Therefore, Jews who did not return to their homeland could maintain their Jewish identity by following Jewish law while living among foreigners. In this way, the Diaspora (“dispersion of population”) came to characterize the history of the Jewish people. Israelite monotheism made the preservation and understanding of a sacred text, the Hebrew Bible, the center of religious life. Making scripture the focus of religion

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proved the most crucial development for the history not only of Judaism but also of Christianity and Islam, because these later religions made their own sacred texts — the Christian Bible and the Qur’an, respectively — the centers of their belief and practice. Through the continuing vitality of Judaism and its impact on the doctrines of Christianity and Islam, the early Jews passed on ideas — chiefly monotheism and the notion of a covenant bestowing a REVIEW QUESTION In what ways was religion divinely ordained destiny on a people if important in the Near East from c. 1000 B.C.E. they obey divine will — whose effects have to c. 500 B.C.E.? endured to this day.

The Reemergence of Greek Civilization, 1000–750 b.c.e. The period of violence in 1200–1000 b.c.e. destroyed the prosperous large settlements of the Greeks and erased their knowledge of how to write. They therefore had to remake their civilization in Greece’s Dark Age (c. 1000–750 b.c.e.). Trade, cultural interaction, and technological innovation led to recovery: contact with the Near East promoted intellectual, artistic, and economic revival, while the introduction of metallurgy for making iron made farming more efficient. As conditions improved, a social elite distinguished by wealth and the competitive pursuit of individual excellence replaced the hierarchy of Mycenaean times. In the eighth century b.c.e., communal values helped create a radically new form of political organization in which central authority was based on citizenship.

The Greek Dark Age Greeks apparently lost their knowledge of writing when Mycenaean civilization fell. The Linear B script they had used was probably known only by a few scribes, who used writing to track the redistribution of goods. When the Mycenaean palaces collapsed, scribes and writing disappeared. Only oral transmission kept Greek cultural traditions alive. Compared with their forebears, Greeks in the early Dark Age cultivated much less land and had many fewer settlements. There was no redistributive economy. The number of ships carrying Greek adventurers, raiders, and traders dwindled. Most people scratched out an existence as herders, shepherds, and subsistence farmers bunched in tiny settlements as small as twenty people. As agriculture declined, more Greeks than ever before made their living by herding animals. In this transient lifestyle, people built only simple huts and kept few possessions. Unlike their Bronze Age ancestors, Greeks in the Dark Age had no monumental architecture. They also stopped painting people and animals on their ceramics (their principal art form), instead putting only abstract designs on their pots.

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The Greek Dark Age, 1000–750 B.C.E. 1000 B.C.E.

Almost all important Mycenaean sites except Athens are destroyed by now

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Greatest depopulation and economic loss

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Early revival of population and agriculture; beginning use of iron tools and weapons

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Greek trading contacts are initiated with Al Mina in Syria

776 B.C.E.

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775 B.C.E.

Euboeans from Greece establish trading post on island in the Bay of Naples

750 B.C.E.

Homeric poetry is recorded in writing after Greeks learn to write again; Hesiod composes his poetry

Dark Age Greece did, however, retain a small but wealthy social elite. On the island of Euboea, for example, archaeologists have discovered the tenth-century b.c.e. grave of a couple who took such enormous riches with them to the next world that the woman’s body was covered in gold ornaments. They had done well in the competition for prestige and wealth; most people of the time were, by comparison, desperately poor. Geography allowed the Greeks to continue seaborne trade with the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean even during their Dark Age. Trade promoted cultural interaction, and the Greeks learned to write again about 800 b.c.e., adopting and adapting the alphabet from the Phoenicians, seafaring traders from Canaan. Near Eastern art inspired Greeks to resume the production of ceramics with figural designs (as on the Corinthian vase on page 40). Seaborne commerce encouraged better-off Greeks to produce agricultural surpluses and goods they could trade for luxuries such as gold jewelry and gems from Egypt and Syria. Most important, trade brought the new technology of iron metallurgy. Greeks learned this skill through their eastern trade contacts and mined their own iron ore, which was common in Greece. Iron eventually replaced bronze in agricultural tools, swords, and spear points. (The Greeks still used bronze for shields and armor, however, because it was easier to shape into thin, curved pieces.) The iron tools’ lower cost allowed more people to acquire them. Because iron is harder than bronze, implements kept their sharp edges longer. Better and more plentiful farming implements of iron helped increase food production, which sustained population growth. In this way, technology imported from the Near East improved people’s chances for survival and thus helped Greece recover from the Dark Age’s depopulation. With the Mycenaean rulers gone, leadership became an open competition in Dark Age Greece. Individuals who proved themselves excellent in action, words, charisma, and religious knowledge joined the social elite, enjoying higher prestige and

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authority in society. Excellence — aretê in Greek — was earned by competing. Men competed with others for aretê as warriors and persuasive public speakers. Women won their highest aretê by managing a household of children, slaves, and storerooms. Members of the elite accumulated wealth by controlling agricultural land, which people of lower status worked for them as tenants or slaves. The Iliad and The Odyssey, the eighth-century b.c.e. poems of Homer, reflect the social elite’s ideals. Homer was the last in a long line of poets who, influenced by Near Eastern mythology, had been singing these stories for centuries, orally transmitting cultural values from one generation to the next. In telling the story of the Greek army in the Trojan War, The Iliad focuses on the greatest Greek warrior, Achilles, who proves his aretê by choosing to die in battle rather than accept the gods’ offer to return home safely but without glory. The Odyssey recounts not only the hero Odysseus’s ten-year adventure sailing home after the fall of Troy but also the struggle of his wife, Penelope, to protect their household from the schemes of rivals. Homer reveals that the white-hot emotions inflamed by the competition for excellence could provoke a disturbing level of inhumanity. Achilles, in preparing to duel Hector, the prince of Troy, brutally rejects the Trojan’s proposal that the winner return the loser’s corpse to his family and friends: “Do wolves and lambs agree to cooperate? No, they hate each other to the roots of their being.” The victor, Achilles, mutilates Hector’s body. When Hecuba, the queen of Troy and Hector’s mother, sees this outrage, she bitterly shouts, “I wish I could sink my teeth into his liver to eat it raw.” The endings of Homer’s poems suggest that the gods could sometimes help people achieve reconciliation after violent conflict, but human suffering in his stories shows that the pursuit of excellence is painful.

The Values of the Olympic Games Greece had recovered enough population and prosperity by the eighth century b.c.e. to begin creating new forms of social and political organization. The most vivid evidence is the founding of the Olympic Games, traditionally dated to 776 b.c.e. This international religious festival showcased the competitive value of aretê. Every four years, the games took place in a huge sanctuary dedicated to Zeus, the king of the gods, at Olympia, in the northwestern Peloponnese. Male athletes from elite families vied in sports, imitating the aretê needed for war: running, wrestling, jumping, and throwing. Horse and chariot racing were added to the program later, but the main event remained a two-hundred-yard sprint, the stadion (hence our word stadium). The athletes competed as individuals, not on national teams. Winners received only a garland made from wild olive leaves to symbolize the prestige of victory. The Olympics illustrate Greek notions of proper behavior for each gender: crowds of men flocked to the games, but women were prohibited on pain of death. Women had their own separate Olympic festival on a different date in honor of Hera, queen of the gods. Only unmarried women could compete. In later times, professional

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Athletic Competition Greek vase painters often showed male athletes in action or training, perhaps in part because athletes were customers who would buy pottery with such scenes. As in this painting of an Athenian foot race from around 530 B.C.E., the athletes were usually shown nude, which was howthey competed, revealing their superb physical condition and strong musculature. Being in excellent shape was a man’s ideal for several reasons: it was regarded as beautiful, it enabled him to compete for individual glory in athletic contests, and it allowed him to fulfill his community responsibility by fighting as a well-conditioned soldier in the city-state’s citizen militia. Why do you think the figure at the far left does not have a full beard? (Euphiletos Painter [sixth century B.C.E.], Panathenaic prize amphora, c. 530 B.C.E. Reverse. Terracotta, h. 24½ in. [62.2 cm]. Archaic Greek, Attic. Rogers Fund, 1914. [14.130.12]. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, U.S.A. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.)

athletes dominated the Olympics, earning their living from appearance fees and prizes at games held throughout the Greek world. Once every four years an international truce of several weeks was declared so that competitors and fans from all Greek communities could safely travel to and from Olympia. The games were open to any socially elite Greek male. These rules represented beginning steps toward a concept of collective Greek identity. The Olympics helped channel the competition for individual excellence into a new context of social cooperation and community values, essential preconditions for the creation of Greece’s new political form, the city-state ruled by citizens.

Homer, Hesiod, and Divine Justice in Greek Myth The Greeks’ belief in divine justice inspired them to develop the cooperative values that remade their civilization. This idea came not from scripture — Greeks had none — but from poetry that told myths about the gods and goddesses and their relationships to humans. Different myths often provided different lessons, teaching

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that human beings could not expect to have a clear understanding of the gods and had to make choices by themselves about how to live. Homer’s poems reveal that the gods had plans for human existence but did not guarantee justice. Bellerophon, for example, the hero whose brave efforts won him a princess bride and a kingdom, ended up losing everything. He became, in Homer’s words, “hated by the gods and wandering the land alone, eating his heart out, a refugee fleeing from the haunts of men.” The poem gives no explanation for this tragedy. Hesiod’s poetry from the eighth century b.c.e., by contrast, reveals how other myths describing divine support for justice contributed to the Greek feeling of community. Hesiod’s vivid stories, which originated in Near Eastern creation myths, show that deities experienced struggle, sorrow, and violence but that the divine order of the universe included a concern for justice. Hesiod’s epic poem Theogony (whose title means “genealogy of the gods”) recounted the birth of the race of gods — including Sky and numerous others — from the intercourse of primeval Chaos and Earth. Hesiod explained that when Sky began to imprison his siblings, Earth persuaded her fiercest son, Kronos, to overthrow him violently because “Sky first schemed to do shameful things.” When Kronos later began to swallow his own children to avoid sharing power with them, his wife, Rhea (who was also his sister), had their son Zeus violently force his father from power. In Works and Days, Hesiod’s poem on conditions in his own time, he identified Zeus as the source of justice in human affairs: “Zeus commanded that fishes and wild beasts and birds should eat each other, for they have no justice; but to human beings he has given justice, which is far the best.” People were responsible for administering justice, and in the eighth century b.c.e. this meant the male social elite. They controlled their family members and household servants. Hesiod insisted that a leader should demonstrate aretê by employing persuasion instead of force: “When his people in their assembly get on the wrong track, he gently sets matters right, persuading them with soft words.” Hesiod complained that many elite leaders in his time failed to exercise their power in this way, instead creating conflict between themselves and the peasants — free proprietors of small farms owning a slave or two, oxen to work their fields, and a limited amount of goods acquired by trading the surplus of their crops. Peasants’ outREVIEW QUESTION What factors proved rage at unjust treatment helped push the most important in the Greek recovery from gradual movement toward a new form of the troubles of the Dark Age? social and political organization in Greece.

The Creation of the Greek City-State, 750–500 b.c.e. The Archaic Age (c. 750–500 b.c.e.) saw the creation of the Greek city-state — the polis — an independent community of citizens inhabiting a city and the countryside around it. Greece’s geography, dominated by mountains and islands, promoted the creation of hundreds of independent city-states around the Aegean Sea. From there,

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Greeks dispersed around the Mediterranean to settle hundreds more trading communities that often grew into new city-states. Individuals’ drive for profit from trade, especially in raw materials, and for free farmland probably started this process of founding new settlements. Though it took varying forms, the Greek polis differed from the Mesopotamian city-state primarily in being a community of citizens making laws and administering justice among themselves instead of being the subjects of a king. Another difference was that poor citizens of Greek city-states enjoyed a rough legal and political equality with the rich. Not different, however, were the subordination of women and the subjugation of slaves.

The Physical Environment of the Greek City-State Culturally, Greeks identified with one another because they spoke the same language and worshipped the same gods. Still, the ancient Greeks never unified into a single political state. Mountains separated independent and often mutually hostile Greek communities. Because few city-states had enough farmland to support many people, most of them had populations of only several hundred to several thousand. A few, prosperous from international trade, grew to have a hundred thousand or more inhabitants. Long-distance transportation in Greece overwhelmingly occurred by sea. Land travel was slow and expensive because roads were mostly just dirt paths. The most plentiful resource was timber from the mountains for building houses and ships. Deposits of metal ore were scattered throughout Greek territory, as were clays suitable for pottery and sculpture. Various quarries of fine stone such as marble provided materials for special buildings and works of art. Only 20 to 30 percent of Greece’s mountainous terrain could be farmed, making it impossible to raise large herds of cattle and horses. Pigs, sheep, goats, and chickens were the common livestock. Because the amount of annual precipitation varied greatly, farming was a precarious business of boom and bust. People preferred to eat wheat, but since that grain was expensive to cultivate, the cereal staple of the Greek diet became barley. Wine grapes and olives were the other most important crops.

Trade and “Colonization,” 800–580 b.c.e. Greece’s jagged coastline made sea travel practical: almost every community lay within forty miles of the Mediterranean Sea. But seaborne commerce faced dangers from pirates and, especially, storms. As Hesiod commented, merchants took to the sea “because an income means life to poor mortals, but it is a terrible fate to die among the waves.” The Odyssey describes the basic strategy of Greek long-distance trade in commodities, when the goddess Athena appears disguised as a metal trader: “I am here . . . with my ship and crew on our way across the wine-dark sea to foreign lands

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in search of copper; I am carrying iron now.” By 800 b.c.e., the Mediterranean swarmed with entrepreneurs of many nationalities. The Phoenicians established settlements as far west as Spain’s Atlantic coast to gain access to inland mines there. Their North African settlement at Carthage (modern Tunis) would become one of the Mediterranean’s most powerful cities in later times. The scale of trade soared near the end of the Dark Age: archaeologists have found only two tenth-century b.c.e. Greek pots that were carried abroad, but eighthcentury pottery has turned up at more than eighty foreign sites. By 750 b.c.e., Greeks were settling far from home, sometimes living in others’ settlements, especially those of the Phoenicians, and sometimes establishing trading posts of their own, as the Euboeans did on an island in the Bay of Naples. Everywhere they traded with the local populations, such as the Etruscans in central Italy, who imported large amounts of Greek goods. Traders were not the only Greeks to emigrate. As the population expanded following the Dark Age, a shortage of farmland in Greece drove some poor farmers abroad to find fields they could work. Apparently only males left home on trading and land-hunting expeditions, so they had to find wives wherever they settled, either through peaceful negotiation or by kidnapping. By about 580 b.c.e., Greek settlements had spread westward to Spain, presentday southern France, southern Italy, and Sicily; southward to North Africa; and eastward to the Black Sea coast (Map. 2.2). The settlements in southern Italy and Sicily, such as Naples and Syracuse, eventually became so large and powerful that this region was called Magna Graecia (“Great Greece”). A Greek trading station had sprung up in Syria by 800 b.c.e., and in the seventh century b.c.e. the Egyptians permitted Greek merchants to settle in a coastal town. These close contacts with eastern Mediterranean peoples paid cultural as well as economic dividends. Near Eastern art inspired Greeks to reintroduce figures into their painting and provided models for statues that stood stiffly and stared straight ahead. When the improving economy of the later Archaic Age allowed Greeks again to afford monumental architecture in stone, their rectangular temples on platforms with columns reflected Egyptian architectural designs. Historians have traditionally called the Greeks’ settlement process in this era colonization, but recent research questions this term’s accuracy because the word colonization implies the process by which modern European governments officially installed dependent settlements and regimes abroad. The evidence for these Greek settlements suggests rather that private entrepreneurship created most of them. Official state involvement was minimal, at least in the beginning.

Citizenship and Freedom in the Greek City-State The creation of the polis filled the political vacuum left by Mycenaean civilization’s fall. The Greek city-state was unique because it was based on the concept of citizenship for all its free inhabitants, rejected monarchy as its central authority, and made justice the responsibility of the citizens. Moreover, except in tyrannies, in which one

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Danub eR

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MAP 2.2 Phoenician and Greek Expansion, 750–500 b.c.e.

The Phoenicians were early explorers and settlers of the western Mediterranean. By 800 B.C.E., they had already founded the city of Carthage, which would become the main commercial power in the region. During the Archaic Age, groups of adventurous Greeks followed the Phoenicians’ lead and settled all around the Mediterranean, hoping to improve their economic prospects by trade and farming. Sometimes they moved into previously established Phoenician settlements; sometimes they founded their own. Some Greek city-states established formal ties with new settlements or sent out their own expeditions to try to establish loyal colonies. Where did Phoenicians predominantly settle, and where did Greeks?

man seized control of the city-state, at least some degree of shared governing was normal. Power sharing reached its widest form in democratic Greek city-states. The most famous ancient analyst of Greek politics and society, the philosopher Aristotle (384– 322 b.c.e.), argued, “Humans are beings who by nature live in a city-state.” Anyone who existed outside such a community, Aristotle remarked, must be either a simple fool or superhuman. The polis’s innovation in making shared power the basis of government did not immediately change the course of history — monarchy later became once again the most common form of government in ancient Western civilization — but it was important as proof that power sharing was a workable system of political organization. Greek city-states were officially religious communities. As well as worshipping many deities, each city-state honored a particular god or goddess as its special protector, such as Athena at Athens. Different communities could choose the same deity: Sparta, Athens’s chief rival in later times, also chose Athena as its defender. Greeks

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A Greek Woman at an Altar This red-figure vase painting (contrast the black-figure vase on page 40) from the center of a large drinking cup shows a woman in rich clothing pouring a libation to the gods onto a flaming altar. In her other arm, she carries a religious object that has notbeen securely identified. This scene illustrates the most important and frequent role of women in Greek public life: participating in religious ceremonies, both at home and in community festivals. Greek women (and men) commonly wore sandals; why do youthink they are usually depicted without shoes in vase paintings? (Attributed to Makron [painter] and Hieron [potter], [Greek, from Athens], Kylix [Drinking Vessel], detail, Tondo: Woman Sacrificing at an Altar, c. 490–480 B.C.E., wheel-thrown, slip-decorated earthenware, red-figure technique, h. 47⁄16 in. [11.3 cm]. Toledo Museum of Art [Toledo, Ohio]. Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey [1972.55].)

envisioned the twelve most important gods banqueting atop Mount Olympus, the highest peak in mainland Greece. Zeus headed this pantheon; the others were Hera, his wife; Aphrodite, goddess of love; Apollo, sun god; Ares, war god; Artemis, moon goddess; Athena, goddess of wisdom and war; Demeter, earth goddess; Dionysus, god of pleasure, wine, and disorder; Hephaestus, fire god; Hermes, messenger god; and Poseidon, sea god. The Greeks believed that their gods occasionally experienced temporary pain or sadness but were immune to permanent suffering because they were immortal. Greek religion’s core beliefs were that humans must honor the gods to thank them for blessings received and to receive more blessings in return, and that the gods sent both good and bad into the world. Gods could punish offenders by sending disasters such as floods, famines, earthquakes, epidemic diseases, and defeats in battle. The relationship between gods and humans generated sorrow as well as joy, and only a limited hope for favored treatment in this life and in the underworld after death even for the gods’ favorites. Ordinary Greeks did not expect the gods to take them to a paradise at some future time when evil forces would be eliminated forever. An inscription on a seventh-century b.c.e. bronze statuette sums up the reciprocity that characterized Greek religious ideas: “Mantiklos gave this from his share to [the god Apollo] the Far Darter of the Silver Bow; now you, Apollo, do something for me in return.” Mythology hinted at the gods’ expectations of proper human behavior. For example, gods demanded hospitality for strangers and proper burial for family members. Other acts such as performing a sacrifice improperly, violating the sanctity of a temple area, or breaking an oath or sworn agreement counted as disrespect for the

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gods. Humans had to police most crimes themselves. Homicide was such a serious offense, however, that the gods were thought to punish it by casting a miasma (ritual contamination) on the murderer and on all those around. Unless the members of the affected group purified themselves by punishing the murderer, they could all expect to suffer divine punishment, such as bad harvests or disease. Oracles, dreams, divination, and the interpretations of prophets provided clues about what humans might have done to anger the gods. The most important oracle was at Delphi, in central Greece, where a priestess in a trance provided Apollo’s answers — in the form of riddles that had to be interpreted — to questions posed by city-states as well as individuals. City-states honored gods by sacrificing animals such as cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs; decorating their sanctuaries with works of art; and celebrating festivals with songs, dances, prayers, and processions. Both city-states and individuals worshipped each god and goddess through a cult, a set of official, publicly funded religious activities overseen by priests and priestesses. People prayed, sang hymns of praise, offered sacrifices, and presented gifts at the deity’s sanctuary. In these holy places a person could honor and thank the deities for blessings and beg them for relief when misfortune struck the community or the individual. People could also offer sacrifices at home with the household gathered around; sometimes the family’s slaves were allowed to participate. Priests and priestesses chosen from the citizen body performed the sacrifices of public cults; they did not use their positions to influence political or social matters. They were not guardians of correct religious thinking because Greek polytheism had no scripture or uniform set of beliefs and practices. It required its worshippers only to support the community’s local rituals and to avoid religious pollution. The concept of citizenship in the Greek city-state meant free people agreeing to form a political community that was a partnership of privileges and duties in common affairs under the rule of law. Citizenship was a remarkable political concept because, even in Greek city-states organized as tyrannies or oligarchies (rule by a small group), it meant a basic level of political equality among citizens. Most important, it carried the expectation of equal treatment under the law for male citizens regardless of their social status or wealth. The degree of power sharing varied. In oligarchic city-states, small groups from the social elite or even a single family could dominate the process of legislating. Women had the protection of the law, but they were barred from participation in politics on the grounds that female judgment was inferior to male. Regulations governing sexual behavior and control of property were stricter for women than for men. In democratic city-states, all free adult male citizens shared in governing by attending and voting in a political assembly, where the laws and policies of the community were decided, and by serving on juries. Citizens did not enjoy perfect political equality. The right to hold office, for example, could be restricted to citizens possessing a certain amount of property. Equality prevailed most strongly in the justice system, in which all male citizens were treated the same, regardless of wealth

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or status. Making equality of male citizens the principle for the reorganization of Greek society and politics in the Archaic Age was a radical innovation. The polis — with its emphasis on equal protection of the laws for rich and poor alike — remained the preeminent form of political and social organization in Greece until the beginning of Roman control six centuries later. How the poor originally gained the privileges of citizenship remains a mystery. The population increase in the late Dark Age and the Archaic Age was greatest among the poor. These families raised more children to help farm more land, which had been vacant after the depopulation brought on by the worst of the Dark Age. There was no precedent in Western civilization for extending even limited political and legal equality to the poor. Historians have customarily believed that a hoplite revolution was the reason for expanded political rights. A hoplite was an infantryman who wore metal body armor and attacked with a thrusting spear. Hoplites formed the basis of the citizen militias that defended Greek city-states. Staying in line and working together were the secrets to successful hoplite tactics. In the eighth century b.c.e., a growing number of men became prosperous enough to buy metal weapons and train as hoplites, especially because the use of iron had made such weapons more readily available. According to the hoplite revolution theory, these new hoplites — feeling that they should enjoy political rights in exchange for buying their own equipment and training hard — forced the social elite to share political power by threatening to refuse to fight, which would have crippled military defense. This interpretation correctly assumes that the hoplites had the power to demand and receive a voice in politics but ignores that hoplites were not poor. Furthermore, archaeology shows that not many men were wealthy enough to afford hoplite armor until the middle of the seventh century b.c.e., well after the earliest city-states had emerged. How then did poor men, too, win political rights? The most likely explanation is that the poor earned respect by fighting to defend the community, just as hoplites did. FightGrave Monument of a Greek Warrior This inscribed flat pillar stood above the grave of a Greek warrior from Athens who died in the late sixth century B.C.E. An inscription preserves his name for future generations to remember: Aristion. The sculpture shows him with the muscular build that Greek hoplites (heavily armed infantry) worked to develop so that they could fight effectively while wearing metal armor. He holds the thrusting spear that was a hoplite’s main battle weapon. (© AISA / Everett Collection.)

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ing as lightly armed troops, poor men could disrupt an enemy’s line by slinging rocks and shooting arrows. It is also possible that tyrants — sole rulers who seized power for their families in some city-states — boosted the status of poor men. Tyrants may have granted greater political rights to poor men as a means of gathering popular support. The growth of freedom and equality for citizens in Greece produced a corresponding expansion of slavery, as free citizens protected their status by establishing clear distinctions between themselves and slaves. Many slaves were war captives. Pirates or raiders also seized people from non-Greek regions to sell into slavery. Rich families prized educated Greek-speaking slaves, who could tutor their children (no public schools existed yet). City-states as well as individuals owned slaves. Publicly owned slaves enjoyed limited independence, living on their own and performing specialized tasks. In Athens, for example, special slaves were trained to detect counterfeit coinage. Temple slaves belonged to the deity of the sanctuary, for whom they worked as servants. Slaves made up about one-third of the total population in some city-states by the fifth century b.c.e. They became cheap enough that even middle-class people could afford one or two. Still, small landowners and their families continued to do much work themselves. Not even wealthy Greek landowners acquired large numbers of agricultural slaves because maintaining gangs of hundreds of enslaved workers year-round was too expensive. Most crops required short periods of intense labor punctuated by long stretches of inactivity, and owners did not want to feed slaves who had no work. Slaves did all kinds of jobs. Household slaves, often women, cleaned, cooked, fetched water from public fountains, helped the wife with the weaving, watched the children, accompanied the husband as he did the marketing, and performed other domestic chores. Neither female nor male slaves could refuse if their masters demanded sexual favors. Owners often labored alongside their slaves in small manufacturing businesses and on farms. Slaves toiling in the narrow, landslide-prone tunnels of Greece’s silver and gold mines had the most dangerous work. Since slaves existed as property, not people, owners could legally beat or even kill them. But injuring or executing slaves made no economic sense — the master would have been damaging or destroying his own property. Under the best conditions, household workers could live free of violent punishment. They sometimes were allowed to join their owners’ families on excursions and attend religious rituals. However, without families of their own, without property, and without legal or political rights, slaves remained alienated from regular society. Sometimes owners freed their slaves, and some promised freedom at a future date to encourage their slaves to work hard. Those slaves who gained their freedom did not become citizens in Greek city-states but instead mixed into the population of noncitizens officially allowed to live in the community. Greek slaves rarely rebelled on a large scale, except in Sparta, because they were usually of too many different origins and nationalities and too scattered to organize.

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No Greeks called for the abolition of slavery. The expansion of slavery in the Archaic Age reduced more and more people to a state of absolute dependence. Although only free men had the right to participate in city-state politics and to vote, free women counted as citizens legally, socially, and religiously. Citizenship gave women security and status because it guaranteed them access to the justice system and a respected role in a cult. Free women had legal protection against being kidnapped for sale into slavery and access to the courts in disputes over property, although they usually had to have a man speak for them. The traditional paternalism of Greek society required that all women have male guardians to regulate their lives and safeguard their interests (as defined by men). Before a woman’s marriage, her father served as her legal guardian; after marriage, her husband took over that duty. The expansion of slavery added new responsibilities for women. While their husbands farmed, participated in politics, and met with their male friends, well-off wives managed the household: raising the children, supervising the preservation and preparation of food, keeping the family’s financial accounts, weaving fabric for clothing, directing the work of the slaves, and tending them when they were ill. Poor women worked outside the home, laboring in the fields or selling produce and small goods such as ribbons and trinkets in the market. Women’s labor ensured the family’s economic self-sufficiency and allowed male citizens the time to participate in public life. Women’s religious functions gave them prestige and freedom of movement. Women left the home to attend funerals, state festivals, and public rituals. They had access, for example, to the initiation rites of the popular cult of Demeter at Eleusis, near Athens. Women had control over cults reserved exclusively for them and also performed important duties in other official cults. In fifth-century b.c.e. Athens, for example, women officiated as priestesses for more than forty different deities, with benefits including salaries paid by the state. Marriages were arranged, and everyone was expected to marry. A woman’s guardian would often engage her to another man’s son while she was still a child, perhaps as young as five. The engagement was a public event conducted in the presence of witnesses. The guardian on this occasion repeated the statement that expressed the primary aim of the marriage: “I give you this woman for the plowing [procreation] of legitimate children.” The wedding took place when the girl was in her early teens and the groom ten to fifteen years older. A legal wedding consisted of the bride moving to her husband’s dwelling; the procession to his house served as the ceremony. The bride’s father bestowed on her a dowry (a certain amount of family property a daughter received at marriage); if she was wealthy, this could include land yielding an income as well as personal possessions that formed part of her new household’s assets and could be inherited by her children. The husband was legally obliged to preserve the dowry, use it to support his wife and their children, and return it in case of a divorce. Except in certain cases in Sparta, monogamy was the rule, as was a nuclear family (husband, wife, and children living together without other relatives in the same house). Citizen men, married or not, were free to have sexual relations with slaves,

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A Bride’s Preparation This special piece of pottery was designed to fit over a woman’s thigh to protect it while she sat down to spin wool. As a woman’s tool, it appropriately carried a picture from a woman’s life: a bride being helped to prepare for her wedding by her family, friends, and servants. The inscriptions indicate that this fifth-century B.C.E. piece shows the mythological bride Alcestis, famous for sacrificing herself to save her husband and then being rescued from Death by the hero Heracles. (onos or epinetron, painted terracotta by Diosphos, Greece, Greek Civilization, 5th Century B.C. / DeAgostini Picture Library / G. Dagli Orti / Bridgeman Images.)

foreign concubines, female prostitutes, or willing pre-adult citizen males. Citizen women, single or married, had no such freedom. Sex between a wife and anyone other than her husband carried harsh penalties for both parties. Greek citizen men placed Greek citizen women under their guardianship both to regulate marriage and procreation and to maintain family property. According to Greek mythology, women were a necessary evil. Zeus supposedly ordered the creation of the first woman, Pandora, as a punishment for men in retaliation against Prometheus, who had stolen fire from Zeus and given it to humans. To see what was in a container that had come as a gift from the gods, Pandora lifted its lid and accidentally released into a previously trouble-free world the evils that had been locked inside. When she finally slammed the lid back down, only hope still remained in the container. Hesiod described women as “big trouble” but thought any man who refused to marry to escape the “troublesome deeds of women” would come to “destructive old age” alone, with no heirs. In other words, a man needed a wife so that he could father children who would later care for him and preserve the family REVIEW QUESTION How did the physical, property after his death. This paternalistic social, and intellectual conditions of life in attitude allowed Greek men to control theArchaic Age promote the emergence of human reproduction and consequently the theGreek city-state? distribution of property.

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New Directions for the Greek City-State, 750–500 b.c.e. Greek city-states developed three forms of social and political organization based on citizenship: oligarchy, tyranny, and democracy. Sparta provided Greece’s most famous example of an oligarchy, in which a small number of men dominated policymaking in an assembly of male citizens. For a time Corinth had the best-known tyranny, inwhich one man seized control of the city-state, ruling it for the advantage of his family and loyal supporters, while acknowledging the citizenship of all — thereby distinguishing a tyrant from a king, who ruled over subjects. Athens developed Greece’s best-known democracy. Greeks in the Archaic Age also created new forms of artistic expression and new ways of thought. In this period they developed innovative ways of using reason to understand the physical world, their relations to it, and their relationships with one another. This intellectual innovation laid the foundation for the gradual emergence of scientific thought and logic in Western civilization.

Oligarchy in the City-State of Sparta, 700–500 b.c.e.

Ion

Sparta organized its society for military readiness. This oligarchic city-state developed the mightiest infantry force in Greece during the Archaic Age. Its citizens were famous for their militaristic self-discipline. Sparta’s urban center nestled in an easily defended valley on the Peloponnesian peninsula twenty-five miles from the Mediterranean coast. This separation from the sea kept the Spartans focused on being a land power. The Spartan oligarchy included three components of rule. First came the two hereditary, prestigious military leaders called kings, who served as the state’s religious heads and the generals of its army. Despite their title, they were not monarchs but just one part of the ruling oligarchy. The second part was a council of twenty-eight men over sixty years old (the elders), and the third part consisted of five annually elected officials called ephors (“overseers”), who made policy and enforced the laws. In principle, legislation had to be approved by an assembly of all Sparta’s free adult males, who Gulf of C were called “The Alike” to stress their common orin Achaea th Ist hm status and purpose. The assembly had only limited us Corinth Olympia power to amend the proposals put before it, howArcadia ever, and the council would withdraw a proposal PELOPONNESE when the assembly’s reaction proved negative. Messenia Sparta Spartan society demanded strict obedience to all Laconia laws. When the ephors took office, they issued an official proclamation to Sparta’s males: “Shave your mustache and obey the laws.” Unlike other Greeks, 0 25 50 miles Sanctuary the Spartans never wrote down their laws. Instead, 0 25 50 kilometers they preserved their system with a unique, highly Sparta and Corinth, 750–500 b.c.e. structured way of life. All Spartan citizens were ian

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expected to put service to their city-state before personal concerns because their state’s survival was continually threatened by its own economic foundation: the great mass of Greek slaves, called helots, who did almost all the work for Spartan citizens. A helot was a slave owned by the Spartan city-state. Helots were Greeks capturedin neighboring parts of Greece that the Spartans defeated in war. Most helots lived in Messenia, to the west, which Sparta had conquered by around 700 b.c.e. The helots outnumbered Sparta’s free citizens. Harshly treated by their Spartan masters, helots constantly looked for chances to revolt. Helots had some family life because they were expected to produce children to maintain their population, and they could own some personal possessions and practice their religion. They labored as farmers and household slaves so that Spartan citizens would not have to do nonmilitary work. Spartan men wore their hair very long to show they were warriors rather than laborers. Helots lived under the constant threat of officially approved violence by Spartan citizens. Every year the ephors formally declared war between Sparta and the helots, allowing any Spartan to kill a helot without legal penalty or fear of offending the gods. By beating the helots frequently, forcing them to get drunk in public as an object lesson to young Spartans, and humiliating them by making them wear dogskin caps, the Spartans emphasized their slaves’ “otherness.” In this way Spartans created a justification for their harsh abuse of fellow Greeks. A later Athenian observed, “Sparta is the home of the freest of the Greeks, and of the most enslaved.” With helots to work the fields, male citizens could devote themselves full-time to preparation for war, training to protect their state from both hostile neighbors and its own slaves. Boys lived at home until their seventh year, when they were sent to live in barracks with other males until they were thirty. They spent most of their time exercising, hunting, practicing with weapons, and learning Spartan values by listening to tales of bravery and heroism at shared meals, where adult males in groups of about fifteen usually ate instead of at home. Discipline was strict, and the boys were purposely underfed so that they would learn stealth tactics by stealing food. If they were caught, punishment and disgrace followed immediately. One famous Spartan tale reported that a boy hid a stolen fox under his clothing and let the panicked animal rip out his insides rather than allow himself to be detected in the theft. A Spartan male who could not survive the tough training was publicly disgraced and denied the status of being an Alike. Spending so much time in shared quarters schooled Sparta’s young men in their society’s values. The community took the place of a Spartan boy’s family when he was growing up and remained his main social environment even after he reached adulthood. There he learned to call all older men “Father,” to emphasize that his primary loyalty was to the group instead of his biological family. This way of life trained him for the one honorable occupation for Spartan men: obedient soldier. A seventh-century b.c.e. poet expressed the Spartan male ideal: “Know that it is good for the city-state and the whole people when a man takes his place in the front row of warriors and stands his ground without flinching.”

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An adolescent boy’s life often involved what in today’s terminology would becalled a homosexual relationship, although the ancient concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality do not match modern notions. An older male would choose a teenager as a special favorite, in many cases engaging him in sexual relations. Their bond was meant to make each ready to die for the other in battle. Numerous Greek city-states included this form of sexuality among their customs, although some thought it disgraceful and made it illegal. The Athenian author Xenophon (c. 430–355 b.c.e.) wrote a work on the Spartan way of life denying that sex with boys existed there because he thought it a stain on the Spartans’ reputation for virtue. However, other sources testify that such relationships did exist in Sparta and elsewhere. In such relationships the elder partner (the “lover”) was supposed to help educate the young man (the “beloved”) in politics and community values, and not just exploit him for physical pleasure. Once they became adults, beloveds were expected to find a wife to start a family; they could also at that point become the “lover” of an adolescent “beloved.” Sex between adult males was considered disgraceful, as was sex between females of all ages (at least according to men). Spartan women were known throughout the Greek world for their personal freedom. Since their husbands were so rarely at home, women totally controlled the households, which included servants, daughters, and sons who had not yet left for their communal training. Consequently, Spartan women exercised even more power at home than did women elsewhere in Greece. They could own property, including land. Wives were expected to stay physically fit so that they could bear healthy children to keep up the population. They were also expected to drum Spartan values into their children. One mother became legendary for handing her son his shield on the eve of battle and sternly telling him, “Come back with it or [lying dead] on it.”

Bronze Sculpture of a Spartan Youth This sculpted handle of a bronze water jar from sixth-century B.C.E. Sparta shows a young male holding two lions by the tail on his shoulders. That spectacular pose portrayed the fearlessness and control over fierce nature that Sparta expected of its citizens. His hair is long in the self-conscious style of Spartan warriors, who prided themselves on not having the short hair that was common for laborers. (Greek, Archaic, about 540 B.C.E. Place of manufacture: Greece, Laconia, Sparta. Bronze. H. 12.8 cm [51 ⁄16 in.]. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum purchase with funds donated by contributions, 85.515. Photograph © 2015 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)

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1000–500 b.c.e.

]

New Directions for the Greek City-State, 750–500 b.c.e.

Demographics determined Sparta’s long-term fate. The population of Sparta was never large. Adult males — who made up the army — numbered between eight and ten thousand in the Archaic period. Over time, the problem of producing enough children to keep the Spartan army from shrinking became desperate, probably because losses in war far outnumbered births and regulations on the timing of intercourse in marriage had the opposite of the intended effect, reducing instead of increasing fertility. Men became legally required to marry, with bachelors punished by fines and public ridicule. A woman could legitimately have children by a man other than her husband, if all three agreed. Because the Spartans’ survival depended on the exploitation of enslaved Greeks, they believed changes in their way of life must be avoided because any change might make them vulnerable to internal revolts. Some Greeks criticized the Spartan way of life as repressive and monotonous, but the Spartans’ discipline and respect for their laws also gained them widespread admiration.

Tyranny in the City-State of Corinth, 657–585 b.c.e. In some city-states, competition among the social elite became so bitter that a single family would suppress all its rivals and establish itself in rule. The family’s leader thus became a tyrant, a dictator who gained political dominance by force. Tyrants usually rallied support by promising support for poor citizens, such as public employment schemes. Since few tyrants successfully passed their dominance on to their heirs, tyrannies tended to be short-lived. Tyrants usually preserved their city-states’ existing laws and political institutions. If a city-state had an assembly, for example, the tyrant would allow it to continue to meet, expecting it to follow his direction. Although today the word tyrant indicates a brutal or unwanted leader, tyrants in Archaic Greece did not always fit that description. Ordinary Greeks evaluated tyrants according to their behavior, opposing the ruthless and violent ones but accepting the fair and generous ones. The most famous early tyranny arose at Corinth in 657 b.c.e., when the family of Cypselus rebelled against the city’s harsh oligarchic leadership. Corinth’s location on the isthmus controlling land access to the Peloponnese and a huge amount of seaborne trade made it the most prosperous city-state of the Archaic Age. Cypselus “became one of the most admired of Corinth’s citizens because he was courageous, prudent, and helpful to the people, unlike the oligarchs in power, who were insolent and violent,” according to a later historian. Cypselus’s son succeeded him at his death in 625 b.c.e. and aggressively continued Corinth’s economic expansion by founding colonies to increase trade. He also pursued commercial contacts with Egypt. Unlike his father, the son lost popular support by ruling harshly. He held on to power until his death in 585 b.c.e., but the hostility he had provoked soon led to the overthrow of his own heir. The social elite, to prevent tyranny, then installed an oligarchic government based on a board of officials and a council.

Chapter 2

Near East Empires

[

1000–500 b.c.e.

]

Democracy in the City-State of Athens, 632–500 b.c.e. Athens, located at the southeastern corner of central Greece, became the most famous of the democratic city-states because its government gave political rights to the greatest number of people; financed magnificent temples and public buildings; and, in the fifth century b.c.e., became militarily strong enough to force numerous other city-states to follow Athenian leadership in a maritime empire. Athenian democracy did not reach its full development until the mid-fifth century b.c.e., but its first steps in the Archaic Age allowed all male citizens to participate in making laws and administering justice. Athens’s early development of a large middle class was a crucial factor in opening this new path for Western civilization. The Athenian population apparently expanded at a phenomenal rate when economic conditions improved rapidly from about 800 to 700 b.c.e. The ready availability of good farmland in Athenian territory and opportunities for seaborne trade allowed many families to improve their standing. These hardworking entrepreneurs felt that their self-won economic success entitled them to a say in government. The democratic unity forged by the Athenian masses was evident as early as 632 b.c.e., when the people rallied to block an elite Athenian’s attempt to install a tyranny. By the seventh century b.c.e., all freeborn adult Athenian male citizens had the right to vote on public matters in the assembly. They also elected officials called archons, who ran the judicial system by rendering verdicts in disputes and criminal accusations. Members of the elite dominated these offices; because archons received no pay, poor men could not afford to serve. An extended economic crisis beginning in the late seventh century b.c.e. almost destroyed Athens’s infant democracy. The first attempt to solve the crisis was the emergency appointment around 621 b.c.e. of a man named Draco to revise the laws.Draco’s changes, which made death the penalty for even minor crimes, proved too harsh to work. Later Greeks said Draco (whose harshness inspired the word draconian) had written his laws in blood, not ink. By 600 b.c.e., economic conditions had become so terrible that poor farmers had to borrow constantly from richer neighbors and deeply mortgage their land. As the crisis grew worse, impoverished citizens were sold into slavery to pay off debts. Desperate, Athenians appointed another emergency official in 594 b.c.e., a war hero named Solon. To head off violence, Solon gave both rich and poor something of what they wanted, a compromise called the “shaking off of obligations.” He canceled private debts, which helped the poor but displeased the rich; he decided not to redistribute land, which pleased the wealthy but disappointed the poor. He banned selling citizens into slavery to settle debts and liberated citizens who had become slaves in this way. His elimination of debt slavery was a significant recognition of citizen rights. Solon balanced political power between rich and poor by reordering Athens’s traditional ranking of citizens into four groups. Most important, he made the topranking group depend solely on income, not birth. This change eliminated inherited aristocracy at Athens. The groupings did not affect a man’s treatment at law, only

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New Directions for the Greek City-State, 750–500 b.c.e.

his eligibility for government office. The higher a man’s ranking, the higher the post to which he could be elected, but higher also was the contribution he was expected to make to the community with his service and his money. Men at the poorest level, called laborers, were not eligible for any office. Solon did, however, confirm the laborers’ right to vote in the legislative assembly. His classification scheme was consistent with democratic principles because it allowed for upward social mobility: a man who increased his income could move up the scale of eligibility for office. The creation of a smaller council to prepare the agenda for the assembly was a crucial development in making Athenian democracy efficient. Four hundred council members were chosen annually from the adult male citizenry by lottery — the most democratic method possible — which prevented the social elite from capturing too many seats. Solon’s two reforms in the judicial system promoted democratic principles of equality. First, he directed that any male citizen could start a prosecution on behalf of any crime victim. Second, he gave people the right to appeal an archon’s judgment to the assembly. With these two measures, Solon empowered ordinary citizens in the administration of justice. Characteristically, he balanced these democratic reforms by granting broader powers to the Areopagus Council (“council that meets on the hill of the god of war Ares”). This select body, limited to ex-archons, held great power because its members judged the most important cases — accusations against archons themselves. Solon’s reforms extended power through the citizen body and created a system of law that applied more equally than before to all the community’s free men. A critic once challenged Solon, “Do you actually believe your fellow citizens’ injustice and greed can be kept in check this way? Written laws are more like spiders’ webs than anything else: they tie up the weak and the small fry who get stuck in them, but the rich and the powerful tear them to shreds.” Solon replied that communal values ensure the rule of law: “People abide by their agreements when neither side has anything to gain by breaking them. I am writing laws for the Athenians in such a way that they will clearly see it is to everyone’s advantage to obey the laws rather than to break them.” Some elite Athenians wanted oligarchy and therefore bitterly disagreed with Solon. The unrest they caused opened the door to tyranny at Athens. Peisistratus, helped by his upper-class friends and the poor whose interests he championed, made himself tyrant in 546 b.c.e. Like the Corinthian tyrants, he promoted the economic, cultural, and architectural development of Athens and bought the masses’ support. He helped poorer men, for example, by hiring them to build roads, a huge temple to Zeus, and fountains to increase the supply of drinking water. He boosted Athens’s economy and its image by minting new coins stamped with Athena’s owl (a symbol of the goddess of wisdom; see the illustration on page 115) and organizing a great annual festival honoring the god Dionysus that attracted people from near and far to see its musical and dramatic performances. Peisistratus’s eldest son, Hippias, ruled harshly and was denounced as unjust by a rival elite family. These rivals convinced the Spartans, the self-proclaimed champions of Greek freedom, to “liberate” Athens from tyranny by expelling Hippias and his family in 510 b.c.e.

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1000–500 b.c.e.

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Peisistratus’s support of ordinary people evidently had the unintended consequence of making them think that they deserved political equality. Tyranny at Athens thus opened the way to the most important step in developing Athenian democracy, the reforms of Cleisthenes. A member of the social elite, Cleisthenes found himself losing against rivals for election to office in 508 b.c.e. He turned his electoral campaign around by offering more political participation to the masses; he called his program “equality through law.” Ordinary people so strongly favored his plan that they spontaneously rallied to repel a Spartan army that Cleisthenes’ bitterest rival had convinced Sparta’s leaders to send to block his reforms. By about 500 b.c.e., Cleisthenes had engineered direct participation in Athens’s democracy by as many adult male citizens as possible. First he created constituent units for the city-state’s new political organization by grouping country villages and urban neighborhoods into units called demes. The demes chose council members annually by lottery in proportion to the size of their populations. To allow for greater participation, Solon’s Council of Four Hundred was expanded to five hundred members. Finally, Cleisthenes required candidates for public office to be spread widely throughout the demes. The creation of demes suggests that Greek democratic notions stemmed from traditions of small-community life, in which each man was entitled to his say in running local affairs and had to persuade — not force — others to agree. It took another fifty years of political struggle, however, before Athenian democracy reached its full development with the democratization of its judicial system.

New Ways of Thought and Expression in Greece, 630–500 b.c.e. The idea that persuasion, rather than force or status, should drive political decisions matched the spirit of intellectual change rippling through Greece in the late Archaic Age. In city-states all over the Greek world, artists, poets, and philosophers pursued new ways of thought and new forms of expression. Through their contacts with the Near East, the Greeks encountered traditions to learn from and alter for their own purposes. By the sixth century b.c.e., Greeks were introducing innovations of their own into art. In ceramics, painters experimented with different clays and colors to depict vivid scenes from mythology and daily life. Sculptors gave their statues balanced poses and calm, smiling faces. Building on the Near Eastern tradition of poetry expressing personal emotions, Greeks created a new poetic form. This poetry, which sprang from popular song, was performed to the accompaniment of a lyre (a kind of harp) and thus called lyric poetry. Greek lyric poems were short, rhythmic, and diverse in subject. Lyric poets wrote songs both for choruses and for individual performers. Choral poems honored gods on public occasions, celebrated famous events in a city-state’s history, praised victors in athletic contests, and enlivened weddings. Solo lyric poems generated controversy because they valued individual expression and opinion over conventional views. Solon wrote poems justifying his reforms.

[

1000–500 b.c.e.

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New Directions for the Greek City-State, 750–500 b.c.e.

Other poets criticized traditional values, such as strength in war. Sappho, a lyric poet from Lesbos born about 630 b.c.e. and famous for her poems on love, wrote, “Some would say the most beautiful thing on our dark earth is an army of cavalry, others of infantry, others of ships, but I say it’s whatever a person loves.” In this poem Sappho was expressing her longing for a woman she loved, who was now far away. Archilochus of Paros, who probably lived in the early seventh century b.c.e., became famous for poems mocking militarism, lamenting friends lost at sea, and regretting love affairs gone wrong. He became infamous for his lines about throwing away his shield in battle so that he could run away to save his life: “Oh, the hell with it; I can get another one just as good.” When he taunted a family in verse after the father had ended Archilochus’s affair with one of his daughters, the power of his ridicule reportedly caused the father and his two daughters to commit suicide. The study of philosophy (“love of wisdom”) began in the seventh and sixth centuries b.c.e. when some Greek thinkers created prose writing to express their innovative

Hoplite Shield This detail from a painting on an Archaic-Age Greek vase shows warriors carrying the large circular shields and long thrusting spears characteristic of Greek heavy infantry (hoplites). To make the warriors look more heroic, they are shown without the torso armor that they wore in battle. Shields were composites of metal, wood, and hide, with a decoration on the outer side to express the warrior’s pride. Hoplites held their heavy shields by putting their left arm through one strap in the middle of the reverse side and grasping another one at the edge. They kept their shields in place as protection when lined up inthe battle line next to their fellow soldiers, but they could also swing them around as weapons in close combat. (Detail of a Corinthian vase, c.600 B.C.E. [terracotta] / Louvre, Paris, France / Peter Willi / Bridgeman Images.)

Chapter 2

Near East Empires

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1000–500 b.c.e.

]

ideas, above all their new explanations of the human world and its relation to the gods. Some also composed poetry to explain their theories. Most of these philosophers lived in Ionia, on Anatolia’s western Aegean Sea Lesbos coast, where they came in contact with Near Eastern knowledge in astronomy, mathematics, and myth. GREECE Chios Because there were no formal schools, philosophers IONIA Colophon Athens Samos communicated their ideas by teaching privately and giving public lectures. People who studied with Miletus Paros these philosophers or heard their presentations helped spread the new ideas. 0 50 100 miles Rhodes Working from Babylonian discoveries about the 0 50 100 kilometers regular movements of the stars and planets, Ionian Ionia and the Aegean, philosophers such as Thales (c. 625–545 b.c.e.) and 750–500 b.c.e. Anaximander (c. 610–540 b.c.e.), both of Miletus, reached the revolutionary conclusion that unchanging laws of nature (rather than gods’ wishes) governed the universe. Pythagoras, who emigrated from the island of Samos to the Greek city-state Croton in southern Italy about 530 b.c.e., taught that numerical relationships explained the world. He began the Greek study of high-level mathematics and the numerical aspects of musical harmony. Ionian philosophers insisted that natural phenomena were neither random nor arbitrary. They applied the word cosmos — meaning “an orderly arrangement that is beautiful” — to the universe. The cosmos included not only the motions of heavenly bodies but also the weather, the growth of plants and animals, and human health. Because the universe was ordered, it was knowable; because it was knowable, thought and research could explain it. Philosophers therefore looked for the first or universal cause of all things, a quest that scientists still pursue. These first philosophers believed they needed to give reasons for their conclusions and to persuade others by arguments based on evidence. That is, they believed in logic. This new way of thought, called rationalism, became the foundation for the study of science and philosophy. This rule-based view of the causes of events and physical phenomena contrasted sharply with the traditional mythological view. Many people had difficulty accepting such a startling change in their understanding of the world, and the older tradition of explaining events as the work of deities lived on alongside the new approach. The early Greek philosophers deeply influenced later times by being the first toclearly separate scientific thinking from myth and religion. Their idea that people must give reasons to justify their beliefs, rather than simply make assertions that others must accept without evidence, was their most important achievement. This insistence on rationalism, coupled with the belief that the world could be understood as something other than the plaything of the gods, gave people hope that they could improve their lives through their own efforts. Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570– c.478 b.c.e.) concluded, “The gods have not revealed all things from the beginning to mortals, but, by seeking, human beings find out, in time, what is better.” This

[

1000–500 b.c.e.

]

Conclusion

saying expressed the value Archaic Age philosophers gave to intellectual freedom, corresponding to the value that citizens gave to political freedom in the city-state.

REVIEW QUESTION What were the main differences among the various forms of government in the Greek city-states?

Conclusion After its Dark Age, the Near East revived its traditional pattern of social and political organization: empire under a strong central authority. The Neo-Assyrians, the NeoBabylonians, and the Persians succeeded one another as imperial powers. The moral dualism of Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, influenced later religions. The Israelites’ development of monotheism based on scripture changed the course of religious history in Western civilization. Greece’s recovery from its Dark Age produced a new form of political and social organization: the polis, a city-state based on citizenship and shared governance. The growing population of the Archaic Age developed a communal sense of identity,

ATLANTIC OCEAN

CELTS Marseille (Massila)

Eb ro R

LY R

Corsica

Sicily

Taras

GREECE Corinth

Syracuse

A N ATO L I A PERSIAN EMPIRE

Troy Sardis Miletus

Lefkandi Athens

Sparta

Knossos Rhodes Me dite Cyprus r r a n Crete Byblos ean S ea Tyre Cyrene

Naucratis

500 miles

a te

s R.

Babylon

500 kilometers

Eu ph r

250 250

Al Mina

Phoenician settlements

Ni l

EG Y P T Greek settlements

. is R gr

N ORTH A F RICA

Black Sea

BALK AN MT S

Naples Pithecusae

Carthage

SARMATIANS

Rome

Hippo

E S

IA N

ETRUSCANS

Sardinia

Cádiz Strait of Gibraltar

SCYTHIANS

IBERO-CELTS

P S

Dn ie p er

PH OE NI CIA

re Loi

Danub eR .

MAPPING THE WEST Mediterranean Civilizations, c. 500 b.c.e.

At the end of the sixth century B.C.E., the Persian Empire was by far the most powerful civilization touching the Mediterranean. Its riches and its unity gave it resources that no Phoenician or Greek city could match. The Phoenicians dominated economically in the western Mediterranean, while the Greek city-states in Sicily and southern Italy rivaled the power of those in the heartland. In Italy, the Etruscans were the most powerful civilization; the Romans were still a small community struggling to replace monarchy with a republic.

Chapter 2

Near East Empires

[

1000–500 b.c.e.

]

personal freedom, and justice administered by citizens. The degree of power sharingvaried in the Greek city-states. Some, like Sparta, were oligarchies; in others, like Corinth, rule was by tyranny. Over time, Athens developed the most extensive democracy, in which political power extended to all male citizens. Greeks in the Archaic Age also developed new methods of artistic expression and new ways of thought. Building on Near Eastern traditions, Greek poets created lyric poetry to express personal emotion. Greek philosophers argued that laws of nature controlled the universe and that humans could discover these laws through reason and research, thereby establishing rationalism as the conceptual basis for science and philosophy.

Chapter 2 Review Key Terms and People Be sure that you can identify the term or person and explain its historical significance. Cyrus (p.44)

Homer (p.52)

Solon (p.68)

moral dualism (p.46)

polis (p.54)

demes (p.70)

Torah (p.47)

cult (p.59)

Sappho (p.71)

Diaspora (p.49)

hoplite (p.60)

rationalism (p.72)

aretê (p.52)

helot (p.65)

Review Questions 1. In what ways was religion important in the Near East from c. 1000 B.C.E. to c. 500 B.C.E.? 2. What factors proved most important in the Greek recovery from the troubles of the Dark Age? 3. How did the physical, social, and intellectual conditions of life in the Archaic Age promote the emergence of the Greek city-state? 4. What were the main differences among the various forms of government in the Greek city-states?

Making Connections 1. What characteristics made the Greek city-state differ in political and social organization from the Near Eastern city-state? 2. How were the ideas of the Ionian philosophers different from mythic traditions? 3. To what extent were the most important changes in Western civilization in this period intentional or unintentional?

Suggested References Scholars today emphasize the importance of contact and intercultural influence among different peoples around the Mediterranean in helping us understand the history of the region as it recovered from the economic troubles and depopulation of the Dark Age.

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1000–500 b.c.e.

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Chapter 2 Review

Important Events 1000–750 B.C.E.

Greece experiences Dark Age

900 B.C.E.

Neo-Assyrian Empire emerges

800 B.C.E.

Greeks learn to write with an alphabet

776 B.C.E.

Olympic Games are founded in Greece

750 B.C.E.

Greeks begin to create the polis

700 B.C.E.

Spartans conquer Messenia, enslave its inhabitants as helots

700–500 B.C.E.

Ionian philosophers develop rationalism

657 B.C.E.

Cypselus becomes tyrant in Corinth

630 B.C.E.

The lyric poet Sappho is born

597 and 586 B.C.E.

Israelites are exiled to Babylon

594 B.C.E.

Solon’s reforms promote early democracy in Athens

546–510 B.C.E.

Peisistratus’s family rules Athens as tyrants

539 B.C.E.

Persian king Cyrus captures Babylon, permits Israelites to return to Canaan

508–500 B.C.E.

Cleisthenes’s reforms extend democracy in Athens

Consider three events: Ionian philosophers develop rationalism (700–500 B.C.E.), the lyric poet Sappho is born (630 B.C.E.), and Solon’s reforms promote early democracy in Athens (594 B.C.E.). How did the development of the Greek city-state (polis) encourage new modes of thinking and expression in science, philosophy, and literature?

Ancient Olympic Games: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Olympics/ *Barnes, Jonathan. Early Greek Philosophy. Rev. ed. 2002. *Boyce, Mary, trans. Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism. 1990. Bright, John. A History of Israel. 4th ed. 2000. Brosius, Maria. The Persians. New ed. 2006. Bryce, Trevor. Life and Society in the Hittite World. 2004. *Dalley, Stephanie, trans. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Rev. ed. 2009. Finkelstein, Israel, and Amihai Mazar. The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel. Ed. Brian B. Schmidt. 2007. Hurwitt, Jeffrey M. The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100–480 B.C. 1985. Kugel, James. The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible. 2003. Lewis, John. Solon the Thinker: Political Thought in Archaic Athens. 2008. *Malandra, William W. An Introduction to Ancient Iranian Religion: Readings from the Avesta and the Achaemenid Inscriptions. 1983. Martin, Thomas R. Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times. 2nd ed. 2013. Osborne, Robin. Greece in the Making, 1200–479 B.C. 2nd ed. 2009. Shapiro, H. A. The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece. 2007. *Primary source.

The Greek Golden Age

c. 500–c. 400 b.c.e.

n 507 b.c.e., Athens feared an attack from Sparta (its more powerful rival) and therefore sent ambassadors to the Persian king Darius I (r. 522–486 b.c.e.) to ask for help. Athens and Sparta so mistrusted each other that the Athenians chose to appeal to a foreign superpower for help against fellow Greeks. Darius’s representative asked, “But who in the world are these people and where do they live that they are begging for an alliance with the Persians?” Even so, the Persian king offered the Athenians help on his standard terms: that they acknowledge his superiority. Darius was eager to make more Greek city-states his subjects because their trade and growing wealth made them desirable prizes. The Athenian democratic assembly rejected his offer. This incident reveals why war dominated Greece’s history throughout the fifth Greek against Persian in century b.c.e., first with Greeks fighting Hand-to-Hand Combat (detail) Persians and then with Greeks fighting This red-figure painting appears on the Greeks. Conflicting interests and misuninterior of a Greek wine cup. Painted derstandings between Persia and Greece about 480 B.C.E. (during the Persian at the start of the century ignited a great Wars), it shows a Greek hoplite (armored infantryman) striking a Persian warrior conflict: the Persian Wars (499–479 b.c.e.), inhand-to-hand combat with swords. which culminated with Persia invading TheGreek has lost his principal weapon, mainland Greece. Some Greek states tema spear, and the Persian can no longer porarily laid aside their competition and shoot his, the bow and arrow. The Greek united to defeat the Persians, surprising artist has designed the painting to express multiple messages: the Perthe world. In victory, however, they lost sian’s colorful outfit with sleeves and their unity and fought one another. Despite pants stresses the “otherness” of the nearly constant warfare, fifth-century b.c.e. enemy in Greek eyes, and the soldiers’ Greeks (especially in Athens) created their serene expressions at such a desperate most famous innovations in architecmoment dignify the horror of killing in ture, art, and theater. This Golden Age, war. Greek warriors often had heroic symbols painted on their shields, such as as historians later named it, is the first the winged horse Pegasus, an allusion partofthe period called the Classical Age tothe brave exploits of Bellerophon. of Greece, which lasted from around (TheTriptolemos Painter / © National Museums 500 b.c.e. to the death of Alexander the ofScotland / Bridgeman Images.) Great in 323 b.c.e. 77

Chapter 3

The Greek Golden Age

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c. 500–c. 400 b.c.e.

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New ideas in education and philosophy that were deeply controversial in the fifth century b.c.e. have had a lasting influence on Western civilization. The controversies arose because many people saw the changes as attacks on ancient traditions, especially religion; they feared the gods would punish their communities for abandoning ancestral beliefs. Political change also characterized the Athenian Golden Age. First, Athenian citizens made their city-state government more democratic than ever. Second, Athens grew internationally powerful by using its navy to establish rule over other Greeks in a system dubbed “empire” by modern scholars. This naval power also promoted seaborne trade, and profits from rule and trade brought Athens enormous prosperity. Athens’s citizens voted to use their revenues to finance new public buildings, art, and competitive theater festivals, and to pay for poorer men to serve as officials and jurors in an expanded democratic government. The Golden Age ended when Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 b.c.e.) and the Athenians then fought a brief but bloody civil war CHAPTER FOCUS Did war bring more benefit (404–403 b.c.e.). The Peloponnesian War or more harm — politically, socially, and intellecand its aftermath bankrupted and divided tually — to Golden Age Athens? Athens.

Wars between Persia and Greece, 499–479 b.c.e. The Athenian ambassadors in 507 b.c.e. agreed to the Persian requirement for an alliance: presenting tokens of earth and water to acknowledge submission to the Persian king. However, the Athenian assembly failed to inform King Darius that it had rejected his terms; he continued to believe that Athens had agreed to obey him in return for support. This misunderstanding planted the seed for two Persian attacks on Greece. Since the Persian Empire far outweighed the Greek city-states in soldiers and money, the conflict pitted the equivalent of a huge bear against a pack of undersized dogs.

From the Ionian Revolt to the Battle of Marathon, 499–490 b.c.e. In 499 b.c.e., the Greek city-states in Ionia rebelled against their Persian-installed tyrants. The Athenians sent troops because they saw the Ionians as close kin. By 494b.c.e., a Persian counterattack had crushed the revolt (Map 3.1). Darius exploded in anger when he learned that the Athenians had helped the Ionian rebels. He even ordered a slave to repeat three times at every meal, “Lord, remember the Athenians.” In 490 b.c.e., Darius sent a force to punish Athens and install a puppet tyrant. The Athenians confronted the invaders at the town of Marathon, on their coast. The Athenian soldiers were stunned by the Persians’ strange garb — colorful pants instead of the short tunics and bare legs that Greeks regarded as proper dress (see the chapteropening photo) — but the Greek commanders had their infantry charge the enemy at a dead run. The soldiers in their heavy armor clanked across the plain through a

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Wars between Persia and Greece, 499–479 b.c.e.

TH R AC E MACEDONIA

Hellespont

Propontis

Thasos Canal dug by Persians

Lemnos Corcyra

Lesbos

THESSALY

Aegean Sea

Thermopylae 480 B.C.E.

Boeotia

ANATOLIA Lydia

Eretria

Attica

Corinth

Olympia

Salamis 480 B.C.E.

Ion

Chios

Plataea Thebes Marathon 479 B.C.E. 490 B.C.E.

Samos

Athens

Ephesus Mt. Mycale 479 B.C.E. Miletus 494 B.C.E.

Troizen

PELOPONNESE

Sardis 498 B.C.E.

CYCLADES IS.

Caria

Sparta

Laconia

Greek states allied against Persia Persian Empire States capitulating to Persia or remaining neutral

Cythera

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Following the example of King Cyrus (r. 557–530 B.C.E.), who founded the Persian Empire, his successors on the throne expanded the empire eastward and westward. King Darius I invaded Thrace more than fifteen years before the conflict against the Greeks that we call the Persian Wars. The Persians’ unexpected defeat in Greece put an end to their attempt to extend their power into Europe.

hail of Persian arrows. In the hand-to-hand combat, the Greek hoplites used their long spears to overwhelm the Persian infantry. The Athenian infantry then hurried the twenty-six miles to Athens to guard the city against the Persian navy. (Today’s marathon races commemorate the legend of a runner speeding ahead to announce the victory, and then dropping dead.) Their

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A Signet of Persia’s King Darius Like other kings in the ancient Mediterranean region, the Persian king hunted lions to show his courage and his ability to overcome nature’s threats. In this scene from a signet, used to impress the royal seal into wet clay to verify documents, Darius I shoots arrows from a chariot driven for him by a charioteer. He is depicted wearing his crown so that his status as ruler would be obvious. The symbol of Ahura Mazda, the chief god of Persian religion, hovers in the sky to indicate that the king enjoys divine favor. (The British Museum, London, UK / akg-images.)

unexpected success strengthened the Athenians’ sense of community. When a rich strike was made in Athens’s publicly owned silver mines in 483 b.c.e., a far-sighted leader named Themistocles (c. 524–c. 460 b.c.e.) convinced the assembly to spend the money on doubling the size of the navy instead of on distributing it to the citizens.

The Great Persian Invasion, 480–479 b.c.e. Themistocles’ foresight proved valuable when Darius’s son Xerxes I (r. 486–465 b.c.e.) assembled an immense force to avenge his father’s defeat by invading Greece and adding the mainland city-states to the many lands paying him taxes. So huge was Xerxes’ army, the Greeks claimed, that when the invasion began in 480 b.c.e. it took seven days and seven nights for it to cross the strip of sea between Asia and Europe. Thirty-one Greek city-states (out of hundreds) allied to defend their political freedom. Their coalition represented only a small sample of the Greek world. The allies desperately wanted the major Greek city-states in Italy and Sicily to join the coalition because they were rich naval powers, but they refused. Syracuse, for example, the most powerful Greek state at the time, controlled a regional empire built on agriculture in Sicily’s plains and seaborne commerce through its harbors serving the Mediter-

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ranean’s western trading routes. The tyrant ruling Syracuse rejected the allies’ appeal for help because he was fighting his own war against Carthage, a Phoenician city in North Africa, over control of the profitable trade routes. The Greek allies chose Sparta as their leader because of its military excellence. The Spartans demonstrated their courage in 480 b.c.e. when three hundred of their infantry (and a few thousand other fighters) blocked Xerxes’ army for several days at the pass called Thermopylae in central Greece. Told the Persian archers were so numerous that their arrows darkened the sun, one Spartan reportedly remarked, “That’s good news; we’ll get to fight in the shade.” They did — to the death. Their tomb’s memorial proclaimed, “Go tell the Spartans that we lie buried here obedient to their orders.” When the Persians marched south, the Athenians, knowing they could not defend the city, evacuated their residents to the Peloponnese region rather than surrender. The Persians then burned Athens. Themistocles and his political rival Aristides (c. 530–c. 468 b.c.e.) cooperated to convince the other city-states’ generals to fight a naval battle. Themistocles tricked the Persian king into attacking the Greek fleet in the narrow channel between the island of Salamis and the west coast of Athens, where Xerxes could not send all his fleet (twice the size of the Greeks’) into battle simultaneously. The heavier Greek warships won the battle by ramming the flimsier Persian craft. The battle of Salamis induced Xerxes to return home. In 479b.c.e., the Spartans commanded victories over the Persian land forces. The Greeks won their battles against the Persians because their generals had better strategic foresight, their soldiers had stronger weapons, and their warships were more effective. Above all, the Greeks won the war because enough of them took the innovative step of uniting to fight together to keep their independence. Because the Greek forces included both the social elites and the poorer men who rowed the warships, their REVIEW QUESTION How did the Greeks oversuccess showed that rich and poor Greeks come the dangers of the Persian invasions? alike treasured political freedom.

Athenian Confidence in the Golden Age, 478–431 b.c.e. Victory fractured the Greek alliance because the allies resented the Spartans’ harshness and the Athenians now competed with them to lead Greece. This competition created the Athenian Empire. The growth of Athens’s power inspired its citizens to broaden their democracy and spend vast amounts to fund officials and jurors, public buildings, art, and religious festivals.

The Establishment of the Athenian Empire Sparta and Athens built up separate alliances to strengthen their own positions, believing that their security depended on winning a competition for power. Sparta led strong infantry forces from the Peloponnese region, and its ally Corinth had a sizable navy. The Spartan alliance had an assembly to decide policy, but Sparta dominated.

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Athens allied with city-states in northern Greece, on the islands of the Aegean Sea, and along the Ionian coast — the places most threatened by Persia. This alliance, the Delian League, was built on naval power. It began as a democratic alliance, but Athens soon controlled it because the allies allowed the Athenians to command andto set the financing arrangements for the league’s fleet. At its height, the league included some three hundred city-states. Each paid dues according to its size; Athens determined how the dues were spent. Larger city-states paid their dues by sending triremes — warships propelled by 170 rowers on three levels and equipped with a battering ram at the bow (Figure 3.1) — complete with trained crews and their pay. Smaller states could share in building one ship or contribute money instead of ships and crews.

FIGURE 3.1 Triremes, the Foremost Classical Greek Warships

Innovations in military technology and training propelled a naval arms race in the fifth century B.C.E. when Greek shipbuilders designed larger and faster ramming ships powered by 170 rowers seated in three rows, each above the other. (See the line illustration of the rowers from behind.) Called triremes, these ships were expensive to build and required extensive crew training. Only wealthy and populous city-states such as Athens could afford to build and man large fleets of triremes. The relief sculpture found on the Athenian acropolis and dating from about 400 B.C.E. gives a glimpse of what a trireme looked like from the side when being rowed into battle. (Sails were used for power only when the ship was not in combat.) (Acropolis Museum, Athens / Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.)

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Over time, more and more Delian League members voluntarily paid cash because it was easier. Athens then used this money to construct triremes and pay men to row them; oarsmen who brought a slave to row alongside them earned double pay. Drawn primarily from the poorest citizens, rowers gained both income and political influence in Athenian democracy because the navy became the city-state’s main force. These benefits made poor citizens eager to expand Athens’s power over other Greeks. The increase in Athenian naval power thus promoted the development of a wider democracy at home, but it undermined the democracy of the Delian League. The Athenian assembly could use the league fleet to force disobedient allies to pay cash dues. Athens’s dominance of the Delian League has led historians to use the label Athenian Empire. By about 460 b.c.e., the Delian League’s fleet had expelled all Persian garrisons from northern Greece and driven the enemy fleet from the Aegean Sea. This sweep eliminated the Persian threat for the next fifty years. Military success made Athens prosperous by bringing in spoils and cash dues from the Delian League and making seaborne trade safe. The prosperity benefited rich and poor alike — the poor rowers earned good pay, while elite commanders enhanced their chances for election to high office by spending their spoils from war on public festivals and buildings. In this way, the democracy of Golden Age Athens supported what modern scholars often label imperialism.

Radical Democracy and Pericles’ Leadership, 461–431 b.c.e. In the late 460s b.c.e., the trireme rowers decided that in their own interest they should make Athens’s court system as democratic as its legislative assembly, in which all free adult male citizens could already participate. They wanted to be free of unfair verdicts rendered by the elite in legal cases. Hoping to win popular support for election to high office, members of the elite pushed this judicial reform, which was accomplished in 461 b.c.e. Pericles (c. 495–429 b.c.e.), a member of one of Athens’s most distinguished families, became Golden Age Athens’s dominant politician by spearheading reforms to democratize its judicial system and provide pay for many public offices. Historians have labeled the changes to Athenian democracy in the 460s and 450sb.c.e. radical (“from the roots”) because the new system gave direct political and judicial power to all adult male citizens (the “roots” of democracy, in the Greek view). The government consisted of the assembly, the Council of Five Hundred chosen annually by lottery, the Council of the Areopagus of ex-archons serving for life, an executive board of ten “generals” elected annually, nine archons chosen by lottery, hundreds of other annual minor officials (most chosen by lottery), and the court system. Athens’s radical democracy balanced two competing goals: (1) participation by as many ordinary male citizens as possible in direct (not representative) democracy with term limits on service in office and (2) selective leadership by elite citizens. To achieve the second goal, the highest-level officials were elected and received no pay. A successful general could be reelected indefinitely.

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The changes in the judicial system did the most to create radical democracy. Previously, archons (high officials in the city-state) and the ex-archons serving inthe Council of the Areopagus, who tended to be members of the elite, had decided most legal cases. As with Cleisthenes (see Chapter 2), reform took place when an elite man proposed it to support ordinary men’s political rights and simultaneously win their votes against his rivals: in 461 b.c.e., Ephialtes won popular support by getting the assembly to establish a new system that took away jurisdiction from the archons and gave it to courts manned by citizen jurors. To make it more democratic and prevent bribery, jurors were selected by lottery from male citizens over thirty years old. They received pay to serve on juries numbering from several hundred to several thousand members. No judges or lawyers existed, and jurors voted by secret ballot after hearing speeches from the persons involved. As in the assembly, a majority vote decided matters; no appeals of verdicts were allowed. In Athenian radical democracy the majority could overrule the legal protectionsfor individuals. In ostracism, all male citizens could cast a ballot on which they scratched the name of one man they thought should be exiled for ten years. If at least six thousand ballots were cast, the man whose name appeared on the greatest number was expelled from Athens. He suffered no other penalty; his family and property remained undisturbed. Usually a man was ostracized because a majority feared he would overthrow the democracy to rule as a tyrant. There was no guarantee of voters’ motives in an ostracism, as a story about Aristides illustrates. He was nicknamed “the Just” because he had proved himself so fair-minded in setting the original level of dues for Delian League members. On the day of an ostracism, an illiterate citizen handed him a pottery fragment and asked him to scratch a name on it: “Certainly,” said Aristides. “What name shall I write?” “Aristides,” replied the man. “All right,” said Aristides as he inscribed his own name, “but why do you want to ostracize Aristides? What has he done to you?” “Oh, nothing. I don’t even know him,” the man muttered. “I just can’t stand hearing everybody refer to him as ‘the Just.’ ” True or not, this tale demonstrates that most Athenians believed the right way to support democracy was to trust a majority vote. Some socially elite citizens bitterly criticized Athens’s democracy for giving political power to the poor. These critics insisted that oligarchy — the rule of the few — was morally superior to radical democracy because they believed that the poor lacked the education and moral values needed for leadership and would use their majority rule to strip the rich of their wealth by making them provide benefits to poorer citizens. Pericles convinced the assembly to pass reforms to strengthen citizens’ equality, making him the most influential leader of his era. He introduced pay for the offices filled by lottery and for jury ser vice so that the poor could serve as well as the

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wealthy. In 451 b.c.e., Pericles sponsored a law restricting citizenship to those whose mother and father were both Athenian by birth. Previously, wealthy men had often married foreign women from elite families. This change both increased the status of Athenian women, rich or poor, as potential mothers of citizens and made Athenian citizenship more valuable by reducing the number of people eligible for its legal and financial benefits. Thousands had their citizenship revoked. Pericles also convinced the assembly to launch naval campaigns when war with Sparta broke out in the 450s b.c.e. The assembly was so eager to compete for power and plunder against other Greeks and against Persians in the eastern Mediterranean that it voted for up to three major expeditions at once. These efforts slowed in the late 450s b.c.e. after a large naval force sent to aid an Egyptian rebellion against Persian rule suffered a horrendous defeat, losing tens of thousands of oarsmen. In 446– 445 b.c.e., Pericles arranged a peace treaty with Sparta for thirty years, to preserve Athenian control of the Delian League.

The Urban Landscape in Athens Golden Age Athens prospered from Delian League dues, war spoils, and profits and taxes from seaborne trade. Its artisans produced goods traded far and wide; the Etruscans in central Italy, for example, imported countless painted vases. All these activities boosted Athens to its greatest prosperity. Athenians spent their public resources on pay for citizens participating in its democracy and on public buildings, art, and religious festivals. In private life, rich urban dwellers splurged on luxury goods influenced by Persian designs, but most houses remained modest and plain. Archaeology at the city of Olynthus in northeastern Greece has revealed typical homes grouping bedrooms, storerooms, and dining rooms around open-air courtyards. Poor city residents rented small apartments. Toilets consisted of pots indoors and a pit outside the front door. The city paid collectors to dump the waste in the countryside. Generals won votes by spending their spoils on public running tracks, shade trees, and buildings. The super-rich commander Cimon (c. 510–c. 450 b.c.e.), for example, paid for the Painted Stoa to be built on the edge of Athens’s agora, the central market square. There, shoppers could admire the building’s paintings of Cimon’s family’s military achievements. This sort of contribution was voluntary, but the laws required wealthy citizens to pay for festivals and warship equipment. This financial obligation on the rich was essential because Athens, as usual in ancient Greece, had no regular property or income taxes. On Athens’s acropolis (the rocky hill at the city’s center, Map 3.2), Pericles had thetwo most famous buildings of Golden Age Athens erected during the 440s and 430s b.c.e.: a mammoth gateway and an enormous marble temple of Athena called the Parthenon (“virgin goddess’s house”). These two buildings cost more than the equivalent of a billion dollars, a phenomenal sum for a Greek city-state. Pericles’ political

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The urban center of Athens, with the agora and acropolis at its heart, measured about one square mile; it was surrounded by a stone wall with a circuit of some four miles. Gates guarded by towers and various smaller entries allowed traffic in and out of the city. Much of the Athenian population lived in the many demes (villages) of the surrounding countryside. Most of the city’s water supply came from wells and springs inside the walls, but, unlike some Greek cities, Athens also had water piped in from outside. The Long Walls provided a protected corridor connecting the city to its harbor at Piraeus, where the Athenian navy was anchored and grain was imported to feed the people.

rivals slammed him for spending too much public money on the project and diverting Delian League funds to beautify Athens; recent research suggests this accusation was false and that the buildings were financed by Athens’s own revenues. The Parthenon is the foremost symbol of Athens’s Golden Age. It honored Athena, the city’s chief deity. Inside the temple, a gold-and-ivory statue nearly forty feet high depicted the goddess in armor, holding a six-foot-tall statue of Nike, the goddess of victory. Like all other Greek temples, the Parthenon was a divinity’s residence, not a hall for worshippers. Its design was standard: a rectangular box on a raised platform lined with columns, a plan probably taken from Egypt. The Parthenon’s soaring columns fenced in a porch surrounding the interior chamber. They were carved in the simple style called Doric, in contrast to the more elaborate Ionic and Corinthian styles (Figure 3.2). The Parthenon’s massive size and innovative style proclaimed the self-confidence of Golden Age Athens and its competitive drive to build a monument more spectacular than any other in Greece. Constructed from twenty thousand tons of local

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FIGURE 3.2 Styles of Greek Capitals

The Greeks decorated the capitals, or tops, of columns in these three styles to fit the different architectural “canons” (their word for precise mathematical systems of proportions) that they devised for designing buildings. These styles were much imitated in later times, as on many U.S. state capitols and the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C.

marble, the temple stretched 230 feet long and 100 feet wide. Its complex architecture demonstrated the Athenian ambition to use human skill to improve nature: because perfectly rectilinear architecture appears curved to the human eye, subtle curves and inclines were built into the Parthenon to produce an illusion of completely straight lines and emphasize its massiveness. The Parthenon’s many sculptures communicated confident messages: the gods ensure triumph over the forces of chaos, and Athenians enjoy the gods’ goodwill more than anyone else. The sculptures in each pediment (the triangular space atop the columns at either end of the temple) portrayed Athena as the city-state’s benefactor. The metopes (panels sculpted in relief above the outer columns around all four sides) portrayed victories over hostile centaurs (creatures with the body of a horse but torso and head of a man) and other enemies of civilization. Most strikingly of all, a frieze (a continuous band of figures carved in relief) ran around the top of the walls inside the porch and was painted in bright colors to make it more visible. The Parthenon’s frieze was special because usually only Ionic-style buildings had one. The frieze showed Athenian men, women, and children parading before the gods, the procession shown in motion like the pictures in a graphic novel today. No other Greeks had ever adorned a temple with representations of themselves. The Parthenon staked a claim of unique closeness between the city-state and the gods, reflecting the Athenians’ confidence after helping turn back the Persians, achieving leadership of a powerful naval alliance, and accumulating great wealth. Their success, the Athenians believed, proved that the gods were on their side, and their fabulous buildings displayed their gratitude. Like the unique Parthenon frieze, the innovations that Golden Age artists made in representing the human body shattered tradition. By the time of the Persian Wars, Greek sculptors had begun replacing the stiffly balanced style of Archaic Age statues

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The Acropolis of Athens Most Greek city-states, including Athens, sprang up around a prominent rocky hill, called an acropolis (“height of the city”). The summit of the acropolis usually housed sanctuaries for the city’s protective deities and could serve as a fortress for the population during an enemy attack. Athens’s acropolis boasted several elaborately decorated marble temples honoring the goddessAthena; the largest one was the Parthenon, seen here from its west (back) side. Recent research suggests that the ruins of a temple burned by the Persians when they captured Athens in 480 B.C.E. remained in place right next to the Parthenon. The Athenians left its charred remains to remind themselves of the sacrifices they had made in defending their freedom. (The walls in the lower foreground are from a theater built in Roman times.) (akg-images.)

with statues in motion in new poses. This style of movement in stone expressed an energetic balancing of competing forces, echoing radical democracy’s principles. Sculptors began carving anatomically realistic but perfect-looking bodies, suggesting that humans could be confident about achieving beauty and perfection. Female statues now displayed the shape of the curves underneath clothing, while male

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ones showed athletic muscles. The faces showed a more relaxed and self-confident look in place of the rigid smiles of Archaic Age statues. Freestanding Golden Age statues, whether paid for with private or government funds, were erected to be seen by the public. Privately commissioned statues of gods were placed in sanctuaries as symbols of devotion. Wealthy families paid for statues of their deceased relatives, especially ifthey had died young in war, to be placed REVIEW QUESTION What factors produced above their graves as memorials of their political change in fifth-century B.C.E. Athens? excellence and signs of the family’s social status.

Tradition and Innovation in Athens’s Golden Age Golden Age Athens’s prosperity and international contacts created unprecedented innovations in architecture, art, drama, education, and philosophy, but the drive to innovate conflicted with traditional ways. In keeping with tradition, women were expected to limit their public role to participation in religious ceremonies. The new ideas of philosophers and teachers called Sophists and the Athenian philosopher Socrates’ views on personal morality and responsibility caused many people to fear that the gods would become angry at the community. The development of publicly funded drama festivals reflected the clash between innovation and tradition; their tragic and comic plays examined problems in city-state life.

Religious Tradition in a Period of Change Greeks maintained religious tradition as protection against life’s dangers. They participated in the city-state’s sacrifices and festivals, and they also worshipped privately. Each public and private cult had its own rituals, from large-animal sacrifices to offerings of fruits, vegetables, and small cakes. State-funded sacrifices of large animals gathered the community to reaffirm its ties to the divine world and to feast on the roasted meat of the sacrificed beast. For poor people, the free food provided at religious festivals might be the only meat they ever tasted. The biggest festivals featured parades and contests in music, dancing, poetry, and athletics. Laborers’ contracts specified how many days off they received to attend such ceremonies. Some festivals were for women only, such as the three-day festival for married women in honor of Demeter, goddess of agriculture and fertility. Families marked significant events such as birth, marriage, and death with prayers, rituals, and sacrifices. They honored their ancestors with offerings made at their tombs, consulted seers about the meanings of dreams and omens, and paid magicians for spells to improve their love lives or curses to harm their enemies. Hero cults included rituals performed at the tomb of an extraordinarily famous man or woman. Heroes’ remains were thought to retain special power to provide oracles, heal

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sickness, and protect the army. The strongman Herakles (or Hercules, as the Romans spelled his name) had cults all over the Greek world because his superhuman reputation gave him international appeal. Mystery cults initiated members into “secret knowledge” about the divine and human worlds. Initiates believed that they gained divine protection from the cult’s god or gods. The Athenian mystery cult of Demeter and her daughter Persephone offered hope for protection on earth and in the afterlife. The cult’s central rite was the Mysteries, a series of initiation ceremonies. So important were these Mysteries that an international truce — as with the Olympic Games — allowed people to travel from distant places to attend them. The Mysteries were open to any free Greek-speaking individuals — women and men, adults and children — if they were clear of ritual pollution (for example, if they had not committed sacrilege, been convicted of murder, or had recent contact with a corpse or blood from a birth). Some slaves who worked in the sanctuary were also eligible to participate. The main stage of initiation took more than a week. A sixth-century b.c.e. poem explained the initiation’s benefits: “Richly blessed is the mortal who has seen these rites; but whoever is not an initiate and has no share in them, that one never has an equal portion after death, down in the gloomy darkness.”

Women, Slaves, and Metics Women, slaves, and metics (foreigners granted permanent residence status in return for taxes and military service) made up the majority of Athens’s population, but they lacked political rights. Citizen women enjoyed legal privileges and social status, earning respect through their family roles and religious activities. Upper-class women managed their households, visited female friends, and participated in religious cults. Poor women worked as small-scale merchants, crafts producers, and agricultural laborers. Slaves and metics performed a variety of jobs in agriculture and commerce. Bearing children in marriage earned women public and family status. Men were expected to respect and support their wives. Childbirth was dangerous under the medical conditions of the time. In Medea, a play of 431 b.c.e. by Euripides (c. 480– 406 b.c.e.), the heroine shouts in anger at her husband, who has selfishly betrayed her: “People say that we women lead a safe life at home, while men have to go to war. What fools they are! I would much rather fight in battle three times than give birth to a child even once.” Wives were partners with their husbands in owning and managing the household’s property to help the family thrive. Rich women acquired property, including land — the most valued possession in Greek society because it could be farmed or rented out for income — through inheritance and dowry. A husband often had to put up valuable land of his own as collateral to guarantee repayment to his wife of the amount of her dowry if he squandered it. Like fathers, mothers were expected to hand down property to their children to keep it in the family through male heirs, since only sons could maintain their father’s

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Vase Painting of Women Fetching Water (detail) This vase painting shows women filling water jugs at a public fountain to take back to their homes. Both freeborn and slave women fetched water for their households, as few Greek homes had running water. Cities built attractive fountain houses such as this one, which dispensed fresh water from springs or piped it in through small aqueducts (compare the large Roman aqueduct on page 157). Women often gathered at fountains for conversation with people from outside their household. (Black-figure water jar [hydria] with women at the fountain, Attica, Athens, Archaic Period, c. 520 B.C. [ceramic], Priam Painter [fl. c. 530–510 B.C.] / Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA / William Francis Warden Fund / Bridgeman Images.)

family line; married daughters became members of their husband’s family. The goal of keeping property in the possession of male heirs shows up most clearly in Athenian law about heiresses (daughters whose fathers died without any sons, which happened in about one of every five families): the closest male relative of the heiress’s father — her official guardian after her father’s death — was required to marry her. The goal was to produce a son to inherit the father’s property. This rule applied regardless of whether either party was already married (unless the heiress had sons); the heiress and the male relative were both supposed to divorce their present spouses and marry each other. In real life, however, people often used legal technicalities to get around this requirement so that they could remain with their chosen partners. Tradition restricted women’s freedom of movement to protect them, men said, from seducers and rapists. Men wanted to ensure that their family property went only to their biological children. Well-off city women were expected to avoid contact with male strangers. Modern research has discredited the idea that Greek homes had a defined “women’s quarter” to which women were confined. Rather, women were granted privacy in certain rooms. In their homes women would spin wool for clothing, converse with visiting friends, direct their children, supervise the slaves, and present opinions on everything, including politics, to their male relatives. Poor women had to leave the house, usually a crowded rental apartment, to sell bread, vegetables, simple clothing, or trinkets they had made.

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An elite woman left home for religious festivals, funerals, childbirths at the houses of relatives and friends, and shopping. Often her husband escorted her, but sometimes she took only a slave, setting her own itinerary. Most upper-class women probably viewed their limited contact with men as a badge of superior social status. For example, a pale complexion, from staying inside much of the time, was much admired as a sign of an enviable life of leisure and wealth. Women who bore legitimate children gained increased respect and freedom, as an Athenian man explained in his speech defending himself for having killed his wife’s lover: After my marriage, I at first didn’t interfere with my wife very much, but neither did I allow her too much independence. I kept an eye on her. . . . But after she had a baby, I started to trust her more and put her in charge of all my things, believing we now had the closest of relationships. Bearing male children brought a woman special honor because sons meant security. Sons could appear in court to support their parents in lawsuits and protect them in the streets of Athens, which for most of its history had no regular police force. By law, sons were required to support elderly parents. Some women escaped traditional restrictions by working as a hetaira (“companion”). Hetairas, usually foreigners, were unmarried, physically attractive, witty in speech, and skilled in music and poetry. Men hired them to entertain at a symposium(a drinking party to which wives were not invited). Their skill at clever teasing and joking with men gave hetairas a freedom of speech denied to “proper” women. Hetairas nevertheless lacked the social status and respectability that wives and mothers possessed. Sometimes hetairas also sold sex for a high price, and they could control their own sexuality by choosing their clients. Athenian men (but not women) could buy sex as they pleased without legal hindrance. Men (but not women) could also have sex freely with female or male slaves, who could not refuse their masters. The most skilled hetairas earned enough to live in luxury on their own. The most famous hetaira in Athens was Aspasia from Miletus, who became Pericles’ lover and bore him a son. She dazzled men with her brilliant talk and wide knowledge. Pericles fell so deeply in love with her that he wanted to marry her, despite his own law of 451 b.c.e. restricting citizenship to the children of two Athenian parents. Great riches also freed a woman from tradition. The most outspoken rich Athenian woman was Elpinike. She once publicly criticized Pericles by sarcastically remarking in front of a group of women who were praising him for an attack on a rebellious Delian League ally, “This really is wonderful, Pericles. . . . You have caused the loss of many good citizens, not in battle against Phoenicians or Persians . . . but in suppressing an allied city of fellow Greeks.”

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Slaves and metics were considered outsiders. Both individuals and the city-state owned slaves, who could be purchased from traders or bred in the household. Some people picked up unwanted newborns abandoned by their parents (in an accepted practice called infant exposure) and raised them as slaves. Athens’s commercial growth increased the demand for slaves, who in Pericles’ time made up around 100,000 of the city-state’s total of perhaps 250,000 inhabitants. Slaves worked in homes, on farms, and in crafts shops; rowed alongside their owners in the navy; and toiled in Athens’s dangerous silver mines. Unlike those in Sparta, slaves in Athens almost never rebelled, probably because they originated from too many different places to be able to unite. Golden Age Athens’s wealth and cultural activities attracted many metics from all around the Mediterranean. By the late fifth century b.c.e., metics constituted perhaps 50,000 to 75,000 of the estimated 150,000 free men, women, and children in the city-state. Metics paid for the privilege of living and working in Athens through a special foreigners’ tax and army service, but they did not become citizens.

Innovative Ideas in Education, Philosophy, History, and Medicine Thinkers in the Greek Golden Age developed innovative ideas in education, philosophy, history, and medicine. These innovations deeply upset some people, who feared that such departures from tradition would undermine society, especially in religion, thereby provoking punishment from angry gods. However, the changes opened the way to the development of scientific study as an enduring characteristic of Western civilization. Education and philosophy provided the hottest battles between tradition and innovation. Parents had traditionally controlled their children’s education, which occurred in the home and included hired tutors (there were no public schools). Controversy erupted when men known as Sophists appeared in the mid-fifth centuryb.c.e. and offered, for pay, classes to young males on nontraditional philosophy and religious doctrines as well as new techniques for public speaking. Some philosophers’ ideas challenged traditional religious views. The philosopher Socrates’ views on personal morality provoked another fierce controversy. In history, innovators created novel models of interpretation to help in understanding human experience; in medicine, they developed a scientific method to help in understanding the body. Disagreement over whether these intellectual changes were dangerous for Athenian society added to the political tension that had arisen at Athens by the 430sb.c.e. concerning Athens’s harsh treatment of its own allies and its economic sanctions against Sparta’s allies. Athenians connected philosophic ideas about the nature of justice with their decisions about the city-state’s domestic and foreign policy, while also worrying about the attitude of the gods toward the community. Wealthy families sent their sons to private teachers to learn to read, write, play a musical instrument or sing, and to develop athletic skills. Physical training was

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Vase Painting of a Symposium Upper-class Greek men often spent their evenings at a symposium, a drinking party that always included much conversation and usually featured music and entertainers. Wives were not included. The discussions could range widely, from literature to politics to philosophy. The man on the right is about to fling the dregs of his wine, playing a messy game called kottabos. The nudity of the female musician indicates she is a hired prostitute. (Detail, Foundry Painter / Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, UK / photo © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK / Art Resource, NY.)

considered vital because it made men’s bodies handsome and prepared them to fight in the militia (they could be summoned to war anytime between ages eighteen and sixty). Men exercised nude every day in gymnasia, public open-air facilities paid for by wealthy families. The daughters of wealthy families usually received instruction at home from educated slaves. Young girls learned reading, writing, and arithmetic to be able to help their future husbands by managing the household. Poor girls and boys learned a trade and perhaps a little reading, writing, and calculating by assisting their parents in their daily work or by serving as apprenticesto skilled craft workers. Most people probably were weak readers, but they could always find someone to read written texts aloud. Oral communication remained central to Greek life, in political speeches, songs, plays, and stories about the past. Prosperous young men learned to participate in public life by observing their fathers, uncles, and other older men as they debated in the Council of Five Hundred and the assembly, served in public office, and spoke in court. Often an older man would choose an adolescent boy as his special favorite to educate. The teenager would learn about public life by spending time with the older man. During the day the boy would listen to his mentor talking politics in the agora, help him perform his duties in public office, and work out with him in a gymnasium. They would spend their

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evenings at a symposium, whose agenda could range from serious political and philosophical discussion to riotous partying. This older mentor/younger favorite relationship could lead to sexual relations between the youth and the older (married) male. Sex between mentors and favorites was considered acceptable in elite circles in many city-states, including Athens, Sparta, and Thebes. Other city-states banned this behavior because they believed that it reflected an adult man’s shameful inability to control his lustful desires. By the time radical democracy emerged in Athens, young men could obtain higher education in a new way: paying expensive professional teachers called Sophists (“men of wisdom”). Sophists challenged tradition by teaching new skills of persuasion in speaking and new ways of thinking based on rational arguments. Sophists became notorious for using complex reasoning to make what many people considered deceptive arguments. By 450 b.c.e., Athens was attracting Sophists from around the Greek world. These entrepreneurs competed with one another to pull in pupils who could pay the hefty tuitions they charged. Sophists strove for excellence by offering specialized training in rhetoric — the skill of speaking persuasively. Every ambitious man wanted rhetorical training because it promised power in Athens’s assembly, councils, and courts. The Sophists alarmed those who feared their teachings would destroy the tradition that preserved democracy. Speakers trained by silver-tongued Sophists, they believed, might be able to mislead the assembly while promoting their personal interests. The most notorious Sophist was Protagoras (c. 490–c. 420 b.c.e.), a contemporary of Pericles. Emigrating to Athens from Abdera, in northern Greece, around 450b.c.e., Protagoras expressed views on the nature of truth and morality that outraged many Athenians. He argued that there could be no absolute standard of truth because every issue had two irreconcilable sides. For example, if one person feeling a breeze thinks it warm but another person thinks it cool, neither judgment can be absolutely correct because the wind simply is warm to one and cool to the other. Protagoras summed up this subjectivism — the belief that there is no absolute reality behind and independent of appearances — in his work Truth: “The human being is the measure of all things, of the things that are that they are, and of the things that are not that they are not.” The subjectivism of Protagoras and other Sophists contained two main ideas: (1) human institutions and values are only matters of nomos (“statute law, tradition, or convention”) and not creations of physis (“nature”), and (2) since truth is subjective, speakers should be able to argue either side of a question with equal persuasiveness and rationality. The first view implied that traditional human institutions were arbitrary and changing rather than natural and permanent, while the second seemed to many people to make questions of right and wrong irrelevant. The Sophists’ critics accused them of teaching moral relativism and threatening the shared public values of the democratic city-state. Aristophanes (c. 446–c. 386b.c.e.),

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author of comic plays, satirized Sophists for harming Athens by instructing students in persuasive techniques “to make the weaker argument the stronger.” Protagoras, for one, energetically responded that his doctrines were not hostile to democracy, arguing that every person had a natural capability for excellence and that human society depended on the rule of law based on a sense of justice. Members of a community, he explained, must be persuaded to obey the laws, not because laws were based on absolute truth, which did not exist, but because rationally it was advantageous for everyone to be law-abiding. A thief, for example, who might claim that stealing was a part of nature, would have to be persuaded by reason that a man-made law forbidding theft was to his advantage because it protected his own property and the community in which he, like all humans, had to live to survive. Even more disturbing to Athenians than the Sophists’ ideas about truth were their ideas about religion. Protagoras angered people with his agnosticism (the belief that supernatural phenomena are unknowable): “Whether the gods exist I cannot discover, nor what their form is like, for there are many impediments to knowledge, [such as] the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.” He upset those who thought he was saying that conventional religion had no meaning. They worried that his words would provoke divine anger against the community where he now lived. Other fifth-century b.c.e. philosophers and thinkers also proposed controversialnew scientific theories about the nature of the cosmos and the origin of religion. A philosopher friend of Pericles, for example, argued that the sun was a lump of flaming rock, not a god. Another philosopher invented an atomic theory of matter to explain how change was constant in the universe. Everything, he argued, consisted of tiny, invisible particles in eternal motion. Their random collisions caused them to combine and recombine in an infinite variety of forms, with no divine purpose guiding their collisions and combinations. These ideas seemed to invalidate traditional religion, which explained events as governed by the gods’ will. Even more provocative was a play written by the wealthy aristocrat Critias that denounced religion as a clever but false system invented by powerful men to fool ordinary people into obeying moral standards through fear of divine punishment. Many poorer citizens saw the Sophists and the philosophers as threats to Athenian democracy because only wealthy men could afford their classes or spend time conversing with them, thereby gaining yet more advantages by learning to speak persuasively in the assembly’s debates or in court speeches. Moral relativism and the physical explanation of the universe also struck many Athenians as dangerous: they feared such teachings would destroy the gods’ goodwill toward their city-state. These ideas so infuriated some Athenians that in the 430s b.c.e. they sponsored a law allowing citizens to bring charges of impiety against “those who fail to respect divine things or teach theories about the cosmos.” Not even Pericles could prevent his philosopher friend from being convicted on this charge and expelled from Athens. Socrates (469–399 b.c.e.), the most famous philosopher of the Golden Age, became well-known during this troubled time of the 430s, when people were anxious

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not just about new ways of thinking but also about war with Sparta. Socrates devoted his life to questioning people about their beliefs, but he insisted he was not a Sophist because he took no pay. Above all, he rejected the view that justice in fact amounted to power over others. Insisting that true justice was always better than injustice, he created an emphasis on ethics (the study of ideal human values and moral duties) in Greek philosophy. Socrates lived an eccentric life attracting constant attention. Sporting a stomach that he called “a bit too big to be convenient,” he wore the same cheap cloak summerand winter and always went barefoot no matter how cold the weather. His physical stamina — including both his tirelessness as a soldier and his ability to outdrink anyone — was legendary. He lived in poverty and disdained material possessions, though he supported a wife and several children by accepting gifts from wealthy admirers. Socrates spent his time in conversations all over Athens: participating in symposia, strolling in the agora, or watching young men exercise in a gymnasium. He wrote nothing. Our knowledge of his ideas comes from others’ writings, especially those of his famous follower Plato (c. 428–348 b.c.e.). Plato portrays Socrates as a relentless questioner of his fellow citizens, foreign friends, and leading Sophists. Socrates pushed his conversational partners to examine their basic assumptions about life. Giving few answers, Socrates never directly instructed anyone. Instead, he led people to draw conclusions in response to his probing questions and refutations of their unexamined beliefs. Today this procedure is called the Socratic method. Socrates frequently outraged people because his method made them feel ignorant and baffled. His questions forced them to admit that they did not in fact know what they had assumed they knew very well. Even more painful to them was Socrates’ fiercely argued view that the way they lived their lives — pursuing success in politics or business or art — was merely an excuse for avoiding the hard work of understanding and developing genuine aretê (“excellence”). Socrates insisted that he was ignorant of the definition of excellence and what was best for human beings, but that his wisdom consisted of knowing that he did not know. He vowed he wanted to improve, not undermine, people’s ethical beliefs, even though, as a friend put it, a conversation with Socrates made a man feel numb — as if a jellyfish had stung him. Socrates especially wanted to use reasoning to discover universal, objective standards for individual ethics. He attacked the Sophists for their relativistic claim that conventional standards of right and wrong were merely “the chains that handcuff nature.” This view, he protested, equated human happiness with power and “getting more.” Socrates insisted that the only way to achieve true happiness was to behave according to a universal, transcendent standard of just behavior that people could understand rationally. He argued that just behavior and excellence were identical to knowledge, and that true knowledge of justice would inevitably lead people to choose good over evil. They would therefore have truly happy lives, regardless of how rich or poor they were. Since Socrates believed that ethical knowledge was all a person

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needed for the good life, he argued that no one knowingly behaved unjustly and that behaving justly was always in the individual’s interest. It was simply ignorant to believe that the best life was the life of unlimited power to pursue whatever one desired. The most desirable human life was concerned with excellence and guided by reason, not by dreams of personal gain. Though very different from the Sophists’ doctrines, Socrates’ ideas proved just as disturbing to the masses because they rejected the Athenians’ traditional way of life. His ridicule of commonly accepted ideas about the importance of wealth and public success angered many people. Unhappiest of all were the fathers whose sons, after listening to Socrates’ questions reduce someone to utter bewilderment, came home to try the same technique on their parents, employing the Socratic method to criticize their parents’ values as old-fashioned and worthless. Men who experienced this reversal of the traditional educational hierarchy — the father was supposed to educate the son — felt that Socrates was undermining the stability of society by making young men question Athenian traditions. Socrates evidently did not teach women, but Plato portrays him as ready to learn from exceptional women, such as Pericles’ companion Aspasia. The worry that Socrates’ ideas presented a danger to conventional society inspired Aristophanes to write his comedy The Clouds (423 b.c.e.). This play portrays Socrates as a cynical Sophist who, for a fee, offers instruction in Protagoras’s technique of making the weaker argument the stronger. When Socrates’ school transforms a youth into a public speaker arguing persuasively that a son has the right to beat his parents, his father burns the place down. None of these plot details was real, but people did have a genuine fear that Socrates’ radical views on individual morality endangered the city-state’s traditional practices. Just as the Sophists and Socrates antagonized many people with their new ideas, the men who first wrote Greek history created controversy because they took a critical attitude in their descriptions of the past. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 485– 425 b.c.e.) and Thucydides of Athens (c. 455–399 b.c.e.) became Greece’s most famous historians and established Western civilization’s tradition of writing history. The fifth-century b.c.e.’s unprecedented events — a coalition Greek victory over the world’s greatest power and then the longest war ever between Greeks — inspired them to create history as a subject based on strenuous research. They explained that they wrote histories because they wanted people to remember the past and to understand why wars had taken place. Herodotus’s long, groundbreaking work The Histories (“Inquiries” in Greek) explained the Persian Wars as a clash between the cultures of the East and West. A typically competitive Greek intellectual, Herodotus — who by Roman times had become known as the Father of History — made the justifiable claim that he surpassed all those who had previously recorded the past by taking an in-depth and investigative approach to evidence, examining the culture of non-Greeks as well as Greeks, and expressing explicit and implicit judgments about people’s actions. Because Herodotus recognized the necessity (and the delight) of studying other cul-

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tures with respect, he pushed his inquiries deep into the past, looking for longstanding cultural differences to help explain the Persian-Greek conflict. He showed that Greeks and non-Greeks were equally capable of good and evil. Unlike poets and playwrights, he focused on human psychology and interactions, not the gods, as the driving forces in history. Thucydides innovated — and competed with Herodotus — by writing contemporary history and creating the kind of analysis of power that today underlies political science. His History of the Peloponnesian War made power politics, not divine intervention, history’s primary force. Deeply affected by the war’s brutality, Thucydides used his experiences as a politician and failed military commander (he was exiled for losing a key outpost) to make his narrative vivid and frank in describing human moral failings. His insistence that historians should energetically seek out the most reliable sources and evaluate their testimony with objectivity set a high standard for later writers. Like Herodotus, he challenged tradition by revealing that Greek history included not just glorious achievements but also some share of shameful acts (such as the Athenian punishment of the Melians in the Peloponnesian War — see page 106). Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 b.c.e.) of Cos, a contemporary of Thucydides, challenged tradition by grounding medical diagnosis and treatment in clinical observation. His fame continues today in the oath bearing his name (the Hippocratic Oath), which doctors swear at the beginning of their professional careers. Previously, medicine had depended on magic and ritual. People believed that evil spirits caused diseases, and various cults offered healing to patients through divine intervention. Competing to refute these earlier doctors’ theories, Hippocrates insisted that only physical factors caused illnesses. He may have been the author of the view, dominant in later medicine, that four humors (fluids) made up the human body: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Health depended on keeping the proper balance among them; being healthy was to be “in good humor.” This system for understanding the body corresponded to the division of the inanimate world into four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Hippocrates taught that the physician’s most important duty was to base his knowledge on careful observation of patients and their response to different treatments. Clinical experience, not abstract theory or religious belief, was the proper foundation for establishing effective cures. By putting his innovative ideas and practices to the test in competition with those of traditional medicine, Hippocrates established the truth of his principle, which later became a cornerstone of scientific medicine.

The Development of Greek Tragedy Ideas about the problematic relationship between gods and humans inspired Golden Age Athens’s most prominent cultural innovation: tragic drama. Plays called tragedies were presented over three days at the major annual festival of the god Dionysus

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in a contest for playwrights, reflecting the competitive spirit of Greek life. Tragedies presented shocking stories involving fierce conflict among powerful men and women, usually from myth but occasionally from recent history. The plots involved themes relevant to controversial issues in contemporary Athens. Therefore, these plays stimulated their large audiences to consider the dangers to their democracy from ignorance, arrogance, and violence. Golden Age playwrights explored topics ranging from the roots of good and evil to the nature of individual freedom and responsibility inthe family and the political community. As with other ancient texts, most Greek tragedies have not survived: only thirty-three still exist of the hundreds that were produced at Athens. Public revenues and mandatory contributions by the rich paid for Athenian dramas. The competition in this public art took place at an annual religious festival honoring the god Dionysus, with an official choosing three authors from a pool of applicants. Each of the finalists presented four plays during the festival: three tragedies in a row (a trilogy), followed by a semicomic play featuring satyrs (mythical half-man, half-animal beings) to end the day on a lighter note. Tragedies were written in verses of solemn language, and many were based on stories about the violent possibilities when gods and humans interacted. The plots often ended with a resolution to the trouble — but only after enormous suffering. The performances of tragedies in Athens, as in many other cities in Greece, took place during the daytime in an outdoor theater. The theater at Athens was built into the southern slope of the acropolis; it held about fourteen thousand spectators overlooking an open, circular area in front of a slightly raised stage. A tragedy had eighteen cast members, all of whom were men: three actors to play the speaking roles (both male and female characters) and fifteen chorus members. Although the chorus leader sometimes engaged in dialogue with the actors, the chorus primarilyperformed songs and dances in the circular area in front of the stage, called the orchestra. A successful tragedy offered a vivid spectacle. The chorus wore elaborate costumes and performed intricate dance routines. The actors, who wore masks, used broad gestures and booming voices to reach the upper tier of seats. A powerful voice was crucial to a tragic actor because words represented the heart of the plays, which featured extensive dialogue and long speeches. Special effects were popular. Actors playing the roles of gods swung from a crane to fly suddenly onto the stage. Actors playing lead roles, called the protagonists (“first competitors”), competed to win the “Best Actor” award. A skilled protagonist was so important to a play’s success that actors were assigned by lottery to the competing playwrights so that all three had an equal chance to have a winning cast. Great protagonists became enormously popular. Playwrights came from the social elite because only men with wealth could afford the amount of time and learning this work demanded. They served as authors, directors, producers, musical composers, choreographers, and occasionally actors for

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Greek Vase Painting of the Murder of King Agamemnon This Greek vase from the fifth century B.C.E. shows Queen Clytemnestra (left) and her lover Aegisthus murdering her husband, King Agamemnon, after he returns home from leading the Greek army in its ten-year war against Troy. The painting shows Agamemnon as defenseless because he was ensnared in a gauzy robe that his wife gave him after he took a bath. The other side of the vase shows Agamemnon’s son murdering Clytemnestra, his mother, in revenge. Greek mythology had many stories of murderous vengeance that emphasized how difficult it was to regulate human passions with social norms and laws. (Mixing bowl [calyx krater] with the killing of Agamemnon, Early Classical Period, c. 460 B.C.E. [ceramic], Dokimasia Painter [fl. 480–460 B.C.E.] / Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts / William Francis Warden Fund / Bridgeman Images.)

their own plays. In their lives as citizens, playwrights fulfilled the military and political obligations of Athenian men. The best-known Athenian tragedians — Aeschylus (525–456 b.c.e.), Sophocles (c. 496–406 b.c.e.), and Euripides (c. 485–406 b.c.e.) — all served in the army, and Sophocles was elected to Athens’s highest board of officials. Authors of plays competed from a love of honor, not money. The prizes, determined by a board of judges, awarded high prestige but little cash. The competition was regarded as so important that any judge who took a bribe in awarding prizes was put to death. Tragedy’s plots set out the difficulties of telling right from wrong when humans came into conflict and the gods became involved. Even though most tragedies were based on stories that referred to a legendary time before city-states existed, such as the period of the Trojan War, the plays’ moral issues were relevant to the society and obligations of citizens in a city-state. The plays suggest that human beings learn only by suffering but that the gods provide justice in the long run. For example, Aeschylus’s trilogy Oresteia (458 b.c.e.) explains the divine origins of democratic Athens’s court system through the story of the gods finally stopping the murderous violence in the family of Orestes, son of King Agamemnon, the Greek leader against Troy. Sophocles’ Antigone (441 b.c.e.) presents the story of the cursed family of Oedipus of Thebes as a drama of harsh conflict between a courageous woman, Antigone,

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and the city-state’s stern male leader, her uncle Creon. After her brother dies in a failed rebellion, Antigone insists on her family’s moral obligation to bury its dead in obedience to divine command. Creon, however, takes harsh action to preserve order and protect community values by prohibiting the burial of his traitorous nephew. In a horrifying story of raging anger and suicide that features one of the most famous heroines of Western literature, Sophocles exposes the right and wrong on each side of the conflict. His play offers no easy resolution of the competing interests of divinely sanctioned moral tradition and the state’s political rules. Ancient sources report that audiences reacted strongly to the messages of these tragedies. For one thing, spectators realized that the plays’ central characters were figures who fell into disaster even though they held positions of power and prestige. The characters’ reversals of fortune came about not because they were absolute villains but because, as humans, they were susceptible to a lethal mixture of error, ignorance, and hubris (violent arrogance that transformed one’s competitive spirit into a self-destructive force). The Athenian Empire was at its height when audiences at Athens attended the tragedies written by competing playwrights. Thoughtful playgoers could reflect on the possibility that Athens’s current power and prestige, managed as they were by humans, might fall victim to the same kinds of mistakes and conflicts that brought down the heroes and heroines of tragedy. Thus, these publicly funded plays both entertained through their spectacle and educated through their stories and words. In particular, they reminded male citizens — who governed the city-state in its assembly, council, and courts — that success created complex moral problems that self-righteous arrogance turned into community-wide catastrophes.

The Development of Greek Comedy Golden Age Athens developed comedy as its second distinctive form of public theater. Like tragedies, comedies were written in verse, performed in festivals honoring the god Dionysus, and subsidized with public funds and contributions from the rich. Unlike tragedies, comedies commented directly on public policy and criticized current politicians and intellectuals. Their plots and casts presented outrageous fantasies of contemporary life. Comic choruses, which had twenty-four dancing singers, could be colorfully costumed as talking birds or dancing clouds, or an actor could fly on a giant dung beetle to visit the gods. Authors competed to win the award for the festival’s best comedy by creating beautiful poetry, raising laughs with constant jokes and puns, and mocking selfimportant citizens and political leaders. The humor, delivered in a stream of imaginative profanity, frequently concerned sex and bodily functions. Well-known men of the day were targets for insults as cowards or weaklings. Women characters portrayed as figures of fun and ridicule seem to have been fictional, to protect the dignity of actual female citizens.

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Athenian comedies often made fun of political leaders. As the leading politician of radical democracy, Pericles was the subject of fierce criticism in comedy. Comic playwrights ridiculed his policies, his love life, even the shape of his skull (“Old Turnip Head” was a favorite insult). Aristophanes (c. 455–385 b.c.e.), Athens’s most famous comic playwright, so fiercely satirized Cleon, the city’s most prominent leader early in the Peloponnesian War, that Cleon sued him. A citizen jury ruled in Aristophanes’ favor, upholding the Athenian tradition of free speech. In several of Aristophanes’ comedies, the main characters are powerful women who force the men of Athens to change their policy to preserve family life and the city-state. These plays even criticize the assembly’s policy during wartime. Most famous is Lysistrata (411 b.c.e.), named after the female lead character of the play. In this fantasy, the women of Athens and Sparta unite to force their husbands to end the Peloponnesian War. To make the men agree to a peace treaty, they first seize the acropolis, where Athens’s financial reserves are kept, to prevent the men from squandering them further on the war. They then use sarcasm and pitchers of cold water to beat back an attack on their position by the old men who have remained in Athenswhile the younger men are away at war with Sparta. Above all, the women steel themselves to refuse to sleep with their husbands returning from battle. The effects of their sex strike on the men, portrayed in a series of explicit episodes, finally drive the warriors to make peace. Lysistrata presents women acting bravely and aggressively against men who seem bent on destroying traditional family life — the men are absent from home for long stretches while on military campaigns and ruin the city-state by prolonging a pointless war. Lysistrata insists that women have the intelligence and judgment to make political decisions: “I am a woman, and, yes, I have brains. And I’m pretty good in my judgment. My education hasn’t been bad: it came from my listening often to the conversations of my father and the elders among the men.” Lysistrata’s old-fashioned training and good sense allow her to see what needs to be done to protect the community. Like the heroines of tragedy, Lysistrata is a conservative, even a reactionary. She wants to put things back the way they were before the war fractured family life. To do that, she has to act like an impatient revolutionary. That irony sums up the challenge that fifth-century b.c.e. Athens faced in trying to resolve the tension between the dynamic innovation of its Golden Age and the importance of tradition in Greek life. The remarkable freedom of speech of Athenian comedy allowed frank, even brutal, commentary on current issues and personalities. It cannot be an accident that this energetic, critical drama emerged in Athens at the same time as radical democracy, in the mid-fifth century b.c.e. The feeling that all citizens should have a stake in determining their government’s policies evidently fueled a passion for REVIEW QUESTION How did new ways of using biting humor to keep the commuthinking in the Golden Age change traditional nity’s leaders from becoming arrogant and ways of life? aloof.

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The End of Athens’s Golden Age, 431–403 b.c.e. A war between Athens and Sparta (431–404 b.c.e.) ended the Golden Age. This long conflict is called the Peloponnesian War because it matched Sparta’s Peloponnesebased alliance against Athens and the Delian League. The war started, according to Thucydides, because the growth of Athenian power alarmed the Spartans, who feared that their interests and allies would fall to the Athenians’ restless energy. Pericles persuaded Athens’s assembly to take a hard line when the Spartans demanded that Athens ease restrictions on city-states allied with Sparta. Corinth and Megara, crucial Spartan allies, complained bitterly to Sparta about Athens. Finally, Corinth told Sparta to attack Athens, or else Corinth and its navy would change sides to the Athenian alliance. Sparta’s leaders therefore gave Athens an ultimatum — stop mistreating our allies. Pericles convinced the Athenian voters to reject the ultimatum on the grounds that Sparta had refused to settle the dispute through the third-party arbitration process called for by the 446–445 b.c.e. treaty. Pericles’ critics claimed he was insisting on war against Sparta to revive his fading popularity. His supporters replied that he was defending Athenian honor and protecting foreign trade, a key to the economy. By 431 b.c.e., these disputes had shattered the peace treaty between Athens and Sparta that Pericles had negotiated fifteen years before.

The Peloponnesian War, 431–404 b.c.e. Lasting longer than any previous war in Greek history, the Peloponnesian War (Map 3.3) took place above all because Spartan leaders believed they had to fight now to keep the Athenians from using their superior long-distance offensive power — the Delian League’s naval forces — to destroy Sparta’s control of their Peloponnesian League. Sparta made the first strike of the war, but the conflict dragged on so long because the Athenian assembly failed to negotiate peace with Sparta when it had the chance and because the Spartans were willing to make a deal with Persia to secure money to build a fleet to win the war. Dramatic evidence for the anger that fueled the war comes from Thucydides’ version of Pericles’ stern oration to the Athenian assembly about not yielding to Spartan pressure: If we do go to war, have no thought that you went to war over a trivial affair. For you this trifling matter is the assurance and the proof of your determination. If you yield to their demands, they will immediately confront you with some larger demand, since they will think that you only gave way on the first point out of fear. But if you stand firm, you will show them that they have to deal with you as equals. . . . When our equals, without agreeing to arbitration of the matter under dispute, make claims on us as neighbors and state those claims as commands, it would be no better than slavery to give in to them, no matter how large or how small the claim may be.

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N W

THRACE

Amphipolis 422 B.C.E.

MACEDONIA

ITAL Y

E S

Cyzicus 410 B.C.E.

Aegospotami 405 B.C.E.

EPIRUS Corcyra

Dodona

THESSALY

Lesbos

Euboea Thebes Megara Corinth Mantinea Argos 418 B.C.E.

Sicily

PELOPONNESE

Syracuse 413 B.C.E.

Pylos

Sparta

Chalcis Delium 424 B.C.E. Marathon Chios Athens

Attica Salamis Aegina

ANATOLIA Arginusae Islands 406 B.C.E.

Ionia

Delphi

Aegean Sea

PERSIAN EMPIRE

Samos

Delos

Melos 416 B.C.E.

Delian League and allies Sparta and allies

Mediterranean

Rhodes

S ea

Neutral states Crete

Athenian route to Sicily, 415 B.C.E. Spartan campaigns Battle

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For the first ten years, the Peloponnesian War’s battles took place largely in mainland Greece. Sparta, whose armies usually avoided distant campaigns, shocked Athens when its general Brasidas led successful attacks against Athenian forces in northeast Greece. Athens stunned the entire Greek world in the war’s next phase by launching a huge naval expedition against Spartan allies in far-off Sicily. The last ten years of the war saw the action move to the east, on and along the western coast of Anatolia and its islands, on the boundary of the Persian Empire. Feeling threatened, the Persian king helped the Spartans build a navy there to defeat the famous Athenian fleet. Look at the route of Athens’s expedition to Sicily; why do you think the Athenians took this longer voyage, rather than a more direct route?

When Sparta invaded Athenian territory, Pericles advised a two-pronged strategy to win what he saw would be a long war: (1) use the navy to raid the lands of Sparta and its allies, and (2) avoid large infantry battles with the superior land forces of the Spartans, even when the enemy hoplites plundered the Athenian countryside outside the city. Athens’s citizens could retreat to safety behind the city’s impregnablewalls, massive barriers of stone that encircled the city and the harbor, with the fortification known as the Long Walls protecting the land corridor between the urban center and the port (Map 3.2, page 86). He insisted that Athenians should sacrifice their vast and valuable country property to save their population. In the

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end, he predicted, Athens, with its superior resources, would win a war of attrition, especially because the Spartans, lacking a base in Athenian territory, could not support long invasions. Pericles’ strategy and leadership might have made Athens the winner in the long run, but chance intervened to deprive Athens of his guidance: an epidemic struck Athens in 430 b.c.e. and killed Pericles the next year. This plague ravaged Athens’s population for four years, killing thousands as it spread like wildfire among the people packed in behind the walls to avoid Spartan attacks. Despite their losses and their fears that the gods had sent the disease to punish them, the Athenians fought on. Over time, however, they abandoned the disciplined strategy that Pericles’ prudent plan had required. The generals elected after his death, especially Cleon, pursued a much more aggressive strategy. At first this succeeded, especially when a group of Spartan hoplites laid down their arms after being blockaded by Cleon’s forces at Pylos in 425 b.c.e. Their surrender shocked the Greek world and led Sparta to ask for a truce, but the Athenian assembly refused, believing their army could now crush their enemy. When the daring Spartan general Brasidas captured Athens’s possessions in northern Greece in 424 and 423 b.c.e., however, he turned the tide of war in the other direction by crippling the Athenian supply of timber and precious metals from this crucial region. When Brasidas and Cleon were both killed in 422 b.c.e., mutual exhaustion made Sparta and Athens agree to a peace treaty in 421 b.c.e. Athens’s most innovative and confident new general, Alcibiades, soon persuaded the assembly to reject the peace and to attack Spartan allies in 418 b.c.e. In 416– 415 b.c.e., the Athenians and their allies overpowered the tiny and strategically meaningless Aegean island of Melos because it refused to abandon its allegiance to Sparta. Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War dramatically represents Athenian messengers telling the Melians they had to be conquered to show that Athens permitted no defiance to its dominance. Following their victory the Athenians executed the Melian men, sold the women and children into slavery, and colonized the island. The turning point in the war came soon thereafter when, in 415 b.c.e., Alcibiades persuaded the Athenian assembly to launch the greatest and most expensive campaign in Greek history. The expedition of 415 b.c.e. was directed against Sparta’s allies in Sicily, far to the west. Alcibiades had dazzled his fellow citizens with the dream of conquering that rich island and especially its greatest city, Syracuse. Alcibiades’ political rivals had him removed from his command, however, and the other generals blundered into catastrophic defeat in Sicily in 413 b.c.e. (see Map 3.3, page 105). The victorious Syracusans destroyed the allied invasion fleet and packed the survivors like sardines into quarries under the blazing sun, with no toilets and only half a pint of drinking water and a handful of food a day. On the advice of Alcibiades, who had deserted to their side in anger at having lost his command, the Spartans in 413 b.c.e. seized a permanent base of operations

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in the Athenian countryside for year-round raids, now that Athens was too weak to drive them out. Constant Spartan attacks devastated Athenian agriculture, and twenty thousand slave workers crippled production in Athens’s silver mines by deserting to the enemy. The democratic assembly became so upset over these losses that in 411 b.c.e. it voted itself out of existence in favor of an emergency government run by the wealthier citizens. When an oligarchic group illegally took charge, however, the citizens restored the radical democracy and kept fighting for another seven years. They even recalled Alcibiades, seeking better generalship, but the end came when Persia gave the Spartans money to build a navy. The Persian king thought it served his interests to have Athens defeated. Aggressive Spartan naval action forced Athens to surrender in 404 b.c.e. After twenty-seven years of near-continuous war, the Athenians were at their enemy’s mercy.

Athens Defeated: Tyranny and Civil War, 404–403 b.c.e. Following Athens’s surrender, the Spartans installed a regime of antidemocratic Athenians known as the Thirty Tyrants, who collaborated with the victors. The collaborators were members of the social elite; some, including the violent leader Critias, infamous for his criticism of religion, had been well-known pupils of the Sophists. Brutally suppressing democratic opposition, these oligarchs embarked on an eight-month period of murder and plunder in 404–403 b.c.e. The speechwriter Lysias, for example, reported that Spartan henchmen murdered his brother to steal the family’s valuables, even ripping the gold rings from the ears of his brother’s wife. Outraged at the violence and greed of the Thirty Tyrants, citizens who wanted to restore democracy banded together outside the city to fight to regain control of Athens. A feud between Sparta’s two most important leaders paralyzed the Spartans, and they failed to send help to the Athenian collaborators. The democratic rebels defeated the forces of the Thirty Tyrants in a series of bloody street battles in Athens. Democracy was thereby restored, but the citizens still seethed with anger and unrest. To settle the internal strife that threatened to tear Athens apart, the newly restored democratic assembly voted the first known amnesty in Western history, a truce agreement forbidding any official charges or recriminations from crimes committed in 404–403 b.c.e. Agreeing not to pursue grievances in court was the price of peace. As would soon become clear, however, some Athenians harbored grudges that no amnesty could dispel. In addition, Athens’s financial and military strength had been shattered. At the end of the Golden Age, Athenians worried about how to remake their lives and restore the REVIEW QUESTION What factors determined reputation that their city-state’s innovative the course of the Peloponnesian War? accomplishments had produced.

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Conclusion The Greek city-states that united early in the fifth century b.c.e. to resist the Persian Empire surprised themselves by defeating the invaders and preserving their political independence. Following the unexpected Greek victory, Athens competed with Sparta for power. The Athenian Golden Age that followed was based on empire and trade, and the city’s riches funded the widening of democracy and famous cultural accomplishments. As the money poured in, Athens built glorious and expensive temples, legislated pay for service in many government offices to strengthen democracy, and assembled the Mediterranean’s most powerful navy. The poor men who rowed the ships demanded greater democracy; such demands led to political and legal reforms that guaranteed fairer treatment for all. Pericles became the most famous politician of the Golden Age by leading the drive for radical democracy. Religious practice and women’s lives reflected the strong grip of tradition on everyday life, but dramatic innovations in education and philosophy created social tension. The Sophists’ moral relativism disturbed tradition-minded people, as did Socrates’ definition of excellence, which questioned ordinary people’s love of wealth and success. Art and architecture broke out of old forms, promoting an impression of balanced motion rather than stability, while medicine gained a more scientific basis. Tragedy and comedy developed at Athens as competitive public theater commenting on contemporary social and political issues. The Athenians’ harsh treatment of allies and enemies combined with Spartan fears about Athenian power to bring on the disastrous Peloponnesian War. Nearly three decades of battle brought the stars of the Greek Golden Age crashing to earth: by 400b.c.e. the Athenians found themselves in the same situation as in 500 b.c.e., fearful of Spartan power and worried whether the world’s first democracy could survive.

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MAPPING THE WEST Greece, Europe, and the Mediterranean, 400 b.c.e.

No single power controlled the Mediterranean region at the end of the fifth century B.C.E. In the west, the Phoenician city of Carthage and the Greek cities on Sicily and in southern Italy were rivals for the riches to be won by trade. In the east, the Spartans, confident after their recent victory over Athens in the Peloponnesian War, tried to become an international power outside the mainland for the first time in their history by sending campaigns into Anatolia. This aggressive action aroused stiff opposition from the Persians because it threatened their westernmost imperial provinces. There was to be no peace and quiet in the Mediterranean even after the twenty-seven years of the Peloponnesian War.

Rhodes

Chapter 3 Review Key Terms and People Be sure that you can identify the term or person and explain its historical significance. Themistocles (p.79)

ostracism (p.84)

hetaira (p.92)

Delian League (p.82)

agora (p.85)

Sophists (p.95)

triremes (p.82)

Parthenon (p.85)

Socratic method (p.97)

Pericles (p.83)

mystery cults (p.90)

hubris (p.102)

radical democracy (p.83)

metic (p.90)

Review Questions 1. How did the Greeks overcome the dangers of the Persian invasions? 2. What factors produced political change in fifth-century B.C.E. Athens? 3. How did new ways of thinking in the Golden Age change traditional ways of life? 4. What factors determined the course of the Peloponnesian War?

Making Connections 1. What were the most significant differences between Archaic Age Greece and Golden Age Greece? 2. For what sorts of things did Greeks of the Golden Age spend public funds? Why did they believe these things were worth the expense? 3. What price, in all senses, did Athens and the rest of Greece pay for the Golden Age? Was it worth it?

Suggested References The Greek city-states, especially Athens, reached the height of their political, economic, and military power in the fifth century B.C.E. following the defeat of the Persian invasion of mainlandGreece; scholars continue to investigate how the frequent wars of this period influenced not only the democracy of Athens but also the famous dramatists and philosophers of this so-called Golden Age. Blundell, Sue. Women in Ancient Greece. 1995. Briant, Pierre. From Cyrus to Alexander: History of the Persian Empire. Trans. Peter Daniels. 2006. Camp, John M. The Archaeology of Athens. 2004. *Dillon, John, and Tania Gergel. The Greek Sophists. 2003. Foxhall, Lin. Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity. 2013. *Grene, David, and Richmond Lattimore, eds. The Complete Greek Tragedies. 1992. Herman, Gabriel. Morality and Behavior in Democratic Athens. 2006. *Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt. Revised by John Marincola. Rev. ed. 2003. Mitchell-Boyask, Robin. Plague and the Athenian Imagination: Drama, History, and the Cult of Asclepius. 2008. Parker, Robert. Athenian Religion: A History. 1996. Patterson, Cynthia B. The Family in Greek History. 1998.

*Primary source.

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Important Events 500–323 B.C.E.

Classical Age of Greece

499–479 B.C.E.

Wars between Persia and Greece

490 B.C.E.

Battle of Marathon

480 B.C.E.

Battle of Salamis

480–479 B.C.E.

Xerxes invades Greece

461 B.C.E.

Ephialtes reforms Athenian court system

Early 450s B.C.E.

Pericles introduces pay for officeholders in Athenian democracy

451 B.C.E.

Pericles restricts Athenian citizenship to children whose parents are both citizens

450 B.C.E.

Protagoras and other Sophists begin to teach in Athens

446–445 B.C.E. (winter)

Peace treaty between Athens and Sparta, intended to last thirty years

441 B.C.E.

Sophocles presents tragedy Antigone

431–404 B.C.E.

Peloponnesian War

420s B.C.E.

Herodotus finishes Histories

415–413 B.C.E.

Enormous Athenian military expedition against Sicily

411 B.C.E.

Aristophanes presents the comedy Lysistrata

404–403 B.C.E.

Rule of Thirty Tyrants at Athens

403 B.C.E.

Restoration of democracy in Athens

Consider three events: Ephialtes reforms Athenian court system (461 B.C.E.), Protagoras and other Sophists begin to teach in Athens (450 B.C.E.), and Aristophanes presents the comedy Lysistrata (411 B.C.E.). How did the principles of radical democracy during the Athenian Golden Age help to make possible these different events?

*Strassler, Robert B., ed. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War. 1996. Strauss, Barry. The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece — and Western Civilization. 2005. Thorley, John. Athenian Democracy. 2004. Wees, Han van, ed. War and Violence in Ancient Greece. 2000.

From the Classical to the Hellenistic World

400–30 b.c.e.

bout 255 b.c.e., an Egyptian camel trader far from home sent a letter of complaint to his Greek employer back in Egypt:

You know that when you left me in Syria with Krotos I followed all your instructions concerning the camels and behaved blamelessly towards you. But Krotos has ignored your orders to pay me my salary; I’ve received nothing despite asking him for my money over and over. He just tells The Rosetta Stone me to go away. I waited a long time Dug out of the wall of a fort in 1799 for you to come, but when I no bya soldier in Napoleon’s army near Rosetta, in the Nile River delta, this longer had life’s necessities and Hellenistic inscription in two different couldn’t get help anywhere, I had to languages and three different forms of run away . . . to keep from starving writing unlocked the lost secrets of how to death. . . . I am desperate summer to read Egyptian hieroglyphs. The and winter. . . . They have treated bands of text repeat the same mesme like dirt because I am not a sage (priests praising King Ptolemy V in196 B.C.E.) in hieroglyphs, demotic Greek. I therefore beg you, please, (acursive form of Egyptian invented order them to pay me so that I won’t around 600 B.C.E.), and Greek. Bilingual go hungry just because I don’t know texts were necessary to reach the how to speak Greek. mixed population of Hellenistic Egypt. Scholars deciphered the hieroglyphs by comparing them to the Greek version. They started with the hieroglyphs surrounded by an oval, which they guessed were royal names. (Art Resource, NY.)

The trader’s plea for help from a foreigner living in his homeland reflects the changes in the eastern Mediterranean world duringthe Hellenistic Age (323–30 b.c.e.). The movement of Greeks into the Near East increased the cultural interaction between the Greek and the Near Eastern worlds and set a new course for Western civilization in politics, art, philosophy, science, and religion. Above all, Alexander the Great (356–323 b.c.e.) changed the course of history by conquering the Persian Empire, leading an army of Greeks and Macedonians 113

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to the border of India, taking Near Easterners into his army and imperial administration, and planting colonies of Greeks as far east as Afghanistan. His amazing expedition shocked the world and spurred great change in Western civilization by combining Near Eastern and Greek traditions as never before. Politics changed in the Greek world when Alexander’s successors (who had been commanders in his army) created new kingdoms that became the dominant powers of the Hellenistic Age. The existing Greek city-states retained local rule but lost their independence in international affairs. The Hellenistic kings imported Greeks to fill royal offices, man their armies, and run businesses, generating tension with their non-Greek subjects. Egyptians, Syrians, or Mesopotamians who wanted to rise in Hellenistic society had to win the support of these Greeks and learn their language. The Near East’s local cultures interacted with the Greek overlords’ culture to spawn a multicultural synthesis. Although Hellenistic royal society always remained hierarchical, its kings and queens did finance innovations in art, philosophy, religion, and science that combined Near Eastern and Greek traditions. The Hellenistic kingdoms fell in the second and first centuries b.c.e. when the Romans overthrew them one by one. But the cultural interaction between diverse peoples and the emergence CHAPTER FOCUS What were the major of new ideas — unintended consequences of political and cultural changes in the Alexander’s military campaigns — would Hellenistic Age? strongly influence Roman civilization.

Classical Greece after the Peloponnesian War, 400–350 b.c.e. The Greek city-states regained their economic and political stability after the Peloponnesian War (431–404 b.c.e.), but daily life remained hard for many. The war’s aftermath dramatically affected Greek philosophy. At Athens, citizens who blamed Socrates for inspiring the Thirty Tyrants’ crimes prosecuted him in court; the jury condemned him to death. His execution helped persuade the philosophers Plato and Aristotle to detest democracy and develop new ways of thinking about right and wrong and how human beings should live. The Greek city-states’ continuing competition for power in the fourth century b.c.e. drained their resources. Sparta’s attempt to dominate central Greece and western Anatolia by collaborating with the Persians provoked violent resistance from Thebes and Athens. By the 350s b.c.e., the Greek city-states had so weakened themselves that they were unable to prevent the Macedonian kingdom from taking control of Greece.

Athens’s Recovery after the Peloponnesian War The devastation of Athens’s economy in the Peloponnesian War and overcrowding of refugees from the country in the wartime city produced social conflict. Life became difficult for middle-class women whose male relatives had been killed. With no man

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Silver Coins of Athens The city-state of ancient Athens owned rich silver mines that financed its silver coinage, famous around the Greek world for purity and reliability. This coin from the fifth century B.C.E. was atetradrachm (“four drachmas”), which was the amount that a worker or rower in the Athenian navy earned in four days. The images show Athena, the city-state’s main goddess, and an owl with an olive branch, also symbols of Athena. The style of the images was kept old-fashioned and mostly unchanging so as not to harm the trust that people in foreign lands had in accepting Athenian coins in trade and commerce as a form of international currency. (© C. M. Dixon / Ancient Art & Architecture Collection, Ltd.)

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to provide for them and their children, many war widows had to work outside the home. The only jobs open to them — such as wet-nursing, weaving, or laboring in vineyards — were low-paying. Resourceful Athenians found ways to profit from women’s skills. The family of one of Socrates’ friends, for example, fell into poverty when several widowed sisters, nieces, and female cousins moved in. The friend complained to Socrates that he was too poor to support his new family of fourteen plus their slaves. Socrates replied that the women knew how to make clothing, so they should sell it. This plan succeeded financially, but the women then complained that Socrates’ friend was the household’s only member who ate without working. Socrates advised the man to reply that the women should think of him as sheep did a guard dog — he earned his share of the food by keeping the wolves away. Athens’s postwar economy recovered as international trade was revived once its Long Walls, which protected the transportation corridor from the city to the port, were rebuilt and mining for silver to produce the city’s coinage resumed. Greek businesses producing manufactured goods were small Academy and usually family-run; the largest known was a Lyceum shield-making company with 120 slave workers. R. us an Some changes occurred in occupations formerly Athens . s R all u defined by gender. For example, men began workW s ll ong Ilis Wa N. L ng o ing alongside women in cloth production when the L S. first commercial weaving shops outside the home Piraeus sprang up. Some women made careers in the arts, Phaleron especially painting and music, which men had tra0 2 miles ditionally dominated. 0 2 kilometers Daily life remained a struggle for working people. Most workers earned barely enough to Athens’s Long Walls as Rebuilt after the Peloponnesian War feed and clothe their families. They ate two meals

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a day, with bread baked from barley as their main food; only rich people could afford wheat bread. A family bought bread from small bakery stands, often run by women, or made it at home, with the wife directing the slaves in grinding the grain, shapingthe dough, and baking it in a clay oven heated by charcoal. People topped their bread with greens, beans, onions, garlic, olives, fruit, and cheese. The few households rich enough to afford meat boiled or grilled it over a fire. Everyone of all ages drank wine, diluted with water, with every meal.

The Execution of Socrates, 399 b.c.e. Socrates, Athens’s most famous philosopher in the Golden Age, fell victim to the bitterness many Athenians felt about the rule of the Thirty Tyrants following the Peloponnesian War. Some prominent Athenians hated Socrates because his follower Critias had been one of the Thirty Tyrants’ most violent leaders. These citizens charged Socrates with impiety, claiming he rejected the city-state’s gods, introduced new divinities, and lured young men away from Athenian moral traditions. Speaking to a jury of 501 male citizens, Socrates refused to beg for sympathy, as was customary in trials, and repeated his dedication to goading his fellow citizens into examining how to live justly. He vowed to remain their stinging gadfly. When the jurors narrowly voted to convict Socrates, Athenian law required them to decide between the penalty proposed by the prosecutors and that proposed by the defendant. The prosecutors proposed death. Socrates said he deserved a reward rather than punishment, but his friends made him propose a fine as his penalty. The jury chose death, requiring him to drink a poison concocted from powdered hemlock. Socrates accepted his sentence calmly, saying that “no evil can befall a good man either in life or in death.” Ancient sources report that many Athenians soon came to regret Socrates’ punishment as a tragic mistake and a severe blow to their reputation.

The Philosophy of Plato Socrates’ death helped make his follower and Greece’s most famous philosopher, Plato (429–348 b.c.e.), hate democracy. Plato started out as a political consultant supporting philosopher-tyrants as the best form of government, but he gave up hope that political action could stop violence and greed. Instead, he turned to talking and writing about philosophy as the guide to life and established a school, the Academy, in Athens around 386 b.c.e. The Academy was an informal association of people who studied philosophy, mathematics, and theoretical astronomy under the leader’s guidance. It attracted intellectuals to Athens for the next nine hundred years, and Plato’s ideas about the nature of reality, ethics, and politics have remained central to philosophy and political science to this day. Plato’s intellectual interests covered astronomy, mathematics, political philosophy, ethics, and metaphysics (ideas about the ultimate nature of reality beyond the

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reach of the human senses). Plato wrote dialogues, to provoke readers into thoughtful reflection, not to prescribe a set of beliefs. Nevertheless, he always maintained one essential idea based on his view of reality: ultimate moral qualities are universal, unchanging, and absolute, not relative. Plato’s dialogues explore his theory that justice, goodness, beauty, and equality exist on their own in a higher realm beyond the daily world. He used the word Forms (or Ideas) to describe the abstract, invariable, and ultimate realities of such ethical qualities. According to Plato, the Forms are the only genuine reality. All things that humans perceive with their senses on earth are only dim and imperfect copies of these metaphysical, ultimate realities. Plato believed that humans possess immortal souls distinct from their bodies; this idea established the concept of dualism, a separation between soul (or mind) and body. Plato further explained that the human soul possesses preexisting knowledge put there by a god. Humans’ present, impure existence is only a temporary stage in cosmic existence because, while the body does not last, the soul is immortal. Plato argued that people must seek perfect order and purity in their souls by using rational thought to control irrational and therefore harmful desires. People who yield to irrational desires fail to consider the future of their body and soul. The desire to drink too much alcohol, for example, is irrational because the binge drinker fails to consider the painful hangover that will follow. Plato presented his most famous ideas on politics and justice in his dialogue The Republic. This work, whose Greek title means “system of government,” discusses the nature of justice and the reasons people should never commit injustice. Democracy, Plato wrote, does not produce justice because people cannot rise above their own self-interest to knowledge of the transcendent reality of universal truth. Justice can come only under the rule of an enlightened oligarchy or monarchy. Plato’s Republic describes an ideal society with a hierarchy of three classes distinguished by their ability to grasp the truth of Forms. Plato did not think humans could actually create the model society described in The Republic, but he did believe that imagining it was an important way to help people learn to live justly. The highest class in his envisioned hierarchy consists of the rulers, or “guardians,” who must be educated in mathematics, astronomy, and metaphysics. Next come the “auxiliaries,” who defend the community. “Producers” make up the bottom class; they grow food and make objects for everyone. According to Plato’s Republic, women can be guardians because they possess the same virtues and abilities as men, except that the average woman has less physical strength than the average man. To minimize distraction, guardians have neither private property nor nuclear families. Male and female guardians live in houses shared in common, eat in the same dining halls, and exercise in the same gymnasia. They have sex with various partners so that the best women can mate with the best men to produce the best children. The children are raised together by special caretakers, not their parents. Guardians who achieve the highest level of knowledge can rule as philosopher-kings.

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Aristotle, Scientist and Philosopher After studying with Plato, Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) founded his own school, the Lyceum, in Athens. He taught his own life-guiding philosophy, emphasizing practical reasoning. Like Plato, he thought Athenian democracy was a bad system because it did not restrict decision making to the most educated and moderate citizens. His vast writings made him one of the world’s most influential thinkers. Aristotle’s achievements included scientific investigation of the natural world, development of systems of logical argument, and practical ethics based on experience. He believed that the search for knowledge brought the good life and genuine happiness. His teachings covered biology, botany, zoology, medicine, anatomy, psychology, meteorology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, music, metaphysics, rhetoric, literary criticism, political science, and ethics. By creating a system of logic for precise argumentation, Aristotle also established grounds for determining whether an argument was logically valid. Aristotle’s thought process stressed rationality and common sense, not metaphysics. He rejected Plato’s theory of Forms and insisted that understanding depended on observation. He coupled detailed investigation with careful reasoning in biology, botany, and zoology. He collected information on more than five hundred different kinds of animals, including insects. His recognition that whales and dolphins are mammals was not rediscovered for another two thousand years. Some of Aristotle’s observations justified inequalities that were characteristic of his time. He argued that some people were slaves by nature because their souls lacked the rationality to be fully human. Mistaken biological information led Aristotle to evaluate females as incomplete males, judging them as inferior. At the same time, he believed that human communities could be successful and happy only if women and men both contributed. In ethics, Aristotle emphasized the need to develop practical habits of just behavior in order to achieve happiness. Ethics, he taught, cannot work if they consist only of abstract reasons for just behavior. People should achieve self-control by training their minds to overcome instincts and passions. Self-control meant finding “the mean,” or balance, between denying and indulging physical pleasures.

Greek Political Disunity In the same period that Plato and Aristotle were developing their philosophies as guides to life, the Greek city-states were in a constant state of war. Sparta, Thebes, and Athens competed to dominate Greece in this period. None succeeded. Their endless fighting weakened their morale and their finances. Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Argos formed an anti-Spartan coalition, but the Spartans checkmated the alliance by negotiating with the Persian king. Betraying their traditional claim to defend Greek freedom, the Spartans acknowledged the Persian ruler’s right to control the Greek city-states of Anatolia — in return for permission to wage war in Greece without Persian interference. This agreement of 386 b.c.e., called the King’s Peace, sold out the Greeks of Anatolia, returning them to submis-

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sion to the Persian Empire. Athens rebuilt its navy, again becoming the leader of a naval alliance. In the 370s b.c.e., Thebes attacked Sparta and freed many helots to weaken the enemy. The Theban success alarmed the Athenians, who allied with their hated enemies, the Spartans. The allied armies confronted the Thebans in the battle of Mantinea in the Peloponnese in 362 b.c.e. Thebes won the battle but lost the war when its best general was killed and no capable replacement could be found. This stalemate left the Greek city-states disunited and weak. By the 350s b.c.e., no Greek city-state controlled anything except its own territory. By failing to cooperate with REVIEW QUESTION How did daily life, philosone another, the Greeks opened the way ophy, and the political situation change in for the rise of a new power — the kingdom Greece during the period 400–350 B.C.E.? of Macedonia.

The Rise of Macedonia, 359–323 b.c.e. The kingdom of Macedonia’s rise to superpower status counts as one of the greatest surprises in ancient military and political history. Located north of central Greece, Macedonia rocketed from being a minor state to ruling the Greek and Near Eastern worlds. Two aggressive and charismatic Macedonian kings led this transformation: Philip II (r. 359–336 b.c.e.) and his son Alexander the Great. Their conquests ended the Greek Classical Age and set in motion the Hellenistic Age’s cultural changes.

Macedonian Power and Philip II, 359–336 b.c.e. The Macedonian kings governed by maintaining the support of the elite, who ranked as their social equals and controlled many followers. Men spent their time training for war, hunting, and drinking heavily. The king had to excel in these activities to show that he deserved to lead the state. Queens and royal mothers received respect because they came from powerful families or the ruling houses of neighboring regions. Macedonian kings thought of themselves as ethnically Greek; they spoke Greek as well as their native Macedonian. Macedonians as a whole, however, looked down on the Greeks as too soft to survive life in their northern land. The Greeks regarded Macedonians as barbarians. In 359 b.c.e., the Illyrians, neighbors to the west, slaughtered Macedonia’s king and four thousand troops. Philip, the new king, restored the troops’ confidence by teaching them to use thrusting spears sixteen feet long. He trained them to maneuverin battle while maintaining formation. Deploying cavalry as a strike force, Philip routed the Illyrians. During the 340s b.c.e., Philip persuaded or forced most of northern and central Greece into alliance with him. Seeking glory for Greece and fearing the instability his strengthened army would create in his kingdom if the soldiers had nothing to do, he decided to lead a united Macedonian and Greek army to conquer the Persian Empire. He justified attacking Persia as revenge for its invasion of Greece 150 years earlier.

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Athens and Thebes rallied a coalition of southern Greek city-states to combat Philip, but in 338 b.c.e. the Macedonian king and his Greek allies crushed the coalition’s forces at the battle of Chaeronea in Greece. The defeated city-states retained their internal freedom, but Philip forced them to join his alliance. The battle of Chaeronea marked a turning point in Greek history: never again would the citystates of Greece be independent agents in international affairs.

The Rule of Alexander the Great, 336–323 b.c.e. Philip was murdered in 336 b.c.e. Some scholars think his son Alexander and his son’s mother, Olympias, arranged the killing to seize power for the twenty-year-old Alexander, but the murderer, one of Philip’s bodyguards, was probably motivated by personal anger at the king. Alexander secured his rule by eliminating rivals and defeating Macedonia’s enemies to the west and north with swift attacks. He forced the southern Greeks, who had defected from the alliance at the news of Philip’s death, to rejoin. To demonstrate the cost of disloyalty, in 335 b.c.e. Alexander destroyed Thebes for having rebelled. In 334 b.c.e., Alexander launched the most astonishing military campaign in ancient history, leading a Macedonian and Greek army against the Persian Empire to fulfill Philip’s dream of avenging Greece. Alexander’s conquest of all the lands from Turkey to Egypt to Uzbekistan while still in his twenties led later peoples to call him Alexander the Great. Alexander inspired his troops by leading charges against the enemy, riding his warhorse Bucephalas (“oxhead”). Everyone saw him speeding ahead in his plumed helmet, polished armor, and vividly colored cloak. He was so intent on conquest that he rejected advice to delay the war until he had fathered an heir. He gave away nearly all of his land to strengthen ties with his army officers. Alexander aimed at becoming more famous even than Achilles; he always kept a copy of Homer’s Iliad under his pillow — along with a dagger. Medallion with Alexander the Great This gold medallion was made in the third century C.E., during the time of the Roman Empire, to commemorate the reputation of Alexander the Great of Macedonia, the ancient world’s greatest conqueror. It depicts Alexander without a helmet to allow his face to show the gaze looking up at the sky that he wanted artists to use in representing him. He wears armor and a shield decorated with images showing his belief in the support he received from the gods, and he holds aspear to show that he fought alongside his men. Roman emperors or high officials wore expensive objects like this to identify with heroes of the past or to give them as gifts to express their great generosity. (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland, USA / Bridgeman Images.)

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Building on Near Eastern traditions of siege technology and Philip’s innovations, Alexander developed even better military technology. When Tyre, a heavily fortified city on an island off the eastern Mediterranean coast, refused to surrender to him in 332 b.c.e., he built a massive stone pier as a platform for artillery towers, armored battering rams, and catapults flinging boulders to breach Tyre’s walls. Knowing that Alexander could overcome their fortifications made enemies much readier to negotiate a deal. In his conquest of Egypt and the Persian heartland, Alexander revealed his strategy for ruling a vast empire: keep an area’s traditional administrative system in place while founding cities of Greeks and Macedonians in the conquered territory.InEgypt, he established his first new city, naming it Alexandria after himself. In Persia, he proclaimed himself the king of Asia and relied on Persian administrators. Alexander led his army past the Persian heartland farther east into territory hardly known to the Greeks (Map 4.1). He aimed to outdo the heroes of legend by marching to the end of the world. Shrinking his army to reduce the need for supplies, he marched northeast into what is today Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. Unable

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From the time Alexander led his army against Persia in 334 B.C.E. until his death in 323 B.C.E., he was continually fighting military campaigns. His charismatic and fearless generalship, combined with effective intelligence gathering about his targets, generated an unbroken string of victories and made him a legend. His founding of garrison cities and preservation of local governments kept his conquests largely stable during his lifetime.

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to subdue the local guerrilla forces, Alexander settled for an alliance sealed by his marriage to the Bactrian princess Roxane. Alexander then headed east into India. Seventy days of marching through monsoon rains extinguished his soldiers’ fire for conquest. In the spring of 326 b.c.e., they mutinied, forcing Alexander to turn back. The return journey through southeastern Iran’s deserts cost many casualties from hunger and thirst; the survivors finally reached safety in the Persian heartland in 324 b.c.e. Alexander immediately began planning an invasion of the Arabian peninsula and, after that, of North Africa. He also announced that he wished to receive the honors due a god. Most Greek citystates obeyed by sending religious delegations to him. Personal motives best explain Alexander’s announcement: he had come to believe he was truly the son of Zeus and that his superhuman accomplishments demonstrated that he must himself be a god. Alexander died from a fever in 323 b.c.e. Unfortunately for the stability of his immense conquests, he had no heir ready to take over his rule. Roxane gave birth to their son only after Alexander’s death. The story goes that, when at Alexander’s deathbed his commanders asked him to whom he left his kingdom, he replied, “To the most powerful.” Scholars disagree on almost everything about Alexander. Was he a bloodthirsty monster obsessed with war, or a romantic visionary intent on creating a multiethnic world open to all cultures? The ancient sources suggest that Alexander had interlinked goals reflecting his restless and ruthless nature: to conquer and administer the known world with a new ruling class mixing competent people from all ethnic groups, to outdo the exploits and glory of legendary heroes, and to earn the status no living human had ever achieved — that of a god on earth. Alexander’s explorations benefited scientific fields from geography to botany because he took along knowledgeable writers to collect and catalog new knowledge. He had vast quantities of scientific observations dispatched to his old tutor Aristotle. Alexander’s new cities promoted trade between Greece and the Near East. Most of REVIEW QUESTION What were the accomall, his career brought the two cultures into plishments of Alexander the Great, and what closer contact than ever before. This conwere their effects both for the ancient world tact represented his career’s most enduring and for later Western civilization? impact.

The Hellenistic Kingdoms, 323–30 b.c.e. New kingdoms arose when Alexander’s empire fragmented after his death. The time from Alexander’s death in 323 b.c.e. to the death of Cleopatra VII, the last Macedonian queen of Egypt, in 30 b.c.e. is the Hellenistic Age. The term Hellenistic (“Greeklike”) conveys the most significant characteristic of this period: the emergence in the eastern Mediterranean world of a mixture of Near Eastern and Greek traditions generating innovations in politics, literature, art, philosophy, and religion. War stirred up this cultural mixing, and tension persisted between conquerors and subjects.

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The Hellenistic period reintroduced monarchy into Greek culture for the first time in a thousand years. Commanders from Alexander’s army created the kingdoms by seizing portions of his empire and proclaiming themselves kings. This process of state formation took more than fifty years of war. The self-proclaimed kings — called Alexander’s successors — had to transform their families into dynasties and accumulate enough power to force the Greek city-states to obey them. Eventually, wars with the Romans ended the Hellenistic kingdoms.

Creating New Kingdoms Alexander’s successors divided his conquests among themselves. Antigonus (c. 382– 301 b.c.e.) took over Anatolia, the Near East, Macedonia, and Greece; Seleucus (c.358–281 b.c.e.) seized Babylonia and the East as far as India; and Ptolemy (c. 367– 282 b.c.e.) took over Egypt. These successors had to create their own form of monarchy based on military power and personal prestige because they were self-proclaimed rulers with no connection to Alexander’s royal line. The kingdoms’ territories were never completely stable because the Hellenistic monarchs never stopped competing (Map 4.2). Conflicts repeatedly arose over border areas. The Ptolemies and the Seleucids, for example, fought to control the eastern

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Monarchy became the dominant political system in the areas of Alexander’s conquests. By about eighty years after his death, the three major kingdoms established by his successors hadsettled their boundaries, after the Seleucids gave up their easternmost territories to an Indian king and the Attalids carved out their kingdom in western Anatolia.

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Mediterranean coast, just like the Egyptians and Hittites. The wars between the major kingdoms created openings for smaller kingdoms to establish themselves. The most famous of these smaller kingdoms was that of the Attalids in western Anatolia, with the wealthy city of Pergamum as its capital. In Bactria in Central Asia, the Greeks — originally colonists settled by Alexander — broke off from the Seleucid kingdom in the mid-third century b.c.e. to found their own regional kingdom, which flourished for a time from the trade in luxury goods between India and China and the Mediterranean world. The Hellenistic kingdoms imposed foreign rule by Macedonian kings and queens on indigenous populations. The kings incorporated local traditions into their rule tobuild legitimacy. The Ptolemaic royal family, for example, observed the Egyptian royal tradition of brother-sister marriage. Royal power was the ultimate source of control over the kingdoms’ subjects, in keeping with the Near Eastern monarchical tradition that Hellenistic kings adopted. Seleucus justified his rule on what he claimed as a universal truth of monarchy: “It is not the customs of the Persians and other people that I impose upon you, but the law which is common to everyone, that what is decreed by the king is always just.” The survival of these dynasties depended on their ability to create strong armies, effective administrations, and close ties to urban elites. A letter from a Greek city summed up the situation while praising the Seleucid king Antiochus I (c. 324–261 b.c.e.): “His rule depends above all on his own excellence [aretê], and on the goodwill of his friends, and on his forces.” Professional soldiers manned Hellenistic royal armies and navies. To develop their military might, the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings encouraged immigration by Greeks and Macedonians, who received land grants in return for military service. When this source of manpower gave out, the kings had to employ more local men as troops. Military competition put tremendous financial pressure on the kings to pay growing numbers of mercenaries and to purchase expensive new military technology. To compete effectively, a Hellenistic king had to provide giant artillery, such as catapults capable of flinging a 170-pound projectile up to two hundred yards. His navy cost a fortune because warships were now huge, requiring crews of several hundred men. War elephants became popular after Alexander brought them back from India, but they were extremely costly to maintain. Hellenistic kings needed effective administrations to collect revenues. Initially, they recruited mostly Greek and Macedonian immigrants to fill high-level posts. The Seleucids and the Ptolemies also employed non-Greeks for middle- and low-level positions, where officials had to be able to deal with the subject populations and speak their languages. Local men who wanted a government job bettered their chances if they could read and write Greek in addition to their native language. Bilingualism qualified them to fill positions communicating the orders of the highest-ranking officials, all Greeks and Macedonians, to local farmers, builders, and crafts producers. Non-Greeks who had successful government careers were rarely admitted to royal society because Greeks and Macedonians saw themselves as too superior

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to mix with locals. Greeks and non-Greeks therefore tended to live in separate communities. Administrators’ principal responsibilities were to maintain order and to direct the kingdoms’ tax systems. The Ptolemaic administration used methods of central planning and control inherited from earlier Egyptian history. Its officials continued to administer royal monopolies, such as that on vegetable oil, to maximize the king’s revenue. They decided how much land farmers could sow in oil-bearing plants, supervised production and distribution of the oil, and set prices for every stage of the oil business. The king, through his officials, also often entered into partnerships with private investors to produce more revenue. Cities were the Hellenistic kingdoms’ economic and social hubs. Many Greeks and Macedonians lived in new cities founded by Alexander and the Hellenistic kings in Egypt and the Near East, and they also immigrated to existing cities there. Hellenistic kings promoted this urban immigration by adorning their new cities with the features of classical Greek city-states, such as gymnasia and theaters. Although these cities often retained the city-state’s political institutions, such as councils and assemblies for citizen men, the need to follow royal policy limited their freedom; they made no independent decisions on foreign policy. The cities taxed their populations to send money demanded by the king. The crucial element in the Hellenistic kingdoms’ political and social structure was the system of mutual rewards by which the kings and their leading urban subjects became partners in government and public finance. Wealthy people in the cities were responsible for collecting taxes from the people in the surrounding countryside as well as from the city dwellers and sending the money on to the royal treasury. The kings honored and flattered the cities’ Greek and Macedonian social elites because they needed their cooperation to ensure a steady flow of tax revenues. When writing to a city’s council, a king would issue polite requests, but the recipients knew he was giving commands. This system thus continued the Greek tradition of requiring the wealthy elite to contribute financially to the common good. Cooperative cities received gifts from the king to pay for expensive public works like theaters and temples or for reconstruction after natural disasters such as earthquakes. Wealthy men and women in turn helped keep the general population peaceful by subsidizing teachers and doctors, financing public works, and providing donations and loans to ensure a reliable supply of grain to feed the city’s residents. To keep their vast kingdoms peaceful and profitable, the kings established relationships with well-to-do non-Greeks living in the old cities of Anatolia and the Near East. In addition, non-Greeks and non-Macedonians from eastern regions began moving westward to the new Hellenistic Greek cities in increasing numbers. Jews in particular moved from their ancestral homeland to Anatolia, Greece, and Egypt. The Jewish community eventually became an influential minority in Egyptian Alexandria, the most important Hellenistic city. In Egypt, as the Rosetta stone shows, the

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king also had to build good relationships with the priests who controlled the temples of the traditional Egyptian gods because the temples owned large tracts of rich land worked by tenant farmers.

The Layers of Hellenistic Society The royal family and the king’s friends had the highest social rank. The Greek and Macedonian elites of the major cities came next. Then came indigenous urban elites, leaders of large minority urban populations, and local lords in rural regions. Merchants, artisans, and laborers made up the free population’s bottom layer. Slaves still lacked any social status. The kingdoms’ growth increased the demand for slave labor throughout the eastern Mediterranean; a market on the island of Delos sold up to ten thousand slaves a day. The luckier ones were purchased as servants for the royal court or elite households and lived physically comfortable lives, so long as they pleased their owners. The luckless ones labored, and often died, in the mines. Enslaved children could be taken far from home to work. For example, a sales contract from 259 b.c.e. records that a Greek bought a seven-year-old girl named Gemstone to work in an Egyptian textile factory. Originally from an eastern Mediterranean town, she had previously labored as the slave of a Greek mercenary soldier employed by a Jewish cavalry commander in the Transjordan region. Poor people — the majority of the population — mostly labored in agriculture, the foundation of the Hellenistic kingdoms’ economies. There were some large cities, above all Alexandria in Egypt, but most people lived in country villages. Many of the poor were employed on the royal family’s huge estates, but free peasants still worked their own small fields in addition to laboring for wealthy landowners. Perhaps as many as 80 percent of all adult men and women had to work the land to produce enough food to sustain the population. In cities, poor women and men worked as small merchants, peddlers, and artisans, producing and selling goods such as tools, pottery, clothing, and furniture. Men could sign on as deckhands on the merchant ships that sailed the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. Many country people in the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms existed in a state of dependency between free and slave. The peoples, as they were called, were tenants who farmed the estates belonging to the king. Although they could not be sold like slaves, they were not allowed to move away or abandon their tenancies. They owed a large quota of produce to the king, and this compulsory rent gave these tenant farmers little chance to escape poverty. Hellenistic queens had great social status and commanded enormous riches and honors. They exercised power as the representatives of distinguished families, as the mothers of a line of royal descendants, and as patrons of artists, thinkers, and even entire cities. Later Ptolemaic queens essentially co-ruled with their husbands. Queens ruled on their own when no male heir existed. For example, Arsinoe II

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(c.316–270 b.c.e.), the daughter of Ptolemy I, first married the Macedonian successor Lysimachus, who gave her four towns as her personal domain. After his death she married her brother Ptolemy II of Egypt and was his partner in making policy. Publicpraise for a queen reflected traditional Greek values for women. A city decree from about 165 b.c.e. honored Queen Apollonis of Pergamum by praising her piety toward the gods, her reverence toward her parents, her distinguished conduct toward her husband, and her harmonious relations with her “beautiful children born in wedlock.” Some queens paid special attention to the condition of women. About 195 b.c.e., for example, the Seleucid queen Laodice gave a ten-year endowment to a city to provide dowries for needy girls. Laodice’s gift shows that she recognized the importance to women of controlling property, which was the surest guarantee of respect. Most women remained under the control of men. A common saying by men was “Who can judge better than a father what is to his daughter’s interest?” Most of the time, elite women continued to be separated from men outside their families, while poor women worked in public. Greeks continued to abandon infants they did not want to raise — girls more often than boys — but other populations, such as the Egyptians and the Jews, did not practice infant exposure. Exposure differed from infanticide in that the parents expected someone to find the child and rear it, usually as a slave. A third-century b.c.e. comic poet overstated the case by saying, “A son, one always raises even if one is poor; a daughter, one exposes, even if one is rich.” Daughters of wealthy parents were not usually abandoned, but scholars have estimated that up to 10 percent of other infant girls were. A woman of exceptional wealth could enter public life by making donations or loans to her city and in return be rewarded with an official post in local government. In Egypt, women of all classes acquired greater say in married life as the marriage contract evolved from an agreement between the bride’s parents and the groom to one in which the bride made her own arrangements with the groom. Rich people showed increasing concern for the welfare of poorer people during the Hellenistic period. They were following the lead of the royal families, who emphasized philanthropy to build a reputation for generosity that would support their legitimacy in ruling. Sometimes wealthy citizens funded a foundation to distribute free grain to eliminate food shortages, and they also funded schools for children in various Hellenistic cities, the first public schools in the Greek world. In some places, girls as well as boys could attend school. Many cities also began sponsoring doctors to improve medical care: patients still had to pay, but at least they could count on finding a doctor. The donors funding these services were repaid by the respect and honor they earned from their fellow citizens. When an earthquake devastated Rhodes, many cities joined kings and queens in sending donations to help the residents recover. In return, the citizens of Rhodes showered honors on their benefactors by appointing them to prestigious municipal offices and erecting inscriptions expressing the city’s gratitude.

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In this system, the masses’ welfare depended more and more on the generosity of the rich. Lacking democracy, the poor had no political power to demand support.

The End of the Hellenistic Kingdoms All the Hellenistic kingdoms eventually lost their riches and power, mostly through internal rivalries in their ruling families. Thus weakened, they could not prevent takeovers by the Romans, who over time intervened forcefully in conflicts among kingdoms and Greek city-states in the eastern Mediterranean. The Roman interventions caused wars. Rome first established dominance over the Antigonid kingdom by the middle of the second century b.c.e. Next, the Seleucid kingdom fell to the Romans in 64 b.c.e. The Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt survived a bit longer; by the 50s b.c.e., however, its royal family had split into warring factions, and the resulting weakness forced the rivals for the throne to seek Roman support. The end came when the famous queen Cleopatra VII, the last Macedonian to rule Egypt, chose the losing side in the civil war between Mark Antony and the future emperor Augustus in the late first century b.c.e. An invading Roman army REVIEW QUESTION How did the political ended Ptolemaic rule in 30 b.c.e. Rome andsocial organization of the new Hellenistic then became the heir to all the Helleniskingdoms compare with that of the earlier tic kingdoms (see Mapping the West, Greek city-states? page 139).

Relief Carving of Cleopatra and Her Son Caesarion This relief carving appears on thewall of a temple at Dendera inEgypt. It depicts Cleopatra VII, queen of Egypt, and her son by Julius Caesar, Caesarion (“Little Caesar”). They are shown wearingthe traditional ceremonial clothing and crowns of Egyptian pharaohs, a sign of the claim ofthe Ptolemaic ruling family to bethe legitimate rulers of Egypt despite their Macedonian ethnic origins. Both died in 30B.C.E. when Octavian, the adopted son of Julius Caesar and soon to become Augustus and the ruler of Rome, conquered Egypt and made it a Roman province. (© Ancient Art andArchitecture Collection, Ltd.)

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Hellenistic Culture Hellenistic culture reflected three principal influences: (1) the overwhelming impact of royal wealth, (2) increased emphasis on private life and emotion, and (3) greater interaction of diverse peoples. The kings drove developments in literature, art, science, and philosophy by deciding which scholars and artists to put on the royal payroll. The obligation of authors and artists to the kings meant that they did not have freedom to criticize public policy; their works mostly concentrated on everyday life and personal feelings. Cultural interaction between Near Eastern and Greek traditions occurred most prominently in language and religion. These developments deeply influenced the Romans as they took over the Hellenistic world. The Roman poet Horace (65–8 b.c.e.) described the effect of Hellenistic culture on his own Roman culture by saying that “captive Greece captured its fierce victor.”

The Arts under Royal Support Hellenistic kings became the supporters of scholarship and the arts on a vast scale, competing with one another to lure the best scholars and artists to their capitals with lavish salaries. They funded intellectuals and artists because they wanted to boost their reputations by having these famous people produce books, poems, sculptures, and other prestigious creations at their courts. The Ptolemies turned Alexandria into the Mediterranean’s leading arts and sciences center, establishing the world’s first scholarly research institute and a massive library. The librarians were instructed to collect all the books in the world. The library grew to hold half a million scrolls, an enormous number for the time. Linked to it was the building in which the hired research scholars dined together and produced encyclopedias of knowledge such as The Wonders of the World and On the Rivers of Europe. We still use the name of the research institute’s building, the Museum (“place of the Muses,” the Greek goddesses of learning and the arts), to designate institutions preserving knowledge. The writers and artists paid by Hellenistic kings had to please their paymasters. The poet Theocritus (c. 300–260 b.c.e.) spelled out the deal underlying royal support in a poem flattering King Ptolemy II: “The spokesmen of the Muses [that is, poets] celebrate Ptolemy in return for his benefactions.” Poets such as Theocritus avoided political topics and exploited the social gap that existed between the intellectual elite — to which the kings belonged — and the uneducated masses. They filled their new poetry with erudite references to make it difficult to understand and therefore exclusive. Only people with a deep literary education could appreciate the mythological allusions that studded these authors’ elaborate poems. No Hellenistic women poets seem to have enjoyed royal financial support; rather, they created their art independently. They excelled in writing epigrams, short poems in the style of those originally used on tombstones to remember the dead.

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Highly literary poems by women from diverse regions of the Hellenistic world still survive. Many epigrams were about women, from courtesans to respectable matrons, and the writer’s personal feelings. No other Hellenistic literature better conveys the depth of human emotion than the epigrams written by women poets. Hellenistic comedies also emphasized stories about emotions and stayed away from politics. Comic playwrights presented plays concerning the troubles of fictional lovers. These comedies became enormously popular because, like modern situation comedies (sitcoms), they offered humorous views of daily life. Papyrus discoveries have restored previously lost comedies of Menander (c. 342–289 b.c.e.), the most famous Hellenistic comic poet, noted for his skill in depicting human personality. Hellenistic tragedy could take a multicultural approach: Ezechiel, a Jew living in Alexandria, wrote Exodus, a tragedy in Greek about Moses leading the Hebrews out of captivity in Egypt. Hellenistic sculptors and painters featured emotions in their works as well. Classical artists had given their subjects’ faces an idealized serenity, but now Hellenistic sculptures depicted intense personal feelings. Athletes, for example, could be shown realistically as exhausted and scarred by the exertion required to compete at a high level. The increasing diversity of subjects that emerged in Hellenistic art presumably represented a trend approved by kings, queens, and the elites. Sculpture best reveals this new preference for depicting people who had never before appeared in art: heartbreaking victims of war, drunkards, battered athletes, wrinkled old people. The female nude became common. A statue of Aphrodite by Praxiteles, which portrayed the goddess completely naked for the first time, became renowned as a religious object Praxiteles’ Statue of Aphrodite The fourth-century B.C.E. Athenian sculptor Praxiteles excelled at carving stone to resemble flesh and producing perfect surfaces, which he had a painter make lively with color. His masterpiece was the Aphrodite made for the city-state of Cnidos in southwestern Anatolia; the original is lost, but many Hellenistic-era copies like this one were made. Praxiteles was the first to show the goddess oflove nude, and rumor said his lover was the model. Given that there was a long tradition of nude male statues, why do you think it took until the Hellenistic period for Greek sculptors to produce female nudes? (Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican Museums, Vatican State / Nimatallah / Art Resource, NY.)

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and also a tourist attraction in the city of Cnidos, which had commissioned it. The king of Bithynia offered to pay off the citizens’ entire public debt if he could have the work of art. They refused.

Philosophy for a New Age New philosophies arose in the Hellenistic period, all asking the same question: “What is the best way to live?” They recommended different paths to the same answer: individuals must achieve inner personal tranquility to achieve freedom from the disruptive effects of outside forces, especially chance. It is easy to see why these philosophies had appeal: outside forces — the Hellenistic kings — had robbed the Greek city-states of their independence in foreign policy, and their citizens’ fates ultimately rested in the hands of unpredictable monarchs. More than ever, human life seemed out of individuals’ control. It therefore was appealing to look to philosophy for personal solutions to the unsettling new conditions of Hellenistic life. Hellenistic philosophers concentrated on materialism, the doctrine that only things made of matter truly exist. This idea corresponded to Aristotle’s teaching that only things identified through logic or observation exist. Hellenistic philosophy was divided into three areas: (1) logic, the process for discovering truth; (2) physics, the fundamental truth about the nature of existence; and (3) ethics, how humans should achieve happiness and well-being through logic and physics. One of the two most significant new Hellenistic philosophies was Epicureanism, named for its founder, Epicurus (341–271 b.c.e.). He settled his followers around 307 b.c.e. in an Athenian house surrounded by greenery — hence, his school came to be known as the Garden. Epicurus broke tradition by admitting women and slaves to study philosophy in his group. Epicurus’s key idea was that people should be free of worry about death. Because all matter consists of tiny, invisible, and irreducible pieces called atoms in random movement, he said, death is nothing more than the painless separating of the body’s atoms. Moreover, all human knowledge must be empirical, that is, derived from experience and perception. Phenomena that most people perceive as the work of the gods, such as thunder, do not result from divine intervention in the world. The gods live far away in perfect tranquility, ignoring human affairs. People therefore have nothing to fear from the gods. Epicurus believed people should pursue true pleasure, meaning an “absence of disturbance.” Thus, people should live free from the turmoil, passions, and desires of ordinary existence. A sober life spent with friends and separated from the cares of the common world provided Epicurean pleasure. Epicureanism thus challenged the Greek tradition of political participation by citizens. The other most prominent Hellenistic philosophy, Stoicism, prohibited an isolationist life. Its name derives from the Painted Stoa in Athens, where Stoic philosophers discussed their ideas. Stoics believed that fate controls people’s lives but that individuals should still make the pursuit of excellence their goal. Stoic excellence

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meant putting oneself in harmony with the divine, rational force of universal nature by cultivating good sense, justice, courage, and temperance. These doctrines applied to women as well as men. Some Stoics advocated equal citizenship for women, unisex clothing, and abolition of marriage and families. The Stoic belief in fate raised the question of whether humans have free will. Stoic philosophers concluded that purposeful human actions do have significance even if fate rules. Nature, itself good, does not prevent evil from occurring, because excellence would otherwise have no meaning. What matters in life is striving for good. A person should therefore take action against evil by, for example, participating in politics. To be a Stoic also meant to shun desire and anger while calmly enduring pain and sorrow, an attitude that yields the modern meaning of the word stoic. Through endurance and self-control, Stoics gained inner tranquility. They did not fear death because they believed that people live the same life over and over again. This repetition occurred because the world is periodically destroyed by fire and then re-formed.

Tower of the Winds This forty-foot octagonal tower, built in Athens about 150 B.C.E., used scientific knowledge developed in Hellenistic Alexandria to tell time and predict the weather. Eight sundials (now missing) carved on the walls displayed thetime of day all year; a huge interior water clock showed hours, days, and phases of the moon. A vane on top showed wind direction. The carved figures represented the winds, which theGreeks saw as gods. Each figure’s clothing predicted the typical weather from that direction, with the cold northern winds wearing boots and heavy cloaks, while the southern ones have bare feet and gauzy clothes. What were the goals, do you imagine, in erecting such a large clock in a public place? (De Agostini Picture Library / S. Vannini / Bridgeman Images.)

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Several other Hellenistic philosophies competed with Epicureanism and Stoicism. Philosophers called Skeptics aimed for a state of personal calm, as did Epicureans, but from a completely different basis. They believed that secure knowledge about anything was impossible because the human senses perceive contradictory information about the world. All people can do, the Skeptics insisted, is depend on perceptions and appearances while suspending judgment about their ultimate reality. These ideas had been influenced by the Indian ascetics (who practiced self-denial as part of their spiritual discipline) encountered on Alexander the Great’s expedition. Cynics rejected every convention of ordinary life, especially wealth and material comfort. The name Cynic, which means “like a dog,” came from the notion that dogs had no shame. Cynics believed that humans should aim for complete self-sufficiency and that whatever was natural was good and could be done without shame before anyone. Therefore, such things as bowel movements and sex acts in public were acceptable. Above all, Cynics rejected life’s comforts. The most famous early Cynic, Diogenes (c. 412–c. 324 b.c.e.), wore borrowed clothing and slept in a storage jar. Also notorious was Hipparchia, a female Cynic of the late fourth century b.c.e. who once defeated a philosophical opponent named Theodorus the Atheist with the following remarks: “Anything that would not be considered wrong if done by Theodorus would also not be considered wrong if done by Hipparchia. Now if Theodorus punches himself, he does no wrong. Therefore, if Hipparchia punches Theodorus, she does no wrong.” Philosophy in the Hellenistic Age reached a wider audience than ever before. Although the working poor were too busy to attend philosophers’ lectures, many well-off members of society studied philosophy. Greek settlers took their interest in philosophy with them to even the most remote Hellenistic cities. Archaeologists excavating a city in Afghanistan — thousands of miles from Greece — uncovered a Greek philosophical text and inscriptions of moral advice recording Apollo’s oracle at Delphi as their source. Sadly, this site, called Ai-Khanoum, was devastated in the twentieth century during the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

Scientific Innovation Historians have called the Hellenistic period the golden age of ancient science. Scientific innovation flourished because Alexander’s expedition had encouraged curiosity and increased knowledge about the world’s extent and diversity, royal families supported scientists financially, and the concentration of scientists in Alexandria promoted the exchange of ideas. The greatest advances in scientific knowledge came in geometry and mathematics. Euclid, who taught at Alexandria around 300 b.c.e., made revolutionary discoveries in analyzing two- and three-dimensional space. Euclidean geometry is still useful. Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 b.c.e.) calculated the approximate value of pi and invented a way to manipulate very large numbers. He also invented hydrostatics (the science of the equilibrium of fluid systems) and mechanical devices, such as a

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screw for lifting water to a higher elevation and cranes to disable enemy warships. Archimedes’ shout of delight when he solved a problem while soaking in his bathtub has been immortalized in the expression Eureka! meaning “I have found it!” Advances in Hellenistic mathematics energized other fields that required complex computation. Early in the third century b.c.e., Aristarchus was the first to propose the correct model of the solar system: the earth revolving around the sun. Later astronomers rejected Aristarchus’s heliocentric model in favor of the traditional geocentric one (with the earth at the center) because conclusions drawn from his calculations of the earth’s orbit failed to correspond to the observed positions of celestial objects. Aristarchus had assumed a circular orbit instead of an elliptical one, an assumption not corrected until much later. Eratosthenes (c. 275–194 b.c.e.) pioneered mathematical geography. He calculated the circumference of the earth with astonishing accuracy by measuring the length of the shadows cast by widely separated but identically tall structures. Together, these researchers gave Western scientific thought an important start toward its fundamental procedure of reconciling theory with observed data through measurement and experimentation. Hellenistic science and medicine made gains even though no technology existed to measure very small amounts of time or matter. The science of the age was as quantitative as it could be, given these limitations. Ctesibius invented pneumatics by creating machines operated by air pressure. He also built a working water pump, an organ powered by water, and the first accurate water clock. Hero of Alexandria also built a rotating sphere powered by steam. As in most of Hellenistic science, these inventions did not lead to usable applications in daily life. The scientists and their royal patrons were more interested in new theoretical discoveries than in practical results, and the technology did not exist to produce the pipes, fittings, and screws needed to build metal machines. Hellenistic science produced impressive military technology, such as more powerful catapults and huge siege towers on wheels. The most famous large-scale application of technology for nonmilitary purposes was the construction of the Pharos, a lighthouse three hundred feet tall, for the harbor at Alexandria. Using polished metal mirrors to reflect the light from a large bonfire, the Pharos shone many miles out over the sea. Awestruck sailors called it one of the wonders of the world. Medicine also benefited from the Hellenistic quest for new knowledge. Increased contact between Greeks and people of the Near East made Mesopotamian and Egyptian medical knowledge better known in the West and promoted research on what made people ill. Hellenistic medical researchers discovered the value of measuring the pulse in diagnosing illness and studied anatomy by dissecting human corpses. It was rumored that they also dissected condemned criminals while they were still alive; they had access to these subjects because the king authorized the research. Some of the terms then invented are still used, such as diastolic and systolic for blood pressure. Other Hellenistic advances in anatomy included the discovery of the nerves and nervous system.

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Greek-Style Buddha The style of this statue of the founder of Buddhism, who expounded his doctrines in India, shows the mingling of Eastern and Western art. The Buddha’s appearance, gaze, and posture stem from Indian artistic traditions, while the flowing folds of his garment recall Greek traditions. This combination of styles is called Gandharan, after the region in northwestern India where it began. What do you think are the possible motives for combining different artistic traditions? (National Museum, New Delhi, India / Borromeo / Art Resource, NY.)

Cultural and Religious Transformations Cultural transformations also shaped Hellenistic society. Wealthy non-Greeks increasingly adopted a Greek lifestyle to conform to the Hellenistic world’s social hierarchy. Greek became the common language for international commerce and cultural exchange. The widespread use of the simplified form of the Greek language called Koine (“shared” or “common”) reflected the emergence of an international culture based on Greek models; this was the reason the Egyptian camel trader stranded in Syria mentioned atthe beginning of this chapter was at a disadvantage because he did not speak Greek. The most striking evidence of this cultural development comes from Afghanistan. There, King Ashoka (r. c. 268–232 b.c.e.), who ruled most of the Indian subcontinent, used Greek as one of the languages in his public inscriptions. These texts announced his plan to teach his subjects Buddhist self-control, such as abstinence from eating meat. Local languages did not disappear in the Hellenistic kingdoms, however. In one region of Anatolia, for example, people spoke twenty-two different languages. Religious diversity also grew. Traditional Greek cults (as described in Chapter 3) remained popular, but new cults, especially those deifying kings, reflected changing political and social conditions. Preexisting cults that previously had only local significance gained adherents all over the Hellenistic world. In many cases, Greek cults and local cults from the eastern Mediterranean influenced each other. Sometimes, local cults and Greek cults existed side by side and even overlapped. Some Egyptian villagers, for example, continued worshipping their traditional crocodile god and mummifying their dead, but they also honored Greek deities. As polytheists (believers in multiple gods), people could worship in both old and new cults.

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New cults incorporated a concern for the relationship between the individual and what seemed the arbitrary power of divinities such as Tychê (“chance” or “luck”). Since advances in astronomy had furthered knowledge about the movement of the universe’s celestial bodies, religion now had to address the disconnect between “heavenly uniformity” and the “shapeless chaos of earthly life.” One increasingly popular approach to bridging that gap was to rely on astrology, which was based on the movement of the stars and planets, thought of as divinities. Another common choice was to worship Tychê in the hope of securing good luck in life. The most revolutionary approach in seeking protection from Tychê’s unpredictable tricks was to pray for salvation from deified kings, who expressed their divine power in ruler cults. Various populations established these cults in recognition of great benefactions. The Athenians, for example, deified the Macedonian Antigonus and his son Demetrius as savior gods in 307 b.c.e., when they liberated the city and bestowed magnificent gifts on it. Like most ruler cults, this one expressed the population’s spontaneous gratitude to the rulers for their salvation, in hopes of preserving the rulers’ goodwill toward them by addressing the kings’ own wishes to have their power respected. Many cities in the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms set up ruler cults for their kings and queens. An inscription put up by Egyptian priests in 238 b.c.e. concretely described the qualities appropriate for a divine king and queen who brought physical salvation: King Ptolemy III and Queen Berenice, his sister and wife, the Benefactor Gods, . . . have provided good government . . . and [after a drought] sacrificed a large amount of their revenues for the salvation of the population, and by importing grain . . . they saved the inhabitants of Egypt. The Hellenistic monarchs’ tremendous power and wealth gave them the status of gods to the ordinary people who depended on their generosity and protection. The idea that a human being could be a god, present on earth to save people from evils, was now firmly established and would prove influential later in Roman imperial religion and Christianity. Healing divinities offered another form of protection to anxious individuals. The cult of the god Asclepius, who offered cures for illness and injury at his many shrines, grew in popularity during the Hellenistic period. Suppliants seeking Asclepius’s help would sleep in special locations at his shrines to await dreams in which he prescribed healing treatments. These prescriptions emphasized diet and exercise, but numerous inscriptions commissioned by grateful patients also testified to miraculous cures and surgery performed while the sufferer slept. The following example is typical: Ambrosia of Athens was blind in one eye. . . . She . . . ridiculed some of the cures [described in inscriptions in the sanctuary] as being incredible and impossible. . . . But when she went to sleep, she saw a vision; she thought the god was standing next to her. . . . He split open the diseased eye and poured in a medicine. When day came she left cured.

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Underground Labyrinth for Healing This underground stone labyrinth formed part of the enormous healing sanctuary of the god Asclepius at Epidaurus in Greece. Patients flocked to the site from all over the Mediterranean world. They descended into the labyrinth, which was covered and dark, as part of their treatment, which centered on reaching a trance state to receive dreams that would provide instructions ontheir healing and, sometimes, miraculous surgery. Do you think such treatment could be effective? (Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.)

People’s faith in divine healing gave them hope that they could overcome the constant danger of illness, which appeared to strike at random; there was no knowledge of germs as causing infections. Mystery cults promised initiates secret knowledge for salvation. The cults of the Greek god Dionysus and the Egyptian goddess Isis attracted many people. Isis became the most popular female divinity in the Mediterranean because her powers protected her worshippers in all aspects of their lives. Her cult involved rituals and festivals mixing Egyptian religion with Greek elements. Disciples of Isis strove to achieve personal purification and the goddess’s aid in overcoming the demonic power of Tychê. This popularity of an Egyptian deity among Greeks (and, later, Romans) is clear evidence of the cultural interaction of the Hellenistic world.

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Cultural interaction between Greeks and Jews influenced Judaism during the Hellenistic period. King Ptolemy II made the Hebrew Bible accessible to a wide audience by having his Alexandrian scholars produce a Greek translation — the Septuagint. Many Jews, especially those in the large Jewish communities that had grown up in Hellenistic cities outside their homeland, began to speak Greek and adopt Greek culture. These Greek-style Jews mixed Jewish and Greek customs, while retaining Judaism’s rituals and rules and not worshipping Greek gods. Internal conflict among Jews erupted in second-century b.c.e. Palestine over how much Greek tradition was acceptable for traditional Jews. The Seleucid king Antiochus IV (r. 175–164 b.c.e.) intervened to support Greek-style Jews in Jerusalem, who had taken over the high priesthood that ruled the Jewish community. In 167 b.c.e., Antiochus converted the great Jewish temple in Jerusalem into a Greek temple and outlawed Jewish religious rites such as observing the Sabbath and performing circumcision. This action provoked a revolt led by Judah the Maccabee, which won Jewish independence from Seleucid control after twenty-five years of war. The most famous episode in this revolt was the retaking of the Jerusalem temple and its rededication to the worship of the Jewish god, Yahweh, commemorated by the Hanukkah holiday. That Greek culture attracted some Jews in the first place provides a striking example of the transformations that affected many — though far from all — people of the Hellenistic world. By the time of the Roman Empire, one of those transformations would be Christianity, whose theology had roots in the cultural interaction of REVIEW QUESTION How did the political Hellenistic Jews and Greeks and their ideas changes of the Hellenistic period affect art, on apocalypticism (religious ideas revealscience, and religion? ing the future) and divine human beings.

Conclusion The aftermath of the Peloponnesian War led ordinary people as well as philosophers like Plato and Aristotle to question the basis of morality. The disunity of Greek international politics allowed Macedonia’s aggressive leaders Philip II and Alexander the Great to make themselves the masters of the competing city-states. Inspired by Greek heroic ideals, Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire and set in motion the Hellenistic period’s enormous political, social, and cultural changes. When Alexander’s commanders transformed themselves into Hellenistic kings after his death, they reintroduced monarchy into the Greek world, adding an administrative layer of Greek and Macedonian officials to the conquered lands’ existing governments. Local elites cooperated with the new Hellenistic monarchs in governing and financing their hierarchical society, which was divided along ethnic lines, with the Greek and Macedonian elite ranking above local elites. To enhance their own reputations, Hellenistic kings and queens funded writers, artists, scholars, phi-

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losophers, and scientists, thereby energizing intellectual life. The traditional citystates continued to exist in Hellenistic Greece, but their freedom extended only to local governance; the Hellenistic kings controlled foreign policy. Increased contacts between diverse peoples promoted greater cultural interaction in the Hellenistic world. Artists and writers expressed emotion in their works, philosophers discussed how to achieve true happiness, and scientists conducted research with royal support. More anxious than ever about the role of chance in life, many people looked for new religious experiences, especially in cults promising secret knowledge to initiates. What changed most of all was the Romans’ culture once they took over the Hellenistic kingdoms’ territory and came into close contact with their diverse peoples’ traditions. Rome’s rise to power took centuries, however, because Rome originated as a tiny, insignificant place that no one except Romans ever expected to amount to anything in the wider world.

Extent of Roman-controlled territory:

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146 B.C.E. 133 B.C.E.

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ATLANTIC OCEAN

ILLYRIA NE

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EPIRUS Samos AETOLIAN LEAGUE Athens ACHAEAN LEAGUE Sparta

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250

500 miles

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250

SELEUCID KINGDOM Antioch Eu ph ra SYRIA tes

Rhodes Cyprus

Alexandria

IA EN M

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NUMIDIA

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ARABIA Red Sea

MAPPING THE WEST Roman Takeover of the Hellenistic World, to 30 b.c.e.

By the death of Cleopatra VII of Egypt in 30 B.C.E., the Romans had taken over the Hellenistic kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. This territory became the eastern half of the Roman Empire.

Chapter 4 Review Key Terms and People Be sure that you can identify the term or person and explain its historical significance. Plato (p.116)

Alexander the Great (p.119)

Stoicism (p.131)

metaphysics (p.116)

Hellenistic (p.122)

Koine (p.135)

dualism (p.117)

epigrams (p.129)

ruler cults (p.136)

Aristotle (p.118)

materialism (p.131)

Lyceum (p.118)

Epicureanism (p.131)

Review Questions 1. How did daily life, philosophy, and the political situation change in Greece during the period 400–350 B.C.E.? 2. What were the accomplishments of Alexander the Great, and what were their effects both for the ancient world and for later Western civilization? 3. How did the political and social organization of the new Hellenistic kingdoms compare with that of the earlier Greek city-states? 4. How did the political changes of the Hellenistic period affect art, science, and religion?

Making Connections 1. What made ancient people see Alexander as “great”? Would he be regarded as “great” in today’s world? 2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of governmental support of the arts and sciences? Compare such support in the Hellenistic kingdoms to that in the United States today (e.g., through the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Science Foundation). 3. Is inner personal tranquility powerful enough to make a difficult or painful life bearable?

Suggested References After the Peloponnesian War, the structure of international relations changed radically in the Greek world as the city-states became secondary in political power to the kingdom of Macedonia, and then to the kingdoms of the Hellenistic period. Long-lasting cultural changes accompanied this political transformation. *Aristotle. Complete Works. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. 1985. Briant, Pierre. Alexander the Great and His Empire: A Short Introduction. Trans. Amélie Kuhrt. 2010. Chaniotis, Angelos. War in the Hellenistic World. 2005. Collins, John Joseph. Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora. 1999. Erskine, Andrew, ed. A Companion to the Hellenistic Age. 2003. Evans, J. A. S. Daily Life in the Hellenistic Age: From Alexander to Cleopatra. 2008. Martin, Thomas R., and Christopher W. Blackwell. Alexander the Great: The Story of an Ancient Life. 2012. Mikalson, Jon D. Religion in Hellenistic Athens. 1998.

*Primary source.

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Important Events 399 B.C.E.

Socrates is executed

386 B.C.E.

In King’s Peace, Sparta surrenders control of Anatolian Greek citystates to Persia; Plato founds Academy

362 B.C.E.

Battle of Mantinea leaves power vacuum in a disunited Greece

338 B.C.E.

Battle of Chaeronea allows Macedonian Philip II to become the leading power in Greece

335 B.C.E.

Aristotle founds Lyceum

334–323 B.C.E.

Alexander the Great leads Greeks and Macedonians to conquer Persian Empire

307 B.C.E.

Epicurus founds his philosophical group in Athens

306–304 B.C.E.

Successors of Alexander declare themselves kings

300–260 B.C.E.

Theocritus writes poetry at Ptolemaic court

c. 300 B.C.E.

Euclid teaches geometry at Alexandria

195 B.C.E.

Seleucid queen Laodice endows dowries for girls

167 B.C.E.

Maccabee revolt after Antiochus IV turns temple in Jerusalem into a Greek sanctuary

30 B.C.E.

Cleopatra VII dies and Rome takes over Ptolemaic Empire

Consider three events: Alexander the Great leads Greeks and Macedonians to conquer Persian Empire (334–323 B.C.E.), Epicurus founds his philosophical group in Athens (307 B.C.E.), and Euclid teaches geometry at Alexandria (c. 300 B.C.E.). How might Alexander’s expeditions have influenced developments in politics, philosophy, and science?

*Plato. The Collected Dialogues. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. 1963. *Plutarch. The Age of Alexander. Trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert. 1973. Pollitt, J. J. Art in the Hellenistic Age. 1986. Ptolemaic Egypt: http://www.houseofptolemy.org/ Sharples, R. W. Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics: An Introduction to Hellenistic Philosophy. 1996. Shipley, Graham. The Greek World after Alexander 323–30 B.C. 1999. Snyder, Jane M. The Woman and the Lyre: Women Writers in Classical Greece and Rome. 1989.

The Rise of Rome and Its Republic

753– 44 b.c.e.

he Romans treasured legends about their state’s transformation from a tiny village to a world power. They especially loved stories about their city’s legendary first king, Romulus. When early Rome needed more women to bear children to increase its population and build a strong army, Romulus begged Rome’s neighbors for permission for its men to marry their women. Everyone turned him down, mocking Rome’s poverty and weakness. Enraged, Romulus hatched a plan to use force where diplomacy had failed. Inviting the neighboring Sabines to a religious The Wolf Suckling Romulus festival, he had his men kidnap the unmarandRemus ried women who attended. The Roman kidThis bronze statue relates to the myth that a she-wolf nursed the twin brothnappers immediately married these Sabines, ers Romulus and Remus, the offspring promising to cherish them as beloved wives of the war god Mars and the future and new citizens. When the Sabine men founders of Rome. Romans treasured attacked Rome to rescue their kin, the women this story because it meant that Mars rushed into the midst of the bloody battle, loved their city so dearly that he sent a wild animal to nurse its founders after begging their brothers, fathers, and new a cruel tyrant had forced their mother husbands either to stop slaughtering one to abandon the infants. The myth also another or to kill them — their devoted sistaught Romans that their state had ters, daughters, and wives — to end the war. been born in violence: Romulus killed The men on both sides made peace on the Remus in an argument over who would spot and agreed to merge their populations lead their new settlement. The wolf is an Etruscan sculpture from the fifth under Roman rule. century B.C.E.; the babies were added This legend emphasizes that Rome, in the Renaissance. (Musei Capitolini, unlike the city-states of Greece, expanded by Rome, Italy / Scala / Art Resource, NY.) absorbing outsiders into its citizen body. Rome’s growth was the ancient world’s greatest expansion of population and territory, as a people originally housed in a few huts gradually created a state that fought countless wars and relocated an unprecedented number of citizens to gain control of most of Europe, North Africa, Egypt, and the eastern Mediterranean region. The social, cultural, political, legal, and economic 143

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traditions that Romans developed to rule this vast area created greater connections between diverse peoples than had ever existed before. Unlike the Greeks and Macedonians, the Romans maintained the unity of their state for centuries. The empire’s long existence allowed many Roman values and traditions to become essential components of Western civilization. Greek literature, art, and philosophy influenced Rome’s culture greatly. Romans learned from their neighbors, adapting foreign traditions to their own purposes and forging their own cultural identity. The legend about Romulus belongs to Rome’s earliest history, when kings ruled (753–509 b.c.e.). Rome’s later history is divided into the republic and the empire. Under the republic (founded 509 b.c.e.), male citizens elected government officials and passed laws (although an oligarchy of the social elite controlled politics). Under the empire, monarchs once again ruled. Rome’s greatest expansion came during the republic. Romans’ belief in a divine destiny fueled this tremendous growth. They believed that the gods wanted them to rule the world and improve it by making everyone adhere to their social and moral values. Roman values emphasized family loyalty, selfless political and military service to the community, individual honor and public status, the importance of the law, and shared decision making. By the first century b.c.e., power-hungry leaders such as Sulla and Julius Caesar had plunged Rome CHAPTER FOCUS How did traditional Roman into civil war. By putting their personal values affect both the rise and the downfall of ambition before the good of the state, they the Roman republic? destroyed the republic.

Roman Social and Religious Traditions Rome’s citizens believed that eternal moral values connected them to one another and required them to honor the gods in return for divine support. Hierarchy affected everyone: people at all social levels were obligated to patrons or to clients; in families, fathers dominated; in religion, people at all levels of society owed sacrifices, rituals, and prayers to the gods who protected the family and the state.

Roman Moral Values Roman values defined relationships with other people and with the gods. Romans guided their lives by the mos maiorum (“the way of the elders”), values passed down from their ancestors. The Romans preserved these values because, for them, old equaled “tested by time,” while new meant “dangerous.” Roman morality emphasized virtue, faithfulness, and respect. A reputation for behaving morally was crucial to Romans because it earned them the respect of others. Virtus (“manly virtue”) meant strength, loyalty, and courage, especially in war. It also included wisdom and moral purity; in this broader sense, women, too,

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couldpossess virtus. In the second century b.c.e., the Roman poet Lucilius defined it this way: Virtus is to know the human relevance of each thing, To know what is humanly right and useful and honorable, And what things are good and what are bad, useless, shameful, and dishonorable. . . . And, in addition, virtus is putting the country’s interests first, Then our parents’, with our own interests third and last. Fides (FEE dehs, “faithfulness”) meant keeping one’s obligations no matter the cost. Failing to meet an obligation offended the community and the gods. Faithful women remained virgins before marriage and monogamous afterward. Faithful men kept their word, paid their debts, and treated everyone with justice — which did not mean treating everyone equally, but rather appropriately, according to whether the person was a social superior, an equal, or an inferior. Showing respect and devotion to the gods and to one’s family was the supreme form of faithfulness. Romans believed they had to worship the gods faithfully to maintain the divine favor that protected their community. Roman values required that each person maintain self-control and limit displays of emotion. So strict was this value that not even wives and husbands could kiss in public without seeming emotionally out of control. It also meant that a person should never give up no matter how hard the situation. The reward for living these values was respect from others. Women earned respect by bearing legitimate children and educating them morally. Respected men relied on their reputations to help them win election to the republic’s government posts. A man of the highest reputation commanded so much respect that others would obey him regardless of whether he held an office with formal power over them. A man with this much prestige was said to possess authority. The concept of authority based on respect reflected the Roman belief that some people were by nature superior to others and that society had to be hierarchical to be just. Romans believed that aristocrats, people born into the “best” families, automatically deserved high respect. In return, aristocrats were supposed to live strictly by the highest values to serve the community. In legends about the early days of Rome, a person could be poor and still remain a proud aristocrat. Over time, however, money became overwhelmingly important to the Roman elite, to spend on showy luxuries, large-scale entertaining, and costly gifts to the community. In this way, wealth became necessary to maintain high social status.

The Patron-Client System The patron-client system was an interlocking network of personal relationships that obligated people to one another. A patron was a man of superior status able to provide benefits to lower-status people; these were his clients, who in return owed him

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duties and paid him special attention. In this hierarchical system, a patron was often himself the client of a higher-status man. Benefits and duties created mutual exchanges of financial and political help. Patrons would help their clients get started in business by giving them a gift or a loan and connecting them with others who could help them. In politics, a patron would promote a client’s candidacy for elective office and provide money for campaigning. Patrons also supported clients if they had legal trouble. Clients had to support their patrons’ campaigns for public office and lend them money to build public works and to fund their daughters’ dowries. A patron expected his clients to gather at his house at dawn to accompany him to the forum, the city’s public center, to show his great status. A Roman leader needed a large house to hold this throng and to entertain his social equals. Patrons’ and clients’ mutual obligations endured for generations. Ex-slaves, who became the clients for life of the masters who freed them, often handed down this relationship to their children. Romans with contacts abroad could acquire clients among foreigners; Roman generals sometimes had entire foreign communities obligated to them. The patron-client system demonstrated the Roman idea that social stability and well-being were achieved by faithfully maintaining established ties.

The Roman Family The family was Roman society’s bedrock because it taught values and determined the ownership of property. Men and women shared the duty of teaching their children values, though by law the father possessed the patria potestas (“father’s power”) over his children — no matter how old — and his slaves. This power made him the sole owner of all his dependents’ property. As long as he was alive, no son or daughter could officially own anything, accumulate money, or possess any independent legal standing. Unofficially, however, adult children did control personal property and money, and favored slaves could build up savings. Fathers also held legal power of life and death over these members of their households, but they rarely exercised this power except through exposure of newborns, an accepted practice to limit family size and dispose of physically imperfect infants. Patria potestas did not allow a husband to control his wife; instead, under the common arrangement called a “free” marriage, the wife formally remained under her father’s power as long as the father lived. But in the ancient world, few fathers lived long enough to oversee the lives of their married daughters or sons; four out of five parents died before their children reached age thirty. A Roman woman without a living father was relatively independent. Legally she needed a male guardian to conduct her business, but guardianship was largely an empty formality by the first century b.c.e. As a commentator explained, “The common belief seems more false than true that, because of their instability of judgment, women are often deceived and that therefore it is only fair to have them controlled by the authority of guardians. In fact, women of full age manage their affairs themselves.”

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Sculpture of a Woman Running a Store This sculpture portrays a woman selling food from a small shop while customers make purchases or chat. Since Roman women could own property, it is possible that the woman is the store owner. The man standing behind her could be her husband or a servant. Much like malls of today, markets in Roman towns were packed with small stores. (Art Resource, NY.)

A Roman woman had to grow up fast. Tullia (c. 79–45 b.c.e.), daughter of Rome’s most famous politician and orator, Cicero, was engaged at twelve, married at sixteen, and widowed by twenty-two. Like every other wealthy married Roman woman, she managed the household slaves, monitored the nurturing of the young children by wet nurses, kept account books to track the property she personally owned, and accompanied her husband to dinner parties — something a Greek wife never did. A mother’s responsibility for shaping her children’s values constituted the foundation of female virtue. Women like Cornelia, a famous aristocrat of the second century b.c.e., won enormous respect for loyalty to family. When her husband died, Cornelia refused an offer of marriage from King Ptolemy VIII of Egypt so that she could continue to oversee the family estate and educate her surviving daughter and two sons. (Her other nine children had died.) The boys, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, grew up to be among the most influential political leaders in the late republic. The number of children Cornelia bore reveals the fertility and stamina required of a Roman wife to ensure the survival of her husband’s family line. Cornelia also became famous for her stylishly worded letters, which were still being read a century later. Roman women could not vote or hold political office, but wealthy women like Cornelia influenced politics by expressing their opinions to men at home and at dinner parties. Marcus Porcius Cato (234–149 b.c.e.), a famous politician and author, described this clout: “All mankind rule their wives, we [Roman men] rule all mankind, and our wives rule us.”

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Women could acquire property through inheritance and entrepreneurship. Archaeological discoveries reveal that by the end of the republic some women owned large businesses. Prenuptial agreements determining the property rights of husband and wife were common. In divorce fathers kept the children. Most poor women worked as field laborers or in shops. Women and men both worked in manufacturing, which mostly happened in the home. The men worked the raw materials — cutting, fitting, and polishing wood, leather, and metal — while the women sold the finished goods. The poorest women earned money through prostitution, which was legal but considered disgraceful.

Education for Public Life Roman education aimed to make men and women effective speakers and exponents of traditional values. Most children received their education at home; there were nopublic schools, but the rich hired private teachers. Wealthy parents bought literate slaves called pedagogues to educate their children, especially to teach them Greek. In upper-class families, both daughters and sons learned to read. The girls were taught literature and music, and how to make educated conversation at dinner parties. The aim of women’s education was to prepare them to teach traditional social and moral values to their children. Sons received physical training and learned to fight with weapons, but rhetorical training dominated an upper-class Roman boy’s education because a successful political career depended on the ability to speak persuasively in public. A boy would learn winning techniques by listening to speeches in political meetings and arguments in court cases. The orator Cicero said, “[Young men must learn to] excel in public speaking. It is the tool for controlling men at Rome.”

Public and Private Religion Romans followed Greek models of religion. Their chief deity, Jupiter, corresponded to the Greek god Zeus and was seen as a powerful, stern father. Juno (Greek Hera), queen of the gods, and Minerva (Greek Athena), goddess of wisdom, joined Jupiter to form the state religion’s central triad. These three deities shared Rome’s most revered temple. Protecting Rome’s safety and prosperity was the gods’ major function. They were supposed to help Rome defeat enemies in war and to support agriculture. Prayers requested the gods’ aid in winning battles, growing abundant crops, healing disease, and promoting reproduction for animals and people. In times of crisis, Romans sought foreign gods for help in bringing salvation to their community, such as when the government imported the cult of the healing god Asclepius from Greece in 293b.c.e., praying he would stop an epidemic. The republic supported many other cults, including that of Vesta, goddess of the hearth and protector of the family. Her shrine housed Rome’s official eternal flame,

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which guaranteed the state’s permanent existence. The Vestal Virgins, six unmarried women sworn to chastity and Rome’s only female priests, tended Vesta’s shrine. They earned high status and freedom from their fathers’ control by performing their most important duty: keeping the flame from going out. If the flame went out, the Romans assumed that one of the Vestal Virgins had had sex and buried her alive. Religion was important in Roman family life. Each household maintained small indoor shrines that housed statuettes of the spirits of the household and those of the ancestors, protectors of the family’s health and morality. Upper-class families kept death masks of famous ancestors hanging in the main room and wore them at funerals to display their status. Religious rituals accompanied everyday activities such as breast-feeding babies or fertilizing crops. Many public religious gatherings promoted the community’s health and stability. For example, during the Lupercalia festival (whose name recalled the wolf, luper in Latin, that had reared Romulus and his twin, Remus, according to legend), near-naked young men streaked around the Palatine hill, lashing any woman they met with strips of goatskin. Women who had not yet borne children would run out to be struck, believing this would help them become fertile. The Romans did not regard the gods as guardians of human morality. As Cicero explained, “We call Jupiter the Best and Greatest not because he makes us just or sober or wise but, rather, healthy, unharmed, rich, and prosperous.” Roman officials preceded important actions with the ritual called taking the auspices, in which they sought Jupiter’s approval by observing natural signs such as birds’ flight direction or eating habits, or the appearance of thunder and lightning. Romans regarded values as divine forces. Pietas (“piety”), for example, meant devotion and duty to family, friends, the state, and the gods; a temple at Rome held a statue personifying pietas as a female divinity. The personification of abstract moral qualities provided a focus for cult rituals. The duty of Roman religious officials was to maintain peace with the gods. Socially prominent men served as priests, conducting sacrifices, festivals, and prayers. Priests were citizens performing public service, not religious professionals. The chief priest, the pontifex maximus (“greatest bridge-builder”), served as the head of state religion, a position carrying political prominence. The most prominent religious ceremonies at which priests presided were sacrifices of large animals, whose meat would be shared among the worshippers. Disrespect for religious tradition brought punishment. Admirals, for example, took the auspices by feeding sacred chickens on their warships: if the birds ate energetically, Jupiter favored the Romans and an attack could begin. In 249 b.c.e., the commander Publius Claudius Pulcher grew frustrated when his chickens, probablyseasick, refused to eat. Determined to attack, he finally hurled the birds overREVIEW QUESTION What common themes board in a rage, sputtering, “Well then, let underlay Roman values, and how did Romans’ them drink!” When he promptly suffered behavior reflect those values? a huge defeat, he was fined heavily.

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From Monarchy to Republic Romans’ values and their belief in a divine destiny fueled their astounding growth from a tiny settlement into the Mediterranean’s greatest power. The Romans spilled much blood as they gradually expanded their territory through war. From the eighth to the sixth century b.c.e., they were ruled by kings, but the later kings’ violence provoked members of the social elite to overthrow the monarchy and create the republic, which lasted until the first century b.c.e. The republic — res publica (“the people’s matter” or “the public business”) — distributed power among elected officials and assemblies of voters. This model of republican government, rather than Athens’s direct democracy, influenced the founders of the United States in organizing their new nation as a federal republic. The Roman Republic gained land and population by winning aggressive wars and by absorbing other peoples. Its economic and cultural growth depended on contact with many other peoples around the Mediterranean.

Roman Society under the Kings, 753–509 b.c.e. Seven kings ruled from 753 to 509 b.c.e. and created Rome’s most famous and enduring government body: the Senate, a group of distinguished men chosen as the king’s personal council. This council played the same role — advising government leaders — for a thousand years, as Rome changed from a monarchy to a republic and back to a monarchy (the empire). It was always a Roman tradition that one should never make decisions by oneself but only after consulting advisers and friends. Rome’s expansion depended on taking in outsiders conquered in war and, uniquely in the ancient world, freed slaves. Though freedmen and freedwomen owed special obligations to their former owners and could not hold elective office or serve in the army, they enjoyed all other citizens’ rights, such as legal marriage. Their children possessed citizenship without any limits. By the late republic, many Roman citizens were descendants of freed slaves. By 550 b.c.e., Rome had grown to some forty thousand people and, through war and diplomacy, had won control of three hundred square miles of surrounding territory. Recent archaeological excavation confirms that the Romans had already built substantial temples to their gods by this date. Rome’s geography propelled its further expansion. The Romans originated in central Italy, a long peninsula with a mountain range down its middle like a spine and fertile plains on either side. Rome also controlled a river crossing on a major north–south route. Most important, Rome was ideally situated for international trade: the Italian peninsula stuck so far out into the Mediterranean that east–west seaborne traffic naturally encountered it (Map 5.1), and the city had a good port nearby. The Italian ancestors of the Romans lived by herding animals, farming, and hunting. They became skilled metalworkers, especially in iron. The earliest Romans’ neighbors in central Italy were poor villagers, too, and spoke the same language, Latin. Greeks lived to the south in Italy and Sicily, and contact with them deeply affected Roman cultural development. Romans developed a love-hate relationship with

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When the Romans overthrew the monarchy to found a republic in 509B.C.E., they controlled a relatively small territory in central Italy. Many differentpeoples lived in Italy at this time, with the most prosperous occupying fertile agricultural land and sheltered harbors on the peninsula’s west side. The early republic’s most urbanized neighbors were the Etruscans to thenorth and the Greeks in the city-states to the south, including on the island of Sicily. Immediately adjacent to Rome were the people of Latium, called Latins. How did geography aid early Roman expansion in the Italian peninsula?

Greece, admiring its literature and art but looking down on its lack of military unity. Romans adopted many elements from Greek culture — from the deities for their national cults to the models for their poetry, prose, and architectural styles. The Etruscans, a people to the north, also influenced Roman culture. Brightly colored wall paintings in tombs, portraying funeral banquets and festive games, reveal the splendor of Etruscan society. In addition to producing their own art, jewelry, and sculpture, the Etruscans imported luxurious objects from Greece and the Near East. Most of the intact Greek vases known today were found in Etruscan tombs, and Etruscan culture was deeply influenced by that of Greece. Romans adopted ceremonial features of Etruscan culture, such as musical instruments, religious rituals, and lictors (attendants who walked before the highest officials carrying the fasces, a bundle of rods around an ax, symbolizing the officials’ right to command and punish). The Romans also borrowed from the Etruscans the ritual of divination — determining the will of the gods by examining organs of slaughtered animals. Other prominent features of Roman culture were probably part of the ancient Mediterranean’s shared practices, such as the organization of the Roman

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Etruscan Tomb of the Leopards This detail from a wall painting in an Etruscan Tomb shows a banquet in honor of the dead person buried in the underground chamber. Like Greeks, the banqueters recline on couches, propped up on an elbow. The servant, shown nude, is carrying a wine jug to refill. Unlike Greeks, the Etruscans mixed women and men as guests at dinner and drinking parties, a tradition they passed on to the Romans. The men are depicted with darker skin tones, while the woman has lighter skin, reflecting the tradition that upper-class women stayed out of the sun to avoid getting a tan. (O. Louis Mazzatenta / National Geographic Creative.)

army (a citizen militia of heavily armed infantry troops fighting in formation) and the use of an alphabet.

The Early Roman Republic, 509–287 b.c.e. The social elite’s hatred of monarchy motivated the creation of the Roman Republic. In 509 b.c.e., the son of the king raped the virtuous Roman woman Lucretia, who committed suicide to preserve her honor. Her relatives and friends from the social elite responded by overthrowing the king to found the republic. Thereafter, the Romans prided themselves on having a political system based on sharing political power among (male) citizens. The Romans struggled for 250 years to shape a stable government for the republic. Roman social hierarchy split the population into two orders: the patricians (a small group of the most aristocratic families) and the plebeians (the rest of the citizens). These two groups’ conflicts over power created the so-called struggle of the

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orders. The struggle finally ended in 287 b.c.e. when plebeians won the right to make laws in their own assembly. Patricians constituted a tiny percentage of the population — numbering only about 130 families — but in the beginning of the republic their inherited status entitled them to control public religion and to monopolize political office. Many patricians were much wealthier than most plebeians. Some plebeians, however, were also rich, and they resented the patricians’ dominance, especially their ban on intermarriage with plebeians. Poor plebeians demanded farmland and relief from crushing debts. Patricians inflamed tensions by wearing special red shoes to set themselves apart; later they changed to black shoes adorned with a small metal crescent. To pressure the patricians, the plebeians periodically refused military service. This tactic worked because Rome’s army depended on plebeian manpower.

The Roman Forum The center of this photo shows the Roman Forum, the valley below the Palatine hill (on the right) and the Capitoline hill (out of the picture at the bottom) that from the earliest days of the city served as the central space for meetings of all kinds. Over the centuries, it became crowded with buildings designed for political, judicial, and religious purposes; today, they survive only as ruins. The later version of the meetinghouse of the Roman Senate stands at the lower left edge of the photo. The huge amphitheater of the Colosseum can be seen in the upper right of the picture, located just outside the forum. (Italy, Latium Region, Rome, Colosseum or Flavian Amphitheater, aerial view, 70–80 A.D. / De Agostini Picture Library / Publiaer Foto / Bridgeman Images.)

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In response to plebeian unrest, the patricians agreed to the earliest Roman law code. This code, enacted between 451 and 449 b.c.e. and known as the Twelve Tables, guaranteed greater equality and social mobility. The Twelve Tables prevented patrician judges from giving judgments in legal cases only according to their own wishes. The Roman belief in fair laws as the best protection against social strife helped keep the republic united until the late second century b.c.e. The voting to elect officials took place around the forum in the city center (Map5.2). All officials worked as part of committees, to ensure power sharing. The highest officials, two elected each year, were called consuls. Their most important duty was to command the army. To be elected consul, a man had to win elections all the way up a ladder of offices (cursus honorum). Before politics, however, came ten years of military service from about age twenty. The ladder’s first step was getting elected quaestor (a financial administrator). Next was election as an aedile (supervisors of Rome’s streets, sewers, aqueducts, temples, and markets). The third step was election as praetor (a powerful office with judicial and military duties). The most successful praetors competed to be one of the two consuls elected each year. Praetors and consuls held imperium (the power to command and punish) and served as army generals. Families with a

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Roman tradition said that a king built Rome’s first defensive wall in the sixth century B.C.E., but archaeology shows that the first wall encircling the city’s center and seven hills on the east bank of the Tiber River belongs to the fourth century B.C.E.; this wall covered a circuit of about seven miles. By the second century B.C.E., the wall had been extended to soar fifty-two feet high and had been fitted with catapults to protect the large gates. Like the open agora surrounded by buildings at the heart of a Greek city, the forum remained Rome’s political and social heart. Do you think that modern cities would benefit from having a large public space at their center?

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consul among their ancestors were honored as nobles. By 367 b.c.e., the plebeians had forced passage of a law requiring that at least one of the two consuls be a plebeian. Ex-consuls competed to become one of the censors, elected every five years to conduct censuses of the citizen body and to appoint new senators. To be eligible for selection to the Senate, a man had to have been at least a quaestor. The patricians tried to monopolize the highest offices, but after violent struggle from about 500 to 450 b.c.e., the plebeians forced the patricians to create ten annually elected plebeian officials, called tribunes, who could stop actions that would harm plebeians or their property. The tribunate did not count as a regular ladder office. Tribunes based their special power on the plebeians’ sworn oath to protect them, and on their authority to block officials’ actions, prevent laws from being passed, suspend elections, and contradict the Senate’s advice. The tribunes’ extraordinary power to veto government action often made them agents of political conflict. Men competed in elections to win respect and glory, not money. Only well-off men could serve in government because officials earned no salaries and were expected to spend their own money to pay for public works and for expensive shows featuring gladiators and wild animals. In the early republic, officials’ only reward was respect, but as Romans conquered overseas territory, the desire for money from plunder overcame many men’s adherence to traditional Roman values of faithfulness and honesty. By the second century b.c.e., military officers were also enriching themselves by extorting bribes as administrators of conquered territories. The Senate directed government policy by giving advice to the consuls. The senators’ social standing gave their opinions great weight. To make their status visible, the senators wore black high-top shoes and robes with a broad purple stripe. If a consul rejected the Senate’s advice, a political crisis ensued. Three different assemblies made legislation, conducted elections, and rendered judgment in certain trials. The Centuriate Assembly, which elected praetors and consuls, was dominated by patricians and rich plebeians. The Plebeian Assembly, which excluded patricians, elected the tribunes. In 287 b.c.e., its resolutions, called plebiscites, became legally binding on all Romans. The Tribal Assembly mixed patricians with plebeians and became the republic’s most important assembly. Each assembly was divided into groups, with each group comprising a different number of men based on status and wealth; each group had one vote. Before assembly meetings, orators gave speeches about issues. Everyone, including women and noncitizens, could listen to these pre-vote speeches. The crowd expressed its opinions by either applauding or hissing. This process mixed a small measure of democracy with the republic’s oligarchy. Early on, the praetors decided most legal cases. A separate jury system arose in the second century b.c.e., and senators repeatedly clashed with other upper-class Romans over whether these juries should consist exclusively of senators. Accusers and accused had to speak for themselves in court, or have friends speak for them. Priests dominated in legal knowledge until the third century b.c.e., when senators with legal expertise, called jurists, began to offer advice about cases.

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The Roman Republic’s complex political and judicial system evolved in response to conflicts over power. Laws could emerge from different assemblies, and legal cases could be decided by various institutions. Rome had no single highest court, such as the U.S. Supreme Court, to give final verdicts. The republic’s stability therefore depended on maintaining the mos maiorum. Because REVIEW QUESTION How and why did the they defined this tradition, the most socially Roman republic develop its complicated prominent and richest Romans dominated political and judicial systems? politics and the courts.

Roman Imperialism and Its Consequences From the fifth to the third century b.c.e., the Romans fought war after war in Italy until Rome became the most powerful state on the peninsula. In the third and second centuries b.c.e., Romans warred far from home in every direction, above all against Carthage across the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Their success in these campaigns made Rome the premier power in the Mediterranean by the first centuryb.c.e. Fear of enemies and the desire for wealth propelled this Roman imperialism, as modern scholars tend to label the process of expansion of Rome’s power internationally. The senators’ worries about national security spurred them to recommend preemptive attacks against foreign powers. Poor soldiers hoped to pull their families out of poverty; the elite, who commanded the armies, wanted to strengthen their campaigns for office by acquiring glory and greater wealth. The state of being at war transformed Roman life. Romans had no literature until around 240 b.c.e., when contact with conquered peoples stimulated their first written history and poetry. War’s harshness also influenced Roman art. Repeated military service away from home created stresses on small farmers and undermined the stability of Roman society; so, too, did the relocation of numerous citizens and the importation of countless war captives to work as slaves on wealthy people’s estates. Rome’s great conquests turned out to be a double-edged sword: they brought expansion and wealth, but their unexpected social and political consequences disrupted the traditional values and stability of the community.

Expansion in Italy, 500–220 b.c.e. After defeating their Latin neighbors in the 490s b.c.e., the Romans spent the next hundred years warring with the nearby Etruscan town of Veii. Their 396 b.c.e. victory doubled their territory. By the fourth century b.c.e., the Roman infantry legion of five thousand men had surpassed the Greek and Macedonian infantry phalanx as an effective fighting force because in the legion’s more flexible battle line the soldiers were trained to throw javelins from behind their long shields and then rush in to finish off the enemy with swords. A devastating sack of Rome in 387 b.c.e. by marauding

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Gauls (Celts) from beyond the Alps made Romans 0 100 200 miles forever fearful of foreign invasion. By around 0 100 200 kilometers Po R. 220b.c.e., Rome controlled all of Italy south of the Genoa Bologna Po River, at the northern end of the peninsula. Tiber The Romans combined brutality with diploR. Adriatic Sea macy to control conquered peoples. Sometimes they Corsica Rome enslaved the defeated or forced them to surrender large parcels of land. Other times they offered genSardinia erous peace terms to former enemies but required Tyrrhenian Sea them to join in fighting against other foes, for which they received a share of the spoils, mainly slaves Palermo Messana Sicily and land. To increase homeland security, the Romans Roman Roads, 110 b.c.e. planted numerous colonies of relocated citizens and constructed roads up and down the peninsula to allow troops to travel faster. By connecting Italy’s diverse peoples, these settlements promoted a unified culture dominated by Rome. Latin became the common language, although some local tongues lived on.

Aqueduct at Nîmes in France The Romans excelled at building complex delivery systems of tunnels, channels, bridges, and fountains to transport fresh water from far away. One of the best-preserved sections of a major aqueduct is the so-called Pont-du-Gard near Nîmes (ancient Nemausus) in France, erected in the late first century B.C.E. to serve the flourishing town there. Built of stones fitted together without clamps or mortar, the span soars 160 feet high and 875 feet long, carrying water along its topmost level from 35 miles away in a channel constructed to fall only one foot in height for every 3,000 feet in length so that the flow would remain steady but gentle. What sort of social and political organization would be necessary to construct such a system? (Hubertus Kanus / Science Source)

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The wealth of its army attracted hordes of people to Rome, where new aqueducts provided fresh, running water and a massive building program employed many. By 300 b.c.e., about 150,000 people lived within Rome’s walls (Map 5.2, page 154). Outside the city, around 750,000 free Roman citizens inhabited various parts of Italy on land that had been taken from local peoples. Much conquered territory was declared public land, open to any Roman for grazing cattle. Rich plebeians and patricians cooperated to exploit the expanding Roman territories, deriving their wealth from agricultural land and war plunder. Since Rome had no regular income or inheritance taxes, families could pass down their wealth from generation to generation freely.

Wars with Carthage and in the East, 264–121 b.c.e. The Roman Republic fought its three most famous foreign wars against the wealthy city of Carthage in North Africa, which Phoenicians had founded around 800 b.c.e. Carthage, governed as a republic like Rome, controlled a powerful empire rich from farming in Africa and seaborne trade in the Mediterranean. Carthage seemed both a dangerous rival and a fine prize. Horror at the Carthaginians’ reported tradition of incinerating infants to placate their gods in times of trouble also fed Romans’ hostility against people they saw as barbarians. Rome’s wars with Carthage are called the Punic Wars (from the Latin word for “Phoenician”). The first one (264–241 b.c.e.) erupted over Sicily, where Carthage wanted to preserve its trading settlements, while Rome wanted to block Carthaginian power close to Italy. This long conflict revealed why the Romans won wars: the large Italian population provided deep manpower reserves, and the government was prepared to sacrifice as many troops, spend as much money, and fight as long as it took to defeat the enemy. Previously unskilled at naval warfare, the Romans expended vast sums to build warships to combat Carthage’s experienced navy; they lost more than five hundred ships and 250,000 men while learning how to win at sea. The Romans’ victory in the First Punic War made them masters of Sicily, where they set up their first province (a foreign territory ruled and taxed by Roman officials). This innovation proved so profitable that they soon seized the islands of Sardinia and Corsica from the Carthaginians to create another province. These first successful foreign conquests increased the Romans’ appetite for expansion outside Italy (Map 5.3). Fearing a renewal of Carthage’s power, the Romans cemented alliances with local peoples in Spain, where the Carthaginians were expanding from their southern trading posts. The Carthaginians decided to strike back. In the Second Punic War (218– 201b.c.e.), their general Hannibal terrified the Romans by marching troops and war elephants over the Alps into Italy. Slaughtering thirty thousand Romans at Cannae in 216 b.c.e., Hannibal tried to convince Rome’s Italian allies to desert, but most refused to rebel. Hannibal’s alliance in 215 b.c.e. with the king of Macedonia forced

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Roman territory: c. 500 B.C.E. (victory over Latium) 264 B.C.E. (start of First Punic War) 241 B.C.E. (end of First Punic War)

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MAP 5.3 Roman Expansion, 500–44 b.c.e.

During its first two centuries, the Roman republic used war and diplomacy to extend its power north and south in the Italian peninsula. In the third and second centuries B.C.E., conflict with Carthage in the south and west and the Hellenistic kingdoms in the east extended Roman power outside Italy and led to the creation of provinces from Spain to Greece. The first century B.C.E. saw the conquest of Syria by Pompey and of Gaul by Julius Caesar.

the Romans to fight on a second front in Greece. Still, they refused to crack despite Hannibal’s ravaging of Italy from 218 to 203 b.c.e. Invading the Carthaginians’ homeland, the Roman army won the battle of Zama in 202 b.c.e. The Senate forced Carthage to scuttle its navy, pay huge war indemnities, and hand over its Spanish territory, rich with silver mines. The Third Punic War (149–146 b.c.e.) began when the Carthaginians retaliatedagainst the aggression of the king of Numidia, a Roman ally. After winning the war, the Romans heeded the senator Cato’s demand, “Carthage must be destroyed!” They obliterated the city and converted its territory into a province. This disaster did not destroy Carthaginian culture, however, and under the Roman Empire this part of North Africa flourished economically and intellectually, creating a synthesis of Roman and Carthaginian traditions.

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The aftermath of the Punic Wars extended Roman power to Spain, North Africa, Macedonia, Greece, and western Asia Minor. Hannibal’s alliance with the king of Macedonia had brought Roman troops east of Italy for the first time. After defeating the Macedonian king for revenge and to prevent any threat of his invading Italy, the Roman commander proclaimed the “freedom of the Greeks” in 196 b.c.e. to show respect for Greece’s glorious past. The Greek cities and federal leagues understood the proclamation to mean that they, as “friends” of Rome, could behave as they liked. They were mistaken. The Romans expected them to behave as clients and follow their new patrons’ advice. The Romans repeatedly intervened to make the kingdom of Macedonia and the Greeks observe their obligations as clients. The Senate in 146 b.c.e. ordered Corinth destroyed for asserting its independence and converted Macedonia and Greece into a province. In 133 b.c.e., a Hellenistic king increased Roman power with a stupendous gift: in his will he bequeathed to Rome his kingdom in western Asia Minor. In 121 b.c.e., the Romans made the lower part of Gaul across the Alps (modern southern France) into a province. By the late first century b.c.e., then, Rome governed and profited from two-thirds of the Mediterranean region; only the easternmost Mediterranean lay outside its control (see Map 5.3, page 159).

Greek Influence on Roman Literature and the Arts Roman imperialism generated extensive cross-cultural contact with Greece. Roman authors and artists found inspiration in Greek literature and art. The earliest Latin poetry was a translation of Homer’s Odyssey by a Greek ex-slave, composed sometime after the First Punic War. About 200 b.c.e., the first Roman historian used Greek to write his narrative of Rome’s founding and the wars with Carthage. Many famous early Latin authors were not native Romans but came from different regions of Italy, Sicily, and even North Africa. All found inspiration in Greek literature. Roman comedies, for example, took their plots and stock characters from Hellenistic comedy such as that of Menander, which featured jokes about family life and stereotyped personalities, such as the braggart warrior and the obsessed lover. In the mid-second century b.c.e., Cato established Latin prose writing with his history of Rome, The Origins, and his instructions on running a large farm, On Agriculture. He predicted that if the Romans adopted Greek values, they would lose their power. In fact, early Latin literature reflected traditional Roman values. For example, the path-breaking Latin epic Annals, a poetic version of Roman history by the poet Ennius, shows the influence of the Greek epic but praises ancestral Roman traditions, as in this famous line: “The Roman state rests on the ways and the men of old.” Later Roman writers also took inspiration from Greek literature. The firstcentury b.c.e. poet Lucretius wrote On the Nature of Things to persuade people not to fear death. His ideas reflected Greek philosophy’s “atomic theory,” which said that matter was composed of tiny, invisible particles. Dying, the poem taught, simply

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meant the dissolving of the union of atoms, which had come together temporarily to make up a person’s body. There could be no eternal punishment or pain after death because a person’s soul perished along with the body. Hellenistic Greek authors inspired Catullus in the first century b.c.e. to write witty poems ridiculing prominent politicians for their sexual behavior and lamenting his own disastrous love life. His most famous love poems revealed his obsession with a married woman named Lesbia. The orator and politician Cicero (106–43 b.c.e.) wrote speeches, letters, and treatises on political science, philosophy, ethics, and theology. He adapted Greek philosophy to Roman life and stressed the need to appreciate each person’s uniqueness. His doctrine of humanitas (“humaneness,” “the quality of humanity”) expressed an ideal for human life based on generous and honest treatment of others and a commitment to morality based on natural law (the rights that belong to all people because they are human beings, independent of the differing laws and customs of different societies). Greece also influenced Rome’s art and architecture. Hellenistic sculptors had pioneered a realistic style showing the ravages of age and pain on the human body. They portrayed only stereotypes, however, such as the “old man” or the “drunken woman,” not specific people. Their portrait sculpture presented actual individuals in the best possible light, much like a digitally enhanced photograph today. By contrast, Roman artists applied Greek realism to male portraiture, as contemporary Etruscan sculptors also did. They sculpted men without hiding their unflattering features: long noses, receding chins, deep wrinkles, bald heads, and worried looks. Portraits of women, by contrast, were more idealized, probably representing the traditional vision of the bliss of family life. Because the men depicted in the portraits (or their families) paid for the busts, they may have wanted their faces sculpted realistically — showing the damage of age and effort — to emphasize how hard they had worked to serve the republic.

Stresses on Society from Imperialism The wars of the third and second centuries b.c.e. damaged small farmers, creating grave social and economic difficulties for the republic. The long deployments oftroops abroad disrupted Rome’s agricultural system, the economy’s foundation. A farmer absent during a protracted war had to rely on a hired hand or slave to manage his crops and animals, or have his wife perform farm work in addition to her usual family responsibilities. The story of the consul Regulus, who won a great victory in Africa in 256 b.c.e., revealed the problems that prolonged absence caused. When the man who managed Regulus’s farm died while the consul was away fighting, a worker stole all the farm’s tools and livestock. Regulus begged the Senate to send a replacement fighter so that he could return to save his wife and children from starving. The senators instead sent help to preserve Regulus’s family and property because they wanted to keep him on the battle lines.

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Ordinary soldiers received no special aid, and economic troubles hit them hard when, in the second century b.c.e., for unknown reasons, there was no longer enough farmland to support the population. The rich had deprived the poor of land, but recent research suggests that an increase in the number of young people created the crisis. Not all regions of Italy suffered as severely as others, and some impoverished farmers and their families survived by working as agricultural laborers for others. Many homeless people, however, relocated to Rome, where the men begged for work and women made cloth or, in desperation, became prostitutes. This flood of landless poor created an explosive element in Roman politics by the late second century b.c.e. The government had to feed its poor citizens to avert riots, so Rome needed to import grain. The poor’s demand for low-priced (and eventually free) food distributed at state expense became one of the most divisive issues in the late republic. While the landless poor struggled, imperialism meant political and financial rewards for Rome’s social elite. The need for commanders to lead military campaigns

Bedroom in a Rich Roman House This bedroom from about 40 B.C.E. was in the house of a rich Roman family near Naples; it was buried — and preserved — by the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius in 79 C.E. The bright paintings showed a dazzling variety of outdoor scenes and architecture. The stone floor helped create a sensation of coolness in the summer. (Cubiculum [bedroom] from the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, c. 50–40 B.C.E. Fresco, Room: 8 ft. ½ in. × 10 ft. 11½ in. × 19 ft. 7¼ in. [265.4 × 334 × 583.9 cm.]. Rogers Fund, 1903 [03.14.13a-g]. Location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.)

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abroad created opportunities for successful generals to enrich their families. The elite enhanced their reputations by spending their gains to finance public works that benefited the general population. Building new temples, for example, won praise because the Romans believed it pleased their gods to have many shrines. The troubles of small farmers enriched landowners who could buy bankrupt farms to create large estates. Some landowners also illegally occupied public land carved out of territory seized from defeated enemies. The rich worked their huge farms, called latifundia, with free laborers as well as slaves who had been taken captive in the same wars that displaced so many farmers. The size of the latifundia slave crews made their periodic revolts so dangerous that the army had to fight hard to suppress them. The elite profited from Rome’s expansion by filling the governing offices in the new provinces. Some governors ruled honestly, but others used their power to extort the locals. Since martial law ruled, no one in the provinces could curb a greedy governor’s appetite for graft and extortion. Often such offenders escaped punishment because their fellow senators excused their crimes. The new opportunities for rich living strained the traditional values of moderation and frugality. Previously, a man could become legendary for his life’s simplicity: Manius Curius (d. 270 b.c.e.), for example, boiled turnips for his meals in a humble hut despite his glorious military victories. Now the elite acquired showy luxuries, REVIEW QUESTION What advantages and such as large country villas for entertaining disadvantages did Rome’s victories over foreign peoples create for both rich and poor friends and clients. Money had become Romans? more valuable to them than the republic’s ancestral values.

Civil War and the Destruction of the Republic Conflict among members of the Roman upper class in the late second century b.c.e. turned politics into a violent competition. This conflict exploded into civil wars in the first century b.c.e. that destroyed the Roman Republic. Senators introduced violence to politics by murdering the tribunes Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus when the brothers pushed for reforms to help the poor by giving them land. When a would-be member of the elite, Gaius Marius, opened military service to the poor to boost his personal status, his creation of “client armies” undermined faithfulness to the general good of the community. The people’s unwillingness to share citizenship with Italian allies sparked a damaging war in Italy. Finally, the competition for power by the “great men” Sulla, Pompey, and Julius Caesar peaked in destructive civil wars.

The Gracchus Brothers and Violence in Politics, 133–121 b.c.e. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus based their political careers on pressuring the rich to make concessions to strengthen the state. Their policies supporting the poor angered

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many of their fellow members of the social elite. Tiberius explained the tragic circumstances motivating them: The wild beasts that roam over Italy have their dens. . . . But the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy nothing but the air and light. They wander about homeless with their wives and children. . . . They fight and die to protect the wealth and luxury of others. They are called masters of the world, but have not a lump of earth they call their own. When Tiberius became tribune in 133 b.c.e., he took the radical step of blocking the Senate’s will by having the Plebeian Assembly vote to redistribute public land to landless Romans and to spend the Attalid king’s gift of his kingdom to equip new farms on the land. Tiberius next announced he would run for reelection as tribune for the following year, violating the prohibition against consecutive terms. His opponents therefore led a band of senators and their clients to kill him and many of his clients, shouting, “Save the Republic.” Gaius, elected tribune for 123 b.c.e. and, contrary to tradition, again for the next year, also pushed measures that outraged his fellow elite: more farming reforms, subsidized prices for grain, public works projects to employ the poor, and colonies abroad with farms for the landless. His most revolutionary measures proposed Roman citizenship for many Italians, and new courts to try senators accused of corruption as provincial governors. The new juries would be manned by equites (“equestrians” or “knights”). These were wealthy businessmen whose focus on commerce instead of government made their interests different from the senators’. Because they did not serve in the Senate, the equites could convict senators for crimes without having to face peer pressure. When the senators blocked Gaius’s plans in 121 b.c.e., he threatened violent resistance. The senators then advised the consuls “to take all measures necessary to defend the republic,” meaning they should kill anyone identified as dangerous to public order. When his enemies came to murder him, Gaius committed suicide by having a slave cut his throat. The senators then killed hundreds of his supporters. The conflict over reforms introduced factions (aggressive interest groups) into Roman politics. Members of the elite now identified themselves as either supporters of the people, the populares faction, or supporters of “the best,” the optimates faction. Some chose a faction from genuine allegiance to its policies; others supported whichever side better promoted their own political advancement. The elite’s splintering into bitterly hostile factions remained a source of murderous political violence until the end of the republic.

Marius and the Origin of Client Armies, 107–100 b.c.e. A new kind of leader arose to meet the need to combat slave revolts and foreign invasions in the late second and early first centuries b.c.e. The “new man” was an

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upper-class man without a consul among his ancestors, whose ability led him to fame, fortune, and — his ultimate goal — the consulship. Gaius Marius (c. 157–86 b.c.e.), from the equites class, set the pattern for the influential “new man.” Gaining fame for his brilliant military record, Marius won election as a consul for 107 b.c.e. Marius’s success as a commander, first in North Africa and next against German tribes attacking southern France and Italy, led the people to elect him consul six times, breaking all tradition. For his victories, the Senate voted Marius a triumph, Rome’s ultimate military honor. In this ceremony, crowds cheered as he rode a chariot through Rome’s streets. His soldiers shouted obscene jokes about him, to ward off the evil eye at his moment of supreme glory. Despite Marius’s triumph, the optimates never accepted him as an equal. His support came from the common people, whom he had won over with his revolutionary reform of entrance requirements for the army. Previously, only men with property could usually enroll as soldiers. Marius opened the ranks to proletarians, men who had no property and could not afford weapons. For them, serving in the army meant an opportunity to better their life by acquiring plunder and a grant of land. Marius’s reform created armies that were more loyal to their commander than to the republic. Poor Roman soldiers behaved like clients following their commander as patron, who benefited them with plunder. They in turn supported his political ambitions. Commanders after Marius used client armies to advance their careers more ruthlessly than he had, accelerating the republic’s internal conflict.

Sulla and Civil War, 91–78 b.c.e. One such commander, Lucius Cornelius Sulla (c. 138–78 b.c.e.), took advantage of uprisings by non-Romans in Italy and Asia Minor in the early first century b.c.e. to use his client army to seize Rome’s highest offices and force the Senate to support him. His career revealed the dirty secret of politics in the late republic: traditional values no longer restrained commanders who prized their own advancement over peace and the good of the community. The uprisings in Italy occurred because many of Rome’s Italian allies lacked Roman citizenship and therefore had no vote in decisions that affected them. Their upper classes also wanted to share the prosperity that war brought to Rome’s citizen elite. The Roman people rejected the allies’ demand for citizenship, afraid that sharing such status would lessen their own privileges. The Italians’ discontent erupted in 91–87 b.c.e. in the Social War. They demonstrated their commitment by the number of their casualties — 300,000 dead. Although Rome’s army prevailed, the rebels won the political war: the Romans granted citizenship and the vote to all freeborn people in Italy south of the Po River. The Social War’s bloodshed therefore reestablished Rome’s tradition of strengthening the state by granting citizenship to outsiders. Sulla’s generalship in the war won him election as consul for 88 b.c.e. When Mithridates VI (120–63 b.c.e.), king of Pontus on the Black Sea’s southern coast,

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Escape from Troy on a Coin of Julius Caesar This coin minted for Julius Caesar in 47/46 B.C.E. shows thehero Aeneas escaping from Troy, which the victorious Greeks were burning down. He carries his elderly father onhis shoulder and the city’s wooden statue of the goddess Athena in his right hand. This myth was a famous example of the Roman value of faithfulness, a quality that Caesar wanted to claim for himself at the time, when he was still fighting other Romans for control of the state as the republic was being torn apart by the violent conflict among upper-class leaders. (bpk, Berlin / Muenzkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany / Art Resource, NY.)

rebelled against Roman control and high taxation, Sulla seized his chance. Victory against Mithridates would mean capturing unimaginable riches from Asia Minor’s cities and allow him to restore his patrician but impoverished family’s status. When the Senate gave Sulla the command, Marius had it transferred to himself by plebiscite. Outraged, Sulla marched his client army against Rome. All his officers except one deserted him in horror at this shameful attack, but his common soldiers followed him. After capturing Rome, Sulla killed or exiled his opponents. He let his men rampage through the city and then led them off to Asia Minor, ignoring a summons to stand trial and sacking Athens on the way. In Sulla’s absence, Marius embarked on his own reign of terror in Rome to try to regain his former power. In 83 b.c.e., Sulla returned victorious, having allowed his soldiers to plunder Asia Minor. Civil war erupted for two years until Sulla crushed his enemies at home. Sulla then exterminated his opponents. He used proscription — posting a list of people accused of being traitors so that anyone could hunt them down and execute them. Because proscribed men’s property was confiscated, the victors fraudulently added to the list anyone whose wealth they coveted. The terrorized Senate appointed Sulla dictator — an emergency office supposed to be held only temporarily — and gave him permanent immunity from prosecution. Sulla reorganized the government to favor the optimates — his social class — by making senators the only ones allowed to judge cases against their colleagues and forbidding tribunes from sponsoring legislation or holding any other office after their term. Sulla’s career revealed the strengths and weaknesses of Roman values. First, the purpose of war had changed from defending the community to accumulating plunder for common soldiers as well as commanders. Second, the patron-client system led proletarian soldiers to feel stronger ties of loyalty to their generals than to the republic. Finally, the traditional competition for status worked both for and against political stability. When that value motivated men to seek office to promote the community’s welfare, it promoted social unity and prosperity. But pushed to its extreme, the contest for individual prestige and wealth destroyed the republic.

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Julius Caesar and the Collapse of the Republic, 83–44 b.c.e. Powerful generals after Sulla proclaimed their loyalty to the community while in reality ruthlessly pursuing their own advancement. The competition for power and money between Gnaeus Pompey and Julius Caesar, two Roman aristocrats, generated the civil war that ended the Roman Republic and led to the return of monarchy. Pompey (106–48 b.c.e.) was a brilliant general. In his early twenties he won victories supporting Sulla. In 71 b.c.e., he won the mop-up battles defeating a massive slave rebellion led by a gladiator named Spartacus, stealing the glory from the real victor, Marcus Licinius Crassus. (Spartacus had terrorized southern Italy for two years and defeated consuls with his army of 100,000 escaped slaves.) Pompey shattered tradition by demanding and receiving a consulship for 70 b.c.e., even though he was nowhere near the legal age of forty-two and had not been elected to any lower post on the ladder of offices. Three years later, he received a command to exterminate the pirates who were then infesting the Mediterranean, a task he accomplished in a matter of months. This success made him wildly popular with many groups: the urban poor, who depended on a steady flow of imported grain; merchants, who depended on safe sea lanes; and coastal communities, which were vulnerable to pirates’ raids. In 66 b.c.e., he defeated Mithridates, who was still stirring up trouble in Asia Minor. By annexing Syria as a province in 64 b.c.e., Pompey ended the Seleucid kingdom and extended Rome’s power to the Mediterranean’s eastern coast. People compared Pompey to Alexander the Great and added Magnus (“the Great”) to his name. He ignored the tradition of consulting the Senate about conquering and administering foreign territories, and behaved like an independent king. He summed up his attitude by replying to some foreigners who criticized his actions as unjust: “Stop quoting the laws to us,” he told them. “We carry swords.” Pompey’s enemies at Rome undermined his popularity by seeking the people’s support, declaring sympathy for the problems of citizens in financial trouble. By the 60s b.c.e., Rome’s urban population had soared to more than half a million. Hundreds of thousands of the poor lived crowded together in slum apartments, surviving on subsidized food distributions. Jobs were scarce. Danger haunted the streets because the city had no police force. Even many formerly wealthy property owners were in trouble: Sulla’s confiscations had caused land values to plummet and produced a credit crunch by flooding the real estate market with properties for sale. The senators, jealous of Pompey’s glory, blocked his reorganization of the former Seleucid kingdom and his distribution of land to his army veterans. Pompey then negotiated with his fiercest political rivals, Crassus and Caesar (100–44 b.c.e.). In 60b.c.e., they formed an unofficial arrangement called the First Triumvirate (“group of three”). Pompey forced through laws confirming his plans, reinforcing his status as a great patron. Caesar got the consulship for 59 b.c.e. and a special command in Gaul, where he could build his own client army. Crassus received financial breaks for the Roman tax collectors in Asia Minor, who supported him politically and financially.

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This coalition of political rivals revealed how private relationships had largely replaced communal values in politics. To cement their political bond, Caesar arranged to have his daughter, Julia, marry Pompey in 59 b.c.e., even though she had been engaged to another man. Pompey soothed Julia’s jilted fiancé by offering the hand of his own daughter, who had been engaged to yet somebody else. Through these marital machinations, the two powerful antagonists now had a common interest: the fate of Julia, Caesar’s only daughter and Pompey’s new wife. (Pompey had earlier divorced his second wife after Caesar allegedly seduced her.) Pompey and Julia apparently fell deeply in love in their arranged marriage. As long as Julia lived, Pompey’s affection for her kept him from breaking his alliance with her father. During the 50s b.c.e., Caesar won his soldiers’ loyalty with victories and plunder in Gaul, which he added to the Roman provinces. His political enemies in Rome dreaded his return, and the bond allying him to Pompey shattered in 54 b.c.e. when Julia died in childbirth. The two leaders’ rivalry exploded into violence: gangs of their supporters battled each other in Rome’s streets. The violence became so bad in 53 b.c.e. that it prevented elections. The First Triumvirate dissolved, and in 52 b.c.e. Caesar’s enemies convinced the Senate to make Pompey consul alone, breaking the republic’s long tradition of two consuls sharing power at the head of the state. Civil war exploded when the Senate ordered Caesar to surrender his command. Like Sulla, Caesar led his army against Rome. In 49 b.c.e., when he crossed the Rubicon River, the official northern boundary of Italy, he uttered the famous words signaling there was now no turning back: “We have rolled the dice.” His troops and the people in the countryside cheered him on. He had many backers in Rome, with the masses counting on his legendary generosity for handouts and impoverished members of the elite hoping to regain their fortunes. The support for Caesar convinced Pompey and most senators to flee to Greece. Caesar entered Rome peacefully, left soon thereafter to defeat enemies in Spain, and then sailed to Greece. There he nearly lost the war when his supplies ran out, but his soldiers stayed loyal even when they were reduced to eating bread made from roots. When Pompey saw what Caesar’s men were willing to live on, he cried, “I am fighting wild beasts.” Caesar defeated Pompey and the Senate at the battle of Pharsalus in central Greece in 48 b.c.e. Pompey fled to Egypt, where the pharaoh’s ministers treacherously murdered him. Caesar then invaded Egypt, winning a difficult campaign that ended when he restored Cleopatra VII (69–30 b.c.e.) to the Egyptian throne. As ruthless as she was intelligent, Cleopatra charmed Caesar into sharing her bed and supporting her rule. Their love affair shocked the general’s friends and enemies alike: they thought Rome should seize power from foreigners, not share it with them. By 45 b.c.e., Caesar had won the civil war. He apparently believed that only a sole ruler could end the chaotic violence of the factions, but the republic’s oldest tradition prohibited monarchy. So Caesar decided to rule as a king without the title, taking instead the traditional Roman title of dictator, used for a temporary emergency ruler. In 44 b.c.e., he announced he would continue as dictator without a term

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Ides of March Coin Celebrating Caesar’s Murder Coins were the most widely distributed form of art and communication in the Roman world. Their messages became topical and contemporary during the crisis of the late republic. Caesar’s assassins, led by Marcus Junius Brutus, issued this coin celebrating the murder and their claim to be liberators. The daggers refer to their method, while the conical cap stands for liberation — it was the kind of headgear worn by slaves who had won their freedom. The inscription gives the date of the assassination, the Ides of March (March 15). What political message was intended by putting pictures of murder weapons on a coin? (© The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY.)

limit. “I am not a king,” he insisted. The distinction, however, was meaningless. As ongoing dictator, he controlled the government. Elections for offices continued, but Caesar manipulated the results by recommending candidates to the assemblies, which his supporters dominated. As sole ruler, Caesar imposed a moderate cancellation of debts; a cap on the number of people eligible for subsidized grain; a large program of public works, including public libraries; colonies for his veterans in Italy and abroad; plans to rebuild Corinth and Carthage as commercial centers; and citizenship for more non-Romans. Caesar treated his opponents mildly, thereby obligating them to become his grateful clients. Caesar’s decision not to seek revenge earned him unheard-of honors, such as a special golden seat in the Senate house and the renaming of the seventh month of the year after him (July). He also regularized the Roman calendar by having each year include 365 days, a calculation based on an ancient Egyptian calendar that forms the basis for our modern one. Caesar’s dictatorship satisfied the people but outraged the optimates. They resented being dominated by one of their own, a “traitor” who had deserted to the people’s faction. Some senators, led by Caesar’s former close friend Marcus Junius Brutus (85–42 b.c.e.), conspired to murder him. They stabbed Caesar repeatedly in the Senate house on March 15 (the Ides of March), 44 b.c.e. When Brutus struck him, Caesar gasped his last words — in Greek: “You, too, son?” He collapsed dead at the foot of a statue of Pompey. The liberators, as they called themselves, had no new plans for government. They apparently expected the republic to revive automatically after Caesar’s murder,ignoring the political violence of the past century and the deadly imbalance in Roman values, with “great men” placing their competitive private interests above thecommunity’s well-being. The liberators were stunned when the people rioted at Caesar’s funeral to vent their anger against the upper class that had robbed them of their generous patron. Instead of then REVIEW QUESTION What factors generated forming a united front, the elite resumed the conflicts that caused the Roman Republic’s their personal vendettas. The traditional destruction? values of the republic failed to save it.

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Conclusion The two most remarkable features of the Roman Republic’s history were its tremendous expansion and its violent disintegration. Rome expanded to control vast territories because it incorporated outsiders, its small farmers produced agriculturalsurpluses to support a growing population and army, and its leaders respected the traditional values stressing the common good. The Romans’ willingness to endure great loss of life and property — the proof of faithfulness — made their army unstoppable: Rome might lose battles, but never wars. Because wars of conquest brought profits to leaders and the common people alike, peace seemed a wasted opportunity. But the victories over Carthage and in Macedonia and Greece had unexpected consequences. Long military service ruined many farming families, and poor people flocked to Rome to live on subsidized food, becoming an unstable political force. Members of the upper class increased their competition with one another for the career opportunities presented by constant war. These rivalries became dangerous to the state when successful generals began acting as patrons to client armies of poor troops. Violence and murder became common in political disputes. Communal values were submerged in the blood of civil war. No one could have been optimistic about the chances for an enduring peace following Caesar’s assassination in 44 b.c.e. It would have seemed an impossible dream to imagine that Caesar’s grandnephew and adopted son, Octavian — a teenage student at the time of the murder — would eventually bring peace by creating a new political system disguised as the restoration of the old republic.

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Conclusion

BRITAIN

GERMANIA Alesia 52 B.C.E.

ATLANTIC Avaricum 52 B.C.E. Gergovia OCEAN 52 B.C.E. NEE

W Danub eR

E S

BOSPORAN KINGDOM

GAUL

PY R E

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Bibracte 58 B.C.E.

S L P

Arar River Po R. 58 B.C.E. Rubicon R.

Ilerda 49 B.C.E.

Rome

SPAIN

Black Sea ARMENIA

Philippi 42 B.C.E.

Dyrrhacium 48 B.C.E.

Zela 47 B.C.E.

GREECE

ASI A MI NO R

Pharsalus 48 B.C.E.

NUMIDIA MAURETANIA

Med iter ranea n

Thapsus 46 B.C.E.

SYRIA

Eu ph

Sea Jerusalem

Alexandria 47 B.C.E.

NO RTH AFR ICA

O ES

Carthage

IAN R. TH E r i s PAR PIR Tig IA s R. EM M ate TA r PO

Carrhae 53 B.C.E.

Corinth

Munda 45 B.C.E.

JUDAEA

CYRENAICA

Roman territory at Caesar’s death, 44 B.C.E.

250

500 miles

Sea

250

Major battles of the civil war

EG Y PT 0

Caesar’s major battles in Gaul

Red

Ni l

Roman client states

500 kilometers

MAPPING THE WEST The Roman World at the End of the Republic, 44 b.c.e.

By the time of Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 B.C.E., the territory that would be the Roman Empire was almost complete. Caesar’s young relative Octavian (the future Augustus) would conquer and add Egypt in 30 B.C.E. Geography, distance, and formidable enemies were the primary factors inhibiting further expansion — which Romans never stopped wanting, even when lack of money and political discord rendered it purely theoretical. The deserts of Africa and the once again powerful Persian kingdom in the Near East worked against expansion southward or eastward, while trackless forests and fierce resistance from local inhabitants made expansion into central Europe and the British Isles impossible to maintain.

Chapter 5 Review Key Terms and People Be sure that you can identify the term or person and explain its historical significance. mos maiorum (p.144)

Twelve Tables (p.154)

equites (p.164)

patron-client system (p.145)

ladder of offices (p.154)

populares (p.164)

patria potestas (p.146)

plebiscites (p.155)

optimates (p.164)

res publica (p.150)

Cicero (p.161)

proletarians (p.165)

orders: patricians and plebeians (p.152)

humanitas (p.161)

First Triumvirate (p.167)

Review Questions 1. What common themes underlay Roman values, and how did Romans’ behavior reflect those values? 2. How and why did the Roman Republic develop its complicated political and judicial systems? 3. What advantages and disadvantages did Rome’s victories over foreign peoples create forboth rich and poor Romans? 4. What factors generated the conflicts that caused the Roman Republic’s destruction?

Making Connections 1. How did the political and social values of the Roman Republic compare to those of the Greek city-state in the Classical Age? 2. What were the positive and the negative consequences of war for the Roman republic? 3. How can people decide what is the best balance between individual advancement and communal stability?

Suggested References Scholars continue to debate the causes and the effects of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, focusing in particular on the intended and unintended political, social, and cultural consequences of the many wars that the Romans fought in this period. Beard, Mary, et al. Religions of Rome. 2 vols. 1998. Billows, Richard. Julius Caesar: The Colossus of Rome. 2008. *Caesar. The Civil War. Trans. John Carter. 1997. *Cicero. On the Good Life. Trans. Michael Grant. 1971. Cornell, Tim. The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000–264 B.C.). 1995. Daily life (and more): http://www.vroma.org/~bmcmanus/romanpages.html Earl, Donald. The Moral and Political Tradition of Rome. 1967. Flower, Harriet. Roman Republics. 2009. Gardner, Jane. Women in Roman Law and Society. 1986. Goldworthy, Adrian. The Punic Wars. 2000. Haynes, Sybill. Etruscan Civilization: A Cultural History. 2005. *Primary source.

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Important Events 753 B.C.E.

Traditional date of Rome’s founding as monarchy

509 B.C.E.

Roman Republic is established

509–287 B.C.E.

Struggle of the orders

451–449 B.C.E.

Creation of Twelve Tables, Rome’s first written law code

396 B.C.E.

Defeat of Etruscan city of Veii; first great expansion of Roman territory

387 B.C.E.

Gauls sack Rome

264–241 B.C.E.

Rome and Carthage fight First Punic War

220 B.C.E.

Rome controls Italy south of Po River

218–201 B.C.E.

Rome and Carthage fight Second Punic War

168–149 B.C.E.

Cato writes The Origins, first history of Rome in Latin

149–146 B.C.E.

Rome and Carthage fight Third Punic War

146 B.C.E.

Carthage and Corinth are destroyed

133 B.C.E.

Tiberius Gracchus is elected tribune; assassinated in same year

91–87 B.C.E.

Social War between Rome and its Italian allies

60 B.C.E.

First Triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus

49–45 B.C.E.

Civil war, with Caesar the victor

45–44 B.C.E.

Cicero writes his philosophical works on humanitas

44 B.C.E.

Caesar is appointed dictator with no term limit; assassinated in same year

Consider two events: Cato writes The Origins (168–149 B.C.E.) and Carthage and Corinth are destroyed (146 B.C.E.). What attitudes prompted Cato’s writings, and how were similar ideas reflected in the destruction of Carthage and Corinth?

Hoyos, Dexter. The Carthaginians. 2010. Martin, Thomas R. Ancient Rome: From Romulus to Justinian. 2012. *Plutarch. The Fall of the Roman Republic. Trans. Rex Warner. Rev. ed. 2006. Ramage, Nancy H., and Andrew Ramage. Roman Art. 2008. Roller, Duane W. Cleopatra: A Biography. 2010. Rosenstein, Nathan, and Robert Morstein-Marx, eds. A Companion to the Roman Republic. 2006.

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n 203 c.e., Vibia Perpetua, wealthy and twenty-two years old, was confined in a Carthage jail, nursing her infant. She had been condemned to death for treason after refusing to sacrifice to the gods for the Roman emperor’s health and safety. Perpetua recorded what happened when the local governor tried to persuade her to save her life: Mosaic of Chariot Racing Racing four-horse chariots was the most popular (and most expensive) sport in the Roman Empire. This mosaic, a picture made from thousands of tiny colored tiles put together like a giant jigsaw puzzle, shows a driver holding a branch signifying that he has just won a big race. Two attendants or race officials are in the background. Hundreds of thousands of spectators attended the largest races at the Circus Maximus in Rome, but many cities across the empire had tracks. Romans loved the races’ action and potential violence, as chariots swerved at top speed around and around the tight turns of the track and sometimes collided in bloody accidents. (Museo Arqueologico

My father came carrying my son, shouting “Perform the sacrifice; take pity on your baby!” Then the governor said, “Think of your old father; show pity for your little child! Offer the sacrifice for the imperial family’s well being.” “I refuse,” I answered. “Are you a Christian?” asked the governor. “Yes.” When my father would not stop trying to change my mind, the governor ordered him thrown to the earth and whipped with a rod. I felt sorry for my father; it seemed they were beating me. I pitied his pathetic old age.

Gored by a wild cow and stabbed by a gladiator, Perpetua died because she placed her faith above her duty of loyalty to her family and the state. Nacional, Madrid, Spain / De Agostini Picture Rome’s rulers during what we call the Library / Gianni Dagli Orti / Bridgeman Images.) Roman Empire punished disloyalty because it threatened to reignite the civil wars that had destroyed the Roman Republic. The refusal of some Christians such as Perpetua to perform traditional sacrifice was considered treason because Romans believed the gods would punish them for sheltering people who refused to worship them and rejected the traditional religion. 175

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The transformation from republic to empire opened with seventeen years of civil war after Julius Caesar’s death in 44 b.c.e. Finally, in 27 b.c.e., his adopted son, Octavian (thereafter known as Augustus), created a disguised monarchy to end the violence, declaring that he had restored the republic. Augustus’s new system retained traditional institutions for sharing power — the Senate, the consuls, the courts — but in reality he and his successors governed like kings ruling an empire. Augustus’s innovations brought peace for two hundred years, except for a struggle between generals for rule in 69 c.e. This Pax Romana (“Roman Peace”) allowed agriculture and trade to flourish in the provinces, but paying for the military eventually weakened Rome. Previously, foreign wars had won Romans huge amounts of land and money, but now the distances were too great and the enemies too strong. The army was no longer an offensive weapon for expansion that brought in new taxes but instead a defense force that had to be paid for out of existing revenues. The financial strain drained the treasury and destabilized the government. Christianity emerged as a new religion that would slowly transform the Roman world, but it also created tension because the growing presence of Christians made other Romans CHAPTER FOCUS How did Augustus’s worry about punishment from the gods. “restored republic” successfully keep the Inthe third century c.e., a crisis developed peace for more than two centuries, and why when generals competing to rule reignited didit fail in the third century? civil war that lasted fifty years.

From Republic to Empire, 44 b.c.e.–14 c.e. It takes time for a new tradition to take hold. Augustus created his new political system gradually; following his favorite saying, Augustus “made haste slowly.” He succeeded because he reinvented government, guaranteed the army’s support, did not hesitate to use violence to win power, and built political legitimacy by communicating an image of himself as a dedicated leader and patron. By declaring his respect for tradition and establishing his disguised monarchy as Rome’s political system, he saved the state from anarchy. Succeeding where Caesar had failed, Augustus preserved his power by making the new look old.

Civil War, 44–27 b.c.e. The main competitors in the civil war after Julius Caesar’s death were Octavian (the future Augustus), Caesar’s eighteen-year-old grandnephew and adopted son, and Caesar’s friend Mark Antony. Octavian won over Caesar’s soldiers by promising them money he had inherited from their general. Marching them to Rome, the teenage Octavian forced the Senate to make him consul in 43 b.c.e., ignoring the ladder of offices. Octavian and Mark Antony joined with a general named Lepidus to eliminate rivals. In 43 b.c.e., they formed the Second Triumvirate to reorganize the govern-

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ment. They murdered many of their enemies, including some of their own relatives, and seized their property. Octavian and Antony then forced Lepidus out and fought each other. Antony controlled the eastern provinces by allying with the ruler of Egypt, Queen Cleopatra VII (69–30 b.c.e.), who had earlier allied with Julius Caesar. Dazzled by her intelligence and magnetism, Antony, who was married to Octavian’s sister, fell in love with Cleopatra. Octavian rallied support by claiming that Antony planned to make this foreign queen Rome’s ruler. He made the residents of Italy and the western provinces swear an oath of allegiance to him. Octavian’s victory in the naval battle of Actium in northwest Greece in 31 b.c.e. won the war. Cleopatra and Antony fled to Egypt, where they both committed suicide in 30 b.c.e. The general Mark Antony first stabbed himself, bleeding to death in his lover’s embrace. Queen Cleopatra then ended her life by allowing a poisonous snake to bite her. Octavian’s revenues from the capture of Egypt made him Rome’s richest citizen.

The Creation of the Principate, 27 b.c.e.–14 c.e. In 27 b.c.e., Octavian proclaimed that he “gave back the state from [his] own power to the control of the Roman Senate and the people” and announced they should decide how to preserve it. Recognizing Octavian’s power, the senators asked him to safeguard the state, granted him special civil and military powers, and bestowed on him the honorary title Augustus, meaning “divinely favored.” Augustus changed Rome’s political system, but he retained the name republic and maintained the appearance of representative government. Citizens elected consuls, the Senate gave advice, and the assemblies met. Augustus occasionally served as consul, but mostly he let others hold that office so they could enjoy its prestige. He concealed his monarchy by referring to himself only with the honorary title princeps, meaning “first man” (among social equals), a term of status from the republic. The Romans used the Latin word princeps to describe the position that we call emperor, and so the Roman government in the early empire after 27 b.c.e. is most accurately labeled the principate. Each new princeps was supposed to be chosen only with the Senate’s approval, but in practice each ruler chose his own successor, in the way a royal family decides who will be king. To preserve the tradition that no official should hold more than one post at a time, Augustus as princeps had the Senate grant him the powers, though not the office, of a tribune. In 23 b.c.e., the Senate agreed that Augustus should also have a consul’s power to command (imperium): in fact, his power would be superior to that held by the actual consuls. Holding the power of a tribune and a power even greater than that of a consul meant that Augustus could rule the state without filling any formal executive political office. Augustus insisted that people obeyed him not out of fear but out of respect for his auctoritas (“moral authority”). Since Augustus realized that symbols affect people’s perception of reality, he dressed and acted modestly, like a regular citizen,

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not an arrogant king. Livia, his wife, played a prominent role as his political adviser and partner in publicly upholding old-fashioned values. In fact, Augustus and the emperors who came after him were able to exercise supreme power because they controlled the army and the treasury. Later Roman emperors held the same power but continued to refer to the state as the republic; the senators and the consuls continued to exist, and the rulers continued to pretend to respect them. Augustus made the military the foundation of the emperor’s power by turning the republic’s citizen militia into a professional, full-time army and navy. He established regular lengths of service and retirement benefits, making the emperor the troops’ patron and solidifying their loyalty to him. To pay the added costs, Augustus imposed Rome’s first inheritance tax on citizens, angering the rich. He also stationed several thousand soldiers in Rome for the first time ever. These soldiers — the praetorian guard — would later play a crucial role in selecting the next emperor when the current one died. Augustus meant them to provide security for him and prevent rebellion in the capital by serving as a visible reminder that the superiority of the princeps was backed by the threat of armed force. Augustus constantly promoted his image as patron and public benefactor. He used media as small as coins and as large as buildings. As a mass-produced medium for official messages, Roman coins functioned like modern political advertising. They proclaimed slogans such as “Father of His Country,” to stress Augustus’s moral authority, or “Roads have been built,” to emphasize his care for the public. Augustus used his personal fortune to erect spectacular public buildings in Rome. The huge Forum of Augustus, dedicated in 2 b.c.e., best illustrates his skill at communicating messages through architecture (Figure 6.1). This public gatheringspace centered on a temple to Mars, the god of war. Two-story colonnades held statues of famous Roman heroes to serve as inspirations to the young. Augustus’s forum hosted religious rituals and the coming-of-age ceremonies of upper-class boys. As a symbol, it demonstrated his justifications for ruling: a new age of peace and security through military power, devotion to the gods protecting Rome, respect for tradition, and generosity in spending money on public works. Augustus used the paternalism of the patron-client system to make the princeps everyone’s most important patron, possessing the moral authority to guide their lives. When in 2 b.c.e. the Senate and the people proclaimed Augustus “Father of His Country,” the title emphasized that the emperor governed like a father: stern but caring, expecting obedience and loyalty from his children, and taking care of them in return. The goal was stability and order, not freedom. Augustus ruled until his death at age seventy-five in 14 c.e. As the historian Tacitus (c. 56–120 c.e.) remarked, by the time Augustus died after a reign of fortyone years, “almost no one was still alive who had seen the republic.” His longevity, military innovations, support for the masses, and manipulation of political symbols had allowed Augustus to create the Roman Empire.

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Colonnades (porches) lined with columns

Statues of Roman heroes

Unroofed area

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FIGURE 6.1 Cutaway

Reconstruction of the Forum of Augustus Augustus built this large forum (120 × 90 yards) to commemorate his victory over the assassins of Julius Caesar. The centerpiece was a marble temple to Mars Ultor (“Mars the Avenger”), and inside the temple were statues of Mars, Venus (the divine ancestor of Julius Caesar), and Julius Caesar (as a god), as well as works of art and Caesar’s sword. The two spaces flanking the temple featured statues of Aeneas and Romulus, Rome’s founders. The high stone wall behind the temple protected it from fire, a constant threat in the crowded neighborhood behind.

Daily Life in the Rome of Augustus In Augustan Rome’s population of nearly one million, many had no regular jobs and too little to eat. The streets were packed: “One man jabs me with his elbow, another whacks me with a pole; my legs are smeared with mud, and big feet step on me from all sides,” one poet wrote of walking in Rome. To ease congestion in the narrow streets, the city banned wagons in the daytime. Most residents lived in small apartments in multistoried buildings called islands. The first floors housed shops, bars, and restaurants. The higher the floor, the cheaper the rent. The wealthy, who lived at ground level, had piped-in water. The less fortunate had to fill water jugs at public fountains, to which aqueducts delivered fresh water, and then lug the heavy jugs up the stairs. Most people had to use the public latrines or keep buckets for toilets at home and then carry the waste down to the streets for sewage collectors. Sanitation was a problem in this city that generated sixty tons of human waste daily. However, low fees for public baths meant that almost everyone could bathe regularly. Baths were centers for exercising and socializing. Bathers progressed through a series of increasingly warm areas until they reached a sauna-like room. They swam naked in their choice of either hot or cold pools. Men and women bathed apart. Augustus improved public safety and health. He instituted the first public fire department in Western history. He also established Rome’s first permanent police force. He greatly enlarged the city’s main sewer, but its contents still emptied untreated into the Tiber River. Also, poor people often left human and animal corpses in the

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A Roman Street Like Pompeii, the town of Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples was frozen in time bythe volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. Mud from the eruption buried the town and preserved its buildings. Herculaneum’s straight roads paved with flat stones and sidewalks were typical for a Roman town. Balconies jutted from the houses, offering ashady viewing point for life in the streets. Roman houses often enclosed agarden courtyard instead of having yards in front or back. Why do you think urban homes had thisarrangement? (Scala / Art Resource, NY.)

streets, to be gnawed by birds and dogs. Flies and no refrigeration contributed to frequent gastrointestinal ailments. The wealthy splurged on luxuries such as snow rushed from the mountains to ice their drinks and slaves to clean their houses, which were built around courtyards and gardens. Roman architects built public structures with concrete, brick, and stone that lasted centuries, but crooked contractors cheated on materials for private buildings; therefore, apartment buildings sometimes collapsed. Augustusimposed a maximum height of seventy feet on new apartment buildings to limit the danger. As the people’s patron, Augustus paid for grain to feed the poor, extending the government’s traditional distribution of food to 250,000 heads of households. From this grain, people made bread or soup, adding beans, leeks, or cheeses if they could afford them; they washed down these meals with cheap wine. The rich ate more costly food, such as roast pork or seafood with honey and vinegar sauce. Wealthy Romans increasingly spent money on luxuries and political careers instead of raising families. Fearing the falling birthrate would destroy the social elite

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on whom Rome relied for public service, Augustus granted privileges to the parents of three or more children. He criminalized adultery, even exiling his own daughter — his only child — and a granddaughter for sex scandals. His legislation failed, however, and the prestigious old families dwindled over time. With each generation, threequarters of senatorial families lost their official status by either spending all their money or dying off without having children. The emperors filled the open places in the social hierarchy and in the Senate with equites and provincials. Since imperial Rome still gave citizenship to freed slaves, all slaves hoped someday to become a free Roman citizen, regardless of how they had originally become enslaved (by being captured in war, stolen from their home region by slave traders,or born to slave women as the owner’s property). Freed slaves’ descendants, if they became wealthy, could become members of the social elite. This policy of giving citizenship to former slaves meant that eventually most Romans had slave ancestors. The harshness of slaves’ lives varied widely. Slaves in agriculture and manufacturing had a grueling existence, while household slaves lived more comfortably. Modestly prosperous families owned one or two slaves, while rich houses and the imperial palace owned large numbers. Domestic slaves were often women, working as nurses, maids, kitchen helpers, and clothes makers. Some male slaves ran businesses for their masters and were often allowed to keep part of the profits, which they could save to purchase their freedom. Women had less opportunity to earn money, though masters sometimes granted tips for sexual favors to both female and male slaves. Many female prostitutes were slaves working for their owner in a brothel. Slaves with savings would sometimes buy other slaves, especially to have a mate; they were barred from legal marriage, because they and their children remained their master’s property, but they could live as a shadow family. Some masters’ tomb inscriptions express affection for a slave, but if slaves attacked their owner, the punishment was death. Violence featured in much of Roman public entertainment. The emperors provided shows featuring hunters killing wild beasts, animals mangling condemned criminals, mock naval battles in flooded arenas, gladiatorial combats, and wreckfilled chariot races. Spectators were seated according to their social rank and gender.The emperor and senators sat up front, while women and the poor were in the upper tiers. Criminals and slaves could be forced to fight as gladiators, but free people also voluntarily competed, hoping to become celebrities and win prizes. Most gladiators were men, though women could fight other women until such matches were banned around 200 c.e. Gladiators were often wounded or killed in the fights, but their contests rarely required a fight to the death, unless they were captives or criminals. To make the bouts unpredictable, pairs of gladiators often competed with different weapons. One favorite match pitted a lightly armored “net man” with a net and a trident against a heavily armored “fish man,” so named from his helmet design. Betting was popular, and the crowds were rowdy.

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Gladiator after a Kill This first-century C.E. mosaic covered a villa floor in North Africa. It shows a gladiator staring at the opponent he has just killed. What feelings do you think his expression conveys? Gladiatorialcombats originated as part of wealthy people’s funeral ceremonies, symbolizing the human struggle to avoid death. Training an expert gladiator took many years and great expense. Like boxers today, gladiators fought only a couple of times a year. Because it cost so much to replace a dead gladiator, most fights were not to the death intentionally; however, kills often happened in the fury of combat. (Gilles Mermet / Art Resource, NY.)

Public entertainment supported communication between the ruler and the ruled. Emperors provided gladiatorial combats, chariot races, and theater productions for the masses, and ordinary citizens staged protests at them to express their wishes. Poor Romans, for example, rioted to protest shortfalls in the free grain supply.

Changes in Education, Literature, and Art in Augustus’s Rome Elite culture changed in the Augustan period to serve the same goal as public entertainment: legitimizing the transformed political system. Orators skilled at speaking persuasively and critically lost their freedom of expression, as did artists. Under the republic, the ability to criticize political opponents in speeches had been such a powerful weapon that it could catapult a “new man” like Cicero to a leadership role. Now, the emperor’s dominance limited frank political debate or subversive art. Criticism of the ruler was very dangerous. With no public schools, only wealthy Romans received formal education. Most people learned only through working. As a character in a novel said, “I didn’t study geometry and literary criticism and worthless junk like that. I just learned how to read the letters on signs and how to work out percentages, and I learned weights, measures, and the values of the different kinds of coins.” Rich boys and girls attended

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Marble Statue of Augustus from Prima Porta At six feet eight inches high, this statue of Augustus stood a foot taller than he did. Found at his wife Livia’s country villa at Prima Porta (“First Gate”), the portrait was probably done about 20 B.C.E., when Augustus was in his forties; however, it shows him as younger, using the idealizing techniques of classical Greek art. The statue’s symbols communicate Augustus’s image: his bare feet hint he is a near-divine hero, the Cupid refers to the Julian family’s descent from the goddess Venus (the Roman equivalent of Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love), and the breastplate’s design shows a Parthian surrendering to a Roman soldier under the gaze of personified cosmic forces admiring the peace Augustus’s regime has created. (Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City / Bridgeman Images.)

private elementary schools to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. Some went on to study literature, history, and grammar. Only a few boys then proceeded to study advanced literature and history, rhetoric, ethical philosophy, law, and dialectic (reasoned argument). Mathematics and science were rarely studied as separate subjects, but engineers and architects became proficient at calculation. Scholars call the Augustan period the Golden Age of Latin literature. The emperor was the patron for writers and artists. Augustus’s favorite authors were Horace (65– 8 b.c.e.) and Virgil (70–19 b.c.e.). Horace’s poem celebrating Augustus’s victory at Actium became famous for its opening line: “Now it’s time to drink!” Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid became Rome’s most famous work of literature. Inspired by Homer, Virgil told the drama-filled story of the Trojan Aeneas, whom the Romans regarded as their heroic ancestor, as he established a community in Italy after fleeing from the burning ruins of his home city. Virgil balanced his praise for Roman civilization with the acknowledgment that peace existed at the cost of freedom. Livy (54 b.c.e.–17 c.e.) wrote a history of Rome recording Augustus’s ruthlessness in the civil war after Caesar’s murder. The emperor only scolded him, because

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Livy’s work proclaimed that stability and prosperity depended on traditional values of loyalty and self-sacrifice. The poet Ovid (43 b.c.e.–17 c.e.), however, wrote Art of Love and Love Affairs to mock the emperor’s moral legislation with witty advice on sexual affairs and adultery. Ovid’s work Metamorphoses undermined the idea of natural hierarchy with stories of supernatural shape-changes, with people becoming animals and mixing the human and the divine. Augustus exiled the poet in 8 b.c.e. for his alleged involvement in the scandal involving the emperor’s granddaughter. Changes in public sculpture also reflected the emperor’s supremacy. Augustus preferred sculpture that had an idealized style. In the Prima Porta statue, Augustus had himself portrayed as serene and dignified, not weary and sick, as he often was. As he did with architecture, Augustus used REVIEW QUESTION How did the peace gained sculpture to project a calm and competent through Augustus’s “restoration of the Roman image of himself as the “Restorer of the Republic” affect Romans’ lives in all social Roman Republic” and founder of a new age classes? for Rome.

Politics and Society in the Early Roman Empire Since Augustus claimed his system was not a monarchy, his successor could inherit his power only with the Senate’s approval. Augustus therefore decided to identify an heir for the Senate to recognize as princeps after his death. This strategy succeeded and kept rule in his family, called the Julio-Claudians, until the death in 68 c.e. of Nero, Augustus’s last descendent. It established the tradition that family dynasties ruled the principate. The Julio-Claudian emperors worked to prevent unrest, maintain loyalty, finance the administration and army, and govern the provinces. Augustus set the pattern for effective imperial rule: take special care of the army, communicate the emperor’s image as a just ruler and generous patron, and promote Roman law and culture as universal standards. The citizens, in return for their loyalty, expected the emperors to be generous patrons — but the difficulties of long-range communication imposed practical limits on imperial support of or intervention in the lives of the residents of the provinces.

The Perpetuation of the Principate after Augustus, 14–180 c.e. Augustus needed the Senate to bestow legitimacy on his successor to continue his disguised monarchy. Having no son, he adopted Livia’s son by a previous marriage, Tiberius (42 b.c.e.–37 c.e.). Since Tiberius had a brilliant career as a general, the army supported Augustus’s choice. Augustus had the Senate grant Tiberius the power of a tribune and the power of a consul equal to his own; his hope was that the senators would recognize Tiberius as emperor after his death. The senators did just that when Augustus died in 14 c.e.

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Tiberius (r. 14–37 c.e.) was able to stay in power for twenty-three years because he retained the army’s loyalty. He built the praetorian guard a fortified camp in Rome to help its soldiers protect the emperor. The guards would influence all future successions — no emperor could come to power without their support. Tiberius’s long reign made permanent the compromise between the elite and the emperor that promoted political stability. The offices of consul, senator, and provincial governor continued, with elite Romans filling them and enjoying their prestige, but the emperors not only decided who received the offices but also controlled law and government policy. The social elite supported the regime by staying loyal and managing the collection of taxes while governing provinces. (The emperor used his own assistants to govern the provinces that housed strong military forces.) Everyone saved face by pretending that the republic’s traditional offices retained their original power. Tiberius paid a bitter price to rule. To strengthen their family tie, Augustus had forced Tiberius to divorce his beloved wife, Vipsania, to marry Augustus’s daughter,Julia — a marriage that proved disastrously unhappy. When Tiberius’s sadness led him to spend his reign’s last decade in seclusion far from Rome, his neglect of the government permitted abuses in the capital and kept him from training a decent successor. Tiberius designated Gaius, better known as Caligula (r. 37–41 c.e.), to be the next emperor, and the Senate approved him because the young man was Augustus’s great-grandson. The third Julio-Claudian emperor might have been successful because he knew about soldiering: Caligula means “baby boots,” the nickname the soldiers gave him as a child because he wore little leather shoes like theirs when he was growing up in the military garrisons his father commanded. Caligula, however, bankrupted the treasury to satisfy his desires. His biographer labeled him a monster for his murders and sexual crimes, which some said included incest with his sisters. He outraged the elite by fighting in mock gladiatorial combats and appearing in public in women’s clothing or costumes imitating gods. He once said, “I’m allowed to do anything.” The praetorian commanders murdered him in his fourth year of rule to avenge personal insults. The senators then debated the idea of truly restoring the republic by refusing to approve a new emperor. They backed down, however, when Claudius (r. 41–54 c.e.), Augustus’s grandnephew, bribed the praetorian guard to support him. The soldiers’ insistence on having an emperor so that they would have a patron signaled that the original republic was never coming back. Claudius was an active emperor, commanding a successful invasion of Britain in 43 c.e. that made much of the island into a Roman province. He promoted provincial elites’ participation in government by enrolling men from Gaul in the Senate. In return for keeping their regions peaceful and ensuring tax payments, upper-class provincials received offices and prestige at Rome. Claudius also transformed imperial bureaucracy by employing freed slaves as powerful administrators who owed loyalty only to the emperor.

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Claudius’s successor, Nero (r. 54–68 c.e.), became emperor at sixteen. He loved music and acting, not governing. The poor loved him for his public entertainments and distributions of cash. His generals suppressed a revolt in Britain led by the woman commander Boudica in 60 c.e. and fought the Jewish rebels against Roman rule in Judaea beginning in 66 c.e., but he had no military career. A giant fire in 64 c.e. (the event behind the legend that Nero fiddled while Rome burned) aroused suspicions that he ordered the city burned to make space for a new palace. Nero emptied the treasury by building a huge palace. To raise money, he faked treason charges against senators and equites to seize their property. When his generals toppled his regime in 68 c.e., Nero had a servant help him cut his own throat. Nero’s death sparked a civil war in 69 c.e. during which four generals competed for power. Vespasian (r. 69–79 c.e.) won. To give his new dynasty (the Flavians) legitimacy, Vespasian had a law passed granting him the powers of previous good emperors, pointedly leaving Caligula and Nero off the list. He encouraged the imperial cult (worship of the emperor as a living god and sacrifices for his household’s welfare) in the provinces beyond Italy but not in Italy itself, where it would have disturbed traditional Romans. The imperial cult communicated the image of the emperor as a superhuman who deserved Roman citizens’ loyalty because he provided benefactions and salvation for them. Vespasian’s sons, Titus (r. 79–81 c.e.) and Domitian (r. 81–96 c.e.), conducted hardheaded fiscal policy and wars. Titus had suppressed the Jewish revolt, capturing Jerusalem in 70 c.e. In his role as “first man” protecting the people, Titus sent relief to Pompeii and Herculaneum when, in 79 c.e., Mount Vesuvius’s volcanic eruption buried these towns. He built Rome’s Colosseum, outfitting the fifty-thousand-seat amphitheater with awnings to shade the crowd. The Colosseum was constructed on the site of the private fishpond in Nero’s palace to demonstrate the Flavian dynasty’s commitment to the people. When Titus died suddenly after only two years as emperor, his brother, Domitian, stepped in. Domitian balanced the budget and campaigned against the Germanic tribes threatening the empire’s northern frontiers. Domitian’s arrogance turned the senators against him; once he sent them a letter announcing, “Our lord god, myself, orders you to do this.” Domitian executed numerous upper-class citizens as disloyal. Fearful that they, too, would become victims, his wife and members of his court murdered him in 96 c.e. The next five emperors gained reputations for ruling well: Nerva (r. 96–98 c.e.), Trajan (r. 98–117 c.e.), Hadrian (r. 117–138 c.e.), Antoninus Pius (r. 138–161 c.e.), and Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–180 c.e.). Historians call this period the Roman political Golden Age because it had peaceful successions for nearly a century. Wars and rivalry among the elite continued, however. Trajan fought to expand Roman control across the Danube River into Dacia (today Romania) and eastward into Mesopotamia (Map 6.1); Hadrian executed several senators as alleged conspirators, punished a Jewish revolt by turning Jerusalem into a military colony, and withdrew Roman

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When Octavian (the future Augustus) captured Egypt in 30 B.C.E. after the suicides of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, he greatly boosted Rome’s economic strength. The land produced enormous amounts of grain and metals, and Roman power now almost encircled the MediterraneanSea. When Emperor Trajan took over the southern part of Mesopotamia in 114–117 C.E., imperial conquest reached its height; Rome’s control had never extended so far east. Egypt remained part of the empire until the Arab conquest in 642 C.E., but Mesopotamia was immediately abandoned by Hadrian, Trajan’s successor, probably because it seemed too distant todefend. How did territorial expansion both strengthen and weaken the Roman Empire?

forces from Mesopotamia; and Marcus Aurelius fought off invaders from the Danube region as the dangers to imperial territory along the northern frontiers kept increasing. Still, the five “good emperors” did preside over a political and economic Golden Age. They succeeded one another without murder or conspiracy — the first four, having no surviving sons, used adoption to find the best possible successor. The

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Roman Colosseum The Roman Emperor Titus finished the construction of the Colosseum, so named because it stood on the spot where the Emperor Nero had earlier erected a colossal statue of himself. Seating some 50,000 spectators, with the most important men granted the best seats in the lower rungs, it was used for gladiatorial combats and other forms of public entertainment. A giant awning stretched out from the topmost level of the seats to protect spectators from the sun. The ruins today reveal in the center the underground rooms and corridors used, for one thing, to house wild animals that were raised by manual elevators to the sandy floor above to be killed in bloody hunts. (© Alinari Archives / The Image Works.)

economy provided enough money to finance building projects such as the fortification wall Hadrian built across Britain. Most important, the army remained obedient. These reigns marked Rome’s longest stretch without a civil war since the second century b.c.e.

Life in the Roman Golden Age, 96–180 c.e. Peace and prosperity in Rome’s Golden Age depended on defense by a loyal military, service by provincial elites in local administration and tax collection, common laws enforced throughout the empire, and a healthy population reproducing itself. The empire’s vast size and the relatively small numbers of soldiers and imperial officials in the provinces meant that emperors had only limited control over these factors.

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In theory, Rome’s military goal was to expand perpetually because conquest brought land, money, and glory. In reality, the emperors lacked the resources to expand the empire much beyond the territory that Augustus had controlled, and they had to concentrate on defending imperial territory. Most provinces were peaceful, housing few troops. Most legions (units of five thousand troops) were stationed on frontiers to prevent invasions from Germanic tribes to the north and Persians to the east. The peace allowed long-distance trade to import luxury goods, such as spices and silk, from as far away as India and China. Roman merchants regularly sailed from Egypt to India and back. The army of both Romans and noncitizens reflected the population’s diversity. Serving under Roman officers, the non-Romans learned to speak Latin and follow Roman customs. Upon discharge, they received Roman citizenship. Thus the army helped spread a common way of life. Paying for defense became an impossible problem. Previously, foreign wars had brought in revenue from riches and prisoners of war sold as slaves. Conquered territory also provided regular income from taxes. Now the army was no longer making conquests, but the soldiers had to be paid well to maintain discipline. This made a soldier’s career desirable but cost the emperors dearly. A tax on agriculture in the provinces (Italy was exempt) now provided the principal source of revenue. The bureaucracy was inexpensive because it was small: only several hundred officials governed a population of about fifty million. Most locally collected taxes stayed in the provinces to pay expenses there, especially soldiers’ pay. Governors with small staffs ran the provinces, which eventually numbered about forty. The government’s finances depended on tax collection carried out by provincial elites. Serving as decurions (members of municipal Senates), these wealthy men were required personally to guarantee that their area’s financial responsibilities were met. If there was a shortfall in tax collection or local finances, the decurions had to pay the difference from their own pockets. Wise emperors kept taxes moderate. As Tiberius put it when refusing a request for tax increases from provincial governors, “I want you to shear my sheep, not skin them alive.” The financial liability in holding civic office made that honor expensive, but the accompanying prestige made the elite willing to take the risk. Rewards for decurions included priesthoods in the imperial cult, an honor open to both men and women. The system worked because it observed tradition: the local elites were their communities’ patrons and the emperor’s clients. As long as there were enough rich, publicspirited provincials participating, the principate functioned by fostering the old ideal of community service by the upper class in return for respect and social status. The provinces contained diverse peoples who spoke different languages, observed different customs, dressed in different styles, and worshipped different divinities (Map 6.2). In the countryside, Roman conquest only lightly affected local customs. In new towns that sprang up around Roman forts or settlements of army veterans, Roman influence predominated. Roman culture had the greatest effect on western Europe, permanently rooting Latin (and the languages that would emerge from it)

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The environment of the Roman world included a large variety of topography, climate, and languages. The inhabitants of the Roman Empire, estimated to have numbered as many as fifty million, spoke dozens of different tongues, many of which survived well into the late empire. The two predominant languages were Latin in the western part of the empire and Greek in the eastern. Latin remained the language of law even in the eastern empire. Vineyards and olive groves were important agricultural resources because wine was regarded as an essential beverage, and olive oil was the principal source of fat for most people as well as being used to make soap, perfume, and other products for daily life. Dates and figs were popular sweets in the Roman world, which had no refined sugar.

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as well as Roman law and customs there. Eventually, emperors came from citizenfamilies in the provinces; Trajan, from Spain, was the first. Romanization, the spread of Roman law and culture in the provinces, raised the standard of living by providing roads and bridges, increasing trade, and establishing peaceful conditions for agriculture. The army’s need for supplies created business for farmers and merchants. The prosperity that provincials enjoyed under Roman rule made Romanization acceptable. In addition, Romanization was not a one-way street. In western regions as diverse as Gaul, Britain, and North Africa, interaction between the local people and Romans produced mixed cultural traditions, especially in religion and art. Therefore, Romanization merged Roman and local culture. The eastern provinces, however, largely retained their Greek and Near Eastern characteristics. Huge Hellenistic cities such as Alexandria (in Egypt) and Antioch (in Syria) rivaled Rome in size and splendor. The eastern provincial elites readily accepted Roman governance because Hellenistic royal traditions had prepared them to see the emperor as their patron and themselves as his clients. The continuing vitality of Greek language and culture contributed to new trends in Roman literature. Lucian (c. 117–180 c.e.) composed satirical dialogues in Greek mocking stuffy and superstitious people. The essayist and philosopher Plutarch (c. 50–120 c.e.) also used Greek to write paired biographies of Greek and Roman men. His exciting stories made him favorite reading for centuries; William Shakespeare based several plays on Plutarch’s biographies. The late first century and early to mid-second century c.e. can be called the Silver Age of Latin literature. Tacitus (c. 56–120 c.e.) wrote historical works that exposed the Julio-Claudian emperors’ ruthlessness. Juvenal (c. 65–130 c.e.) wrote poems ridiculing pretentious Romans while complaining about living broke in the capital. Apuleius (c. 125–170 c.e.) excited readers with a sexually explicit novel called The Golden Ass, about a man turned into a donkey who regains his body and his soul through the kindness of the Egyptian goddess Isis. The emperors made the laws for the entire empire based on the principle of equity. This meant doing what was “good and fair” even if that required ignoring the letter of the law. This principle taught that a contract’s intent outweighed its words, and that accusers should prove the accused guilty because it was unfair to make defendants prove their innocence. In dealing with accusations against Christians, the emperor Trajan ruled that no one should be convicted on the grounds of suspicion alone because it was better for a guilty person to go unpunished than for an innocent person to be condemned. The importance of hierarchy led Romans to continue formal distinctions in society based on wealth. The elites constituted a tiny portion of the population. Only about one in every fifty thousand had enough money to qualify for the senatorial order, the highest-ranking class, while about one in a thousand belonged to the equestrian order, the second-ranking class. Different purple stripes on clothing identified these orders. The third-highest order consisted of decurions, the local Senate members in provincial towns.

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The legal distinction between the elite and the rest of the population now became stricter. “Better people” included senators, equites, decurions, and retired army veterans. Everybody else — except slaves, who counted as property — made up the vastly larger group of “humbler people.” The law imposed harsher penalties on them than on “better people” for the same crime. “Humbler people” convicted of serious crimes were regularly executed by being crucified or torn apart by wild animals before a crowd of spectators. “Better people” rarely received the death penalty, and those who did were allowed a quicker and more dignified execution by the sword. “Humbler people” could also be tortured in criminal investigations, even if they were citizens. Romans regarded these differences as fair on the grounds that an elite person’s higher status required of him or her a higher level of responsibility for the common good. As one provincial governor expressed it, “Nothing is less equitable than mere equality itself.” Nothing mattered more to the empire’s strength than steady population levels. Concerns about marriage and reproduction thus filled Roman society; remaining single and childless represented social failure for both women and men. The propertied classes usually arranged marriages. Girls often married in their early teens, to

Midwife’s Sign Childbirth carried the danger of death from infection or internal hemorrhage. This terra-cotta sign from Ostia, the ancient port city of Rome, probably hung outside a midwife’s room to announce her expertise in helping women give birth. It shows a pregnant woman clutching the sides of her chair, with an assistant supporting her from behind and the midwife crouched in front to help deliver the baby. Why do you think the woman is seated for delivery instead of lying down? Such signs were especially effective for people who were illiterate; a person did not have to read to understand the ser vices that the specialist inside could provide. (Museo Ostiense, Ostia, Italy / Scala / Art Resource, NY.)

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have as many years as possible to bear children. Because so many babies died young, families had to produce numerous offspring to keep from disappearing. The tombstone of Veturia, a soldier’s wife, tells a typical story: “Here I lie, having lived for twenty-seven years. I was married to the same man for sixteen years and bore six children, five of whom died before I did.” The social pressure to bear numerous children created many health hazards for women. Doctors possessed metal instruments for surgery and physical examinations, but many were poorly educated former slaves with only informal training. There was no official licensing of medical personnel. Complications in childbirth could easily kill the mother because doctors and midwives could not stop internal bleeding or cure infections. Romans controlled reproduction with contraception (by obstructing the vagina or by administering drugs to the female partner) or by abandoning unwanted infants. The emperors tried to support reproduction. They gave money to feed needy children, hoping they would grow up to have families. Wealthy people often adopted children in their communities. One North African man supported three hundred boys REVIEW QUESTION In the early Roman Empire, and three hundred girls each year until what was life like in the cities and in the country for the elite and for ordinary people? they grew up.

The Emergence of Christianity in the Early Roman Empire Christianity began as what scholars call “the Jesus movement,” a Jewish splinter group in Judaea (today Israel and the Palestinian Territories). There, as elsewhere under Roman rule, Jews were allowed to worship in their ancestral religion. The emergence of the new religion was gradual: three centuries after the death of Jesus, Christians were still a minority in the Roman Empire. Moreover, Roman officials suspected that Christians’ beliefs made them disloyal. Christianity grew because of the attraction of Jesus’s charismatic career, its message of individual spiritual salvation, its early members’ sense of mission, and the strong bonds of community it inspired. Ultimately, Christianity’s emergence proved the most significant development in Roman history.

Jesus and His Teachings Jesus (c. 4 b.c.e.–30 c.e.) grew up in a troubled region. Harsh Roman rule in Judaea had angered the Jews, and Rome’s provincial governors worried about rebellion. Jesus’s execution reflected the Roman policy of eliminating any threat to social order. In the two decades after his crucifixion, his followers, particularly Paul of Tarsus, elaborated on and spread his teachings beyond his region’s Jewish community to the wider Roman world. Christianity offered an answer to the question about divine justice raised by the Jews’ long history of oppression under the kingdoms of the ancient and Hellenistic

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Near East: If God was just, as Hebrew monotheism taught, how could he allow the wicked to prosper and the righteous to suffer? Nearly two hundred years before Jesus’s birth, persecution by the Seleucid king Antiochus IV (r. 175–164 b.c.e.) had provoked the Jews into revolt, a struggle that generated the concept of apocalypticism (see Chapter 2, page 49). According to this doctrine, evil powers controlled the world, but God would end their rule by sending the Messiah (“anointed one,” Mashiach in Hebrew, Christ in Greek) to conquer them. A final judgment would follow, punishing the wicked and rewarding the righteous for eternity. Apocalypticism especially influenced the Jews living in Judaea under Roman rule and later inspired Christians and Muslims. During Jesus’s life, Jews disagreed among themselves about what form Judaism should take in such troubled times. Some favored cooperation with Rome, while others preached rejection of the non-Jewish world. Unrest in Judaea led Augustus to install a Roman governor to suppress disorder. The writings that would later become the New Testament Gospels, composed around 70 to 90 c.e., offer the earliest accounts of Jesus’s life. Jesus wrote nothing down, and others’ accounts of his words and deeds are often inconsistent. He began his career as a teacher and healer during the reign of Emperor Tiberius. He taught through stories and parables that challenged his followers to reflect on what he meant. Jesus’s public ministry began with his baptism by John the Baptist, who preached a message of repentance before the approaching final judgment. After John was executed as a rebel, Jesus traveled around Judaea’s countryside teaching that God’s kingdom was coming and that people needed to prepare spiritually for it. Some saw Jesus as the Messiah, but his apocalypticism did not call for immediate revolt against the Romans. Instead, he taught that God’s true kingdom was to be found not on earth but in heaven. He stressed that this kingdom was open to believers regardless of their social status or sinfulness. His emphasis on God’s love for humanity and people’s responsibility to love one another reflected Jewish religious teachings, such as the scriptural interpretations and moral teachings of the scholar Hillel, who lived in Jesus’s time. Realizing that he had to reach more than country people, Jesus took his message to the Jewish population of Jerusalem, the region’s main city. His miraculous healings and exorcisms, combined with his powerful preaching, created a sensation. He became so popular that his followers created the Jesus movement; it was not yet Christianity but rather a Jewish sect, of which there were several, such as the Saduccees and Pharisees, competing for authority at the time. Jesus attracted the attention of Jewish leaders, who assumed that he wanted to replace them. Fearing Jesus might lead a Jewish revolt, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate ordered his crucifixion in Jerusalem in 30 c.e. Jesus’s followers reported that they had seen him in person after his death, proclaiming that God had raised him from the dead. They convinced a few other Jews that he would soon return to judge the world and begin God’s kingdom. At this time, his closest disciples, the twelve Apostles (Greek for “messengers”), still considered

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Catacomb Painting of Christ as the Good Shepherd Catacombs (tunnels with underground rooms) cut deep into soft rock outside major cities in the Roman Empire served as meeting places and burial chambers for Jews and Christians. Rome had 340 miles of catacombs. This painting from the catacomb at Rome named after Priscilla, who was probably a Christian from the first century C.E., shows Jesus as the Good Shepherd (John 10:10–11). He is carrying an animal back to the flock, symbolizing his role as savior; he is dressed in the traditional fashion for a Roman man on a special occasion. Catacomb paintings such as this one were the earliest form of Christian art. (Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome, Italy / photograph by Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.)

themselves faithful Jews and continued to follow the commandments of Jewish law. Their leader was Peter, who won acclaim as the greatest miracle worker of the Apostles, an ambassador to Jews interested in the Jesus movement, and the most important messenger proclaiming Jesus’s teachings in the imperial capital. The later Christian church called him the first bishop of Rome. A turning point came with the conversion of Paul of Tarsus (c. 10–65 c.e.), a pious Jew and a Roman citizen who had violently opposed Jews who accepted Jesus as the Messiah. A spiritual vision on the road to Damascus in Syria, which Paul

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interpreted as a divine revelation, inspired him to become a follower of Jesus as the Messiah, or Christ — a Christian, as members of the movement came to be known. Paul taught that accepting Jesus as divine and his crucifixion as the ultimate sacrifice for the sins of humanity was the only way of becoming righteous in the eyes of God. In this way alone could one expect to attain salvation in the new world to come. Paul’s mission opened the way for Christianity to become a new religion separate from Judaism. Seeking converts outside Judaea, Paul traveled to preach to Jews and Gentiles (non-Jews) who had adopted some Jewish practices in Asia Minor (today Turkey), Syria, and Greece. Although he stressed the necessity of ethical behavior as defined by Jewish tradition, especially the rejection of sexual immorality and polytheism, Paul also taught that converts did not have to live strictly according to Jewish law. To make conversion easier, he did not require male converts to undergo the Jewish initiation rite of circumcision. He also told his congregations that they did not have to observe Jewish dietary restrictions or festivals. These teachings generated tensions with Jewish authorities in Jerusalem as well as with followers of Jesus living there, who still believed that Christians had to follow Jewish law. Roman authorities arrested Paul as a troublemaker and executed him in 65 c.e. Hatred of Roman rule provoked Jews to revolt in 66 c.e. After crushing the rebels in 70 c.e., the Roman emperor Titus destroyed the Jerusalem temple and sold most of the city’s population into slavery. Following this catastrophe, which cost Jews their religious center, Christianity began to separate more and more clearly from Judaism. The destruction of the Jerusalem temple created a crisis for Judaism that eventually led to a reorientation of its teachings and interpretations through Jewish oral law being committed to writing. Paul’s importance in early Christianity shows in the number of letters — thirteen — attributed to him among the twenty-seven Christian writings that were eventually put together as the New Testament. Christians came to regard the New Testament as having equal authority with the Jewish Bible, which they then called the Old Testament. Since teachers like Paul preached mainly in the cities, congregations of Christians sprang up in urban areas. In early Christianity, women in some locations could be leaders — such as Lydia, a businesswoman who founded the congregation in Philippi in Greece — but many men, including Paul, opposed women’s leadership.

Growth of a New Religion Christianity faced serious obstacles as a new religion. Imperial officials, suspectingChristians of being traitors, could prosecute them for refusing to perform traditional sacrifices. Christian leaders had to build an organization from the ground up to administer their growing congregations. Finally, Christians had to decide whether women could continue as leaders in their congregations. The Roman emperors found Christians baffling and troublesome. Unlike Jews, Christians professed a new faith rather than their ancestors’ traditional religion.

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Roman law therefore granted them no special treatment, as it did Jews out of respect for the great age of Judaism. Most Romans feared that Christians’ denial of the old gods and the imperial cult would bring divine punishment upon the empire. Secret rituals in which Christians symbolically ate the body and drank the blood of Jesus during communal dinners, called Love Feasts, led to accusations of cannibalism and sexual promiscuity. Romans were quick to blame Christians for disasters. Nero declared that Christian arsonists set Rome’s great fire, and he covered Christians in animal skins to be torn to pieces by dogs or fastened to crosses and set on fire at night. Nero’s cruelty, however, earned Christians sympathy from Rome’s population. Persecutions like Nero’s were infrequent. There was no law specifically prohibiting Christianity, but officials could punish Christians, as they could anyone, to protect public order. Pliny’s actions as a provincial governor in Asia Minor illustrated the situation. In about 112 c.e., Pliny asked a group of people accused of following this new religion if they were really Christians. When some said yes, he asked them to reconsider. He freed those who denied Christianity, so long as they sacrificed to the gods, swore loyalty to the imperial cult, and cursed Christ. He executed those who refused these actions. Christians argued that Romans had nothing to fear from their faith. Christianity, they insisted, taught morality and respect for authority. It was the true philosophy, combining the best features of Judaism and Greek thought. The occasional persecutions in the early empire did not stop Christianity. Christians like Vibia Perpetua regarded public executions as an opportunity to become a martyr (Greek for “witness”), someone who dies for his or her religious faith. Martyrs’ belief that their deaths would send them directly to paradise allowed them to face torture. Some Christians actively sought to become martyrs. Tertullian (c. 160– 240 c.e.) proclaimed that “martyrs’ blood is the seed of the Church.” Ignatius (c. 35– 107 c.e.), bishop of Antioch, begged Rome’s congregation, which was becoming the most prominent Christian group, not to ask the emperor to show him mercy after his arrest: “Let me be food for the wild animals [in the arena] through which I can reach God,” he pleaded. “I am God’s wheat, to be ground up by the teeth of beasts so that I may be found pure bread of Christ.” Stories reporting the martyrs’ courage showed that the new religion gave its believers spiritual power to endure suffering. First-century c.e. Christians expected Jesus to return to pass judgment on the world during their lifetimes. When that did not happen, they began transforming their religion from an apocalyptic Jewish sect expecting the immediate end of the world into one that could survive indefinitely. This transformation was painful because early Christians fiercely disagreed about what they should believe, how they should live, and who had the authority to decide these questions. Some insisted Christians should withdraw from the everyday world to escape its evil, abandoning their families and shunning sex and reproduction. Others believed they could follow Christ’s teachings while living ordinary lives. Many Christians worried they could not serve as soldiers without betraying their faith because the army participated in the imperial cult. This dilemma raised the further issue of whether Christians could

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Christians were still a minority in the Roman world three hundred years after Jesus’s crucifixion. However, certain areas of the empire — especially Asia Minor, where Paul had preached — had a concentration of Christians. Most Christians lived in cities and towns, where the missionaries had gone to find crowds to hear their message. Paganus, a Latin word for “country person” or “rural villager,” came to mean a believer in traditional polytheistic cults — hence the word pagan that modern historians sometimes use to indicate traditional polytheism. Paganism lived on in rural areas for centuries.

remain loyal subjects of the emperor. Disagreement over these doctrinal questions raged in the many congregations that arose in the early empire around the Mediterranean, from Gaul to Africa to the Near East (Map 6.3). The need to deal with such tensions, to administer the congregations, and to promote spiritual communion among believers led Christians to create an official hierarchy of men, headed by bishops. They spearheaded the drive to build the connection between congregations and Christ that promised salvation to believers. Bishops possessed authority to define Christian doctrine and administer practical affairs for congregations. The emergence of bishops became the most important institutional development in early Christianity. Bishops received their positions accordingto the principle later called apostolic succession, which states that the Apostles appointed the first bishops as their successors, granting these new officials the authority Jesus had originally given to the Apostles. Those designated by the Apostles in turn appointed their own successors. Bishops had authority to ordain ministers with the holy power to administer the sacraments, above all baptism and commu-

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nion, which believers regarded as necessary for achieving eternal life. Bishops also controlled their congregations’ memberships and finances. The money financing the early church came from members’ donations. The bishops tried to suppress the disagreements that arose in the new religion. They used their authority to define orthodoxy (true doctrine) and heresy (false doctrine). The meetings of the bishops of different cities constituted the church’s organization in this period. Today this loose organization is referred to as the early Catholic(Greek for “universal”) church. Since the bishops often disagreed about doctrine and about which bishops should have greater authority than others, unity remained impossible to achieve. When the male bishops came to power, they demoted women from positions of leadership. This change reflected their view that in Christianity women should be subordinate to men, just as in Roman imperial society in general. Some congregations took a long time to accept this shift, however, and women still claimed authority in some groups in the second and third centuries c.e. In late-second-century c.e. Asia Minor, for example, Prisca and Maximilla declared themselves prophetesses with the power to baptize believers in anticipation of the coming end of the world. They spread the apocalyptic message that the heavenly Jerusalem would soon descend in their region. Excluded from leadership posts, many women chose a life without sex to demonstrate their devotion to Christ. Their commitment to celibacy gave these women the power to control their own bodies. Other Christians regarded women who reached this special closeness to God as holy and socially superior. By rejecting the traditional roles of wife and mother in favor of spiritual excellence, celibate Christian women achieved independence and status otherwise denied them.

Competing Religious Beliefs Three centuries after Jesus’s death, traditional polytheism was still the religion of the overwhelming majority of the Roman Empire’s population. Polytheists, who worshipped a variety of gods in different ways in diverse kinds of sanctuaries, often reflecting regional religious rituals and traditions, never created a unified religion. Nevertheless, the stability and prosperity of the early empire gave traditional believers confidence that the old gods and the imperial cult protected them. Even those who preferred religious philosophy, such as Stoicism’s idea of divine providence, respected the old cults because they embodied Roman tradition. By the third century c.e., the growth of Christianity, along with the persistence of Judaism and polytheistic cults, meant that people could choose from a number of competing beliefs. Especially appealing were beliefs that offered people hope that they could change their present lives for the better and also look forward to an afterlife. Polytheistic religion aimed at winning the goodwill of all the divinities who could affect human life. Its deities ranged from the state cults’ major gods, such as Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, to spirits thought to inhabit groves and springs. International

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Mithras Slaying the Bull Hundreds of shrines to the mysterious god Mithras have been found in the Roman Empire. Scholars debate the symbolic meaning of the bull slaying that is prominent in art connected toMithras’s cult, as in this wall painting of about 200 C.E. from the shrine at Marino, south of Rome. Here, a snake and a dog lick the sacrificial animal’s blood, while a scorpion pinches its testicles as it dies in agony. The ancient sources do not clarify the scene’s meaning. What do you think could be the explanation for this type of sacrifice? (Mitreo, Marino, Italy / Scala / Art Resource, NY.)

cults such as the mystery cults of Demeter and Persephone outside Athens remained popular. The cults of Isis and Mithras demonstrate how polytheism could provide a religious experience arousing strong emotions and demanding a moral way of life. The Egyptian goddess Isis had already attracted Romans by the time of Augustus, who tried to suppress her cult because it was Cleopatra’s religion. But the fame of Isis as a kind, compassionate goddess who cared for her followers made her cult too popular to crush: the Egyptians said it was her tears for starving humans that caused the Nile to flood every year and bring them good harvests. Her image was that of a loving mother, and in art she was often depicted nursing her son. Her cult’s central doctrine concerned the death and resurrection of her husband, Osiris. Isis also promised her believers a life after death.

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Isis required her followers to behave righteously. Many inscriptions expressed her high moral standards by listing her own civilizing accomplishments: “I broke down the rule of tyrants; I put an end to murders; I caused what is right to be mightier than gold and silver.” The hero of Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass shouts out his intense joy after his rescue and spiritual rebirth through Isis: “O holy and eternal guardian of the human race, who always cherishes mortals and blesses them, you care for the troubles of miserable humans with a sweet mother’s love. Neither day nor night, nor any moment of time, ever passes by without your blessings.” Other cults also required worshippers to lead upright lives. Inscriptions from Asia Minor, for example, record people’s confessions to sins such as sexual transgressions for which their local god had imposed severe penance. Archaeology reveals that the cult of Mithras had many shrines under the Roman Empire, but no texts survive to explain its mysterious rituals and symbols, which Romans believed had originated in Persia. Mithras’s legend said that he killed a bull in a cave, apparently as a sacrifice for the benefit of his worshippers. As pictures show, this was an unusual sacrifice because the animal was allowed to struggle as it was killed. Initiates in Mithras’s cult proceeded through rankings named, from bottom to top, Raven, Male Bride, Soldier, Lion, Persian, Sun-runner, and Father — the latter a title of great honor. Many upper-class Romans also guided their lives by Greek philosophy. Most popular was Stoicism, which presented philosophy as the “science of living” and required self-discipline and duty from men and women alike. (See Chapter 4, page131.) Philosophic individuals put together their own set of beliefs, such as those on duty expressed by the emperor Marcus Aurelius in his memoirs expressing Stoic ideas, entitled To Myself (or Meditations). In this moving personal journal, the most powerful man in the Roman world told himself that “when it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning, keep it in mind that you are getting up to do the work of a human being.” Christian and polytheist intellectuals debated Christianity’s relationship to Greek philosophy. Origen (c. 185–255 c.e.) argued that Christianity was superior to Greek philosophical doctrines as a guide to correct living. At about the same time, Plotinus (c. 205–270 c.e.) developed the philosophy that had the greatest influence on religion. His spiritual philosophy was influenced by Persian religious ideas and, above all, Plato’s philosophy, for which reason it is called Neoplatonism. Plotinus’s ideas deeply influenced many Christian thinkers as well as polytheists. He wrote that ultimate reality is a trinity of The One, of Mind, and of Soul. By rejecting the life of the body and relying on reason, individual souls could achieve a mystic union with The One, who in Christian thought would be God. To sucREVIEW QUESTION Which aspects of social, ceed in this spiritual quest required strenucultural, and political life in the early Roman ous self-discipline in personal morality and Empire supported the growth of Christianity, spiritual purity as well as in philosophical and which opposed it? contemplation.

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From Stability to Crisis in the Third Century c.e. In the third century c.e., military expenses provoked a financial crisis that fed a political crisis lasting from the 230s to the 280s c.e. Invasions on the northern and eastern frontiers had forced the Roman emperors to expand the army for defense, but no new revenues came in to meet the increased costs. The emperors’ desperate schemes to pay for defense damaged the economy and infuriated the population. This anger at the regime encouraged generals to repeat the behavior that had destroyed the republic: commanding client armies to seize power in a prolonged civil war. Earthquakes and regional epidemics added to people’s misery. By 284 c.e., this combination of troubles had destroyed the Pax Romana.

Threats to the Northern and Eastern Frontiers of the Early Roman Empire Emperors since Domitian in the first century had combated invaders. The most aggressive attackers were the multiethnic bands from northern Europe that crossed the Danube and Rhine Rivers to raid Roman territory. These attacks perhaps resulted from pressure on the northerners caused by wars in central Asia that disrupted trade and the economy. These originally poorly organized northerners developed military discipline through their frequent fighting against the Roman army. They mounted especially damaging invasions during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–180 c.e.). A major threat also appeared at the eastern edge of the empire, when a new Persian dynasty, the Sasanids, defeated the Parthian Empire and fought to re-create the ancient Persian Empire. By the early third century c.e., Persia’s renewed military power forced the Roman emperors to deploy a large part of the army to protect the rich eastern provinces, which took troops away from defense of the northern frontiers. The Atlantic Ocean on the west and the Sahara Desert to the south meant that threats to Roman territory were significantly less from those directions. (See Mapping the West: The Roman Empire in Crisis, 284 c.e., page 206.) Recognizing the northern warriors’ bravery, the emperors had begun hiring them as auxiliary soldiers for the Roman army in the late first century c.e. and settling them on the frontiers as buffers against other invaders. By the early third century, the army had expanded to enroll perhaps as many as 450,000 troops (the size of the navy remains unknown). Training constantly, soldiers had to be able to carry forty-pound packs twenty miles in five hours, swimming rivers on the way. Since the early second century c.e., the emperors had built stone camps for permanent garrisons, but while on the march an army constructed a fortified camp every night. Soldiers transported all the makings of a wooden walled city everywhere they went. As one ancient commentator noted, “Infantrymen were little different from loaded pack mules.” At one temporary fort in a frontier area, archaeologists found a supply of a million iron nails — ten tons’ worth. The same encampment required seventeen miles of timber for its barracks’ walls. To outfit a single legion with tents required fifty-four thousand calves’ hides.

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Emperor Severus and His Family This portrait of the emperor Septimius Severus; his wife, Julia Domna; and their sons, Caracalla (on the right) and Geta (with his face obliterated), was painted in Egypt about 200 C.E. The males hold scepters, symbolic of rule, but all four family members wear bejeweled golden crowns fit for royalty. Severus arranged to marry Julia without ever meeting her because her horoscope predicted she would become a queen, and she served as her husband’s valued adviser. They hoped their sons would share rule, but when Severus died in 211 C.E., Caracalla murdered Geta so that hecould rule alone. Why do you think the portrait’s owner rubbed out Geta’s face? (Staaliche Museen, Berlin, Germany / BridgemanImages.)

The increased demand for pay and supplies strained imperial finances. The army had become a source of negative instead of positive cash flow to the treasury, and the economy had not expanded to make up the difference. To make matters worse, inflation had driven up prices. The principate’s long period of peace promoted inflation by increasing demand for goods and services to a level that outstripped the supply. In desperation, some emperors attempted to curb inflation by debasing imperial coinage. Debasement of coinage meant putting less precious metal in each coin and adding more metal of less worth without changing the coin’s face value. In this way, the emperors created more cash from the same amount of precious metal. But merchants soon raised prices to make up for the debased coinage’s reduced value; this in turn produced more inflation, causing prices to rise even more. Still, the soldiers demanded that their patrons, the emperors, pay them well. This pressure drove imperial finances into collapse by the 250s c.e.

Uncontrolled Spending, Natural Disasters, and Political Crisis, 193–284 c.e. The emperor Septimius Severus (r. 193–211 c.e.) and his son and successor Caracalla (r. 211–217 c.e.) made financial crisis unavoidable when they drained the treasury to satisfy the army and their own dreams of glory. A soldier’s soldier from North

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Africa, Severus became emperor when his predecessor’s incompetence caused a government crisis and civil war. Seeking to restore imperial prestige and acquire money from foreign conquest, Severus campaigned beyond the frontiers of the provinces in Mesopotamia and Scotland. Since extreme inflation had reduced their wages to almost nothing, soldiers expected the emperors to provide gifts of extra money. Severus spent large sums on gifts and raised soldiers’ pay by a third. The army’s expanded size made this raise more expensive than the treasury could handle. The out-of-control spending did not trouble Severus. His deathbed advice to his sons, Caracalla and Geta, in 211 c.e. was to “stay on good terms with each other, be generous to the soldiers, and pay no attention to anyone else.” Ignoring the first part of his father’s advice, Caracalla murdered his brother. He then went on to end the Roman Golden Age of peace and prosperity with his uncontrolled spending and cruelty. He increased the soldiers’ pay by another 40 to 50 percent and spent gigantic sums on building projects, including the largest public baths Rome had ever seen, covering blocks and blocks of the city. These huge expenses put unbearable pressure on the local provincial officials responsible for collecting taxes and on the citizens, whom the officials in turn squeezed for ever larger payments. In 212 c.e., Caracalla tried to fix the budget by granting Roman citizenship to almost every man and woman in imperial territory except slaves. Since only citizens paid inheritance taxes and fees for freeing slaves, an increase in citizens meant an increase in revenues, most of which was earmarked for the army. But too much was never enough for Caracalla, whose cruelty to anyone who displeased him made his contemporaries whisper that he was insane. His attempted conquests of new territory failed to bring in enough funds, and he wrecked imperial finances. Once when his mother reprimanded him for his excesses he replied, as he drew his sword, “Never mind, we won’t run out of money as long as I have this.” The financial crisis generated political instability that led to a half century of civil war. This period of violent struggle destroyed the principate. More than two dozen men, often several at once, held or claimed power in this period. Their only qualification was their ability to command a frontier army and to reward the troops for loyalty to their general instead of to the state. The civil war devastated the population and the economy. Violence and hyperinflation made life miserable in many regions. Agriculture withered as farmers could not keep up normal production when armies searching for food ravaged their crops. City council members faced constantly escalating demands for tax revenues from the swiftly changing emperors. The endless financial pressure destroyed members’ will to serve their communities. Earthquakes and epidemics also struck the provinces in the mid-third century. In some regions, the population declined significantly as food supplies became less dependable, civil war killed soldiers and civilians alike, and infection raged. The loss

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of population meant fewer soldiers for the army, whose strength as a defense and police force had been gutted by political and financial chaos. This weakness made frontier areas more vulnerable to Black Sea raids and allowed roving bands of robbers to range Med unchecked inside the borders. iterra nean Se a Foreign enemies to the north and east took Spain was under Gallic advantage of the third-century crisis to attack. control until 269 Roman Palmyrene Roman fortunes hit bottom when Shapur I, king Empire control ofthe Sasanid Empire of Persia, invaded the provGallic control Persia ince of Syria and captured the emperor Valerian (r. 253–260 c.e.). By this time, Roman imperial The Fragmented Roman Empire territory was in constant danger of being captured. of the Third Century Zenobia, the warrior queen of Palmyra in Syria, for example, seized Egypt and Asia Minor. Emperor Aurelian (r. 270–275 c.e.) won back these provinces only with great difficulty. He also had to encircle Rome with a larger wall to ward off attacks from northern raiders, who were smashing their way into Italy. Polytheists explained the third-century crisis in the traditional way: the state gods were angry about something. But what? To them, the obvious answer was the presence of Christians, who denied the existence of the Roman gods and refused to worship them. Emperor Decius (r. 249–251 c.e.) therefore launched a systematic persecution to eliminate Christians and restore the goodwill of the gods. He ordered all the empire’s inhabitants to prove their loyalty to the state by sacrificing to its gods. Christians who refused were killed. This persecution did not stop the civil war, economic failure, and natural disasters that threatened Rome’s empire, and Emperor Gallienus (r. 253–268 c.e.) ordered Christians to be left alone and their property restored. The crisis in government continREVIEW QUESTION What were the causes and the effects of the Roman crisis in the ued, however, and by the 280s c.e. the printhird century C.E.? cipate had reached a political and financial dead end. North Sea

Conclusion Augustus created the principate and the Pax Romana by constructing a disguised monarchy while insisting that he was restoring the republic. He succeeded by ensuring the loyalty of both the army and the people to him by becoming their patron. He bought off the upper class by letting them keep their traditional offices and status. The imperial cult provided a focus for building and displaying loyalty to the emperor. The emperors provided food to the poor, built baths and arenas for public entertainment, paid their troops well, and gave privileges to the elite. By the second century,

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peace and prosperity created a Golden Age. Long-term financial difficulties set in, however, because the army, now concentrating on defense, no longer brought in money from conquests. Severe inflation made the situation desperate. Ruined by the demand for more tax revenues, provincial elites lost their public-spiritedness and avoided their communal responsibilities. The emergence of Christianity generated tension because Romans doubted Christians’ loyalty. The new religion had evolved from Jewish apocalypticism to a hierarchical organization. Its believers argued with one another and with the authorities. Martyrs such as Vibia Perpetua worried the government by placing their beliefs ahead of loyalty to the state. When financial ruin, natural disasters, and civil war combined to create a political crisis in the mid-third century c.e., the emperors lacked the money and the popular support to solve it. Not even their persecution of Christians had convinced the gods to restore Rome’s good fortunes. Threatened with the loss of peace, prosperity, and territory, the empire needed a political transformation to survive. That process began under the emperor Diocletian (r. 284–305 c.e.). Under his successor, Constantine (r. 306–337 c.e.), the Roman Empire also began the slow process of becoming officially Christian.

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MAPPING THE WEST The Roman Empire in Crisis, 284 c.e.

By the 280s C.E., fifty years of civil war had torn the principate apart. Imperial territory retained the outlines inherited from the time of Augustus (compare Map 6.1 on page 188), except for the loss of Dacia to the Goths a few years before. Attacks from the north and east had repeatedly penetrated the frontiers, however. Long-distance trade had always been important to the empire’s prosperity, but the decades of violence had made transport riskier and therefore more expensive, contributing to the crisis.

Chapter 6 Review Key Terms and People Be sure that you can identify the term or person and explain its historical significance. Pax Romana (Roman Peace) (p.176)

Colosseum (p.186)

apostolic succession (p.198)

decurions (p.189)

orthodoxy (p.199)

Augustus (p.177)

Romanization (p.191)

heresy (p.199)

principate (p.177)

Christ (p.194)

Neoplatonism (p.201)

praetorian guard (p.178)

martyr (p.197)

debasement of coinage (p.203)

Julio-Claudians (p.184)

Review Questions 1. How did the peace gained through Augustus’s “restoration of the Roman Republic” affect Romans’ lives in all social classes? 2. In the early Roman Empire, what was life like in the cities and in the country for the elite and for ordinary people? 3. Which aspects of social, cultural, and political life in the early Roman Empire supported the growth of Christianity, and which opposed it? 4. What were the causes and the effects of the Roman crisis in the third century C.E.?

Making Connections 1. What were the similarities and differences between the crisis in the first century B.C.E. that undermined the Roman Republic and the crisis in the third century C.E. that undermined theprincipate? 2. If you had been a first-century Roman emperor under the principate, what would you have done about the Christians and why? What if you had been a third-century emperor? 3. Do you think that the factors that caused the crisis in the Roman Empire could cause a similar crisis in the Western world of today?

Suggested References Scholars continue to debate the nature and the significance of the many social, cultural, and (especially) religious changes that occurred under the early Roman Empire. Perhaps the most difficult question to answer is to what extent life became better or worse for most people — and indeed how to define better and worse in this context — once the empire stopped expanding into new territories. Ando, Clifford. The Matter of the Gods: Religion and the Roman Empire. 2008. Challet, Claude-Emmanuelle C. Like Man, Like Woman: Roman Women, Gender Qualities, and Conjugal Relationships at the Turn of the First Century. 2013. Crossan, Dominic, and Jonathan Reed. In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom. 2005. Dennison, Matthew. Livia: Empress of Rome. 2010. Denzey, Nicola. The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women. 2007. *Futrell, Allison. The Roman Games: Historical Sources in Translation. 2006.

*Primary source.

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Important Events 30 B.C.E.

Octavian (the future Augustus) conquers Ptolemaic Egypt

27 B.C.E.

Augustus inaugurates the principate

30 C.E.

Jesus is crucified in Jerusalem

64 C.E.

Great fire in Rome; Nero blames Christians

69 C.E.

Civil war after death of Nero in 68 C.E.

70 C.E.

Titus captures Jerusalem; the Jewish temple is destroyed

70–90 C.E.

New Testament Gospels are written

80s C.E.

Domitian leads campaigns against multiethnic invaders on northern frontiers

161–180 C.E.

Marcus Aurelius battles multiethnic bands attacking northern frontiers

212 C.E.

Caracalla extends Roman citizenship to almost all free inhabitants of the provinces

230s–280s C.E.

Third-century financial and political crisis

249–251 C.E.

Decius persecutes Christians

Consider three events: Great fire in Rome; Nero blames Christians (64 C.E.), New Testament Gospels are written (70–90 C.E.), and Decius persecutes Christians (249– 251 C.E.). How were these events similar to and different from one another, and what attitudes did they illustrate? How might polytheist and Christian ideas have contributed to these events?

Galinsky, Karl, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus. 2005. Goldsworthy, Adrian. The Complete Roman Army. 2003. Green, Bernard. Christianity in Ancient Rome: The First Three Centuries. 2010. Harris, W. V. Rome’s Imperial Economy. 2010. *Kraemer, Ross Shephard. Her Share of the Blessings: Women’s Religion among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World. 1992. *Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Trans. Robin Hard. Intro. Christopher Gill. 2011. Mattingly, David J. Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire. 2010. Matz, David. Life of the Ancient Romans: Daily Life through History. 2008. Roman emperors: http://www.roman-emperors.org/startup.htm *Suetonius. Lives of the Caesars. Trans. Catharine Edwards. 2009. *Tacitus. The Complete Works. Trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb. 1964.

The Transformation of the Roman Empire

284 – 600 c.e.

round 300,* Emperor Diocletian (r. 284–305) proclaimed the reason why the Roman Empire was endangered: “The immortal gods in their foresight have taken care to proclaim and prescribe what is good and true, which the sayings of many good and distinguished men have approved and confirmed, along with the reasoned judgments of the wisest. It is wrong to oppose and resist these tradiVandal General Stilicho tions, and a new cult should not find fault and His Family with ancient religion. It is a serious crime to This diptych (“folding tablet”) made of ivory around 400 shows Stilicho, the question matters that our ancestors estabtop general in the Roman army in lished and fixed once and for all. . . . ThereEurope and close adviser to the western fore, we are eager to punish the obstinate Roman emperor, with his wife, Serena, and perverse thinking of these utterly worthand their son Eucherius. Stilicho’s life less people.” reveals the mixing of cultures in the later Roman Empire: his father was Diocletian had ended the third-century from the Vandal tribe in Germany, and political crisis and kept the Roman Empire his mother was Roman; he himself rose from breaking into warring parts by appointto prominence in Roman imperial goving a co-emperor and two assistant emperernment and society. Serena was the ors. Still, suspicions endured that nontradiadoptive daughter of the emperor, and tional worshippers were responsible for the Stilicho and Serena’s daughter Maria married the emperor’s son. Stilicho is divine anger that, everyone believed, had shown dressed in the richly decorated sent the crisis. Diocletian convinced his clothing appropriate for a member of co-rulers first to persecute the pagan Manithe Roman elite, and he wears a metal chaeans (followers of the Iranian prophet clasp to fasten his robe, a symbol of Mani and the objects of his proclamation) hisfather’s ethnicity. The images on his shield of the two emperors then ruling and then the Christians. His successor the divided Roman Empire proclaim his Constantine (r. 306–337) ended the perseloyalty even as they point to the political cution by converting to Christianity and and geographic fragmentation of the time. (Basilica di San Giovanni Battista, Monza,

Italy / Bridgeman Images.)

*From this point on, dates are c.e. unless otherwise indicated.

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supporting his new faith with imperial funds and a policy of religious freedom. Nevertheless, it took a century more for Christianity to become the state religion. The social and cultural transformations produced by the Christianization of the Roman Empire came slowly because many Romans clung to their ancestral beliefs. Diocletian’s reform of government only postponed the division of imperial territory. In 395, Emperor Theodosius I split the empire in two to try to provide better defense against the barbarians pressing into Roman territory, especially from the north. He appointed one of his sons to rule the west and the other the east. The two emperors were supposed to cooperate, but in the long run this system of divided rule could not cope with the different pressures affecting the two regions. In the western Roman Empire, military and political events provoked social and cultural change when barbarian immigrants began living side by side with Romans. Both groups underwent changes: the barbarians created kingdoms and laws based on Roman traditions yet adopted Christianity, and the wealthy Romans fled from cities to seek safety in country estates when the western government became ineffective. These changes in turn transformed the political landscape of western Europe in ways that foreshadowed the later development of nations there. In the east, however, the empire lived on for another thousand years, passing on the memory of clasCHAPTER FOCUS What were the most imporsical traditions to later Western civilization. tant sources of unity and of division in the The eastern half endured as the continuRoman Empire from the reign of Diocletian to ation of the Roman Empire until Turkish the reign of Justinian, and why? invaders conquered it in 1453.

From Principate to Dominate in the Late Roman Empire, 284–395 Diocletian and Constantine pulled Roman government out of its extended crisis by increasing the emperors’ authority, reorganizing the empire’s defense, restricting workers’ freedom, and changing the tax system to try to increase revenues. The two emperors firmly believed they had to win back divine favor to ensure their people’s safety. Diocletian and Constantine believed that they could solve the empire’s problems by becoming more autocratic. They transformed their appearance as rulers to make their power seem awesome beyond compare, taking ideas from the self-presentation of their most powerful rivals, the rulers of the Persian Empire. Diocletian and Constantine hoped that their assertion of supremacy would keep their empire united; in the long run, however, it proved impossible to preserve Roman imperial territory on the scale once ruled by Augustus.

The Political Transformation and Division of the Roman Empire No one could have predicted Diocletian’s rise to power: he began life as an uneducated peasant in the Balkans, but his leadership, courage, and intelligence propelled him

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through the ranks until the army made him emperor in 284. He ended a half a century of civil war by imposing the most autocratic system of rule in Roman history. Historians refer to Roman rule from Diocletian onward as the dominate because he took the title dominus (“lord” or “master”) — what slaves called their owners. The emperors of the dominate continued to refer to their government as the Roman Republic, but in truth they ruled autocratically. This new system eliminated the principate’s ideal of the princeps (“first man”) as the social equal of the senators. The emperors of the dominate now recognized no equals. The offices of senator, consul, and other traditional positions continued, but only as posts of honor. These officials had the responsibility to pay for public services, especially chariot races and festivals, but no power to govern. Imperial administrators were increasingly chosen from lower ranks of society according to their competence and their loyalty to the emperor. The dominate’s emperors took ideas for emphasizing their superiority from the Sasanids in Persia, whose empire (224–651) they recognized as equal to their own in power and whose king and queen they addressed as “our brother” and “our sister.” The Roman Empire’s masters broadcast their majesty by surrounding themselves with courtiers and ceremony, presiding from a raised platform, and sparkling in jeweled crowns, robes, and shoes. Constantine took from Persia the tradition that emperors set themselves apart by wearing a diadem, a purple gem-studded headband. In another echo of Persian monarchy, a series of veils separated the palace’s waiting rooms from the interior room where the emperor listened to people’s pleas for help or justice. Officials marked their rank by wearing special shoes and belts and claiming grandiose titles such as “Most Perfect.” The dominate’s emperors also asserted their supreme power through laws and punishments. They alone made law. To impose order, they raised punishments to brutal levels. New punishments included Constantine’s order that the “greedy hands” of officials who took bribes “shall be cut off by the sword.” The guardians of a young girl who allowed a lover to seduce her were executed by having molten lead poured into their mouths. Penalties grew ever harsher for the majority of the population, legally designated as “humbler people,” who were punished more severely than the “better people” for comparable offenses. In this way, the dominate strengthened the divisions between ordinary people and the rich. Diocletian appointed three “partners” (a co-emperor, Maximian, and two assistant emperors, Constantius and Galerius, who were the designated successors) to join him in ruling the empire in a tetrarchy (“rule by four”). Each ruler controlled one of four districts. Diocletian served as supreme ruler and was supposed to receive the loyalty of the others. He also created smaller administrative units, called dioceses, under separate governors, who reported to the four emperors’ assistants, the praetorian prefects (Map 7.1). This system was Diocletian’s attempt to put imperial government into closer contact with the empire’s frontier regions, where the dangers of invasion and rebellious troops loomed. Diocletian’s reforms ended Rome’s thousand years as the empire’s most important city. Diocletian did not even visit Rome until 303, nearly twenty years after

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Trying to prevent civil war, Emperor Diocletian reorganized Rome’s imperial territory into a tetrarchy, to be ruled by himself, his co-emperor Maximian, and assistant emperors Constantius and Galerius, each the head of a large district. He subdivided the preexisting provinces into smaller units and grouped them into fourteen dioceses, each overseen by a regional administrator. The four districts as shown here reflect the arrangement recorded by the imperial official Sextus Aurelius Victor in about 360. What were the advantages and disadvantages of subdividing the empire?

becoming emperor. Italy became just another section of the empire, now subject to the same taxation as everywhere else. Diocletian resigned in 305 for unknown reasons, after which rivals for power abandoned the tetrarchy and fought a civil war until 324, when Constantine finally won. At the end of his reign in 337, Constantine designated his three sons to rule as co-emperors. Failing to cooperate, they waged war against one another. Constantine’s warring sons unofficially split the empire on a north–south line along the Balkan peninsula, a division that Theodosius made permanent in 395. In the long run, the empire’s halves would be governed largely as separate territories despite the emperors’ insistence that the empire remained one state.

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Each half had its own capital city. Constanti0 200 kilometers nople (“Constantine’s City”) — formerly the ancient . ILLYRIA city of Byzantium (today Istanbul, Turkey) — was R e b D a nu Ravenna the eastern capital. Constantine made it his capiTHRACIA ITALIA tal,a “new Rome,” because of its strategic military MOESIAE Constantinople and commercial location: it lay at the mouth of the Black Sea guarding principal routes for trade and troop movements. To recall the glory of Rome, Sicily Constantine constructed a forum, an imperial palLine of division between east and west ace, a hippodrome for chariot races, and monumenCrete Mediterranean Sea tal statues of the traditional gods in his refounded city. Constantinople grew to be the most imporEGYPT tant city in the Roman Empire. AFRICA ITALIA Dioceses Honorius, Theodosius’s son and successor in the west, wanted a headquarters that was easy to defend. The Empire’s East/West In 404, he chose the port of Ravenna, a commercial Division, 395 center on Italy’s northeastern coast housing a naval base. Marshes and walls protected Ravenna by land, while its harbor kept it from being starved out in a siege. Though the emperors enhanced Ravenna with churches covered in multicolored mosaics, it never rivaled Constantinople in size or splendor. PANNONIAE

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The Social Consequences of Financial Pressures To try to control inflation and support his huge army, Diocletian imposed price and wage controls and a new taxation system. These measures failed because they imposed great financial pressures on both rich and poor. Diocletian also placed restrictions on many people’s rights to choose their occupations. Diocletian was desperate to reduce the hyperinflation resulting from the thirdcentury crisis. As prices escalated, people hoarded whatever they could buy. “Hurry and spend all my money you have; buy me any kinds of goods at whatever prices they are available,” wrote one official to his servant. Hoarding only worsened the inflation. In 301, the inflation was so severe that Diocletian imposed harsh price and wage controls in the worst-hit areas. This mandate, which blamed high prices on merchants’ “unlimited and frenzied avarice,” forbade hoarding of goods and set cost ceilings for about a thousand goods and services. The mandate failed to change people’s behavior, despite penalties of exile or death. Diocletian’s price and wage controls thus only increased financial pressure on everyone. The emperors increased taxes mostly to support the army, which required enormous amounts of grain, meat, salt, wine, vegetable oil, military equipment, horses, camels, and mules. The major sources of revenue were a tax on land, assessed according to its productivity, and a head tax on individuals. To supplement taxes paid in coin, the emperors began collecting some payments in goods and services.

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The empire was too large to enforce the tax system uniformly. In some areas both men and women ages twelve to sixty-five paid the full tax, but in others women paid only half the tax assessment, or none at all. The reasons for such differences are not recorded. Workers in cities periodically paid “in kind,” that is, by laboring without pay on public works projects such as cleaning municipal drains or repairing buildings. People in commerce, from shopkeepers to prostitutes, still paid taxes in money, while members of the senatorial class were exempt from ordinary taxes but had to pay special levies. The new tax system could work only if agricultural production remained stable and the government kept track of the people who were liable for the head tax. Diocletian therefore restricted the movement of tenant farmers, called coloni (“cultivators”), whose work provided the empire’s economic base. Now male coloni, as well as their wives in areas where women were assessed for taxes, were increasingly tied to a particular plot of land. Their children, too, were bound to the family plot, making farming a hereditary obligation. The government also regulated other occupations deemed essential. Bakers, whowere required to produce free bread for Rome’s poor, a tradition begun under the republic to prevent food riots, could not leave their jobs. Under Constantine, the sons of military veterans were obliged to serve in the army. However, conditions were not the same everywhere in the empire. Free workers who earned wages apparently remained important in the economy of Egypt in the late Roman Empire, and archaeological evidence suggests that some regions may actually have become more prosperous. The emperors also decreed oppressive regulations for the curials, the social elite in the cities and towns. During this period, many men in the curial class were obliged to serve as decurions (unsalaried members of their city Senate) and to spend their own funds to support the community. Their financial responsibilities ranged from maintaining the water supply to feeding troops, but their most expensive duty was paying for shortfalls in tax collection. The emperors’ demands for revenue made this a crushing obligation. The empire had always depended on property owners to fill local offices in return for honor and the emperor’s favor. Now this tradition broke down as some wealthy people avoided public service to escape financial ruin. Service on a municipal council could even be imposed as punishment for a crime. Eventually, to prevent curials from escaping their obligations, imperial policy decreed that they could not move away from the town where they had been born. Members of the elite sought exemptions from public service by petitioning the emperor, bribing imperial officials, or taking up an occupation that freed them from curial obligations (the military, imperial administration, or church governance). The most desperate simply abandoned their homes and property. These restrictions eroded the communal values motivating wealthy Romans. The drive to increase revenues also produced social discontent among poorer citizens: the tax rate on land eventually reached one-third of the land’s gross yield, impover-

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ishing small farmers. Financial troubles, especially severe in the west, kept the empire from ever regaining the prosperity of its Golden Age.

From the Great Persecution to Religious Freedom To eliminate what he saw as a threat to national security, Diocletian in 303 launched the so-called Great Persecution to please the gods by suppressing Christianity. He expelled Christians from official posts, seized their property, tore down churches, and executed anyone who refused to participate in official religious rituals. His three partners in the tetrarchy applied the policy unevenly. In the western empire, official violence against Christians stopped after about a year; in the east, it continued for a decade. The public executions of Christians were so gruesome that they aroused the sympathy of some polytheists. The Great Persecution ultimately failed: it undermined social stability without destroying Christianity. Constantine changed the world’s religious history forever by converting to the new faith. During the civil war after Diocletian’s resignation, right before the crucial battle of the Milvian Bridge in Rome in 312, Constantine reportedly experienced a dream promising him God’s support and saw Jesus’s cross in the sky surrounded by the words “Under this sign you will win the victory.” Constantine ordered his soldiers to paint “the sign of the cross of Christ” on their shields. When his soldiers won a great victory in that battle, Constantine attributed his success to the Christian God and declared himself a Christian. However, Constantine did not make polytheism illegal and did not make Christianity the official state religion. Instead, he and his polytheist co-emperor Licinius enforced religious freedom, as shown by the Edict of Milan of 313. The edict proclaimed free choice of religion for everyone and referred to protection of the empire by “the highest divinity” — a general term meant to satisfy both polytheists and Christians.

Coin Portrait of Emperor Constantine Constantine had these special, extra-large coins minted to depict him for the first time as an overtly Christian emperor. The jewels on his helmet and crown, the fancy bridle on the horse, and the scepter indicate his status as emperor, while his armor and shield signify his military accomplishments. Heproclaims his Christian rule with his scepter’s new design — a cross with a globe — and the round badge sticking up from his helmet that carries the monogram signifying “Christ” that he had his soldiers paint on their shields to win God’s favor in battle. (The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.)

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Constantine promoted his newly chosen religion while trying to placate traditional polytheists, who still greatly outnumbered Christians. For example, he returned all property confiscated from Christians during the Great Persecution, but he had the treasury compensate those who had bought it. When in 321 he made the Lord’s Day of each week a holy occasion on which no official business or manufacturing work could be performed, he called it Sunday to blend Christian and traditional notions in honoring two divinities, God and the sun. He decorated his new capital of Constantinople with statues of traditional gods. Above all, he respected tradition by REVIEW QUESTION What were Diocletian’s continuing to hold the office of pontifex policies to end the third-century crisis, and how maximus (“chief priest”), which emperors successful were they? had filled ever since Augustus.

The Official Christianization of the Empire, 312–c. 540 The process of Christianization of the Roman Empire was gradual: Christianity was not officially made the state religion until the end of the fourth century, and even then many people continued to worship the traditional gods in private. Eventually, Christianity became the religion of most people by attracting converts among women and men of all classes, assuring believers of personal salvation, offering the social advantages and security of belonging to the emperors’ religion, nourishing a strong sense of shared identity and community, developing a hierarchy to govern the church, and creating communities of devoted monks (male and female). The transformation from a polytheist into a Christian state was the Roman Empire’s most important long-term influence on Western civilization.

Polytheism and Christianity in Competition Polytheism and Christianity competed for people’s faith. They shared some similar beliefs. Both, for example, regarded spirits and demons as powerful and ever-present forces in life. Some polytheists focused their beliefs on a supreme god who seemed almost monotheistic; some Christians took ideas from Neoplatonist philosophy, which was based on Plato’s ideas about God and spirituality. Unbridgeable differences remained, however, between the beliefs of traditional polytheists and Christians. People disagreed over whether there was one God or many, and what degree of interest the divinity (or divinities) paid to the human world. Polytheists could not accept a divine savior who promised eternal salvation for believers but had apparently lacked the will or the power to overthrow Roman rule and prevent his own execution. The traditional gods by contrast, they believed, had given their worshippers a world empire. Moreover, polytheists could say, cults such as that of the goddess Isis and philosophies such as Stoicism insisted that only the pure of heart and mind could be admitted to their fellowship. Christians, by contrast, embraced sinners. Why, wondered perplexed polytheists, would anyone

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want to associate with such people? In short, as the Greek philosopher Porphyry argued, Christians had no right to claim they possessed the sole version of religious truth, for no one had ever discovered a doctrine that provided “the sole path to the liberation of the soul.” The slow pace of Christianization revealed how strong polytheism remained in this period, especially at the highest social levels. In fact, the emperor known as Julian the Apostate (r. 361–363) rebelled against his family’s Christianity — the word apostate means “renegade from the faith” — by trying to reverse official support of the new religion in favor of his own less traditional and more philosophical interpretation of polytheism. Like Christians, he believed in a supreme deity, but he based his religious beliefs on Greek philosophy when he said, “This divine and completely beautiful universe, from heaven’s highest arch to earth’s lowest limit, is tied together by the continuous providence of god, has existed ungenerated eternally, and is imperishable forever.” Emperors after Julian provided financial support for Christianity, dropped the title pontifex maximus, and stopped paying for sacrifices. Symmachus (c. 340–402), a polytheist senator who also served as prefect (mayor) of Rome, objected to the suppression of religious diversity: “We all have our own way of life and our own way of worship. . . . So vast a mystery cannot be approached by only one path.” Christianity officially replaced polytheism as the state religion in 391 when Theodosius I (r. 379–395) enforced a ban on privately funded polytheist sacrifices. In 395, he also announced that all polytheist temples had to close. Nevertheless, some famous shrines, such as the Parthenon in Athens, remained open for a long time. Pagan temples were gradually converted to churches during the fifth and sixth centuries. Non-Christian schools were not forced to close — the Academy, founded by Plato in Athens in the early fourth century b.c.e., endured for 140 years more. Jews posed a special problem for the Christian emperors. They seemed entitled to special treatment because Jesus had been a Jew. Previous emperors had allowed Jews to practice their religion, but the rulers now imposed legal restrictions. They banned Jews from holding office but still required them to assume the financial burdens of curials without the status. By the late sixth century, the law barred Jews from marrying Christians, making wills, receiving inheritances, or testifying in court. These restrictions began the long process that turned Jews into second-class citizens in later European history, but they did not destroy Judaism. Magnificent synagogues had been built in Palestine, though most Jews had been dispersed throughout the cities of the empire and the lands to the east. Written Jewish teachings and interpretations proliferated in this period, culminating in the vast fifth-century c.e. texts known as the Palestinian and the Babylonian Talmuds (learned opinions on the Mishnah, a collection of Jewish law) and the Midrash (commentaries on parts of Hebrew Scripture). As the official religion, Christianity attracted more believers, especially in the military. Soldiers could convert and still serve in the army. Previously, some Christians

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Christians were a minority in the Roman Empire in 300, although congregations existed in manycities and towns, especially in the eastern provinces. The emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in the early fourth century gave a boost to the new religion. It gained further strength during that century as the Christian emperors supported it financially and eliminated subsidies for the polytheist cults that had previously made up the religion of the state. By 600, Christians were numerous in all parts of the empire. (From Henry Chadwick and G. R. Evans, Atlas of the Christian Church [Oxford: Andromeda Oxford Ltd., 1987], 28. Reproduced by permission of Andromeda Oxford Limited.)

had felt a conflict between the military oath and their allegiance to Christ. Once the emperors were Christians, however, soldiers viewed military duty as serving Christ’s regime. Christianity’s social values contributed to its appeal by offering believers a strong sense of shared identity and community. When Christians traveled, they could find a warm welcome in the local congregation (Map 7.2). The faith also won converts by promoting the tradition of charitable works characteristic of Judaism and some polytheist cults, which emphasized caring for poor people, widows, and orphans. By the mid-third century, Rome’s Christian congregation was supporting fifteen hundred widows and poor people.

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Women were deeply involved in the new faith. Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo in North Africa and perhaps the most influential theologian in Western civilization, recognized women’s contribution to the strengthening of Christianity in a letter he wrote to the unbaptized husband of a baptized woman: “O you men, who fear all the burdens imposed by baptism! Your women easily best you. Chaste and devoted to the faith, it is their presence in large numbers that causes the church to grow.” Women could earn respect by giving their property to their congregation or by renouncing marriage to dedicate themselves to Christ. Consecrated virgins rejecting marriage and widows refusing to remarry joined donors of large amounts of money as especially admired women. Their choices challenged the traditional social order, in which women were supposed to devote themselves to raising families. Even these sanctified women, however, were largely excluded from leadership positions as the church’s hierarchy came more closely to resemble the male-dominated world of imperial rule. There were still some women leaders in the church even in the fourth century, but they were a small minority. The hierarchy of male bishops replaced early Christianity’s relatively loose communal organization, in which women held leadership posts. Over time, the bishops replaced the curials as the emperors’ partners in local rule, taking control of the distribution of imperial subsidies to the people. Regional councils of bishops appointed new bishops and addressed doctrinal disputes. Bishops in the largest cities became the most powerful leaders in the church. The bishop of Rome eventually emerged as the church’s supreme leader in the western empire, claiming for himself a title previously applied to many bishops: pope (from pappas, a child’s word for “father” in Greek), the designation still used for the head of the Roman Catholic church. Christians in the eastern empire never conceded this title to the bishop of Rome. The bishops of Rome claimed they had leadership over other bishops on the basis of the New Testament, where Jesus addresses Peter, his head apostle: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church. . . . I will entrust to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matt. 16:18–19). Noting that Peter’s name in Greek means “rock” and that Peter had founded the Roman church, bishops in Rome eventually argued that they had the right to command the church as Peter’s successors.

The Struggle for Clarification in Christian Belief The bishops struggled to establish clarity concerning what Christians should believe to ensure their spiritual purity. They often disagreed about theology, however, as did ordinary Christians, and doctrinal disputes repeatedly threatened the church’s unity. Controversy centered on what was orthodoxy and what was heresy. (See Chapter6, page 199.) The emperor became ultimately responsible for enforcing orthodox creed (a summary of correct beliefs) and could use force to compel agreement when disputes led to violence.

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Theological questions about the nature of the Christian Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three seemingly separate deities nevertheless conceived by orthodox believers to be a unified, co-eternal, and identical divinity — proved the hardest to clarify. The doctrine called Arianism generated fierce controversy for centuries. Named after its founder, Arius (c. 260–336), a priest from Alexandria, it maintained

Jesus as Sun God This heavily damaged mosaic, perhaps from the mid-third century, depicts Jesus like the Greek god of the sun, Apollo, riding in a chariot pulled by horses with rays of light shining forth around his head. This symbolism — God is light — reached back to ancient Egypt. Christian artists used it to portray Jesus because he had said, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12). The mosaic artist arranged the sunbeams to suggest the shape of the Christian cross. The cloak flaring from Jesus’s shoulder suggests the spread of his motion across the heavens. (Grotte, St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican State / Scala / Art Resource, NY.)

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that God the Father begot (created) his son Jesus from nothing and gave him his special status. Thus, Jesus was not identical with God the Father and was, in fact, dependent on him. Arianism found widespread support — the emperor Valens and his barbarian opponents were Arian Christians. Many people found Arianism appealing because it eliminated the difficulty of understanding how a son could be the equal of his father and because its subordination of son to father corresponded to the norms of family life. Arius used popular songs to make his views known, and people everywhere became engaged in the controversy. “When you ask for your change from a shopkeeper,” one observer remarked in describing Constantinople, “he harangues you about the Begotten and the Unbegotten. If you inquire how much bread costs, the reply is that ‘the Father is superior and the Son inferior.’ ” Disputes such as this led Constantine to try to determine religious truth. In 325, he convened 220 bishops at the Council of Nicaea to discuss Arianism. The majority voted to banish Arius to the Balkans and declared in the Nicene Creed that the Father and the Son were homoousion (“of one substance”) and co-eternal. So difficult were the issues, however, that Constantine later changed his mind twice, first recalling Arius from exile and then reproaching him again not long after. Numerous other disputes divided believers. Orthodoxy taught that Jesus’s divine and human natures commingled within his person but remained distinct. Monophysites (a Greek term for “single-nature believers”) argued that the divine took precedence over the human in Jesus and that he therefore had essentially only a single nature. They split from the orthodox hierarchy in the sixth century to found independent churches in Egypt (the Coptic church), Ethiopia, Syria, and Armenia. Nestorius, made bishop of Constantinople in 428, argued that Mary, in giving birth to Jesus, had produced the human being who became the temple for God dwelling within him. Nestorianism therefore offended Christians who accepted the designation of theotokos (Greek for “bearer of God”) for Mary. The bishops of Alexandria and Rome had Nestorius deposed and his doctrines officially rejected at councils held in 430 and 431. Nestorian bishops then established a separate church centered in the Persian Empire, where for centuries Nestorian Christians flourished under the tolerance of non-Christian rulers. They later became important agents of cultural diffusion by establishing communities that still endure in Arabia, India, and China. The heresy of Donatism best illustrates the ferocity that Christian disputes could generate. A conflict erupted in North Africa over whether to readmit to their old congregations Christians who had cooperated with imperial authorities during the Great Persecution. The Donatists (followers of the North African priest Donatus) insisted that the church should not be polluted with such “traitors.” So bitter was the clash that it even broke apart Christian families. One son threatened his mother, “I will join Donatus’s followers, and I will drink your blood.” A council organized in Chalcedon (a suburb of Constantinople) in 451 to settle the still-raging disagreement over Nestorius’s views was the most important attempt to clarify orthodoxy. The conclusions of the Council of Chalcedon form the basis of

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Mosaic of a Family from Edessa This mosaic, found in a cave tomb from c. 218–238 C.E., depicts an elite family from Edessa in the late Roman Empire. Their names are given in Syriac, the dialect of Aramaic spoken in their region, and their colorful clothing reflects local Iranian traditions. The mosaic’s border uses decorative patterns from Roman art, illustrating the combining of cultural traditions in the Roman Empire. Edessa was the capital of the small kingdom of Osrhoëne, annexed by Rome in 216. It became famous in Christian history because its king Abgar (r. 179–216) was the first monarch to convert to Christianity, well before Constantine. The eastern Roman emperors proclaimed themselves the heirs of King Abgar. (© World History Archive / Alamy.)

the doctrine of most Christians in the West today. At the time, however, it failed to create unanimity, especially in the eastern empire, where Monophysites flourished. By around 500, Augustine and other influential theologians such as Ambrose (c.339–397) and Jerome (c. 345–420) earned the informal title church fathers because their views were cited as authoritative in disputes over orthodoxy. Augustine became the most famous of this group of patristic (from pater, Greek for “father”) authors,

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and for the next thousand years his many works would be the most influential texts in western Christianity aside from the Bible. In The City of God, Augustine expressed his views on the need for order in human life and asserted that the basic human dilemma lay in the conflict between desiring earthly pleasures and desiring spiritual purity. Emotion, especially love, was natural and commendable, but only when directed toward God. Humans were misguided to look for any value in life on earth. Only life in God’s eternal city at the end of time had meaning. Nevertheless, Augustine wrote, law and government are required on earth because humans are imperfect. God’s original creation was perfect, but after Adam and Eve disobeyed God, humans lost their initial perfection and inherited a permanently flawed nature. According to this doctrine of original sin — a subject of theological debate since at least the second century — Adam and Eve’s disobedience passed down to human beings a hereditary moral disease that made the human will a divisive force. This corruption necessitated governments that could suppress evil. The state therefore had a duty to compel people to remain loyal to the church, by force if necessary. Christians, he argued, had a duty to obey the emperor and participate in political life. Soldiers, too, had to follow their orders. Order was so essential, Augustine argued, that it even justified what he admitted was the unjust institution of slavery. Although he detested slavery, he believed it was a lesser evil than the social disorder that he thought its abolition would create. In The City of God, Augustine argued that history has a divine purpose, even if people could not see it. History progressed toward an ultimate goal, but only God knew the meaning of his creation: To be truthful, I myself fail to understand why God created mice and frogs, flies and worms. Nevertheless, I recognize that each of these creatures is beautiful in its own way. For when I contemplate the body and limbs of any living creature, where do I not find proportion, number, and order exhibiting the unity of concord? Where one discovers proportion, number, and order, one should look for the craftsman. The question of how to understand and regulate sexual desire perplexed Christians in the search for religious truth. Augustine wrote that sex trapped human beings in evil and that they should therefore strive for asceticism, the practice of self-denial and spiritual discipline. Augustine knew from personal experience how difficult it was to accept this doctrine. In his autobiographical work Confessions, written about 397, he described the deep conflict he felt between his sexual desires and his religious beliefs. Only after a long period of reflection and doubt, he wrote, did he find the inner strength to commit to chastity as part of his conversion to Christianity.

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He advocated sexual abstinence as the highest course for Christians because he believed that Adam and Eve’s disobedience had forever ruined the perfect harmony God created between the human will and human passions. According to Augustine, God punished his disobedient children by making sexual desire a disruptive force that human will would always struggle to control. He reaffirmed the value of marriage in God’s plan, but he insisted that sexual intercourse even between loving spouses carried the unhappy reminder of humanity’s fall from grace. Reproduction, not pleasure, was the only acceptable reason for sex. This doctrine ennobled virginity and sexual renunciation as the highest virtues. By the end of the fourth century, Christians valued virginity so highly that congregations began to request virgin ministers and bishops.

The Emergence of Christian Monks Christian asceticism peaked with the emergence of monks: men and women who withdrew from everyday society to live a life of extreme self-denial imitating Jesus’s suffering, while praying for divine mercy on the world. In monasticism, monks originally lived alone, but soon they formed communities for mutual support in the pursuit of holiness. Polytheists and Jews had strong ascetic traditions, but Christian monasticism was distinctive for the huge numbers of people drawn to it and the high status that they earned in the Christian population. Monks’ fame came from their rejection of ordinary pleasures and comforts. They left their families and congregations, renounced sex, worshipped almost constantly, wore rough clothes, and ate so little they were always starving. To achieve inner peace, monks fought a constant spiritual battle against fantasies of earthly delights — plentiful, tasty food and the joys of sex. The earliest monks emerged in Egypt in the second half of the third century. Antony (c. 251–356), the son of a well-to-do family, was among the first to renounce regular existence. After hearing a sermon stressing Jesus’s command to a rich young man to sell his possessions and give the proceeds to the poor (Matt. 19:21), he left his property in about 285 and withdrew into the desert to devote the rest of his life to worshipping God through extreme self-denial. The opportunity to gain fame as a monk seemed especially valuable after the end of the Great Persecution. Becoming a monk — a living martyrdom — not only served as the substitute for dying a martyr’s death but also emulated the sacrifice of Christ. In Syria, “holy women” and “holy men” sought fame through feats of pious endurance; Symeon (390–459), for example, lived atop a tall pillar for thirty years, preaching to the people gathered at the foot of his perch. Egyptian Christians came to believe that their monks’ supreme piety made them living heroes who ensured the annual flooding of the Nile (which enriched the soil, aiding agriculture), an event once associated with the pharaohs’ religious power. In a Christian tradition originating with martyrs, the relics of dead holy men and women — body parts or clothing — became treasured sources of protection and

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Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai The sixth-century eastern Roman emperor Justinian built a wall to protect this monastery in the desert at the foot of Mount Sinai (on the peninsula between Egypt and Arabia). Justinian fortified the monastery to promote orthodoxy in a region dominated by Monophysite Christians. The monastery gained its name in the ninth century when the story was circulated that angels had recently brought the body of Catherine of Alexandria there. Catherine was said to have been martyred in the fourth century for refusing to marry the emperor because, in her words, she was the bride of Christ. (Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.)

healing. The power associated with the relics of saints (people venerated after their deaths for their holiness) gave believers faith in divine favor. In about 323, an Egyptian Christian named Pachomius organized the first monastic community, establishing the tradition of single-sex settlements of male or female monks. This communal monasticism dominated Christian asceticism ever after. Communities of men and women were often built close together to share labor, with women making clothing, for example, while men farmed. Some monasteries imposed military-style discipline, but there were large differences in the degree of control of the monks and the extent of contact allowed with the outside world. Some groups strove for complete self-sufficiency and strict rules to avoid transactions with outsiders. Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–379), in Asia Minor, started an alternative tradition of monasteries in service to society. Basil (later dubbed “the Great”) required monks to perform charitable deeds, especially ministering to

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the sick, a development that led to the foundation of the first hospitals, which were attached to monasteries. A milder code of monastic conduct became the standard in the west beginning about 540. Called the Benedictine rule after its creator, Benedict of Nursia (c. 480– 553), it mandated the monastery’s daily routine of prayer, scriptural readings, and manual labor. This was the first time in Greek and Roman history that physical work was seen as noble, even godly. The rule divided the day into seven parts, each with a compulsory service of prayers and lessons, called the office. Unlike the harsh regulations of other monastic communities, Benedict’s code did not isolate the monks from the outside world or deprive them of sleep, adequate food, or warm clothing. Although it gave the abbot (the head monk) full authority, it instructed him to listen to other members of the community before deciding important matters. He was not allowed to beat disobedient monks. Communities of women, such as those founded by Basil’s sister Macrina and Benedict’s sister Scholastica, generally followed the rules of the male monasteries, with an emphasis on the decorum thought necessary for women. Monastic piety held special appeal for women and the rich because women could achieve greater status and respect for their holiness than ordinary life allowed them, and the rich could win fame on earth and hope for favor in heaven by endowing monasteries with large gifts of money. Jerome wrote, “[As monks,] we evaluate people’s virtue not by their gender but by their character, and judge those to be worthy of the greatest glory who have renounced both status and riches.” Some monks did not choose their life; monasteries took in children from parents who could not raise them or who, in a practice called oblation, gave them up to fulfill pious vows. Jerome once advised a mother regarding her young daughter: Let her be brought up in a monastery, let her live among virgins, let her learn to avoid swearing, let her regard lying as an offense against God, let her be ignorant of the world, let her live the angelic life, while in the flesh let her be without the flesh, and let her suppose that all human beings are like herself. When the girl reached adulthood as a virgin, he added, she should avoid the baths so that she would not be seen naked or give her body pleasure by dipping in the warm pools. Jerome emphasized traditional values favoring males when he promised that God would reward the mother with the birth of sons in compensation for the dedication of her daughter. Monasteries could come into conflict with the church leadership. Bishops resented members of their congregations who withdrew into monasteries, especially because they then gave money and property to their new community instead of to their local churches. Monks represented a threat to bishops’ authority because holy men and women earned their special status not by having it bestowed from the REVIEW QUESTION How did Christianity both church hierarchy but through their own unite and divide the Roman Empire? actions.

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Non-Roman Kingdoms in the Western Roman Empire, c.370–550s The western Roman Empire came under great pressure from the incursions of non-Roman peoples — barbarians, the Romans called them, meaning “brave but uncivilized” — that took place in the fourth and fifth centuries. The emperors had traditionally admitted some multiethnic groups from east of the Rhine River and north of the Danube River into the empire to fight in the Roman army, but eventually other barbarians fought their way in from the northeast. The barbarians wanted to flee attacks by the Huns (nomadic warriors from central Asia) and share in Roman prosperity. By the 370s, this human tide provoked violence and a loss of order in the western empire. The immigrants slowly transformed themselves from loosely organized tribes into kingdoms with newly defined identities. By the 470s, one of their commanders ruled Italy — the political change that has been said to mark the fall of the Roman Empire. However, the interactions of these non-Roman peoples with the empire’s residents in western Europe and North Africa seem closer to a political, social, and cultural transformation — based on force more than cooperation — that made the immigrants the heirs of the western Roman Empire and led to the formation of medieval Europe.

Non-Roman Migrations into the Western Roman Empire The non-Roman peoples who flooded into the empire had diverse origins; simply labeling them “Germanic peoples” misrepresents the diversity of their multiethnic languages and customs. These diverse barbarian peoples had no previously established sense of ethnic identity, and many of them had had long-term contact with Romans through trade across the frontiers and service in the Roman army. By encouraging this contact, the emperors unwittingly set in motion forces that they could not in the end control. By late in the fourth century, attacks by the Huns had destabilized life for these bands across the Roman frontiers, and the families of the warriors followed them into the empire seeking safety. Hordes of men, women, and children crossed into the empire as refugees, fleeing the Huns. They came with no political or military unity and no clear plan. They shared only their terror of the Huns and their custom of conducting raids for a living in addition to farming small plots. The inability to prevent immigrants from crossing the border or to integrate them into Roman society once they had crossed put great stress on the western central government. Persistent economic weakness rooted in the third-century crisis worsened this pressure. Tenant farmers and landlords fleeing crushing taxes had left as much as 20 percent of farmland unworked in the most seriously affected areas. The loss of revenue made the government unable to afford enough soldiers to control the frontiers. Over time, the immigrating non-Roman peoples forced the Roman government to grant them territory in the empire. Remarkably, they then began to

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develop separate ethnic identities and create new societies for themselves and the Romans living under their control. In their homelands the barbarians had lived in chiefdom societies, whose members could only be persuaded, not ordered, to follow the chief. Chiefs maintained their status by giving gifts to their followers and leading raids to capture cattle and slaves. They led clans — groups of households organized by kinship lines, following maternal as well as paternal descent. Violence against a fellow clan member was the worst possible offense. Clans in turn grouped themselves into tribes — fluctuating coalitions that anyone could join. Tribes differentiated themselves by their clothing, hairstyles, jewelry, weapons, religious cults, and oral stories. Family life was patriarchal: men headed households and held authority over women, children, and slaves. Warfare preoccupied men, as their ritual sacrifices of weapons preserved in northern European bogs have shown. Women were valued for their ability to bear children, and rich men could have more than one wife and perhaps concubines as well. A division of labor made women responsible for growing crops, making pottery, and producing textiles, while men worked iron and herded cattle. Women enjoyed certain rights of inheritance and could control property, and married women received a dowry of one-third of their husband’s property. Assemblies of free male warriors made major decisions in the tribes. Their leaders’ authority was restricted mostly to religious and military matters. Tribes could be unstable and prone to internal conflict — clans frequently feuded, with bloody consequences. Tribal law tried to determine what forms of violence were and were not acceptable in seeking revenge, but laws were oral, not written, and thus open to wide dispute. Tribes frequently attacked other tribes. The migrations became a flood of people when the Huns invaded eastern Europe in the fourth century. The Huns arrived on the Russian steppes shortly before 370 as the vanguard of Turkish-speaking nomads moving west. Their warriors’ appearance terrified their victims, who reported their attackers had skulls elongated from having been bound between boards in infancy, faces grooved with decorative scars, and arms fearsome with elaborate tattoos. Huns excelled as raiders, launching cavalry attacks without warning. Skilled as horsemen, they could shoot their powerful bows accurately while riding full tilt and stay mounted for days, sleeping atop their horses and carrying snacks of raw meat between their thighs and the animal’s back. By later in the fourth century the Huns had moved as far west as the Hungarian plain north of the Danube, terrifying the peoples there and launching raids southward into the Balkans. The emperors in Constantinople began paying the Huns to spare their territory, so the most ambitious Hunnic leader, Attila (r. c. 440–453), pushed his domain westward toward the Alps. He led his forces as far west as central France and into northern Italy. At Attila’s death in 453, the Huns lost their fragile unity and faded from history. By this time, however, the terror that they had inspired in the peoples living in eastern Europe had provoked the migrations that eventually transformed the western empire.

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The first non-Roman group that created a new identity and society inside the empire were barbarians from the north. Their history illustrates the pattern of the migrations: desperate barbarians in barely organized groups with no uniform ethnic identity, who sought protection in the Roman Empire in return for military service but were brutalized, and then rebelled to form their own, new kingdom. Abused by the officers of the emperor Valens, these barbarians defeated and killed him at the battle of Adrianople in 378 (Map 7.3).

N W

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Frankish kingdom in 486 C.E.

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MAP 7.3 Migrations and Invasions of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries

The movements of non-Roman peoples into imperial territory transformed the Roman Empire. These migrations had begun as early as the reign of Domitian (r. 81–96), but in the fourth century they increased greatly when the Huns’ attacks pushed numerous barbarian bands into the empire’s northern provinces. Print maps offer only a static representation of dynamic processes such as movements of populations, but this map helps illustrate the variety of peoples involved, the wide extent of imperial territory that they affected, and their prominence in the western empire.

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When the emperor Theodosius died in 395, the barbarians whom he had allowed to settle in the empire rebelled. United by the Gothic chief Alaric into a tribe known as the Visigoths, they fought their way into the western empire. In 410, they stunned the world by sacking Rome itself. For the first time since the Gauls eight hundred years before, a foreign force occupied the ancient capital. They terrorized the population: “What will be left to us?” the Romans asked when Alaric demanded all the citizens’ goods. “Your lives,” he replied. Too weak to fend off the invaders, the western emperor Honorius in 418 reluctantly agreed to settle the newcomers in southwestern Gaul (present-day France), where they completed their unprecedented transition from tribe to kingdom, organizing a political state and creating their identity as Visigoths. They had no precedents to follow from their previous existence, so they adapted the only model available: Roman tradition, including a code of written law. The Visigoths established mutually beneficial relations with local Roman elites, who used time-tested ways of flattering their new superiors to gain advantages. Sidonius Apollinaris (c. 430–479), for example, a well-connected noble from Lyon, once purposely lost a backgammon game to the Visigothic king as a way of winning a favor. How the new non-Roman kingdoms raised revenues is uncertain. Did the newcomers become landlords by forcing Roman property owners to redistribute a portion of their lands, slaves, and movable property as “ransom” to them? Or did Romans directly pay the expenses of the kingdom’s soldiers, who lived mostly in urban garrisons? Whatever the new arrangements were, the Visigoths found them profitable enough to expand into Spain within a century of establishing themselves in southwestern Gaul. The western government’s concessions to the Visigoths led other groups to seize territory and create new kingdoms and identities. In 406, the Vandals cut a swath through Gaul all the way to the Spanish coast. (The modern word vandal, meaning “destroyer of property,” perpetuates their reputation for destruction.) In 429, eighty thousand Vandals ferried to North Africa, where they broke their agreement to become federate allies with the western empire and captured the region. They crippled the western empire by seizing North Africa’s tax payments of grain and vegetable oil and disrupting the importation of food to Rome. They threatened the eastern empire with their navy and in 455 sailed to Rome, plundering the city. Back in the Roman province of Africa, the Vandals caused tremendous hardship for local people by confiscating property rather than allowing owners to make regular payments on the land. As Arian Christians, they persecuted North African Christians whose doctrines they considered heresy. Small non-Roman groups took advantage of the disruption caused by bigger bands to break off distant pieces of the empire. The Anglo-Saxons, for example, were composed of Angles from what is now Denmark and Saxons from northwestern Germany. This mixed group invaded Britain in the 440s after the Roman army had been recalled from the province to defend Italy against the Visigoths. The Anglo-

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Saxons captured territory from the local Celtic peoples and the remaining Roman inhabitants. Gradually, their culture replaced the local traditions of the island’s eastern regions. The Celts there lost most of their language, and Christianity gave way to Anglo-Saxon beliefs except in Wales and Ireland. Another barbarian group, the Ostrogoths, carved out a kingdom in Italy in the fifth century. By the time their king Theodoric (r. 493–526) came to power, there had not been a western Roman emperor for nearly twenty years, and there never would be again. The details of the change in the later fifth century that has traditionally, but simplistically, been called the fall of the Roman Empire reveal the complexity of the political transformation of the western empire under the new kingdoms. The weakness of the western emperors’ army had obliged them to hire foreign officers to lead the defense of Italy. By the middle of the fifth century, one non-Roman general after another had come to decide who would serve as a puppet emperor under his control. The last such unfortunate puppet was only a child. His father, a former aide to Attila, tried to establish a royal house by proclaiming his young son as western emperor in 475. He gave the boy ruler the name Romulus Augustulus (“Romulus the Little Augustus”) to match his young age and to recall both Rome’s founder and its first emperor. In 476, following a dispute over pay, the boy emperor’s non-Roman soldiers murdered his father and deposed him. Little Augustus was given refuge and a pension. The rebels’ leader, Odoacer, had the Roman Senate petition Zeno, the eastern emperor, to recognize his leadership in return for his acknowledging Zeno as sole emperor over west and east. Odoacer thereafter oversaw Italy nominally as the eastern emperor’s subordinate, but he ruled on his own. Theodoric established the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy by eliminating Odoacer. He and his nobles wanted to enjoy the luxurious life of the empire’s elite and to preserve the empire’s prestige; they therefore left the Senate and consulships intact. An Arian Christian, Theodoric announced a policy of religious freedom. Like the other non-Romans, the Ostrogoths adopted and adapted Roman traditions that supported the stability of their own rule. The Franks were especially significant in the reshaping of the western Roman Empire because they transformed Roman Gaul into Francia (from which comes the name France). In 507, their king Clovis (r. 485–511), with support from the eastern Roman emperor, overthrew the Visigothic king in Gaul. When the emperor named Clovis an honorary consul, Clovis celebrated this honor by having himself crowned with a diadem in the style of the emperors. He established western Europe’s largest new kingdom in what is today mostly France, overshadowing the neighboring and rival kingdoms of the Burgundians and Alemanni in eastern Gaul. Probably persuaded by his wife, Clotilda, a Christian, to believe that God had helped him defeat the Alemanni, Clovis proclaimed himself an orthodox Christian and renounced Arianism. To build stability, he carefully fostered good relations with the bishops as the regime’s intermediaries with the population.

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Clovis’s dynasty, called Merovingian after the legendary Frankish ancestor Merovech, endured for another two hundred years, foreshadowing the kingdom that would emerge much later as the forerunner of modern France. The Merovingians survived so long because they successfully combined their own traditions of military bravery with Roman social and legal traditions. In addition, their location in far western Europe kept them out of the reach of the destructive invasions sent against Italy by the eastern emperor Justinian in the sixth century to reunite the Roman world.

Social and Cultural Transformation in the Western Roman Empire The gradual replacement of government in the western Roman Empire by barbarian kingdoms set in motion social and cultural transformations. The newcomers and their Roman subjects created novel ways of life by combining old traditions, as Athaulf, king of the Visigoths (r. 410–415), explained after marrying a Roman noblewoman: At the start I wanted to erase the Romans’ name and turn their land into a Gothic empire, doing myself what Augustus had done. But I have learned that the Goths’ freewheeling wildness will never accept the rule of law, and that state with no law is no state. Thus, I have more wisely chosen another path to glory: reviving the Roman name with Gothic vigor. I pray that future generations will remember me as the founder of a Roman restoration. This process of social and cultural transformation promoted stability by producing new law codes but undermined long-term security by weakening the economic situation. Roman law was the most influential precedent for the new kings in constructing states. Their tribes had never possessed written laws, but their new states required legal codes to create a sense of justice and keep order. The Visigothic kings issued the first “barbarian law code.” Published in Latin in about 475, it made fines and compensation the primary method for resolving disputes. Clovis also emphasized written law for the Merovingian kingdom. His code, also published in Latin between about 507 and 511, promoted social order through clear penalties for specific crimes, formalizing a system of fines intended to defuse feuds and vendettas between individuals and clans. The most prominent component of this system was wergild, the payment a murderer had to make as compensation for his crime, to prevent endless cycles of revenge. The king received about one-third of the fine, with the rest paid to the victim’s family. Since laws indicate social values, the differing amounts of wergild in Clovis’s code suggest the relative values of different categories of people in his kingdom. Murdering a woman of childbearing age, a boy under twelve, or a man in the king’s

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retinue brought a massive fine of six hundred gold coins, enough to buy six hundred cattle. A woman past childbearing age (specified as sixty years), a young girl, or a freeborn man was valued at two hundred gold coins. Ordinary slaves rated thirty-five. The migrations of new groups into Roman territory had the unintended consequence of harming the empire’s already weakened economy. The Vandals’ violence battered many towns in Gaul, hastening a decline in urban population. In the countryside, now beyond the control of any central government, wealthy Romans built sprawling villas on extensive estates, staffed by tenants bound to the land like slaves. These establishments aimed to operate as self-sufficient units by producing all they needed, defending themselves against barbarian raids, and keeping their distance from any authorities. The owners shunned municipal offices and tax collection, the public services that had supplied the lifeblood of Roman administration. Provincial government slowly disappeared.

Mosaic of Women Exercising This picture covered a floor in a fourth-century country villa in Sicily that had more than forty rooms decorated with thirty-five hundred square meters of mosaics. The women shown in this mosaic were perhaps dancers getting in shape for public appearances or athletes performing as part of a show. Members of the Roman elite built such enormous and expensive houses as the centerpieces of estates meant to insulate them from increasingly dismal conditions in cities and protect them from barbarian attack. In this case, the strategy apparently failed: the villa was likely seriously damaged by Vandal invaders. (Villa del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily, Italy / Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.)

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In some areas now outside reach of the central government, the infrastructure of trade — roads and bridges — fell into disrepair with no public-spirited elite to maintain them. The elite holed up in their fortress-like households. They could afford to protect themselves: the annual income of the richest of them rivaled the revenue of an entire province in the old western empire. In some cases, these fortunate few helped pass down Roman learning to later ages. Cassiodorus (c. 490–585) founded a monastery on his ancestral estate in Italy in the 550s after a career in imperial administration. He gave the monks the task of copying manuscripts to keep their contents from disappearing as old ones disintegrated. His own book, Institutions, summed up what he saw as the foundation of ancient Greek and Roman culture by listREVIEW QUESTION How did their migrations ing the books an educated person should and invasions change the barbarians themread; it included ancient classical literature selves and the Roman Empire? as well as Christian texts.

The Roman Empire in the East, c. 500–565 The eastern Roman Empire (later called the Byzantine Empire — see Chapter 8) avoided the massive transformations that reshaped the western Roman Empire. Trade and agriculture kept the eastern empire from poverty, while its emperors used force, diplomacy, and bribery to prevent invasions from the north and repel attacks by the powerful Sasanid Empire in Persia. The eastern emperors believed it was their duty to rule a united Roman Empire and prevent barbarians from degrading its culture. The most famous eastern Roman emperor, Justinian (r. 527–565), and his wife and partner in rule, Theodora (500– 548), waged war against the barbarian kingdoms in the west, aiming to reunite the empire and restore the imperial glory of the Augustan period. Justinian increased imperial authority and tried to purify religion to satisfy what he saw as his duty to provide strong leadership and God’s favor. He and his successors in the eastern empire contributed to the preservation of the memory of classical Greek and Roman culture by preserving a great deal of earlier literature, non-Christian and Christian.

Imperial Society in the Eastern Roman Empire The sixth-century eastern empire enjoyed a vitality that had vanished in the west. Its social elite spent freely on luxuries such as silk, precious stones, and pepper and other spices imported from India and China. Markets in its large cities teemed with merchants from abroad. Its churches’ soaring domes testified to its confidence in the Christian God as its divine protector. The eastern emperors sponsored religious festivals and entertainments on a massive scale to rally public support. Rich and poor alike crowded city squares, theaters,

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and hippodromes on these lively occasions. Chariot racing aroused the hottest passions. Constantinople’s residents divided themselves into competitive factions called Blues and Greens after the racing colors of their favorite charioteers. Emperors sometimes backed one gang or the other to intimidate potential rivals. The eastern emperors worked to maintain Roman tradition and identity, believing that “Romanness” was the best defense against what they saw as the barbarization of the western empire. They hired foreign mercenaries but also tried to keep their subjects from adopting foreign ways. The emperors ordered Constantinople’s residents not to wear barbarian-style clothing (especially heavy boots and furs, which the chariot racing fans favored) instead of traditional Roman attire (sandals or light shoes and cloth robes). The emperors’ push for cultural unity was doomed to failure because everyday society in the eastern empire was widely multilingual and multiethnic. The inhabitants referred to themselves as Romans, but most of them spoke Greek as their native language and used Latin only for government and military communication. Many people retained their traditional languages, such as Phrygian and Cappadocian in western Asia Minor, Armenian farther east, and Syriac and other Aramaic dialects along the eastern Mediterranean coast. The streets of Constantinople reportedly rang with seventy-two languages. Romanness definitely included Christianity, but the eastern empire’s theological diversity rivaled its ethnic and linguistic complexity. Bitter controversies over doctrine divided eastern Christians; emperors used violence against Christians with different beliefs — heretics they called them — when persuasion failed. They had to employ force, they believed, to save lost souls and preserve the empire’s religious purity and divine goodwill. Most women in eastern Roman society lived according to ancient Mediterranean tradition, concentrating on their households and minimizing contact with men outside that circle. Law barred them from performing many public functions, such as witnessing wills. Subject to the authority of their fathers and husbands, women veiled their heads (though not their faces) to show modesty. The strict views of Christian theologians on sexuality and reproduction made divorce more difficult and discouraged remarriage even for widows. Sexual offenses carried harsher legal penalties. Female prostitution remained legal and common, but emperors raised the penalties for those who forced girls or female slaves under their control into prostitution. Women in the imperial family could achieve prominence unattainable for ordinary women. Empress Theodora demonstrated the influence high-ranking women could have in the eastern empire. Uninhibited by her humble origins (she was the daughter of a bear trainer and had been an actress with a scandalous reputation), she came to rival anyone in influence and wealth. She participated in every aspect of Justinian’s rule, advising him on personnel for his administration, advocating for her doctrinal views in Christian disputes, and rallying Justinian’s courage at times of crisis. A contemporary called her “superior in intelligence to any man.”

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Theodora and Her Court in Ravenna This mosaic shows the empress Theodora and members of her court presenting a gift to the church at San Vitale in Ravenna. It faced the matching scene of her husband Justinian and his attendants (page 239). Theodora wears the jewels, pearls, and rich robes characteristic of eastern Roman monarchs. She extends in her hands a gem-encrusted wine cup as her present. Her gesture imitates the gift-giving of the Magi to the baby Jesus, the scene illustrated on the hem of her garment. The circle around her head, called a nimbus (Latin for “cloud”), indicates special holiness. (Basilica San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy / Bridgeman Images.)

Government in the eastern empire increased social divisions because it provided services according to people’s wealth. Officials received fees for activities from commercial permits to legal grievances. People with money and status certainly found this situation useful: they relied on their social connections and wealth to get what they wanted. The poor had trouble affording the payments that government officials expected. This fee-based system allowed the emperors to pay their civil servants tiny salaries and spend imperial funds for other purposes. One top official reported that he earned thirty times his annual salary in payments from people seeking services. To keep the system from destroying itself through extortion, the emperors published an official list of the maximum fees that their employees could charge.

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Justinian and His Court in Ravenna This mosaic scene dominated by the eastern Roman emperor Justinian stands opposite Theodora’s mosaic (page 238) in San Vitale’s Church in Ravenna. The emperor is shown presenting a gift to the church. Justinian and Theodora finished building the church, which the Ostrogothic king Theodoric had started, to commemorate their successful campaign to restore Italy to the Roman Empire and reassert control of the western capital, Ravenna. The inclusion of the portrait of Maximianus, bishop of Ravenna, standing on Justinian’s left and identified by name, stresses the theme of cooperation between bishops and emperors in ruling the world. What do you think the inclusion of the soldiers at the left is meant to indicate? (Basilica San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy / Bridgeman Images.)

The Reign of Emperor Justinian, 527–565 Justinian became the most famous eastern emperor by waging war to reunite the empire as it had been in the days of Augustus, making imperial rule more autocratic, constructing costly buildings in Constantinople, and instituting legal and religious reforms. Justinian had the same aims as all his predecessors: to preserve social order based on hierarchy and maintain divine goodwill. The cost of his plans, however, forced him to raise taxes, generating civil strife. Justinian’s unpopular taxes provoked the Nika Riot in 532, when the Blue and Green factions, gathering to watch chariot races, united against the emperor, shouting

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“Nika! Nika!” (“Win! Win!”). After nine days of violence had left much of Constantinople in ashes, Justinian prepared to flee in panic. But Theodora sternly rebuked him: “Once born, no one can escape dying, but for one who has held imperial power it would be unbearable to be a fugitive. May I never take off my imperial robes of purple, nor live to see the day when those who meet me will not greet me as their ruler.” Her reproach convinced her husband to send in troops, who ended the rioting by slaughtering thirty thousand rioters trapped in the racetrack. Justinian’s most ambitious goal was to restore the empire to a unified territory, religion, and culture. Invading the former western provinces, his generals defeated the Vandals and Ostrogoths after campaigns that in some cases took decades to complete. At an enormous cost in lives and money, Justinian’s armies restored the boundaries of the Roman Empire as in the time of Augustus, with its territory stretching from the Atlantic to the western edge of Mesopotamia. His successors, however, would not be able to retain these reconquests. Justinian’s success in reuniting the western and eastern empires had unintended consequences: severe damage to the west’s infrastructure and the east’s finances. Italy endured the most physical destruction, while the eastern empire suffered because Justinian demanded even more taxes to finance his wars and pay the Persian kingdom not to attack. The tax burden crippled the economy, leading to constant banditry in the countryside. Crowds poured into the capital from rural areas, seeking relief from poverty and robbers. Natural disaster compounded Justinian’s problems. In the 540s, a horrific epidemic killed a third of his empire’s inhabitants; a quarter of a million, half the capital’s population, died in Constantinople alone. This was the first of many pandemics that erased millions of people in the eastern empire over the next two centuries. Serious earthquakes increased the death toll. The loss of so many people created a shortage of army recruits, requiring the emperor to hire expensive mercenaries, and left countless farms vacant, reducing tax revenues. Justinian sought stability by emphasizing his closeness to God and increasing the autocratic power of his rule. Moreover, he proclaimed the emperor the “living law,” recalling the Hellenistic royal doctrine that the ruler’s decisions defined law. He communicated his supremacy and piety through his building program in Constantinople, especially in Hagia Sophia (“Church of the Holy Wisdom”). Creating a new design for churches, Justinian’s architects erected a huge building on a square plan capped by a dome 107 feet across and 160 feet high. Its interior walls glowed like the sun from the light reflecting off their four acres of gold mosaics. Imported marble of every color added to the sparkling effect. When he first entered his masterpiece, dedicated in 538, Justinian exclaimed, “I have defeated you, Solomon,” claiming to have outdone the glory of the temple that the ancient king built for the Hebrews. Justinian’s autocratic rule reduced the autonomy of cities: imperial officials governed instead of their councils. Provincial elites still had to ensure full payment of their area’s taxes, but they no longer controlled local matters or social status. Men

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of property from the provinces who aspired to power and prestige could satisfy their ambitions only by joining the imperial administration in the capital. To streamline the mass of decisions that earlier emperors had made, Justinian codified the laws. His Codex appeared in 529, with a revised version completed in 534. A team of scholars also condensed millions of words of regulations to produce the Digest in 533, intended to expedite legal cases and provide a syllabus for law schools. This collection, like the Codex written in Latin and therefore readable in the western empire, influenced legal scholars for centuries. Justinian’s legal experts also compiled a textbook for students, the Institutes, which appeared in 533 and remained on law-school reading lists until modern times. To fulfill the emperor’s sacred duty to the welfare of his people, Justinian acted to enforce religious purity. He believed his world could not flourish if its god became angered by the presence of religious offenders. As emperor, Justinian decided who the offenders were. Zealously enforcing laws against polytheists, he compelled them to be baptized or forfeit their lands and official positions. He also purged heretical Christians opposing his version of orthodoxy. Justinian’s laws made male homosexual relations illegal for the first time in Roman history. Male same-sex unions had apparently been allowed, or at least officially ignored, until they were prohibited in 342 after Christianity became the emperors’ religion. There had never before been any civil penalties imposed on men engaging in homosexual activity, perhaps because previous rulers considered it impractical to regulate men’s sexuality, given that adult men lived their private lives free of direct oversight. All the previous emperors had, for example, simply taxed male prostitutes. The legal status of homosexual activity between women is uncertain, but homosexual activity between married women probably counted as adultery and thus as a crime. Justinian tried to reconcile orthodox and Monophysite Christians by revising the creed of the Council of Chalcedon. But the church leaders in Rome and Constantinople could not agree. The eastern and western churches were therefore launched on diverging courses that would result in formal schism five hundred years later. Justinian’s own ecumenical council in Constantinople ended in conflict in 553 when it jailed Rome’s defiant pope Vigilius while also managing to alienate Monophysite bishops. Justinian’s efforts to impose religious unity only drove Christians further apart and undermined his vision of a restored Roman world.

The Preservation of Classical Traditions in the Late Roman Empire Christianization of the late Roman Empire endangered the memory of classical traditions. The plays, histories, philosophical works, poems, speeches, and novels of classical Greece and Rome were polytheist and therefore potentially subversive of Christian belief, but the threat to their survival stemmed more from neglect than suppression. As many Christians became authors, their works displaced ancient Greek and Roman texts as the most important literature of the age.

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Some classical texts survived, however, because Christian education and literature depended on non-Christian models, both Latin and Greek. Latin scholarship in the east received a boost when Justinian’s Italian wars caused Latin-speaking scholars to flee to Constantinople. There they helped conserve many ancient Roman texts. Scholars preserved classical literature because they regarded it as a crucial part of an elite education. Some knowledge of pre-Christian classics was required for a successful career in government service, the goal of every ambitious student. An imperial decree from 360 stated, “No person shall obtain a post of the first rank unless it shall be shown that he excels in long practice of liberal studies, and that he is so polished in literary matters that words flow from his pen faultlessly.” Another factor promoting the preservation of classical literature was the use of classical rhetoric and its techniques for making persuasive arguments to present Christian theology. When Ambrose, bishop of Milan from 374 to 397, composed the first systematic description of Christian ethics for young ministers, he imitated the great Roman orator Cicero. Theologians refuted heresies among Christians by employing the dialogue form pioneered by Plato. Authors of the biographies of saints found inspiration in ancient literature that praised the heroes of traditional polytheist

An Author or Scribe at Work This illustration from a book produced in late Roman/early medieval times shows either an author writing a book or a scribe making a copy of a book by hand. This was the painstaking and slow process necessary to produce books in antiquity; mechanical printing had not yet been invented, and therefore mass production of books was not possible. As a result, books were expensive and precious objects, as indicated in the painting by their being carefully placed on their sides in the cabinet behind the writer to keep their weight from warping their spines and pages. (Holy Bible [Biblia Sacra], Codex Amiatinus, 690–716 [parchment] / Anglo-Saxon / Biblioteca MediceaLaurenziana, Florence, Italy / Mondadori Portfolio / Electa / Sergio Anelli / Bridgeman Images.)

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religion. Choricius, a Christian who held the official position of professor of rhetoric in Gaza, wrote works based on subjects from pre-Christian Greek mythology and history, such as the Trojan War or the Athenian general Miltiades. Similarly, Christian artists incorporated polytheist traditions in communicating their beliefs and emotions in paintings, mosaics, and carved reliefs. A favorite artistic motif of Christ with a sunburst surrounding his head, for example, took its inspiration from polytheist depictions of the radiant Sun as a god. (See the illustration on page 222.) The growth of Christian literature generated a technological innovation that helped preserve classical literature. Polytheist scribes had written books on sheets of parchment (made from animal skin) or paper (made from papyrus). They then glued the sheets together and attached rods at both ends to form a scroll. Readers faced an awkward task in unrolling scrolls to read. For ease of use, Christians produced their literature in the form of the codex — a book with bound pages. Eventually the codex became the standard form of book production. Despite its continuing importance in education and rhetoric, classical Greek and Latin literature barely survived the war-torn world dominated by Christians. Knowledge of Greek in the west faded so drastically that by the sixth century almost no one there could read the original versions of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the foundations of a classical literary education. Latin fared better, and scholars such as Augustine and Jerome knew Rome’s ancient literature extremely well. But they also saw its classics as potentially too seductive for a pious Christian because the pleasure that came from reading them could be a distraction from the worship of God. Jerome in fact once had a nightmare of being condemned on Judgment Day for having been more dedicated to Cicero than to Christ. The closing around 530 of the Academy, founded in Athens by Plato more than nine hundred years earlier, demonstrated the dangers for classical learning in the later Roman Empire. This most famous of classical schools finally went out of business when many of its scholars emigrated to Persia to escape Justinian’s tightened restrictions on polytheist teachers and its revenues dwindled because the Athenian elite, its traditional supporters, were increasingly Christianized. The Neoplatonist school at Alexandria, by contrast, continued. Its leader John Philoponus (c. 490–570) was a Christian. In addition to Christian theology, Philoponus wrote commentaries on the works of Aristotle. Some of his ideas anticipated those of Galileo a thousand years later. He achieved the kind of synthesis of old and new that was one of the innovative outcomes of the cultural transformation of the late Roman world — he was a Christian subject of the eastern Roman Empire in sixth-century Egypt, heading a school founded long before by polytheists, studying the works of an ancient Greek philosopher as the inspiration for his forward-looking scholarship. The strong possibility that present generations could learn REVIEW QUESTION What policies did Justinfrom the past would continue as Western ian undertake to try to restore and strengthen civilization once again remade itself in the Roman Empire? medieval times.

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Conclusion Diocletian ended the third-century crisis of the Roman Empire, but his reforms only delayed its fragmentation. In the late fourth century, migrations of barbarians fleeing the Huns weakened the Roman imperial government. Emperor Theodosius I divided the empire into western and eastern halves in 395 to try to improve its administration and defense. When Roman authorities bungled the task of integrating barbarian tribes into Roman society, the newcomers created kingdoms that eventually replaced Roman rule in the west. Large-scale and violent immigration transformed the western empire’s politics, society, and economy. The political changes and economic deterioration accompanying this transformation destroyed the public-spiritedness of the elite, as wealthy nobles retreated to self-sufficient country estates and shunned municipal office. The eastern empire fared better economically than the western and avoided the worst violence of the migrations. Eastern emperors attempted to preserve “Romanness” by maintaining Roman culture and political traditions. The financial pressure of wars to reunite the empire drove tax rates to unbearable levels, while the concentration of authority in the capital weakened local communities. Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312 marked a turning point in Western history. Christianization of the empire occurred gradually, and Christians disagreed among themselves over doctrines of faith, even to the point of deadly violence. Monastic life redefined the meaning of holiness by creating communities of “God’s heroes” who withdrew from this world to devote their service to glorifying the next. In the end, the quest for unity fell short through the powerful effects of political and social transformation. Nevertheless, the memory of Roman power and culture remained potent, providing an influential inheritance to the peoples and states that would become Rome’s heirs in the next stage of Western civilization.

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The eastern Roman Empire at the accession of Justinian, 527 C.E.

The eastern Roman Empire at the death of Justinian, 565 C.E.

MAPPING THE WEST Western Europe and the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire, c. 600

The eastern Roman emperor Justinian employed brilliant generals and expended huge sums of money to reconquer Italy, North Africa, and part of Spain to reunite the western and eastern halves of the former Roman Empire. His wars to regain Italy and North Africa eliminated the Ostrogothic and Vandal kingdoms, respectively, but at a huge cost in effort, time — the war in Italy took twenty years — and expense. The resources of the eastern empire were so depleted that his successors could not maintain the reunification. By the early seventh century, the Visigoths had taken back all of Spain. Africa, despite serious revolts by indigenous Berber tribes, remained under imperial control until the Arab conquest of the seventh century. Within five years of Justinian’s death, however, the Lombards had set up a new kingdom controlling a large section of Italy. Never again would anyone in the ancient world attempt to reestablish a universal Roman Empire.

Chapter 7 Review Key Terms and People Be sure that you can identify the term or person and explain its historical significance. dominate (p.213)

Edict of Milan (p.217)

Nicene Creed (p.223)

tetrarchy (p.213)

Julian the Apostate (p.219)

asceticism (p.225)

coloni (p.216)

Theodosius I (p.219)

Visigoths (p.231)

curials (p.216)

Augustine (p.221)

wergild (p.234)

Great Persecution (p.217)

Arianism (p.222)

Justinian and Theodora (p.236)

Review Questions 1. What were Diocletian’s policies to end the third-century crisis, and how successful were they? 2. How did Christianity both unite and divide the Roman Empire? 3. How did their migrations and invasions change the barbarians themselves and the Roman Empire? 4. What policies did Justinian undertake to try to restore and strengthen the Roman Empire?

Making Connections 1. How did the principate and the dominate differ with regard to political appearance versus political reality? 2. What were the main similarities and differences between polytheism and Christianity as official state religions in the late Roman Empire? 3. What developments in the late Roman Empire would support the idea that it is possible for a state to be too large to be well governed and to remain united indefinitely?

Suggested References Some scholars regard the political, social, and cultural changes in the late Roman Empire as evidence of a sad “decline and fall”; others judge them to have had mixed positive and negative consequences. The rise of Christianity to the status of an official religion also changed Roman life in complex ways that are still being investigated. Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. 1988. Cameron, Averil. The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity AD 395–700. 2nd ed. 2012. Daryaee, Touraj. Sasanian Iran (224–651 C.E.): Portrait of a Late Antique Empire. 2008. *Drew, Katherine Fischer, ed. The Laws of the Salian Franks. 1991. Elsner, Jas. Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire, A.D. 100–450. 1998. *Grubbs, Judith Evans. Women and Law in the Roman Empire: A Sourcebook on Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood. 2002. Heather, Peter. Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe. 2010. Jacobsen, Torsten Cumberland. A History of the Vandals. 2012. Kelly, Christopher. Ruling the Later Roman Empire. 2006. *Primary source.

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Important Events 293

Diocletian creates the tetrarchy

301

Diocletian issues Edict on Maximum Prices and Wages

303

Diocletian launches Great Persecution of Christians

312

Constantine sees vision, wins battle of the Milvian Bridge in Rome, and converts to Christianity

313

Religious freedom is proclaimed in the Edict of Milan

323

Pachomius in Upper Egypt establishes the first monasteries

324

Constantine wins civil war and re-founds Byzantium as Constantinople, the “New Rome”

325

Council of Nicaea defends Christian orthodoxy against Arianism

361–363

Julian the Apostate tries to reinstate polytheism as official state religion

378

Barbarian massacre of Roman army in battle of Adrianople

391

Theodosius I makes Christianity the official state religion

395

Theodosius I divides empire into western and eastern halves

410

Visigoths sack Rome

426

Augustine publishes The City of God

451

Council of Chalcedon attempts to forge agreement on Christian orthodoxy

475

Visigoths publish law code

476

German commander Odoacer deposes the final western emperor, the boy Romulus Augustulus (“the fall of Rome”)

493–526

Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy

507

Clovis establishes Frankish kingdom in Gaul

527–565

Reign of eastern Roman emperor Justinian

529–534

Justinian publishes law code and handbooks

540

Benedict devises his rule for monasteries

Consider three events: Augustine publishes The City of God (426), Council of Chalcedon attempts to forge agreement on Christian orthodoxy (451), and Justinian publishes law code and handbooks (529–534). What connections can be drawn between these events in terms of the attitudes that informed them, their goals, and their effects on society?

*Lee, A. D. Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity: A Sourcebook. 2000. MacMullen, Ramsay. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries. 1997. Odahl, Charles. Constantine and the Christian Empire. 2nd ed. 2010. *Procopius. The Secret History. Trans. G. A. Williamson and Peter Sarris. 2007. *Procopius. The Wars. Vols. I–V. Trans. H. B. Dewing. 1914–1928. Rosen, William. Justinian’s Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire. 2008. Southern, Pat, and Karen R. Dixon. The Late Roman Army. 1996. Wickham, Chris. Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean. 2007.

The Heirs of Rome: Islam, Byzantium, and Europe

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t the end of the sixth century, Gregory, bishop of Tours, wrote about Clovis, the first king of the Franks. Under Clovis, the Franks took over Gaul and turned it into a barbarian kingdom. Yet, about a century later, Gregory insisted that Clovis was a legitimate Roman ruler. He described a day in which Clovis stood in the church of Saint Martin at Tours:

Reliquary The precious remains of a saint — or relics — were housed in this equally precious box — a seventh-century reliquary. Most of the decorative elements of the box — cloisonné enamel (bits of enamel framed by metal), garnets, and glass gems laid out in an abstract pattern — were drawn from barbarian artistic motifs. The pearls, however, form crosses that make clear the Christian purpose of the box. Right in the center, the maker put a cameo (or perhaps an imitation cameo) that was meant to recall Roman silhouettes, as if there were no contradiction between barbarian abstract styles and Roman forms. Like Gregory of Tours calling Clovis “Augustus,” the maker of this box considered a Roman-type element to be a perfect complement to his otherwise geometrical design. (Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.)

[He was] clad in a purple tunic and the military mantle, and he crowned himself with a diadem. He then rode out on his horse and with his own hand showered gold and silver coins among the people present all the way from the doorway of Saint Martin’s church to Tours cathedral. From that day on he was called Consul or Augustus.

Consul or Augustus! Gregory thought that the Roman Empire lived on in the person of the barbarian Clovis. His words reveal that at the time people did not recognize the enormous transformations that were taking place in the sixth and seventh centuries. In fact, as the western and eastern parts of the Roman Empire went their separate ways, a third power — Islamic — took shape as well. These three powers have continued in various forms to the present day: the western Roman Empire became western Europe, the eastern Roman Empire became eastern Europe and Turkey and helped create Russia, and the Islamic world endures across North Africa and the Middle East and elsewhere as well. 249

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Diverse as these cultures are today, they share many of the same roots. Gregory had a good point: the successor states were heirs of Rome. All adhered to monotheism. The western and eastern halves of the Roman Empire had Christianity in common, although they differed at times in interpreting it. Adherents of Islam believed in the same one God as the Jews and Christians. The seventh and eighth centuries illustrate the Roman Empire’s persistence and transformation. Changes in the eastern half of the empire were so important that historians have given it a new name — Byzantine Empire. The term Byzantine Empire or Byzantium, which comes from the old Greek name for Constantinople, rightly implies that the center of power and culture in the eastern Roman Empire was now concentrated in this one city. Over the centuries, the empire expanded, shrank, and even nearly disappeared — but it hung on in one form or another until 1453. During the period 600–750, which historians consider the beginning of the Middle Ages, all three heirs of the Roman Empire combined elements of their heritage with new values, interests, and conditions. Their differences should nevertheCHAPTER FOCUS What three cultures took less not obscure the fact that the Byzantine, the place of the Roman Empire, and to what Muslim, and western European cultures extent did each of them both draw on and reject Roman traditions? were partly based on a common heritage.

Islam: A New Religion and a New Empire In the early seventh century, a religion that called on all to believe in one God began in Arabia (today Saudi Arabia). Islam (“submission to God”) took shape under Muhammad (c.570–632). While many of the people living in Arabia were polytheists, Muhammad recognized the one God of the Jews and Christians. He saw himself as God’s final prophet and thus became known as the Prophet. Invited by the people of Medina, in western Arabia, to come and act as a mediator in their disputes, Muhammad exercised the powers of both a religious and a secular leader. This dual role became the model for his successors, known as caliphs. Through a combination of persuasion and force, Muhammad and his co-religionists, the Muslims (“those who submit to Islam”), converted most of the Arabian peninsula. By the time Muhammad died in 632, Muslims had begun to conquer Byzantine and Persian territories. In the next generation, they expanded both east- and westward. Yet within the territories they conquered, daily life went on much as before.

Nomads and City Dwellers In the seventh century, the vast deserts of the Arabian peninsula were populated by both sedentary (settled) and nomadic peoples. The sedentary peoples, sometimes farmers, sometimes merchants and artisans, lived in oases. They far outnumbered the nomads, known as Bedouins, who herded livestock and raided one another for plunder, slaves, and wives (men practiced polygyny — having more than one wife at

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a time). Their poetry, oral rather than written, expressed their esteem for honor, friendship, bravery, and love. Islam began as a religion of the sedentary, but it soon found support and military strength among the nomads. It started in Mecca, an important commercial and religious center south of Medina. Mecca was the home of the Ka‘ba, a shrine that contained the images of many gods. It was a sacred place within which war and violence were prohibited. The tribe that dominated Mecca, the Quraysh, controlled access to the shrine, taxing the pilgrims who flocked there. Visitors, assured of their safety, bartered on the sacred grounds, transforming the plunder from raids into trade.

The Prophet Muhammad and the Faith of Islam Muhammad was born in Mecca. Orphaned at the age of six, he went to live with his uncle, a leader of the Quraysh tribe. Eventually, Muhammad became a trader and married Khadija, a rich widow. They lived (to all appearances) happily and comfortably. Yet Muhammad sometimes left home to pray in a nearby cave, practicing a type of piety similar to that of the early Christians. Around 610, on one of these retreats, Muhammad heard a voice and had a vision that summoned him to worship the God of the Jews and Christians, Allah (“the God” in Arabic). Over the next years, he received messages that he understood to be divine revelations. Later, when these messages had been written down and compiled — a process completed in the seventh century, but after Muhammad’s death — they became the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam. Qur’an means “recitation”; each of the book’s parts, called suras, is understood to be God’s revelation as told to Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel — the very Gabriel of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles — and then recited by Muhammad to others. Written entirely in verse and focused on the divine, the Qur’an stood apart from traditional Bedouin poetry, which had emphasized the here and now. Qur’an More than a holy book, theQur’an represents for Muslims the very words of Godthat were dictated to Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel. In the Umayyad period, the Qur’an was written, as here, on pages wider than long. The first four lines on thetop give the last verses ofSura 21. (The last verses of the Sura, Qur’an, Abbasid Period, North Africa, 9th century, ink, color and gold on parchment / Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., USA / Bridgeman Images.)

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Beginning with the Fatihah, which praises God as the “lord sustainer of the worlds,” the Qur’an continues with suras of gradually decreasing length. They cover the gamut of human experience and the life to come after death. For Muslims, the Qur’an contains the legal and moral code by which men and women should live: “Do not set up another god with God. . . . Do not worship anyone but Him, and be good to your parents.” It emphasizes the family — a man, his wife (or wives), and children — as the basic unit of Muslim society. Islam replaced the identity and protection of the tribe with a new identity: the ummah, the community of believers, who share both a belief in one God and a set of religious practices. Stressing individual belief in God and adherence to the Qur’an, Islam had no priests or sacraments, though in time it came to have authoritative religious leaders who interpreted the Qur’an and related texts.

Growth of Islam, c.610–632 The first convert to Muhammad’s faith was his wife. Eventually, as Muhammad preached the new faith, others became adherents. But Muhammad’s insistence that the cults of all other gods be abandoned in favor of one brought him into conflict with leading members of the Quraysh tribe, whose control over the Ka‘ba had given them prestige and wealth. Perceiving Muhammad as a threat, they insulted him and harassed his followers. Disillusioned with the people of Mecca, Muhammad looked elsewhere for converts. In particular, he expected support from Jews because he thought their monotheism prepared them for his own faith. He eagerly accepted an invitation to go to Medina, in part because of its significant Jewish population. Muhammad’s journey to Medina — called the Hijra — proved to be a crucial event for the new faith, and the year in which it occurred, 622, became the first year of the Islamic calendar.* Although he was disappointed not to find much support among the Jews at Medina, Muhammad did find others there ready to listen to his religious message and to accept him as the leader of their community. Muhammad’s political position in the community set the pattern by which Islamic society would be governed afterward; rather than simply adding a church to political and cultural life, Muslims made their political and religious institutions inseparable. Yet Muhammad felt threatened by the Quraysh tribe at Mecca, and he led raids against their caravans. At the battle of Badr in 624, the Muslims killed forty-nine of the Meccan enemy, took numerous prisoners, and confiscated considerable treasure. From the time of this conflict, the Bedouin tradition of plundering was grafted onto the Muslim duty of jihad (“striving in the way of God”). The battle of Badr was a great triumph for Muhammad, who now secured his position at Medina, gaining new adherents and silencing all doubters, including Jews. Turning against those who refused to convert, he expelled two Jewish tribes from *Thus, 1 anno Hegirae (1 a.h.) on the Muslim calendar is equivalent to 622 c.e.

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Medina and executed the male members of another. Although Muslims had originally prayed in the direction of Jerusalem, the center of Jewish worship, Muhammad now had them turn in the direction of Mecca. Around the same time, Muhammad instituted new religious obligations. Among these were the zakat, a tax on possessions to be used for alms; the fast of Ramadan, which took place during the ninth month of the Islamic year, the month in which the battle of Badr had been fought; the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca during the last month of the year, which each Muslim was to make at least once in his or her lifetime; and the salat, formal worship at least three times a day (later increased to five). The salat could include the shahadah, or profession of faith: “There is no divinity but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” Detailed regulations for these practices, sometimes called the Five Pillars of Islam, were worked out in the eighth and early ninth centuries. Meanwhile, Muhammad sent troops to subdue Arabs north and south. In 630, he entered Mecca with ten thousand men and took over the city. As the prestige of Islam grew, clans elsewhere converted. Through a combination of force, conversion, and negotiation, Muhammad was able to unite many, though not all, Arabic-speaking tribes under his leadership by the time of his death in 632. Muhammad was responsible for social as well as religious change. The ummah included both men and women; Islam thus enhanced women’s status. At first, Muslim women joined men during the prayer periods that punctuated the day, but, beginning in the eighth century, women began to pray apart from men. Men were allowed to have up to four wives at one time but were obliged to treat them equally; wives received dowries and had certain inheritance rights. Islam prohibited all infanticide, a practice that Arabs had long used largely against female infants. Like Judaism and Christianity, however, Islam retained the practices of a patriarchal society in which women’s participation in community life was limited. The ummah functioned in many ways as a “supertribe,” obligated to fight common enemies, share plunder, and peacefully resolve any internal disputes. Bedouin converts to Islam turned their traditional warrior culture to its cause. Unlike intertribal fighting, warfare was now the jihad of people who were carrying out God’s command against unbelievers as recorded in the Qur’an: “Strive, O Prophet, against the unbelievers and the hypocrites, and deal with them firmly. Their final abode is Hell: And what a wretched destination!”

The Caliphs, Muhammad’s Successors, 632–750 In the new political community he founded in Arabia, Muhammad reorganized traditional Arab society by cutting across clan allegiances and welcoming converts from every tribe. He forged the Muslims into a formidable military force, and his successors, the caliphs, took the Byzantine and Persian worlds by storm. They quickly conquered Byzantine territory in Syria and Egypt and invaded the Sasanid Empire, conquering the whole of Persia by 651 (Map 8.1). During the last half of the seventh

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In little more than a century, Islamic armies conquered a vast region that included numerous different people, cultures, climates, and living conditions. Yet under the Umayyads these disparate territories were administered by one ruler from the capital city at Damascus. The uniting force was the religion of Islam, which gathered all believers into one community, the ummah.

century and the beginning of the eighth, Islamic warriors extended their sway westward to Spain and eastward to India. How were such widespread conquests possible, especially in so short a time? First, the Islamic forces came up against weakened empires. The Byzantine and Sasanid states were exhausted from fighting each other. Second, discontented Christians and Jews welcomed Muslims into both Byzantine and Persian territories. The Monophysite Christians in Syria and Egypt, for example, had suffered persecution under the Byzantines and were glad to have new, Islamic overlords. There were also internal reasons for Islam’s success. Inspired by jihad, Arab fighters were well prepared: fully armed and mounted on horseback, using camel convoys to carry supplies and provide protection, they conquered with amazing ease. To secure their victories, they built garrison cities from which their soldiers requisitioned taxes and goods. Yet the solidarity of the Muslim community was threatened by disputes over the successors to Muhammad, the caliphs. While the first two caliphs came to power without serious opposition, the third, Uthman (r.644–656), a member of the Umayyad clan and son-in-law of Muhammad, aroused discontent among other members of the inner circle and soldiers unhappy with his distribution of high offices and revenues. Accusing Uthman of favoritism, they supported his rival, Ali, a member of

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the Hashim clan (to which Muhammad had belonged) and the husband of Muhammad’s only surviving child, Fatimah. After a group of discontented soldiers murdered Uthman, civil war broke out between the Umayyads and Ali’s faction. It ended when Ali was killed by one of his own former supporters, and the caliphate remained in Umayyad hands from 661 to 750. Despite defeat, the Shi‘at Ali (“Ali’s faction”) did not fade away. Ali’s memory lived on among Shi‘ite Muslims, who saw in him a symbol of justice and righteousness. For them, Ali’s death was the martyrdom of the true successor to Muhammad. They remained faithful to his dynasty, shunning the mainstream caliphs of Sunni Muslims (whose name derived from the word sunna, the practices of Muhammad). They awaited the arrival of the true leader — the imam — who in their view could come only from the house of Ali.

Peace and Prosperity in Islamic Lands Ironically, the definitive victories of the Muslim warriors in the seventh and early eighth centuries ushered in a time of peace. While the conquerors stayed within their fortified cities or built magnificent hunting lodges in the deserts of Syria, the conquered, including Christians and Jews, went back to work, to study, to play, and to worship. Under the Umayyad caliphate, which lasted from 661 to 750, the Muslim world became a state, its capital at Damascus, in Syria. Borrowing from institutions well known to the civilizations they had just conquered, the Muslims issued coins and hired Byzantine and Persian officials as civil servants They made

The Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem (691) Rivaling the great churches of Christendom, the mosque in Jerusalem called Dome of the Rock borrowed from late Roman and Byzantine forms even while asserting its Islamic identity. The columns and the capitals atop them, the round arches, the dome, and the mosaics are allfrom Byzantine models. In fact, the columns were taken from older buildings at Jerusalem. But the strips of Arabic writing on the dome itself — and in many other parts of the building — assert Islamic doctrine. (Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.)

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Mosaic from the Great Mosque at Damascus Like the Dome of the Rock, the Umayyad mosque at Damascus in Syria, built at the beginning of the eighth century, drew on Byzantine forms. In this mosaic, which is one of many that decorate the interior of the mosque, the style is Byzantine. But the harmonious intertwining of trees, buildings, rocks, and water picks up on an Islamic theme: the new faith’s conquest over both civilization and nature. (Umayyad Mosque, Damascus, Syria / Bildarchiv Steffens / Bridgeman Images.)

Arabic a tool of centralization, imposing it as the language of government. The Umayyads took advantage of the vigorous economy in both the cities and the countryside to preside over a literary and artistic flowering. At Damascus, local artists and craftspeople worked on the lavish decorations for a mosque that used Roman motifs. At Jerusalem, the mosque called the Dome of the Rock used Christian building models for its octagonal form and its interior arches. Muslim scholars determined the definitive form for the Qur’an and compiled pious narratives about Muhammad, called hadith literature. A literate class — consisting mainly of the old Persian and Syrian elites, now converted to Islam — created new forms of prose and poetry in Arabic. Supported by the caliphs, these writers reached a wide audience that delighted in their clever use of words, their satire, and their verses celebrating courage, piety, and sometimes erotic love: I spent the night as her bed-companion, each enamored of the other, And I made her laugh and cry, and stripped her of her clothes. Poetry like this scandalized conservative Muslims, brought up on the ascetic tenets of the Qur’an. But it was a by-product of the new urban civilization of the Umayyad period, during which wealth, cultural mix, and the confidence born of conquest inspired diverse and experimental literary forms. By the time the Umayyad caliphate REVIEW QUESTION How and why did the ended in 750, Islamic civilization was multiMuslims conquer so many lands in the period ethnic, urban, and sophisticated — a true 632–750? heir of Roman and Persian traditions.

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Byzantium Besieged The eastern Romans (the Byzantines) saw themselves as the direct heirs of Rome. In fact, as we have seen, Emperor Justinian (r.527–565) had tried to re-create the old Roman Empire territorially. Under Justinian, vestiges of classical Roman society persisted: an educated elite, town governments, and old myths and legends, which were depicted in literature and art. Around 600, however, Byzantium began to undergo a transformation as striking as the one that had earlier remade the western half of the Roman Empire. Constant war shrank the eastern empire’s territory drastically. Cultural and political change followed. Cities decayed, and the countryside became the focus of government and military administration. In the wake of these shifts, the old elite largely disappeared and classical learning gave way to new forms of education, mainly religious in content. The traditional styles of urban life, dependent on public gathering places and community spirit, faded away. Nevertheless, the transformations should not be exaggerated. A powerful emperor continued to rule at Constantinople (today Istanbul, Turkey). Roman laws and taxes remained in place. The cities, while shrunken, nevertheless survived, and Constantinople itself had a flourishing economic and cultural life even in Byzantium’s darkest hours. The Byzantines continued to call themselves Romans. For them, the empire never ended: it just moved to Constantinople.

Wars on the Frontiers, c.570–750 From about 570 to 750, the Byzantines waged war against invaders. One key challenge came from an old enemy, Persia. Another involved many new groups — Lombards, Slavs, Avars, Bulgars, and Muslims. In the wake of these onslaughts, Byzantium became smaller but tougher. Before the Muslims came on the scene, the principal challenge to Byzantine power came from the Sasanid Empire of Persia (Map 8.2). From their capital city at Ctesiphon, where they built a grand palace complex, the Sasanid kings promoted an exalted view of themselves: they took the title King of Kings and gave the men at their court titles such as priest of priests and scribe of scribes. With dreams of military glory, they invaded major areas of the Roman Empire, using the revenues from new taxes to strengthen the army. King Chosroes II (r. 591–628) took Syria and Jerusalem between 611 and 614, and he conquered Egypt in 620. Responding to these attacks, the Byzantine emperor Heraclius (r. 610–641) reorganized his army and inspired his troops to avenge the sack of Jerusalem. By 627, the Byzantines had regained all their lost territory. But the wars had changed much: Syrian, Egyptian, and Palestinian cities had grown used to being under Persian rule, and Christians who did not adhere to the orthodoxy at Byzantium preferred their Persian overlords. Even more important, the constant wars and plundering sapped the wealth of the region and the energy of the people who lived under Byzantine rule.

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The emperor Justinian (r.527–565) hoped to re-create the old Roman Empire, but just a century after his death Italy was largely conquered by the Lombards. Meanwhile, the Byzantine Empire had to contend with the Sasanid Empire to its east. In 600, these two major powers faced each other uneasily. Three years later, the Sasanid king attacked Byzantine territory. The resulting wars, which lasted until 627, exhausted both empires and left them open to invasion by the Arabs. By 700, the Byzantine Empire was quite small. Compare the inset map here with Map 8.1, on page 254. Where had the Muslims made significant conquests of Byzantine territory?

Preoccupied by war with Persia, Byzantium was ill equipped to deal with other groups who were pushing into parts of the empire at about the same time. The Lombards, a Germanic people, entered northern Italy in 568 and by 572 were masters of the Po valley and parts of Italy’s south. In addition to Rome, the Byzantines retained only Italy’s “foot,” the island of Sicily, and a narrow swath of land through the middle of the peninsula called the Exarchate of Ravenna. The Byzantine army could not contend any better with the Slavs and Bulgars just beyond the Danube River. Joined by the Avars, the Slavs attacked both rural and urban areas of Byzantium. Meanwhile, the Bulgars entered what is now Bulgaria in the 670s, defeating the Byzantine army and in 681 forcing the emperor to recognize their new state. Even as the Byzantine Empire was facing military attacks on all fronts, its power was being whittled away by more peaceful means. As Slavs and Avars, who were not subject to Byzantine rulers, settled in the Balkans, they often intermingled with the native peoples there, absorbing local agricultural techniques and burial practices while imposing their language and religious cults.

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Byzantium’s loss of control over the Balkans meant the shrinking of its empire (see inset on Map 8.2, page 258). It also exacerbated the growing separation between the eastern and western parts of the former Roman Empire. Avar and Slavic control of the Balkans effectively cut off trade and travel between Constantinople and the cities of the Dalmatian coast, while the new Bulgarian state served as a political barrier across the Danube. The two halves of the former Roman Empire communicated very little in the seventh century, a fact reflected in their different languages: Greek in the East, Latin in the West.

From an Urban to a Rural Way of Life As Byzantium shrank, the conquered regions had to adjust to new rulers. Byzantine subjects in Syria and Egypt who came under Arab rule adapted to the new conditions, paying a special tax to their conquerors and practicing their Christian and Jewish religions in peace. Cities remained centers of government, scholarship, and business, and peasants were permitted to keep and farm their lands. In the Balkans, as Slavs and Bulgars came to dominate the peninsula, some cities disappeared when people fled to hilltop settlements. Nevertheless, the newcomers recognized the Byzantine emperor’s authority and soon began to flirt with Christianity. Some of the most radical transformations for seventh- and eighth-century Byzantines occurred not in the territories lost but in the shrunken empire itself. Under the ceaseless barrage of invaders, many towns, formerly bustling centers of trade and the imperial bureaucracy, vanished or became unrecognizable. The public activity of open marketplaces, theaters, and town squares largely ended. City baths, once places where people gossiped, made deals, and talked politics and philosophy, disappeared in most Byzantine towns — with the significant exception of Constantinople. Warfare reduced some cities to rubble, and the limited resources available for rebuilding went to construct thick city walls and solid churches instead of spacious marketplaces and baths. Despite the general urban decay, Constantinople and a few other urban centers retained some of their old vitality. The manufacture and trade of fine silk textiles continued. Even though Byzantium’s economic life became increasingly rural and barter-based in the seventh and eighth centuries, the skills, knowledge, and institutions of urban workers remained. As urban life declined, agriculture, always the basis of the Byzantine economy, became the center of its social life as well. Unlike Europe, where peasants often depended on aristocratic landlords, the Byzantine Empire had many free peasants; they grew food, herded cattle, and tended vineyards on their own small plots of land. As Byzantine cities declined, the curials (town councilors), the elite who for centuries had mediated between the emperor and the people, disappeared. Now on those occasions when farmers came into contact with the state — to pay taxes, for example — they felt the impact of the emperor or his representatives directly. Byzantine emperors, drawing on the still-vigorous Roman legal tradition, promoted domestic life with new imperial legislation, strengthening the nuclear family by

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narrowing the grounds for divorce and setting new punishments for marital infidelity. Abortion was prohibited, and new protections were set in place against incest. Mothers were given equal power with fathers over their offspring; if widowed, they became the legal guardians of their minor children and controlled the household property.

New Military and Cultural Forms The shift from an urban- to a rural-centered society meant changes not only in daily life and the economy but also in the empire’s military and cultural institutions. The Byzantine navy fought successfully at sea with its powerful weapon of “Greek fire,” a mixture of crude oil and resin that was heated and shot via a tube over the water, engulfing enemy ships in flames. Determined to win wars on land as well, the imperial government tightened its control over the military by wresting power from elite families and encouraging the formation of a middle class of farmer-soldiers. In the seventh century, the empire was divided into military districts called themes. All civil and military authority in each theme was held by a general, a strategos. Landless men were lured to join the army with the promise of land and low taxes; they fought side by side with local farmers, who provided their own weapons and horses. The new organization effectively countered frontier attacks. The disappearance of the old cultural elite meant a shift in the focus of education. Whereas the curial class had cultivated the study of the pagan classics, eighthcentury parents showed far more interest in a religious education. Even with the decay of urban centers, cities and villages often retained an elementary school. There, teachers used the Book of Psalms (the Psalter) as their primer. Secular, classical learning remained decidedly out of favor throughout the seventh and eighth centuries; dogmatic writings, biographies of saints, and devotional works took center stage.

Religion, Politics, and Iconoclasm The new stress on religious learning in the seventh century complemented both the autocratic imperial ideal and the powers of the bishops. While in theory imperial and church powers were separate, in practice they were interdependent. The emperor exercised considerable power over the church: he influenced the appointment of the chief religious official, the patriarch of Constantinople; he called church councils to determine dogma; and he regularly used bishops as local governors. Bishops and their clergy, whose seats were in the cities, formed a rich and powerful upper class. They distributed food to the needy, sat as judges, functioned as tax collectors, and built military fortifications. They owed their appointment to metropolitans (bishops who headed an entire province), who in turn were appointed by the patriarchs (bishops with authority over whole regions). Monasteries were theoretically under the limited control of the local bishop, but in practice they were enormously powerful institutions that often defied the authority of bishops and even emperors.

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Icon of the Virgin and Child Surrounded by two angels in the back and two soldier-saints at either side, the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child are depicted with still, otherworldly dignity. The sixth-century artist gave the angels transparent halos to emphasize their spiritual natures, while depicting the saints as earthly men, with hair and beards, and feet planted firmly on the ground. Icons like this were used for worship both in private homes and in Byzantine monasteries. (St. Catherine Monastery, Sinai, Egypt / Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.)

Laypeople, clergy, and monks alike looked to relics and holy images to help them worship. Relics were the material remains of the saints: their bodies and body parts, even clothes and dust from their tombs. Holy images — of Christ, Mary (his mother), and the saints — gave people a visual focus for their worship. As a series of setbacks rocked the Byzantine Empire — plagues, earthquakes, and wars against invading Slavs and Bulgars — the images became more important than the relics in Byzantine worship. By the late seventh century, the images were understood to be more than just representations of holy people. They took on the character of icons, manifesting in physical form the holy person depicted and concentrating all his or her holiness in one particular image. Monks, above all, centered their worship on icons and encouraged others to do so. Soon there was a backlash against such intense devotion to icons. Emperor Leo III the Isaurian (r.717–741) made that backlash official. In 726, as Islamic armies swallowed up Byzantine territory and after a volcano erupted in the middle of the Aegean Sea, Leo denounced icons. The year 726 marks the beginning of iconoclasm (“icon breaking”) in Byzantine history. It lasted until 787, and a modified ban was imposed between 815 and 843. Legend has it that in 726 Leo tore down the great image of Christ that used to be at the portal of the imperial palace. Certainly he erected a cross there, and in 730 he demanded that both the pope at Rome and the patriarch of Constantinople remove sacred images. He and his successors had good political reasons to oppose icons. Icons diluted loyalties because they created intermediaries between worshippers and God that undermined the emperor’s exclusive place in the divine and temporal order. In addition, the emphasis on icons in monastic communities made the monks potential

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threats to imperial power; the emperors hoped to use this issue to weaken the monasteries. Finally, the emperors opposed icons because the army did so. Byzantine soldiers, unnerved by Arab triumphs, attributed their misfortunes to icons, which disregarded the biblical command against graven (carved) images. They compared their defeats to Muslim successes and noted that Islam prohibited all visual images of the divine. The Byzantine emperors, who needed to keep the loyalty of their troops, adopted their soldiers’ position on icons. They saw it as a renewal of pagan idolatry. Iconoclasm had an enormous impact on Byzantium. The devout had to destroy their personal icons or worship them in secret. Iconoclasts (who were especially numerous at Constantinople itself) whitewashed the walls of churches, erasing all the images. They smashed portable icons. Artists largely ceased depicting the human form, and artistic production in general dwindled during this time. The power and prestige of the monasteries, which were associated with icons, diminished. As the REVIEW QUESTION What stresses did the tide of battle turned in favor of the ByzanByzantine Empire endure in the seventh and tines, imperial supporters and soldiers eighth centuries, and how was iconoclasm a response to those stresses? credited iconoclasm for their victories.

Western Europe: A Medley of Kingdoms In contrast to Byzantium — where an emperor still ruled as the successor to Augustus and Constantine — western Europe saw a dispersal of political power. With the end of Roman imperial government there, independent monarchs ruled in Spain, Italy, England, and Gaul. The European kings relied on kinship networks, the support of powerful men who attended them at court, the prestige that came from church patronage, and wealth derived from land and plunder. In some places churchmen and rich magnates were even more powerful than royalty. So were saintly relics, which represented and were believed to wield the divine forces of God. Icons existed but were not very important in the West.

Frankish Kingdoms with Roman Roots The most important kingdoms in post-Roman Europe were Frankish. The Franks dominated Gaul during the sixth century, and by the seventh century their kingdoms roughly approximated the eastern borders of present-day France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg (Map 8.3). Moreover, the Frankish kings who constituted the Merovingian dynasty (c.486–751) subjugated many of the peoples beyond the Rhine River, foreshadowing the contours of the western half of modern Germany. Where there were cities, there were reminders of Rome. Elsewhere, the Roman heritage was less obvious. Imagine, then, travelers going from Rome to Trier (near what is now Bonn, Germany) in the early eighth century, perhaps to visit its bishop and check up on his piety. They would have relied on river travel: water routes were preferable to roads because land travel was slow, even though some Roman roads

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By the seventh century, there were three powerful Merovingian kingdoms: Neustria, Austrasia, and Burgundy. The important cities of Aquitaine were assigned to these major kingdoms, while Aquitaine as a whole was assigned to a duke or other governor. Kings did not establish capital cities; they did not even stay in one place. Rather, they continually traveled throughout their kingdoms, making their power felt in person.

were still in fair repair, and because even large groups of travelers on the roads were vulnerable to attacks by robbers. Traveling northward on the Rhône River, our voyagers would have passed Roman walled cities and farmlands neatly and squarely laid out by Roman land surveyors. The great stone palaces of villas would still have dotted the countryside. Once at Trier, the travelers would have felt at home seeing the city’s great gate (now called the Porta Nigra; see the illustration on page 264), its monumental baths (some still standing today), and its cathedral, built on the site of a Roman palace. Being in Trier was almost like being in Rome. Nevertheless, these travelers would have noticed that the cities that they passed through were not what they had been in the heyday of the Roman Empire. True, cities still served as the centers of church administration. Bishops lived in them, and so did clergymen, servants, and others who helped the bishops. Cathedrals (the churches presided over by bishops) remained within city walls, and people were drawn to them for important rituals such as baptism. Nevertheless, many urban centers had lost their

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commercial and cultural vitality. Largely depopulated, they survived as skeletons of their former selves. Whereas the chief feature of the Roman landscape had been cities, the Frankish landscape was characterized by dense forests, acres of marshes and bogs, patches of cleared farmland, and pastures for animals. These areas were not much influenced by Rome; they more closely represented the farming and village settlement patterns of the Franks. On the vast plains between Paris and Trier, most peasants were only semi-free. They were settled in family groups on small holdings called manses, which included a house, a garden, and cultivable land. The peasants paid dues and sometimes owed labor services to a lord (an aristocrat who owned the land). Some of the peasants were The Porta Nigra at Trier Although in Germania, Trier became one of Rome’s capitals in the fourth century. The Porta Nigra was originally the northern gate of the city. During the course of the fifth century, the Porta Nigra came to be considered at best useless and at worst pagan, so bits and pieces of it were pillaged to be used in other building projects. However, this practice stopped in 1030 when a hermit named Simeon moved into its eastern tower. After Simeon’s death in 1035, the Porta Nigra wasturned into a two-story church, which it remained until the early nineteenth century, when Napoleon, who conquered Trier, ordered the church to be dismantled and the site returned (more or less) to its original shape. (De Agostini Picture Library / Gianni Dagli Orti / Bridgeman Images.)

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descendants of the coloni (tenant farmers) of the late Roman Empire; others were the sons and daughters of slaves, now provided with a small plot of land; and a few were people of free Frankish origin who for various reasons had come down in the world. At the lower end of the social scale, the status of Franks and Romans had become identical. Romans (or, more precisely, Gallo-Romans) and Franks had also merged at the elite level. Although people south of the Loire River continued to be called Romans and people to the north Franks, their cultures — their languages, their settlement patterns, their newly military way of life — were strikingly similar. The language that aristocrats spoke and (often) read depended on location, not ethnicity. Among the many dialects in the Frankish kingdoms, some were Germanic, especially to the east and north, but most were derived from Latin, yet no longer the Latin of Cicero. At the end of the sixth century, the bishop Gregory of Tours (r.573– c.594), wrote, “Though my speech is rude, . . . to my surprise, it has often been said by men of our day, that few understand the learned words of the rhetorician but many the rude language of the common people.” This beginning to Gregory’s Histories, a valuable source for the Merovingian period, testifies to Latin’s transformation; Gregory expected that his “rude” Latin — the plain Latin of everyday speech — would be understood and welcomed by the general public. The Frankish elites, like Frankish peasants, tended to live in the countryside rather than in cities. In fact, peasants and aristocrats tended to live together in villages. In many cases, a village consisted of a large central building (probably for the aristocratic household to use), sometimes with stone foundations. Surrounding the central building were smaller buildings, some of which were houses for peasant families, who lived with their livestock. Such villages might boast populations a bit over a hundred. The elites of the Merovingian period cultivated military — rather than civilian — skills. They went on hunts and wore military-style clothing: the men wore trousers, a heavy belt, and a long cloak; both men and women bedecked themselves with jewelry. As hardened 0 750 1,500 feet warriors, or wanting to appear so, aristocrats no 0 400 meters L oire R . longer lived in grand villas, choosing instead modChurch of est wooden structures without baths or heating sysSt. Martin Bishop’s church tems. That explains why the village great house and ¡ the smaller ones nearby looked very much alike. Bishop’s palace Sometimes villages formed around old villas. In Baptistery other instances they clustered around sacred sites. Fortifications built c. 400 Tours — where Gregory was bishop — exemplified House Area inhabited in this new-style settlement. In Roman times, Tours 4th century Cemetery was a thriving city; around 400, its population Zone of pilgrimage Church/ and semi-permanent diminished, and it constructed walls around its monastery habitation, c. 600 shrunken perimeter. By Gregory’s day, however, it had gained a new center outside the city walls. Tours, c.600

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There a church had been built to house the remains of the most important and venerated person in the locale: St. Martin. This fourth-century soldier-turned-monk was long dead, but his relics remained at Tours, where he had served as bishop. The population of the surrounding countryside was pulled to his church as if to a magnet. Seen as a miracle worker, Martin acted as the representative of God’s power: a protector, healer, and avenger. In Gregory’s view, Martin’s relics (or rather God through Martin’s relics) not only cured the lame and sick but even prevented armies from plundering local peasants. The veneration of saints and their relics marked a major departure from practices of the classical age, in which the dead had been banished from the presence of the living. In the medieval world, the holy dead held the place of highest esteem. The church had no formal procedures for proclaiming saints in the early Middle Ages, but holiness was “recognized” by influential local people and the local bishop. Everyone at Tours recognized Martin as a saint, and to tap into the power of his relics, the local bishop built a church directly over his tomb. For a man like Gregory of Tours and his flock, the church building was above all a home for the relics of the saints.

Economic Activity in a Peasant Society Gregory wrote about some sophisticated forms of economic activity that existed in early medieval Europe, such as long-distance trade, which depended on surpluses. But he also wrote about famines. Most people in his day lived on the edge of survival. From the fifth to the mid-eighth century, the mean temperature in Europe dropped. This climatic change spelled shortages in crops and the likelihood of famine and disease. An underlying reason for these calamities was the weakness of the agricultural economy. Even the meager population of the Merovingian world was too large for the land’s productive capacities. The heavy, wet soils of northern Europe were difficult to turn and aerate. Technological limitations meant a limited food supply, and agricultural work was not equitably or efficiently allocated and managed. A leisure class of landowning warriors and churchmen lived off the work of peasant men, who tilled the fields, and peasant women, who wove cloth, gardened, brewed, and baked. Occasionally surpluses developed, either from good harvests in peacetime or plunder in warfare, and these changed hands, although rarely in an impersonal, commercial manner. Most economic transactions of the seventh and eighth centuries were part of a gift economy, a system of give-and-take: the rich took plunder, demanded tribute, hoarded harvests, and minted coins — all to be redistributed to friends, followers, and dependents. Powerful men and women amassed gold, silver, ornaments, and jewelry in their treasuries and grain in their storehouses to mark their power, add to their prestige, and demonstrate their generosity. Those benefiting from the gifts of the rich included monasteries and churches. The gift economy was the dynamic behind most of the exchanges of goods and money in the Merovingian period.

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However, some economic activity in this period was purely commercial and impersonal. Long-distance traders transported slaves and raw materials such as furs and honey from areas of northern Europe such as the British Isles and Sweden. These they sold to traders in Byzantium and the Islamic world, returning home with luxuries and manufactured goods such as silks and papyrus. Byzantine, Islamic, and western European descendants of the Roman Empire kept in tenuous contact with one another by making voyages for trade, diplomatic ventures, and pilgrimages. Seventh- and eighth-century sources speak of Byzantines, Syrians, and Jews as the chief intermediaries of such long-distance trade. Many of these merchants lived in the still-thriving port cities of the Mediterranean. Gregory of Tours associated Jews with commerce, complaining that they sold things “at a higher price than they were worth.” Although the population of the Merovingian world was overwhelmingly Christian, Jews were integrated into every aspect of secular life. They used Hebrew in worship, but otherwise they spoke the same languages as Christians and used Latin in their legal documents. Jews dressed as everyone else did, and they engaged in the same occupations. Many Jews planted and tended vineyards, partly because of the importance of wine in synagogue services and partly because they could easily sell the surplus. Some Jews were rich landowners, with slaves and dependent peasants working for them; others were independent peasants of modest means. Some Jews lived in towns with a small Jewish quarter that included both homes and synagogues, but most Jews, like their Christian neighbors, lived on the land.

The Powerful in Merovingian Society The Merovingian elite — who included monks and bishops as well as kings and lay aristocrats — obtained their power through hereditary wealth, status, and personal influence. Many of them were extremely wealthy. The will drawn up by a bishop and aristocrat named Bertram of Le Mans, for example, shows that he owned estates — some from his family, others given him as gifts — scattered all over Gaul. Along with administering their estates, many male aristocrats spent their time honing their proficiency as warriors. To be a great warrior in Merovingian society meant perfecting the virtues necessary for leading armed men. Merovingian warriors affirmed their skills and comradeship in the hunt: they proved their worth in the regular taking of plunder, and they rewarded their followers afterward at generous banquets. Merovingian aristocrats also spent time with their families. The focus of marriage was procreation. Important both to the survival of aristocratic families and to the transmission of their property and power, marriage was an expensive institution. It had two forms: in the most formal, the man gave a generous dowry of clothes, livestock, and land to his bride; after the marriage was consummated, he gave her a “morning gift” of furniture. Very wealthy men also might support one or more concubines, who enjoyed a less formal type of marriage, receiving a morning gift but

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no dowry. Churchmen in this period had many ideas about the value of marriages, but in practice they had little to do with the matter. Marriage was a family decision and a family matter: the couple exchanged rings before witnesses, and later the bride moved to the house of the groom. In the sixth century, some aristocrats still patterned their lives on the old Roman model, teaching their children classical Latin poetry and writing to one another in phrases borrowed from Virgil. But this changed in the seventh century. The spoken language had become very different from classical Latin, and written Latin was learned mainly to read the Psalms. Just as in Byzantium, a religious culture that emphasized Christian piety over the classics was developing in Europe. The arrival on the continent around 590 of the Irish monk St. Columbanus (c. 543–615) heightened this emphasis on religion. Columbanus’s brand of monasticism — which stressed exile, devotion, and discipline — found much favor among the Merovingian elite. The monasteries St. Columbanus established in both Gaul and Italy attracted local recruits from the aristocracy. Some were grown men and women; others were young children, given to the monastery by their parents in the ritual called oblation. This practice was not only accepted but also often considered essential for the spiritual well-being of both the children and their families. Alongside monks, bishops ranked among the most powerful men in Merovingian society. Gregory of Tours, for example, considered himself the protector of “his citizens.” When representatives of the king came to collect taxes in Tours, Gregory stopped them in their tracks, warning them that St. Martin would punish anyone who tried to tax his people. “That very day,” Gregory reported, “the man who had produced the tax rolls caught a fever and died.” Little wonder that Frankish kings let the old Roman land tax die out. Like other aristocrats, many bishops were married, even though church councils demanded celibacy. As the overseers of priests and guardians of morality, bishops were expected to refrain from sexual relations with their wives. Since bishops were ordinarily appointed late in life, long after they had raised a family, this restriction did not threaten the ideal of a procreative marriage. Noble parents generally decided whom their daughters would marry, for such unions bound together not only husbands and wives but entire extended families as well. Aristocratic brides received a dowry from their families in addition to their husband’s gift. This was often land, over which they had some control; if they were widowed without children, they were allowed to sell, give away, exchange, or rent out their dowry estates as they wished. Moreover, people could give property to their women kinfolk outright in written testaments. Many aristocratic women were very rich, and like rich men, they frequently gave generous gifts to the church from their vast possessions. Though legally under the authority of her husband, a Merovingian married woman often found ways to exercise some power and control over her life. Tetradia, wife of Count Eulalius, left her husband, taking all his gold and silver, because, as Gregory of Tours tells us,

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he was in the habit of sleeping with the women-servants in his household. As a result he neglected his wife. . . . As a result of his excesses, he ran into serious debt, and to meet this he stole his wife’s jewelry and money. A court of law ordered Tetradia to repay Eulalius four times the amount she had taken from him, but she was allowed to keep and live on her own property. Other women were able to exercise behind-the-scenes control through their sons. A woman named Artemia, for example, used the prophecy that her son Nicetius would become a bishop to prevent her husband from becoming a bishop himself. After Nicetius fulfilled the prophecy, he nevertheless remained at home with his mother well into his thirties, working alongside the servants and teaching the younger children to read the Psalms. Some women exercised direct power. Rich widows with fortunes to bestow wielded enormous influence. Some Merovingian women were abbesses, rulers in their own right over female monasteries and sometimes over “double monasteries,” with separate facilities for men and women. Monasteries under the control of abbesses could be substantial centers of population: the convent at Laon, for example, had three hundred nuns in the seventh century. Because women lived in populous convents or were monopolized by rich men able to support several wives or mistresses at one time, unattached aristocratic women were scarce. Atop the aristocracy were the Merovingian kings, rulers of the Frankish kingdoms. The Merovingian dynasty (c.486–751) owed its longevity to good political sense: from the start it allied itself with local lay aristocrats and ecclesiastical (church) authorities. Bishops and abbots bolstered the power that kings also gained from their leadership in war, their access to the lion’s share of plunder, and their takeover of the public lands and legal framework of Roman administration. The kings’ courts functioned as schools for the sons of the elite. When kings sent officials — counts and dukes — to rule in their name in various regions of their kingdoms, these regional governors worked with and married into the aristocratic families who had long controlled local affairs. Both kings and aristocrats benefited from a powerful royal authority. The king acted as arbitrator and intermediary for the competing interests of the aristocrats. Gregory of Tours’s history of the sixth century is filled with stories of bitter battles between Merovingian kings, as royal brothers fought continuously. Yet what seemed to the bishop like royal weakness and violent chaos was in fact one way the kings contained local aristocratic tensions, organizing them on one side or another, and preventing them from spinning out of royal control. By the beginning of the seventh century, three relatively stable Frankish kingdoms had emerged: Austrasia to the northeast; Neustria to the west, with its capital city at Paris; and Burgundy, incorporating the southeast (see Map 8.3, page 263). As the power of the kings in the seventh century increased, however, so did the might of their chief court official, the mayor of the palace. As we shall see, one mayoral family allied with the Austrasian aristocracy would in the following century displace the Merovingian dynasty and establish a new royal line, the Carolingians.

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Christianity and Classical Culture in the British Isles The Merovingian kingdoms exemplify some of the ways in which Roman and nonRoman traditions combined; the British Isles show others. Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire, but the Irish people were early converts to Christianity, as were people in Roman Britain and parts of Scotland. Invasions by various Celtic and Germanic groups — particularly the Anglo-Saxons, who gave their name to England (“land of the Angles”) — redrew the religious boundaries. Ireland, largely free of invaders, remained Christian. Scotland, also relatively untouched by invaders,had been slowly Christianized by the Irish from 0 100 200 miles the west and in early years by the British from the 0 100 200 kilometers south. England, which emerged from the invasions SCOTLAND as a mosaic of about a dozen kingdoms ruled by separate Anglo-Saxon kings, became largely pagan until it was actively converted in the seventh Whitby York century. IRELAND ENGLAND Christianity was introduced to Anglo-Saxon WALES England from two directions. To the north, Irish Canterbury Kent monks brought their own brand of Christianity. Converted in the fifth century by St. Patrick and other missionaries, the Irish had evolved a church The British Isles organization that corresponded to its rural clan organization. Abbots and abbesses were more powerful than bishops there. The Irish missionaries to England were monks, and they set up monasteries modeled on those at home — out in the countryside. In the south, Christianity came to England in 597 via missionaries sent by the pope known as Gregory the Great (r.590–604). These men, led by Augustine (not the same Augustine as the bishop of Hippo as discussed on page 224), intended to convert the king and people of Kent, the southernmost kingdom, and then work their way northward. Augustine and his party brought with them Roman practices at odds with those of Irish Christianity, stressing ties to the pope and the authority of bishops. Using the Roman model, they divided England into territorial units, called dioceses, headed by an archbishop and bishops. Augustine became archbishop of Canterbury. Because he was a monk, he set up a monastery right next to his cathedral, and having a community of monks attached to the bishop’s church became a characteristic of the English church. Later a second archbishopric was added at York. A major bone of contention between the Roman and Irish churches involved the calculation of the date of Easter, celebrated by Christians as the day on which Christ rose from the dead. Because everyone agreed that believers could not be saved unless they observed Christ’s resurrection properly and on the right date, the conflict was bitter. It was resolved by Oswy, king of Northumbria, who organized a meeting of churchmen, the Synod of Whitby, in 664. Convinced that Rome spoke with the voice of St. Peter, who was said in the New Testament to hold the keys of the king-

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dom of heaven, Oswy chose the Roman date. His decision paved the way for the triumph of the Roman brand of Christianity in England. The authority of St. Peter was only one of the attractions of Roman Christianity. Rome had great prestige as a treasure trove of knowledge, piety, and holy objects. Benedict Biscop (c. 630–690), the founder of two important English monasteries, made many difficult trips to Rome, bringing back relics, liturgical vestments, and even a cantor to teach his monks the proper melodies in a time before written musical notation. Above all, he went to Rome to get books. At his monasteries in the north of England, he built up a grand library. In Anglo-Saxon England, as in Scotland and Ireland, all of which lacked a strong classical tradition from Roman times, a book was considered a precious object, to be decorated as finely as a jewel-studded reliquary (see the chapter-opening image on page 248). The Anglo-Saxons and Irish Celts had a thriving oral culture but extremely limited uses for writing. Books became valuable only when these societies converted to Christianity. Just as Islamic reliance on the Qur’an made possible a literary culture under the Umayyads, so Christian dependence on the Bible, liturgy, and the writings of the church fathers helped make England and Ireland centers of literature and learning in the seventh and eighth centuries. Men like Benedict Biscop soon sponsored other centers of learning, using texts from the classical past. Although women did not establish famous schools, many abbesses ruled over monasteries that stressed Christian learning. Latin writings, even pagan texts, were studied diligently, in part because Latin was so foreign a language on the British Isles that mastering it required systematic and formal study. One of Benedict Biscop’s pupils was Bede (“the Venerable,” 673–735), an Anglo-Saxon monk and a historian of extraordinary breadth. Bede in turn taught a new generation of monks who became advisers to eighth-century rulers. Page from the Lindisfarne Gospels The lavishly illuminated manuscript known as the Lindisfarne Gospels, of which this is one page, was probably produced in the first third of the eighth century. For the monks at Lindisfarne (atidal island off the northeast coast ofEngland) and elsewhere in the British Isles, books were precious objects. The page shown here depicts the Evangelist St. Mark, writing while also holding a book. Above his halo is his symbol, a winged lion; it is blowing a trumpet while its front paws rest on a book. What books might St. Mark and the lion be holding? (© The British Library / The Image Works.)

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Much of the vigorous pagan Anglo-Saxon oral tradition was adapted to Christian culture. Bede encouraged and supported the use of the Anglo-Saxon language, urging priests, for example, to use it when they instructed their flocks. In contrast to other European regions, where Latin was the primary written language in the seventh and eighth centuries, England made use of the vernacular — the language normally spoken by the people. Written Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) was used in every aspect of English life, from government to entertainment. The decision at the Synod of Whitby to favor Roman Christianity tied the English church to Rome by doctrine, friendship, and conviction. The Anglo-Saxon monk and bishop Wynfrith took the Latin name Boniface to symbolize his loyalty to the Roman church. Preaching on the continent, Boniface (680–754) set up churches in Germany and Gaul that, like those in England, looked to Rome for leadership and guidance. Boniface was one of those travelers from Rome who went to Trier to check on the bishop’s piety. He found it badly wanting! Boniface’s efforts to reform the Frankish church gave the papacy new importance in Europe.

Unity in Spain, Division in Italy Southern Gaul, Spain, and Italy, unlike the British Isles, had long been part of the Roman Empire and preserved many of its traditions. Nevertheless, as these areas were settled and fought over by new peoples, their histories diverged dramatically. When the Merovingian king Clovis (r. 485–511) defeated the Visigoths in 507, the Visigothic kingdom, which had sprawled across southern Gaul into Spain, was dismembered. By midcentury, the Franks had come into possession of most of its remnants in southern Gaul. In Spain, the Visigothic king Leovigild (r.569–586) established territorial control by military might. But no ruler could hope to maintain his position in Visigothic Spain without the support of the Hispano-Roman population, which included both the great landowners and leading bishops — and their backing was unattainable while the Visigoths remained Arian Christians, who maintained that Christ was not identical with God (see page 222). Leovigild’s son Reccared (r.586–601) took the necessary step in 587, converting to Roman Catholic Christianity. Two years later, at the Third Council of Toledo, most of the Arian bishops followed their king by announcing their conversion to Catholicism. Thereafter, the bishops and kings of Spain cooperated to a degree unprecedented in other regions. While the king gave the churchmen free rein to set up their own hierarchy (with the bishop of Toledo at the top) and to meet regularly at synods to regulate and reform the church, the bishops in turn supported their Visigothic king, who ruled as a minister of the Christian people. Rebellion against him was tantamount to rebellion against Christ. The Spanish bishops reinforced this idea by anointing the king, daubing him with holy oil in a ritual that paralleled the ordination of priests and demonstrated divine favor. Toledo, the city where the highest bishop presided, was also where the kings were “made” through anointment. While

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the bishops in this way made the king’s cause their Lombard Venice own, their lay counterparts, the great landowners, Pavia Byzantine helped supply the king with troops, allowing him Ravenna EXARCHATE to maintain internal order and repel his external OF RAVENNA DUCHY OF SPOLETO enemies. Corsica Rome DUCHY OF Ironically, it was precisely the centralization BENEVENTO and unification of the Visigothic kingdom that Sardinia proved its undoing. When the Arabs arrived in 711, they needed only to kill the king, defeat his army, Sicily 200 miles 100 0 and capture Toledo to take the kingdom. 0 100 200 kilometers By contrast, in Italy the Lombard king faced a hostile papacy in the center of the peninsula and Lombard Italy, Early Eighth Century insubordinate dukes in the south. Theoretically the dukes of Benevento and Spoleto were royal officers, but in fact they ruled independently. Although many Lombards were Catholics, others were Arian. The “official” religion of Lombards in Italy varied with the ruler in power. The conversion of the Lombards to Catholic Christianity occurred gradually, ending only around the mid-seventh century. Partly as a result of this slow development, the Lombard kings never gained the full support of the church. Nevertheless, Lombard kings had strengths. Chief among these were the traditions of leadership associated with the royal dynasty, the kings’ military ability, their control over large estates in northern Italy, and their hold on surviving Roman institutions. Lombard kings took advantage of the still-urban organization of Italian society and the economy, assigning dukes to city bases and setting up a royal capital at Pavia. Recalling emperors like Constantine and Justinian, the kings built churches, monasteries, and other places of worship in the royal capital; they also maintained the city walls, issued laws, and minted coins. Revenues from tolls, sales taxes, port duties, and court fines filled their treasuries, although their inability to revive the Roman land tax was a major weakness. The greatest challenge for the Lombard kings came from sharing the peninsula with Rome. As soon as the kings began to make serious headway into southern Italy against the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, the pope began to fear for his own position and called on the Franks for help.

Political Tensions and the Power of the Pope Around 600, the pope’s position was ambiguous: he was both a ruler — successor of St. Peter and head of the church — and a subordinate, subject to the Byzantine emperor. Pope Gregory the Great in many ways laid the foundations for the papacy’s spiritual and temporal ascendancy. During Gregory’s reign, the papacy became the greatest landowner in Italy. Gregory organized the defenses of Rome and paid for its army; he heard court cases, made treaties, and provided welfare services. The missionary expedition Gregory sent to England was only a small part of his involvement in the rest of Europe.

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A prolific author of spiritual works and biblical commentaries, Gregory digested and simplified the ideas of church fathers like St. Augustine of Hippo, making them accessible to a wider audience. His book Pastoral Rule was used as a guide for bishops throughout Europe. Yet even Gregory was not independent, for he was subordinate to the emperor. For a long time the Byzantine views on dogma, discipline, and church administration prevailed at Rome. This authority began to unravel in the seventh century. Sheer distance, as well as diminishing imperial power in Italy, meant that the popes became, in effect, the leaders of the parts of Italy not controlled by the Lombards. The gap between Byzantium and Rome widened in the early eighth century as Emperor Leo III tried to increase the taxes on papal property to pay for his war against the Arab invaders. The pope responded by leading a general tax revolt. Meanwhile, Leo’s fierce policy of iconoclasm collided with the pope’s tolerance of images. In Italy, as in other European regions, Christian piety focused more on relics than on icons. Nevertheless, the papacy would not allow sacred images and icons to be destroyed. The pope argued that holy images should be respected, though not worshipped. These disputes with the emperor were matched by increasing friction between the pope and the Lombards. The Lombard kings had gradually managed to bring under their control the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento as well as part of the Exarchate of Ravenna. By the mid-eighth century, the popes feared that Rome would fall to the Lombards, and Pope Zachary (r.741–752) looked northward for friends. He created an ally by giving his approval to the removal of the last Merovingian king and his replacement by the first Carolingian king, Pippin III (r. 751–768). In 753, REVIEW QUESTION What were the similariPope Stephen II (r.752–757) called on Pipties and differences among the kingdoms that pin to march to Italy with an army to fight emerged in western Europe, and how did their histories combine and diverge? the Lombards.

Conclusion The Islamic world, Byzantium, and western Europe were heirs to the Roman Empire, but they built on its legacies in different ways. Muslims were the newcomers to the Roman world, but their religion, Islam, was influenced by both Jewish and Christian monotheism, each with roots in Roman culture. Under the guidance of Muhammad the Prophet, Islam became both a coherent theology and a way of life. Once the Muslim Arabs embarked on military conquests, they became the heirs of Rome in other ways: preserving Byzantine cities, hiring Syrian civil servants, and adopting Mediterranean artistic styles. Drawing on Roman and Persian traditions, the Umayyad dynasty created a powerful Islamic state, with a capital city in Syria and a culture that generally tolerated a wide variety of economic, religious, and social institutions so long as the conquered paid taxes to their Muslim overlords. Byzantium directly inherited the central political institutions of Rome: its people called themselves Romans; its emperor was the Roman emperor; and its capital, Con-

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stantinople, was considered to be the new Rome. Byzantium also inherited the taxes, cities, laws, and Christian religion of Rome. The changes of the seventh and eighth centuries — contraction of territory, urban decline, disappearance of the old elite, and a ban on icons — whittled away at this Roman character. By 750, Byzantium was less Roman than it was a new, resilient political and cultural entity, a Christian state. Western Europe also inherited — and transformed — Roman institutions. The Frankish kings built on Roman traditions that had earlier been modified by provincial and Germanic custom. In the seventh century, Anglo-Saxon England reimported the Roman legacy through Latin learning and the Christian religion. Visigothic kings in Spain converted from Arian to Roman Christianity and allied themselves with the Hispano-Roman elite. In Italy and at Rome itself, the traditions of the classical past endured. The roads remained, the cities of Italy survived (although depopulated), and both the popes and the Lombard kings ruled according to the traditions of Roman government.

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MAPPING THE WEST Rome’s Heirs, c.750

The major political fact of the period 600–750 was the emergence of Islam and the creation ofan Islamic state that reached from Spain to the Indus River. The Byzantine Empire, once a great power, was dwarfed — and half swallowed up — by its Islamic neighbor. To the west were fledgling European kingdoms, mere trifles on the world stage. The next centuries, however, would prove their resourcefulness and durability.

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Muslim, Byzantine, and western European societies all suffered the ravages of war. Social hierarchies became simpler, with the loss of “middle” groups like the curials at Byzantium and the near suppression of tribal affiliations among Muslims. Politics were tightly tied to religion: the Byzantine emperor was a religious force, the caliph was a religious and political leader, and western European kings allied with churchmen. Despite their many differences, all these leaders had a common understanding of their place in a divine scheme: they were God’s agents on earth, ruling over God’s people. In the next century they would consolidate their power. Little did they know that, soon thereafter, local elites would be able to assert greater authority than ever before.

Chapter 8 Review Key Terms and People Be sure that you can identify the term or person and explain its historical significance. Muhammad (p.250)

Umayyad caliphate (p.255)

Merovingian dynasty (p.262)

Qur’an (p.251)

Heraclius (p.257)

Gregory of Tours (p.265)

Hijra (p.252)

Lombards (p.258)

Gregory the Great (p.270)

jihad (p.252)

theme (p.260)

Synod of Whitby (p.270)

Five Pillars of Islam (p.253)

icon (p.261)

Shi‘ite (p.255)

iconoclasm (p.261)

Review Questions 1. How and why did the Muslims conquer so many lands in the period 632–750? 2. What stresses did the Byzantine Empire endure in the seventh and eighth centuries, and how was iconoclasm a response to those stresses? 3. What were the similarities and differences among the kingdoms that emerged in western Europe, and how did their histories combine and diverge?

Making Connections 1. What were the similarities and the differences in political organizations of the Islamic, Byzantine, and western European societies in the period 600–750? 2. Compare and contrast the roles of religion in the Islamic, Byzantine, and western European worlds in the period 600–750. 3. Compare the material resources of the Islamic, Byzantine, and western European governments in the period 600–750.

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Important Events c.486–751

Merovingian dynasty

c.570–632

Life of Muhammad, prophet of Islam

572

Lombards conquer northern Italy

r. 573–c.594

Bishop Gregory of Tours

587

Conversion of Visigothic king Reccared

c.590

Arrival of Irish monk Columbanus in Gaul

r. 590–604

Papacy of Pope Gregory the Great

603–623

War between Byzantium and Persia

622

Hijra to Medina; year 1 of the Islamic calendar

624

Muhammad and Meccans fight battle of Badr

661–750

Umayyad caliphate

664

Synod of Whitby; English king opts for Roman form of Christianity

680–754

Life of Boniface, who reformed the Frankish church

r. 717–741

Emperor Leo III the Isaurian

726–787

Period of iconoclasm at Byzantium

Consider three events: Papacy of Pope Gregory the Great (r.590–604); Hijra to Medina, year 1 of the Islamic calendar (622); and Emperor Leo III the Isaurian (r.717–741). How did these events reshape religious faith? What were the broader implications of those changes for social and political life?

Suggested References Donner’s book offers insight on Islam’s origins. Herrin gives a dazzling overview of Byzantine history. Smith’s and Wickham’s books are essential for understanding the early medieval West. *Bede. A History of the English Church and People. Trans. Leo Sherley-Price. 1991. Berkey, Jonathan P. The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600–1800. 2003. *Byzantine Sourcebook: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook1c.html Cameron, Averil. The Byzantines. 2006. Donner, Fred McGraw. Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam. 2010. *Geanakoplos, Deno John, ed. and trans. Byzantium: Church, Society, and Civilization Seen through Contemporary Eyes. 1984. Geary, Patrick. Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World. 1988. *Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. 1976. Haldon, J. F. Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture. 1990. Herrin, Judith. Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. 2007. *Islamic Sourcebook: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/islam/islamsbook.html Kennedy, Hugh. The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century. 2nd ed. 2004. Smith, Julia M. H. Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History 500–1000. 2005. Whittow, Mark. The Making of Byzantium, 600–1025. 1996. Wickham, Chris. Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800. 2005. *Primary source.

From Centralization to Fragmentation

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n 841, a fifteen-year-old boy named William went to serve at the court of Charles the Bald, king of the Franks. William’s father, Bernard, was an extremely powerful noble. His mother, Dhuoda, was a well-educated, pious, and able woman; she administered the family’s estates in the south of France while her husband was occupied with politics at court. In 841, however, politics had become a dangerous business. King Charles was fighting with his brothers over his portion of the FrankishEmpire, and he doubted Bernard’s loyalty. In fact, William was sent to Charles’s court as a kind of hostage, to ensure Bernard’sfidelity. Anxious about her son, Dhuoda King Charles Receives a Bible wrote a handbook of advice for William, The importance of loyalty is clear in outlining his moral obligations. She emphathis ninth-century depiction of King sized duty to his father even over loyalty to Charles the Bald receiving a book. the king: The painting appears at the very end of thebook (a large and splendid bible) accompanied by two poems. Inthe painting, the king sits on a throne. Two courtiers flank him on either side, and beside each of them is a warrior. Two canons hold the bible the king is about to receive, while all the others make gestures of praise and prayer. Above, the hand of God reaches down to bless the king, whose throne touches the very scarf of heaven. The first poem begins “Kind King Charles, flourish with the power of the Almighty. . . . [You are] the patron of the church, asolace to the clergy and people.” (From the First Bible of Charles the Bald, c.843–851 / Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France / Bridgeman Images.)

Royal and imperial . . . power seem preeminent in the world, and the custom of men is to [put] their names ahead of all others. . . . But despite all this, I caution you to render first to him whose son you are special, faithful, steadfast loyalty as long as you shall live. . . . So I urge you . . . that first of all you love God. . . . Then love, fear, and cherish your father. William heeded his mother’s words, with tragic results: when Bernard ran afoul of Charles and was executed, William died in a failed attempt to avenge his father. 279

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Dhuoda’s handbook reveals the volatile political atmosphere of the mid-ninth century, and her advice to her son points to one of its causes: a crisis of loyalty. Loyalty to emperors, caliphs, and kings competed with allegiances to local authorities, which, in turn, vied with family loyalties. The period from 600 to 750 had seen the startling rise of Islam, the whittling away of Byzantium, and the beginnings of stable political and economic development in an impoverished Europe. The period from 750 to 1050 would see all three societies contend with internal issues of diversity even as they became increasingly conscious of their unity and uniqueness. At the beginning of this period, rulers built up and dominated strong, united political communities. By the end, these realms had fragmented into smaller, more local units. In Byzantium, military triumphs brought emperors enormous prestige. A renaissance (French for “rebirth”) — that is, an important revival — of culture and art took place at Constantinople. Yet at the same time new elites began to dominate the Byzantine countryside. In the Islamic world, a dynastic revolution in 750 ousted the Umayyads from the caliphate and replaced them with a new family, the Abbasids. The Abbasid caliphs moved their capital to the east, from Damascus to Baghdad. Even though the Abbasids’ power began to ebb as regional Islamic rulers came to the fore, the Islamic world, too, saw a renaissance. In western Europe, Charlemagne — a Frankish king from a new dynasty, the Carolingians — forged a huge empire and presided over yet another cultural renaissance. Yet this newly unified kingdom was fragile, disintegrating within a generation of Charlemagne’s death. In western Europe, even more than in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, power fell into the hands of local lords. Along the borders of these realms, new political entities began to develop, shaped by the religion and culture of their more dominant neighbors. Rus, the ancestor of Russia, grew up in the shadow of Byzantium, as did Bulgaria and Serbia. Western Europe cast its influence over central European states. In the west, the borders of the CHAPTER FOCUS What forces led to the Islamic world remained stable or were dissolution — or weakening — of centralized pushed back. By the year 1050, the contours governments in the period from 750 to 1050, of what were to become modern Europe and what institutions took their place? and the Middle East were dimly visible.

The Byzantine Emperor and Local Elites Between 750 and 850, Byzantium staved off Muslim attacks and began to rebuild. After 850, it expanded. Military victories brought new wealth and power to the imperial court, and the emperors supported a vast program of literary and artistic revival at Constantinople. But while the emperor dominated at the capital, a new landowning elite began to control the countryside. On its northern frontier, Byzantium helped create new Slavic realms.

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Imperial Power While the themes, with their territorial military organization (see page 260), took care of attacks on Byzantine territory, tagmata — new mobile armies made up of the best troops — moved aggressively outward, beginning around 850. By 1025, the Byzantine Empire extended from the Danube in the north to the Euphrates in the south (Map 9.1). Military victories gave new prestige and wealth to the army and to the imperial court. The Byzantine emperors drew revenues from vast and growing imperial estates. They could demand services and money from the general population at will, and they used their wealth to create a lavish court culture, surrounding themselves with servants, slaves, family members, and civil servants. From their powerful position, the emperors negotiated with other rulers, exchanging ambassadors and receiving and entertaining diplomats with elaborate ceremonies to express the serious, sacred, concentrated power of imperial majesty. Some of the emperors’ wealth derived from a prosperous agricultural economy organized for trade. Byzantine commerce depended on a careful balance of state regulation and individual enterprise. The emperor controlled craft and commercial guilds,

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Under Emperor Basil II, the Byzantine Empire once again embraced the entire area of the Balkans, while its eastern arm extended around the Black Sea and its southern fringe reached nearly to Tripoli. The year 1025 marked the Byzantine Empire’s greatest size after the rise of Islam.

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while entrepreneurs organized most of the markets held throughout the empire. Foreign merchants were welcomed, but because international trade intertwined with foreign policy, the Byzantine government insisted on controlling it, issuing privileges to certain “nations” (as the Venetians, Genoese, and Jews, among others, were called), regulating the fees they were obliged to pay and the services they had to render. The emperors also negotiated privileges for their own traders in foreign lands. Byzantine merchants were guaranteed protection in Syria, for example, while the two governments split the income on sales taxes. Thus, Byzantine trade flourished in the Middle East and, thanks to Venetian intermediaries, with western Europe. Equally significant was trade to the north; from the conquerors of the area around the outpost of Kiev, known as the Kievan Rus, the Byzantines imported furs, slaves, wax, and honey.

The Macedonian Renaissance, c.870–c.1025 Flush with victory and recalling Byzantium’s past glory, the emperors of the late ninth century revived classical intellectual pursuits. Basil I (r. 867–886) from Macedonia founded the imperial dynasty that presided over the so-called Macedonian renaissance. Basil’s dynasty drew on an intellectual elite who came from families that — even in the anxious years of the eighth century — had persisted in studying the classics. Now, with the empire slowly regaining its military eminence and with icons permanently restored in 843, this scholarly elite thrived again. Under the patronage of the emperor and other members of the imperial court, scholars wrote summaries of classical literature, encyclopedias of ancient knowledge, and commentaries on classical authors. Some copied religious manuscripts and theological commentaries such as Bibles, Psalters,

The Macedonian Renaissance The cultural flowering known as the Macedonian renaissance produced extraordinary works of art and literature. Even textiles felt its influence as the wealthy at Constantinople paid for lavish silks, many used as tapestries to mark major triumphs. This fragment of silk woven in compound twill (a diagonal weave composed of intricately interlaced silk threads) boasts a large dark green eagle with a yellow eye on a rose-purple background. Parts of two green rosettes are visible as well. (Museo Diocesano, Bressanone, Italy / De Agostini Picture Library / Gianni Dagli Orti / Bridgeman Images.)

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homilies, and liturgical texts. But the merging of classical and Christian traditions is clearest in manuscript illuminations (painted illustrations or embellishments in hand-copied manuscripts). Here Byzantine artists showed how liberated they were from the sober taboos of the iconoclastic period. For example, to depict King David, the supposed poet of the Psalms, an artist illuminating a Psalter turned to a model of Orpheus, the enchanting musician of ancient Greek mythology. Other artists worked in a less classical style, as in the depiction of the decorative eagle on page 282.

The Dynatoi : A New Landowning Elite At Constantinople the emperor reigned supreme. But outside the capital, extremely powerful military families began to compete with imperial power. The dynatoi (“powerful men”), as this new hereditary elite was called, got rich on plunder and new lands taken in the aggressive wars of the tenth century. They took over or bought up whole villages, turning the peasants’ labor to their benefit. For the most part they exercised their power locally, but they also sometimes occupied the imperial throne. The Phocas family exemplifies the strengths as well as the weaknesses of the dynatoi. Probably originally from Armenia, they possessed military skills and exhibited loyalty to the emperor that together brought them high positions in both the army and at court in the last decades of the ninth century. In the tenth century, with new successes in the east, the Phocas family gained independent power. After some particularly brilliant victories, Nicephorus Phocas was declared emperor by his armies and ruled (as Nicephorus II Phocas) at Constantinople from 963 to 969. But opposing factions of the dynatoi brought him down. The mainstay of Phocas family power, as of that of all the dynatoi, was outside the capital, on the family’s great estates. As the dynatoi gained power, the social hierarchy of Byzantium began to resemble that of western Europe, where land owned by aristocratic lords was farmed by peasants bound by tax and service obligations to the fields they cultivated.

The Formation of Eastern Europe and Kievan Rus The contours of modern eastern Europe took shape during the period from 850 to 950. By 800, Slavic settlements dotted the area from the Danube River down to Greece and from the Black Sea to Croatia. The ruler of the Bulgarians, called a khagan, presided over the largest realm. In the ninth century, Bulgarian rule stretched west to the Tisza River in modern Hungary. At about the same, however, the Byzantine Empire began its own campaigns to conquer, convert, and control these Slavic regions, today known as the Balkans. The Byzantine offensive began under Emperor Nicephorus I (r.802–811), who waged war against the Slavs of Greece in the Peloponnese, set up a new Christian diocese there, organized it as a new military theme, and forcibly resettled Christians in the area to counteract Slavic paganism. The Byzantines followed this pattern of conquest as they pushed northward. By 900, Byzantium ruled all of Greece.

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Still under Nicephorus I, the Byzantines launched a massive attack against the Bulgarians, took the chief city of Pliska, plundered it, burned it to the ground, and then marched against the khagan’s encampment in the Balkan Mountains. But the Bulgarians successfully parried this attack. In 816, the two sides agreed to a temporary peace — though it was punctuated by hostilities — that lasted for most of the tenth century. Then Emperor Basil II (r.976–1025) led the Byzantines in a slow, methodical conquest. Aptly known as the Bulgar-Slayer, Basil brought the entire region under Byzantine control and forced its ruler to accept the Byzantine form of Christianity. Around the same time, the Serbs, encouraged by Byzantium to oppose the Bulgarians, began to form the political community that would become Serbia. Religion played an important role in the Byzantine conquest of the Balkans. In 863, the brothers Cyril and Methodius were sent as Christian missionaries from the Byzantines to the Slavs. Well educated in both classical and religious texts, they devised an alphabet for Slavic (until then an oral language) based on Greek forms. It was the ancestor of the modern Cyrillic alphabet used in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Russia today. The region that would eventually become Russia lay outside the sphere of direct Byzantine rule in the ninth and tenth centuries. Like Serbia and Bulgaria, however, it came under increasingly strong Byzantine influence. In the ninth century, the Vikings — Scandinavian adventurers who ranged over vast stretches of ninth-century Europe seeking trade, riches, and land — penetrated the region below the Gulf of Finland, where they imposed their rule. By the end of the century, they had moved southward and had conquered the region around Kiev, a key commercial emporium. From there the Rus, as the Viking conquerors were called, sailed the Dnieper River and crossed the Black Sea in search of markets for their slaves and furs. The relationship between Rus and Byzantium began with trade, continued with war, and ended with a common religion. By the beginning of the tenth century, the Rus had special trade privileges at Constantinople. But relations deteriorated, and the Rus unsuccessfully attacked Constantinople in 941. Soon they resumed trading with Byzantium. Few Rus were Christian (most were polytheists, others Muslims or Jews), but that changed at the end of the tenth century, when good relations between the Rus and the Byzantines were sealed by the conversion of the Rus ruler Vladimir (r. c. 978–1015). In 988, Emperor Basil II sent his sister Anna to marry Vladimir in exchange for an army of Rus. To seal the alliance, Vladimir was baptized and took his brother-in-law’s name. The general population seems to have quickly adopted the new religion. Vladimir’s conversion represented a wider pattern: the Christianization of Europe. In the southeast, orthodox Byzantine Christianity dominated, while in the west and northwest, Roman Catholicism tended to be most important. Slavic realms such as Moravia, Serbia, and Bulgaria adopted the Byzantine form of Christianity, while the rulers and peoples of Poland, Hungary, Denmark, and Norway were converted under the auspices of the Roman church. The conversion of the Rus was especially significant because they were geographically as close to the Islamic world as to the Christian and could conceivably have become Muslims. By converting to Byzantine Christianity,

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the Rus made themselves heirs to Byzantium and its church, customs, art, and political ideology. However, choosing the Byzantine form of Christianity, rather than the Roman Catholic, later served to isolate the region from western Europe. For more than fifty years, Rus remained united under one ruler. But after 1054, civil wars broke out. Invasions by outsiders, particularly from the east, further weakened the Kievan rulers, who were eventually displaced by princes from the north. At the crossroads of East and West, Rus could meet and absorb a great variety of REVIEW QUESTION In what ways did the traditions, but its geographical position Byzantine emperor expand his power, and in what ways was that power checked? also opened it to unremitting military pressures.

The Rise and Fall of the Abbasid Caliphate A new dynasty of caliphs — the Abbasids — first brought unity and then, in their decline, fragmentation to the Islamic world as regional rulers took over. Local traditions based on religious and political differences played an increasingly important role in people’s lives. Yet, even in the eleventh century, the Islamic world had a clear sense of its own unity, based on language, commerce, and artistic and intellectual achievements that transcended regional boundaries.

The Abbasid Caliphate, 750–936 In 750, a civil war ousted the Umayyads and raised the Abbasids to the caliphate. The Abbasids found support in an uneasy coalition of Shi‘ites (the faction of Islam loyal to Ali’s memory; see page 255) and non-Arabs who had been excluded from the Umayyad government. Under the Abbasids, the center of Islamic rule shifted from Damascus, with its roots in the Roman tradition, to the newly founded city of Baghdad in Iraq. Here the Abbasid caliphs adhered even more firmly than the Umayyads to Persian courtly models, with a centralized administration, a large staff, and control over the appointment of regional governors. The Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809) presided over a flourishing empire. His contemporary Frankish ruler, Charlemagne, was impressed with the elephant Harun sent him as a gift, along with monkeys, spices, and medicines. Such items were mainstays of everyday commerce in Harun’s Iraq. A mid-ninth-century catalog of imports listed “tigers, panthers, elephants, panther skins, rubies, white sandal[wood], ebony, and coconuts” from India as well as “silk, chinaware, paper, ink, peacocks, racing horses, saddles, felts [and] cinnamon” from China. The Abbasid dynasty began to decline after Harun’s death. While his sons waged war against each other, the caliphs lost control over many regions, including Syria and Egypt. They needed to recruit an army that would be loyal to them alone. This they found in “outsiders,” many of them Turks from east of the Caspian Sea (today Kazakhstan). Many of the Turks, later called Mamluks, were bought as slaves. Once

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Comparing this map with Map 8.1 (page 254) will quickly demonstrate the fragmentation of the once united Islamic caliphate. In 750, one caliph ruled territory stretching from Spain to India. In 1000, there was more than one caliphate as well as several other ruling dynasties. The most important of those dynasties were the Fatimids, who began as organizers of a movement to overthrow the Abbasids. By 1000, the Fatimids had conquered Egypt and claimed hegemony over all of North Africa.

purchased, the Turks were freed and paid a salary. They were expert fighters, but the Abbasids needed a good tax base to be able to pay them. This they did not have. Serious uprisings just south of Baghdad kept huge swaths of territory outside the control of the caliphs. Other regions of the Islamic world easily went their own way when the caliphs lacked the money to keep them in line. In the tenth century, the caliphs became figureheads only, while independent regional rulers collected taxes and hired their own armies. Thus, in the Islamic world, as in the Byzantine, new regional lords challenged the power of the central ruler. But the process advanced more quickly in Islamic than in Byzantine territories. Map 9.1 (page 281) correctly omits any indication of regional dynatoi because the key center of power in the Byzantine Empire continued to be Constantinople. Map 9.2, in contrast, shows how the Abbasid caliphate fragmented as local dynasties established themselves.

Regional Diversity in Islamic Lands The splintering of the Islamic world was to be expected since central power there was based on the conquest of many diverse regions, each with its own deeply rooted traditions and culture. The Islamic religion, with its Sunni/Shi‘ite split, also became

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Fatimid Tableware The elites under the Fatimid rulers cultivated a luxurious lifestyle that included dining on lusterware — porcelain tableware that was glazed and fired several times to produce an iridescent metallic sheen. Trade contacts with China inspired the Islamic world to mimic Chinese pottery. (Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, USA / Werner Forman Archive / Bridgeman Images.)

a source of polarization.* Western Europeans knew almost nothing about Muslims, calling all of them Saracens (from the Latin word for “Arabs”) without distinction. But, as is still true today, Muslims were of different ethnicities, practiced different customs, and identified with different regions. With the fragmentation of political and religious unity, each of the tenth- and early-eleventh-century Islamic states built on local traditions under local rulers. A good example of this trend was the Shi‘ite group known as the Fatimids. Taking their name from Fatimah, daughter of Muhammad and wife of Ali, they established themselves in 909 as rulers in the region of North Africa now called Tunisia. The Fatimid ruler claimed to be not only the true imam — the descendant of Ali — but also the mahdi, the “divinely guided” messiah, come to bring justice on earth. In 969, the Fatimids declared themselves rulers of Egypt. Their dynasty lasted for about two hundred years. Fatimid leaders also controlled North Africa, Arabia, and even Syria for a time. They established a lavish court culture that rivaled the one at Baghdad, and they supported industries such as lusterware that had once been a monopoly of the Abbasids. While the Shi‘ites dominated Egypt, Sunni Muslims ruled al-Andalus, the Islamic central and southern heart of Spain. The emirate of Córdoba (so called because its ruler took the secular title emir, “commander,” and fixed his capital at Córdoba) was created early, near the start of the Abbasid caliphate. During the Abbasid revolution of 750, a member of the Umayyad family gathered an army, invaded Spain, and after only one battle was declared emir in 756, becoming Abd al-Rahman I. He and his successors ruled a broad range of peoples, including many Jews and Christians. After the initial Islamic conquest of Spain, the Christians had adopted so much of the new Arabic language and so many of the customs that they were called Mozarabs (“like Arabs”). The Muslims allowed them freedom of worship and let them live according to their own laws. Some Mozarabs were content with their status, others converted to Islam, and still others intermarried. *The Shi‘ites, originally followers of Ali, had by this time come to practice Islam differently from the Sunni. Each faction adhered to its own interpretation of the prophet Muhammad’s life and message.

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A Princely Pyxis A pyxis is a small container, and this one, about six inches high and carved out of ivory, was made for theyounger son of Abd al-Rahman III, the caliph of Córdoba. The prince is depicted in a decorative lozenge, sitting on a rug and holding a bottle and a flower. One servant sits beside him to cool him with afan; another stands and plays the lute. Underneaththe rug are lions, symbols of power. Outside the princely enclosure, falconers stand by, ready to accompany the prince to the hunt. The whole scene suggests order, skill, and elegance, all important features of the Islamic renaissance. (Louvre, Paris, France / Peter Willi / Bridgeman Images.)

Abd al-Rahman III (r.912–961) was powerful enough to take the title of caliph, and the caliphate of Córdoba, which he created, lasted from 929 to 1031. Under him, members of all religious groups in al-Andalus enjoyed not only freedom of worship but also equal opportunity to rise in the civil service. Abd al-Rahman enjoyed diplomatic relations with European and Byzantine rulers. Yet under later caliphs, al-Andalus experienced the same political fragmentation that was occurring everywhere else. The caliphate of Córdoba broke up in 1031, and rulers of small, independent regions, called taifas, took power.

Unity of Commerce and Language Although the regions of the Islamic world were culturally and politically diverse, they maintained a measure of unity through trade networks and language. Their principal bond was Arabic, the language of the Qur’an. At once poetic and sacred, Arabic was also the language of commerce and government from Baghdad to Córdoba. Moreover, despite political differences, borders were open. The primary reason for these open borders was Islam itself, but the openness extended to non-Muslims as well. The commercial activities of the Tustari brothers, Jewish merchants from southern Iran, are a good example. By 1026, they had established a flourishing business in Egypt. Informal contacts with friends and family allowed them to import fine textiles from Iran to sell in Egypt and to export Egyptian fabrics to sell in Iran. The Tustari brothers held the highest rank in Jewish society and had contacts with Muslim rulers. At the same time, commercial networks even more vast than those of the Tustari family were common. Muslim merchants brought tin from England; salt and gold from Timbuktu in west-central Africa; amber, gold, and copper from Rus; and slaves from every region.

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The Islamic Renaissance, c.790–c.1050 Unlike the Macedonian renaissance, which was concentrated in Constantinople, the Islamic renaissance occurred throughout the Islamic world. In fact, the dissolution of the caliphate into separate political entities multiplied the centers of learning and intellectual productivity. The Islamic renaissance was particularly dazzling in capital cities such as Córdoba (a city in southern Spain today), where tenth-century rulers presided over a brilliant court culture, patronizing scholars, poets, and artists. Islamic scholarship was diverse. Some scholars read, translated, and commented on the works of ancient philosophers. Others studied astronomy or wrote on mathematical matters. Ibn Sina (980–1037), known in Christian Europe as Avicenna, wrote books on logic, the natural sciences, and physics. His Canon of Medicine systematized earlier treatises and reconciled them with his own experience as a physician. Long before there were universities in Europe, there were institutions of higher learning in the Islamic world. A rich Muslim might demonstrate his piety and charity by establishing a madrasa, a school located within or attached to a mosque. Professors at madrasas held classes throughout the day on the interpretation of the Qur’an and literary or legal texts. Students, all male, attended the classes that suited their achievement level and interest. Most students paid a fee for learning, but there were also scholarship students. One tenth-century court official was so solicitous of the welfare of the scholars he supported that each day he set out iced refreshments, candles, and paper for them in his own kitchen. The use of paper, made from flax and hemp or rags and vegetable fiber, points to a major difference among the Islamic, Byzantine, and (as we shall see) Carolingian renaissances. Byzantine scholars worked to enhance the prestige of the ruling classes. Their work, written on expensive parchment (made from animal skins), kept manuscripts out of the hands of all but the very rich. This was true of scholarship in Europe REVIEW QUESTION What forces contributed as well. By contrast, Islamic scholars wrote to the fragmentation of the Islamic world in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and what forces on paper, which was cheap, and they spoke held it together? to a broad audience.

The Carolingian Empire Just as in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, in Europe the period from 750 to 1050 saw first the formation of a strong empire, ruled by one man, and then its fragmentation as local rulers took power into their own hands. A new dynasty, the Carolingian, came to rule in the Frankish kingdom at almost the very moment (c. 750) that the Abbasids gained the caliphate. Charlemagne, the most powerful Carolingian monarch, conquered new territory, took the title of emperor, and presided over a revival of Christian classical culture known as the Carolingian renaissance. He ruled at the local level through counts and other military men. Nevertheless, the unity of

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the Carolingian Empire — based largely on conquest, a measure of prosperity, and personal allegiance to Charlemagne — was shaky. Its weaknesses were exacerbated by attacks from Viking, Muslim, and Magyar invaders. Charlemagne’s successors divided his empire among themselves and saw it divided further as local leaders took defense — and rule — into their own hands.

The Rise of the Carolingians The Carolingians were among many aristocratic families on the rise during the Merovingian period (see pages 262–269), but they gained exceptional power by monopolizing the position of “palace mayor” — a sort of prime minister — under the Merovingian kings. Charles Martel (“Charles the Hammer”), mayor 714–741, gave the name Carolingian (from Carolus, Latin for “Charles”) to the dynasty. Renowned for defeating an invading army of Muslims from al-Andalus near Poitiers in 732, he also contended vigorously against other aristocrats who were carving out independent lordships for themselves. Charles Martel and his family turned aristocratic factions against one another, rewarded supporters, crushed enemies, and dominated whole regions by supporting monasteries that served as focal points for both religious piety and land donations. The Carolingians also allied themselves with the Roman papacy. They supported Anglo-Saxon missionaries like Boniface (see page 272) who went to areas on the fringes of the Carolingian realm as the pope’s ambassador. Reforming the Christianity that these regions had adopted, Boniface set up a hierarchical church organization and founded new monasteries. His newly appointed bishops were loyal to Rome and the Carolingians. Pippin III (d. 768), Charles Martel’s son, turned to the pope directly. When he deposed the Merovingian king in 751, taking over the kingship himself, Pippin petitioned Pope Zachary to legitimize the act; the pope agreed. The Carolingians returned the favor a few years later when the pope asked for their help against hostile Lombards. That papal request signaled a major shift. Before 754, the papacy had been part of the Byzantine Empire; after that, it turned to Europe for protection. Pippin launched a successful campaign against the Lombard king that ended in 756 with the so-called Donation of Pippin, a peace accord between the Lombards and the pope. The treaty gave back to the pope cities that had been taken by the Lombard king. The new arrangement recognized what the papacy had long before created: a territorial “republic of St. Peter” ruled by the pope, not by the Byzantine emperor. Henceforth, the fate of Italy would be tied largely to the policies of the pope and the Frankish kings to the north, not to the eastern emperors. Partnership with the Roman church gave the Carolingian dynasty a Christian aura, expressed in symbolic form by anointment. Bishops rubbed holy oil on the foreheads and shoulders of Carolingian kings during the coronation ceremony, imitating the Old Testament kings who had been anointed by God.

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Charlemagne and His Kingdom, 768–814 The most famous Carolingian king was Charles, whom his contemporaries called the Great (le Magne in Old French) — thus, Charlemagne (r.768–814). Charlemagne was complex, contradictory, and sometimes brutal. He loved listening to St. Augustine’s City of God as it was read aloud, and he supported major scholarly enterprises, yet he never learned to write. He was devout, yet he flouted the advice of churchmenwhen they told him to convert pagans rather than force baptism on them. He admired the pope, yet he was furious when a pope placed the imperial crown on his head. He waged many successful wars, yet he thereby destroyed the buffer states surrounding the Frankish kingdoms, unleashing a new round of invasions. Behind these contradictions, however, lay a unifying vision. Charlemagne dreamed of an empire that would unite the martial and learned traditions of the Roman and Germanic worlds with the legacy of Christianity. This vision lay at the core of his political activity, his building programs, and his support of scholarship and education. During the early years of his reign, Charlemagne conquered lands in all directions (Map 9.3). He invaded Italy, seizing the crown of the Lombard kings and annexing northern Italy in 774. He then moved northward and began a long and difficult war against the Saxons, during which he annexed their territory and forcibly converted them to Christianity. To the southeast, Charlemagne fought the Avars, bringing home cartloads of plunder. To the southwest, he led an expedition to al-Andalus and there set up a march (a military buffer region). By the 790s, Charlemagne’s kingdom stretched east beyond the Elbe River (today in Germany), southeast to what is today Austria, and south to Spain and Italy. Such power in the West had been unheard of since the time of the Roman Empire, and Charlemagne began to imitate aspects of the imperial model. He sponsored building programs to symbolize his authority, standardized weights and measures, and acted as a patron of intellectual and artistic efforts. He built a capital city at Aachen, complete with a chapel that was patterned on Justinian’s church of San Vitale at Ravenna (see the illustrations on pages 238–39 and 293). To discourage corruption, Charlemagne appointed special officials, called missi dominici (“those sent out by the lord king”), to oversee his regional governors — the counts. The missi (lay aristocrats or bishops) traveled in pairs throughout the kingdom to ensure that all, rich and poor alike, had access to royal justice. Meanwhile, the papacy was beginning to claim imperial power for itself. At some point, perhaps in the 760s, members of the papal chancery (writing office) created a document called the Donation of Constantine. It declared the pope the recipient of the fourth-century emperor Constantine’s crown, cloak, and military rank along with “all provinces, palaces, and districts of the city of Rome and Italy and of the regions of the West.” (Only much later was the document proved a forgery.) The tension between the imperial claims of the Carolingians and those of the pope was heightened by the existence of an emperor at Constantinople who also had rights in the west.

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The conquests of Charlemagne temporarily united almost all of western Europe under one ruler. Although the great Carolingian Empire broke apart (see the inset showing how the empire was divided by the Treaty of Verdun), the legacy of that unity remained, even serving as one of the inspirations behind today’s European Union.

Pope Leo III (r.795–816) upset the delicate balance among these three powers. In 799, accused of adultery and perjury by a faction of the Roman aristocracy, Leo narrowly escaped being blinded and having his tongue cut out. He fled northward to seek Charlemagne’s protection. Charlemagne had the pope escorted back to Rome, and he soon arrived there himself to an imperial welcome orchestrated by Leo. On Christmas Day, 800, Leo put an imperial crown on Charlemagne’s head, and the clergy and nobles who were present acclaimed the king Augustus, the title of the first Roman emperor. The pope hoped in this way to exalt the king of the Franks, to downgrade the Byzantine ruler, and to claim for himself the role of “emperor maker.” At first, Charlemagne avoided using the imperial title. He may have hesitated toadopt it because he feared the reaction of the Byzantines. Or perhaps he objected

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Charlemagne’s Chapel Charlemagne was the first Frankish king to build a permanent capital city. He decided to do so in 789 and chose Aachen because of its natural warm springs. There he built a palace complex that, besides a grand living area for himself and hisretinue, included a chapel (a small semiprivate church). Today the entire chapel is enclosed within Aachen’s cathedral. (Aachen Cathedral, Aachen, Germany / Bildarchiv Steffens / Bridgeman Images.)

to the papal role in his crowning since it seemed to give the pope power over the imperial office. When Charlemagne finally did call himself emperor, he used a long and revealing title: “Charles, the most serene Augustus, crowned by God, great and peaceful Emperor who governs the Roman Empire and who is, by the mercy of God, king of the Franks and the Lombards.” According to this title, Charlemagne was not the Roman emperor crowned by the pope, but rather God’s emperor who governed the Roman Empire along with his many other duties.

The Carolingian Renaissance, c.790–c.900 Charlemagne inaugurated a revival of learning designed to enhance the glory of the kings, educate their officials, and purify the faith. Like the renaissances of the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, the Carolingian renaissance resuscitated the learning of the past. Scholars studied Roman imperial writers such as Suetonius and Virgil, read and commented on the works of the church fathers, and worked to establish complete and accurate texts of everything they read and prized. The English scholar Alcuin (c. 732–804), a member of the circle of scholars whom Charlemagne recruited to form a center of study, brought with him the traditions of Anglo-Saxon scholarship that had been developed by men such as Benedict Biscop and Bede. Invited to Aachen, Alcuin became Charlemagne’s chief adviser, writing letters on the king’s behalf, counseling him on royal policy, and tutoring the king’s household. He also prepared an improved edition of the Vulgate, the Latin Bible used by the clergy in all church services.

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David in the Carolingian Renaissance In this sumptuous illustration from a Bible made for Charlemagne’s grandson Charles the Bald, the central figure is David, the composer of the Psalms, who is playing theharp and dancing on a cloud. Above andbelow him are his musicians with their instruments. The influence of earlier models is clear in the two figures flanking David, who aredressed like soldiers in the late Roman Empire. (Scala / White Images / Art Resource, NY.)

Art, like scholarship, served Carolingian political and religious goals. Carolingian artists turned to models from Italy and Byzantium (perhaps some refugees from Byzantine iconoclasm joined them) to illustrate Bibles (see the illustration at left), Psalters, scientific treatises, and literary manuscripts. Many of the achievements of the Carolingian renaissance endured even after the dynasty itself had faded to a memory. The work of locating, understanding, and transmitting models of the past continued in a number of monastic schools. In the twelfth century, scholars would build on the foundations laid by the Carolingian renaissance. The very print of this textbook depends on one achievement of the period: modern typefaces are based on the clear and beautiful letter forms, called Caroline minuscule, invented in the ninth century to standardize manuscript handwriting.

Charlemagne’s Successors, 814–911 Charlemagne’s successor, Louis the Pious (r.814–840), took his role as leader of the Christian empire even more seriously than his father did. In 817, he imposed on all the monasteries of the empire a uniform way of life, based on the Benedictine rule. Although some monasteries opposed this legislation, and in the years to come the king was unable to impose his will directly, this moment marked the effective adoption of the Benedictine rule as the monastic standard in Europe. In a new development of the coronation ritual, Louis’s first wife, Ermengard, was crowned empress by the pope in 816. In 817, their firstborn son, Lothar, was named emperor and made co-ruler with Louis. Their other sons, Pippin and Louis (later called Louis the German), were made subkings under imperial rule. Louis the Pious

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hoped in this way to ensure the unity of the empire while satisfying the claims of all his sons. Should any son die, only his firstborn could succeed him, a measure intended to prevent further splintering. But Louis’s hopes were thwarted by events. Ermengard died, and Louis married Judith, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. In 823, she and Louis had a son, Charles (later known as Charles the Bald, to whose court Dhuoda’s son William was sent). The sons of Ermengard, bitter over the birth of another royal heir, rebelled against their father and fought one another for more than a decade. Finally, after Louis the Pious died in 840, the Treaty of Verdun (843) divided the empire among his three remaining sons (Pippin had died in 838). The arrangement roughly defined the future political contours of western Europe (see the inset in Map 9.3, page 292). The western third, bequeathed to Charles the Bald (r.843–877), would eventually become France, and the eastern third, handed to Louis the German (r.843–876), became Germany. The “Middle Kingdom,” which was given to Lothar (r.840–855) along with the imperial title, had a different fate: parts of it were absorbed by France and Germany, and the rest eventually formed what became the modern states of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Italy. Thus, by 843, the European-wide empire of Charlemagne had dissolved. Forged by conquest, it had been supported by a small group of privileged aristocrats with lands and offices stretching across its entire expanse. Their loyalty — based on shared values, friendship, expectations of gain, and sometimes formal ties of vassalage and oaths of fealty (faithfulness) — was crucial to the success of the Carolingians. The empire had also been supported by an ideal, shared by educated laymen and churchmen alike, of conquest and Christian belief working together to bring good order to the earthly state. But powerful forces operated against the Carolingian Empire. Once the empire’s borders were fixed and conquests ceased, the aristocrats could not hope for new lands and offices. They put down roots in particular regions and began to gather their own followings. Powerful local traditions such as different languages also undermined imperial unity. Finally, as Dhuoda revealed in the handbook she wrote for her son, some people disagreed with the imperial ideal. By asking her son to put his father before the emperor, Dhuoda demonstrated her belief in the primacy of the family and the personal ties that bound it together. Her ideal represented a new sensibility that saw real value in the breaking apart of Charlemagne’s empire into smaller, more intimate local units.

Land and Power The Carolingian economy, based on war profits, trade, and agriculture, contributed first to the rise and then to the dissolution of the Carolingian Empire. After the spoils of war ceased to pour in, the Carolingians still had access to money and goods. To the north, the Carolingian economy intermingled with that of the Abbasid caliphate.

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Silver from the Islamic world probably came north up the Volga River through Kievan Rus to the Baltic Sea. There the coins were melted down and the silver was traded to the Carolingians in return for wine, jugs, glasses, and other manufactured goods. The Carolingians turned the silver into coins of their own, to be used throughout the empire for small-scale local trade. The weakening of the Abbasid caliphate in the mid-ninth century, however, disrupted this far-flung trade network and contributed to the weakening of the Carolingians at about the same time. Land provided the most important source of Carolingian wealth and power. Carolingian aristocrats held many estates, called manors, scattered throughout the Frankish kingdoms and organized for production. The names of the peasants who tilled the soil and the dues and services they owed were even sometimes carefully noted down in registers. A typical manor was Villeneuve Saint-Georges, which belonged to the monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Près (today in Paris) in the ninth century. Villeneuve consisted of arable fields, vineyards, meadows where animals could roam, and woodlands, all scattered about the countryside rather than connected in a compact unit. Peasant families did the farming. Each family had its own manse, which consisted of a house, a garden, and small sections of the arable land. Besides farming the land that belonged to them, the families also worked the demesne, the very large manse of the lord, in this case the abbey of Saint-Germain. Grown children would found their own families, and their parents’ land would be subdivided to give them a share. In many ways, the peasant household of the Carolingian period was the precursor of the modern nuclear family. Peasants at Villeneuve practiced the most progressive sort of plowing, known as the three-field system, in which they farmed two-thirds of the arable land at one time (see Figure 9.1). They planted one-third of the arable land in the fall with winter wheat, one-third in the spring with summer crops, and left the remaining third fallow to restore its fertility. The crops sown and the fallow field then rotated so that land use was repeated only every three years. This method of organizing the land produced larger yields (because two-thirds of the land was cultivated each year) than the still-prevalent two-field system, in which only half of the arable land was cultivated one year while the other half lay fallow. All the peasants at Villeneuve were dependents of the monastery and owed dues and services to Saint-Germain. Their status and obligations varied enormously. One family, for example, owed four silver coins, wine, wood, three hens, and fifteen eggs every year, and the men had to plow the fields of the demesne. Another family owed the intensive labor of working the vineyards. Peasant women spent much time at the lord’s house in the gynaeceum — the workshop where women made and dyed cloth and sewed garments — or in the kitchens, as cooks. Peasant men spent most of their time in the fields. Manors organized on the model of Villeneuve were profitable. Like other lords, the Carolingians benefited from their extensive landholdings. Nevertheless, farming was still too primitive to return great surpluses, and as the lands belonging to the

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This schematic diagram of a manor shows that peasants lived clustered together in a village that consisted of houses and gardens. One of the buildings was a church. Nearby were vineyards. A bit beyond were the fields, pastureland, and meadows, well connected by dirt roads. The field sown with spring crops (such as oats) this year would have been sown with winter wheat the next year, while the fallow field would get a spring crop.

king were divided up in the wake of the partitioning of the empire and new invasions, the Carolingians’ dependence on manors scattered throughout their kingdom proved to be a source of weakness.

Viking, Muslim, and Magyar Invasions, c.790–955 Beginning around the time of Charlemagne’s imperial coronation and extending to the mid-tenth century, new groups — Vikings, Muslims, and Magyars — confronted the Carolingian Empire and many of the other kingdoms of Europe. The Vikings were the first invaders. About the same time as some Vikings made their eastward forays into the region below the Gulf of Finland, others moved westward as well. Traveling in small bands led by a chief, the Vikings were merchants, sailors, and pirates. Some crossed the Atlantic in their longships to settle Iceland and Greenland. Around 1000, a few landed on the coast of North America. Others navigated the rivers of continental Europe.

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As pagans, Vikings considered monasteries and churches — with their reliquaries, chalices, and crosses — no more than convenient storehouses of plunder. They hit the British Isles particularly hard. By the middle of the ninth century, the Vikings were spending winters there, and in 876 they settled in the northeast quadrant as farmers. This region was later called the Danelaw. In Wessex, the southernmost kingdom of England, King Alfred the Great bought time and peace from the Vikings by giving them hostages and tribute. The tribute, later called Danegeld, eventually became the basis of a relatively lucrative taxation system in England. After Alfred led his army against the Vikings, set up strongholds, and deployed new warships, the threat of invasions eased. On the continent, too, the Vikings set up trading stations and settled where originally they had raided. Beginning about 850, their attacks became well-organized expeditions for regional control. At the end of the ninth century, one contingent settled in the region of France that soon took the name Normandy (“land of the Northmen”). In 911, the Frankish king Charles the Simple ceded the region to Rollo, the Viking leader there. In turn, Rollo converted to Christianity. Normandy was not the only new Christian polity created in the north during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Scandinavia itself was transformed with the creation of the powerful kingdom of Denmark. There had been kings in Scandinavia before the tenth century, but they had been weak, their power challenged by nearby chieftains. Some of these chieftains led the Viking raids, competing with one another for foreign plunder in order to win prestige, land, and power back home. During the course of their raids, they and their followers came into contact with new cultures and learned from them. Meanwhile the Carolingians and the English supported missionaries in Scandinavia. By the middle of the tenth century, the Danes had become Christian. Following the model of the Christian kings to their south, the Danish kings built up an effective monarchy, with a royal mint and local agents who depended on them. By about 1000, the Danish monarchy had extended its control to parts of Sweden, Norway, and even England under King Cnut (also spelled Canute) (r.1017–1035). Southern Europe largely escaped the Vikings, but parts of it were attacked by Muslim adventurers from North Africa, Sicily, and northeastern al-Andalus who set up bases in the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, the Magyars (or Hungarians) settled in Europe’s very center. A nomadic people from the Ural Mountains (today northeastern Russia), they arrived around 899 in the Danube basin, driving a wedge between the Slavs near the Frankish kingdom and those bordering on Byzantium. The Bulgarians, Serbs, and Rus were forced into the Byzantine orbit, while the Slavs nearer the Frankish kingdom came under the influence of Germany. From their bases in present-day Hungary, the Magyars raided far to the west, attacking Germany, Italy, and even southern Gaul frequently between 899 and 955. Then in 955 the German king Otto I (r. 936–973) defeated a marauding party of Magyars at the battle of Lechfeld. Otto’s victory, his subsequent military reorganization of his eastern frontiers, and the cessation of Magyar raids around this time made

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Otto a great hero to his contemporaries. However, historians today think the containment of the Magyars had more to do with their internal transformation from nomads to farmers than with their military defeat. Soon they converted to the Roman form of Christianity. Hungary’s position between East and West made it a frontier region, vulnerable to invasion and immigration but also open to new experiments in assimilation and integration. The Viking, Muslim, and Magyar invasions were the final onslaught western Europe experienced from outsiders. In some ways they were a continuation of the invasions that had rocked the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. Loosely organized in war bands, the new groups entered western Europe looking for wealth REVIEW QUESTION What were the strengths and weaknesses of Carolingian institutions of but stayed on to become absorbed in the government, warfare, and defense? region’s post-invasion society.

After the Carolingians: The Emergence of Local Rule As royal power diminished, counts and other powerful men stopped looking to the king for new lands and offices; instead, they began to develop and exploit what they already had. Commanding allegiance from vassals, controlling the local peasantry, building castles to dominate the countryside, setting up markets, collecting revenues, and keeping the peace, they regarded themselves as independent regional rulers. In this way, a new warrior class of lords and vassals came to dominate post-Carolingian society. There were, to be sure, variations on this theme. In northern and central Italy, where urban life had never lost its importance, elites ruled from the cities rather than from rural castles. Everywhere kings retained a certain amount of power; in some places, such as Germany and England, they were extremely effective. Central European monarchies formed under the influence of Germany.* Still, throughout this period, local allegiances — between lord and vassal, castellan and peasant, bishop and layman — mattered most to the societies of Europe.

Public Power and Private Relationships Both kings and less powerful men commanded others through institutions designed to ensure personal loyalty. This was true already under Charlemagne, and in the wake of the Viking, Magyar, and Muslim invasions, more and more warriors were drawn into networks of dependency, but not with the king: they became the faithful men — the vassals — of local lords, who often gave them fiefs (grants of land) in return for their military service. As sons often took the place of their fathers, this

*Names such as Germany, France, and Italy are used here for the sake of convenience. They refer to regions, not to the nation-states that would eventually become associated with those names.

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arrangement tended to be permanent. From the Latin feodum (“fief ”) comes the word feudal, and some historians use the term feudalism to describe the social and economic system created by the relationship among vassals, lords, and fiefs. Medieval people divided their society into three groups: those who prayed, those who fought, and those who worked. All these groups were involved in hierarchies of dependency and linked by personal bonds, but the upper classes — those who prayed (monks) and those who fought (knights) — were free. Their brand of dependency was prestigious, whether they were vassals, lords, or both. In fact, a typical warrior was lord of several vassals even while serving as the vassal of another lord. Monasteries normally had vassals to fight for them, and their abbots in turn were often vassals of a king or other powerful lord. Vassalage served both as an alternative to public power and as a way to strengthen what little public power remained. Given the impoverished economic conditions of western Europe, its primitive methods of communication, and its lack of unifying traditions, lords of every sort needed faithful men to protect them and carry out their orders. And vassals needed lords. At the low end of the social scale, poor vassals depended on their lords to feed, clothe, house, and arm them. At the upper end of the social scale, landowning vassals looked to lords to give them still more land. Many upper-class laywomen participated in the society of “those who fought” as wives and mothers of vassals and lords. A few women were themselves vassals, and some were lords (or, rather, ladies). Other women entered convents and joined the group of those who prayed. Through its abbess or a man standing in for her, a convent often had vassals as well. Many elite women engaged in property transactions, whether alone, with other family members, or as part of a group such as a convent. Becoming a vassal involved both ritual gestures and verbal promises. In a ceremony witnessed by others, the vassal-to-be knelt and, placing his hands between the hands of his lord, said, “I promise to be your man.” This act, known as homage, was followed by the promise of fealty — fidelity, trust, and service — which the vassal swore with his hand on relics or a Bible. Then the vassal and the lord kissed. In an age when many people could not read, a public ceremony such as this represented a visual and verbal contract. Vassalage bound the lord and vassal to one another with reciprocal obligations, usually military. Knights, as the premier fighters of the day, were the most desirable vassals. At the bottom of the social scale were those who worked — the peasants. In the Carolingian period, many peasants were free; they did not live on a manor or, if they did, they owed very little to its lord. (Manors like Villeneuve were the exceptions.) But as power fell into the hands of local rulers, fewer and fewer peasants remained free. Rather, they were made dependent on lords, not as vassals but as serfs. A serf ’s dependency was completely unlike that of a vassal. Serfdom was not voluntary. No serf did homage or fealty to his lord; no serf kissed his lord as an equal. Whereas vassals served their lords as warriors, serfs worked as laborers on their lord’s land and paid taxes and dues to their lord. Peasants constituted the majority of the population, but unlike knights, who were celebrated in song, they were barely noticed by the

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upper classes — except as a source of revenue. While there were still free peasants who could lease land or till their own soil without paying dues to a lord, serfs — who could not be kicked off their land but who were also not free to leave it — became the norm. New methods of cultivation and a slightly warmer climate helped transform the rural landscape, making it more productive and thus able to support a larger population. But population increase meant more mouths to feed and the threat of food shortages. Landlords began reorganizing their estates to run more efficiently. In the tenth century, the three-field system became more prevalent; heavy plows that could turn wet, clayey northern soils came into wider use, and horses (more effective than oxen) were harnessed to pull the plows. The results were surplus food and a better standard of living for nearly everyone. In search of greater profits, some lords lightened the dues and services of peasants, or turned them into fixed money payments that the lords could then use to open up new lands by draining marshes and cutting down forests. Money payments allowed lords to buy what they wanted, while peasants benefited because their dues were fixed despite inflation. By the tenth century, many peasants had begun living in populous rural settlements, true villages. Surrounded by arable lands, meadows, woods, and wastelands, villages developed a sense of community. Boundaries — sometimes real fortifications, sometimes simple markers — told nonresidents to stay away or to find shelter in huts located outside the village limits. The church often formed the focal point of village activity. There people met, received the sacraments, drew up contracts, and buried their dead. Religious feasts and festivals joined the rituals of farming to mark the seasons. The church dominated the village in another way: men and women owed it a tax called a tithe (onetenth of their crops or income, paid in money or in kind), which was first instituted on a regular basis by the Carolingians. Village peasants developed a sense of common purpose based on their interdependence, as they shared oxen or horses for the teams that pulled the plow or turned to village craftsmen to fix their wheels or shoe their horses. Village solidarity could be compromised, however, by conflicting loyalties and obligations. A peasant in one village might very well have one piece of land connected with a certain manor and another piece on a different estate; and he or she might owe several lords different kinds of dues. Even peasants of one village working for one lord might owe him varied services and taxes. Obligations differed even more strikingly across the regions of Europe than within particular villages. The principal distinction was between free peasants — such as small landowners in Saxony and other parts of Germany, who had no lords — and serfs, who were especially common in France and England. In Italy, peasants ranged from small independent landowners to leaseholders. As landlords consolidated their power over their manors, they collected not only dues and services but also fees for the use of their flour mills, bake houses, and breweries. Some built castles, fortified strongholds, collected taxes, heard court cases, levied

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fines, and mustered men for defense. In France, for example, as the king’s power waned, political control fell into the hands of counts and other princes. By 1000, castles had become the key to their power. In the south of France, power was so fragmented that each man who controlled a castle — a castellan — was a virtual ruler, although often with a very limited reach. In northwestern France, territorial princes, basing their rule on the control of many castles, dominated much broader regions. The development of virtually independent local political units, dominated by a castle and controlled by a military elite, marks an important turning point in western Europe. Although this development did not occur everywhere simultaneously (and in some places it hardly occurred at all), the social, political, and cultural life of Europe was now dominated by landowners who were both military men and regional rulers.

Warriors and Warfare Not all medieval warriors were alike. At the top of this elite group were the kings, counts, and dukes. Below them, but on the rise, were the castellans; and still further down the social scale were ordinary knights. Yet all shared in a common lifestyle. Knights and their lords fought on horseback. High astride his steed, wearing a shirt of chain mail and a helmet of flat metal plates riveted together, the knight marked a military revolution. The war season started in May, when the grasses were high enough for horses to forage. Horseshoes allowed armies to move faster than ever before and to negotiate rough terrain previously unsuitable for battle. Stirrups, probably invented by nomadic Asiatic tribes, allowed the mounted warrior to hold his seat while thrusting at the enemy with a heavy lance. The light javelin of ancient Roman warfare was abandoned. Lords and their vassals often lived together. In the lord’s great hall they ate, listened to entertainment, and bedded down for the night. They went out hunting together, competed with one another in military games, and went off to the battlefield as a group. Some powerful vassals — counts, for example — lived on their own fiefs. These vassals hardly ever saw their lord (probably the king), except when doing homage and fealty — once in their lifetime — or serving him in battles, for perhaps forty days a year (as was the custom in eleventh-century France). These powerful vassals were themselves lords of other men — typically unmarried knightly vassals who lived, ate, and hunted together with their lord. No matter how old they might be, unmarried knights who lived with their lords were called youths by their contemporaries. Such perpetual bachelors were something new, the result of a profound transformation in the organization of families and inheritance. Before about 1000, noble families had recognized all their children as heirs and had divided their estates accordingly. Thereafter, adapting to diminished opportunities for land and office and wary of fragmenting the estates they had, French nobles (in particular) changed both their conception of their family and the way property passed to the next generation. Recognizing the overriding claims of one son, often the eldest, they handed down their entire inheritance to him. (The

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system of inheritance in which the heir is the eldest son is called primogeniture.) The heir, in turn, traced his lineage only through the male line, backward through his father and forward through his own eldest son. Such patrilineal families left many younger sons without an inheritance and therefore without the prospect of marrying and founding a family; instead, the younger sons lived at the courts of the great as youths, or they joined the church as clerics or monks. The development of territorial rule and patrilineal families went hand in hand, as fathers passed down to one son not only manors but also titles, castles, and authority over the peasantry. Patrilineal inheritance tended to bypass daughters and so worked against aristocratic women, who lost the power that came with inherited wealth. In families without sons, however, widows and daughters did inherit property. And wives often acted as lords of estates when their husbands were at war. Moreover, all aristocratic women played an important role in this warrior society, whether in the monastery (where they prayed for the souls of their families) or through their marriages (where they produced children and helped forge alliances between their own natal families and the families of their husbands).

Efforts to Contain Violence The rise of the castellans meant an increase in violence. Supported by their knights, castellans were keen to maintain their new authority over the peasants in their vicinity in the face of older regional powers, like counts and dukes. Threatened from below, those higher-ranking authorities looked to the bishops for help. The bishops, themselves resentful of local castellan claims and, moreover, generally members of the same elite families as counts and dukes, were glad to oblige. To do so, they enlisted the lower classes — peasants who were tired of wars that destroyed their crops or forced them to join regional infantries. The result was the Peace of God, which united bishops, counts, and peasants in an attempt to contain local violence. The movement began in the south of France around 990 and had spread over a wide region by 1050. At impassioned meetings of bishops, lords, and crowds of enthusiastic men and women, the clergy set forth the provisions of this peace. “No man in the counties or bishoprics shall seize a horse, colt, ox, cow, ass, or the burdens which it carries. . . . No one shall seize a peasant, man or woman,” ran the decree of one early council. Anyone who violated this peace was to be excommunicated: cut off from the community of the faithful, denied the services of the church and the hope of salvation. The Peace of God proclaimed at local councils like this limited some violence but did not address the problem of conflict between armed men. A second set of agreements, the Truce of God, soon supplemented the peace. The truce prohibited fighting between warriors at certain times. Enforcement fell to the local knights and nobles, who swore over saints’ relics to uphold it and to fight anyone who broke it. The Peace of God and the Truce of God were only two of the mechanisms that attempted to contain or defuse violent confrontations in the tenth and eleventh centuries. At times, lords and their vassals mediated wars and feuds at grand judicial

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assemblies. In other instances, monks or laymen tried to find solutions to disputes that would leave the honor of both parties intact. Rather than establishing guilt or innocence, winners or losers, these methods of adjudication often resulted in compromises on both sides.

Political Communities in Italy, England, and France The political systems that emerged following the breakup of the Carolingian Empire were as varied as the regions of Europe. In northern and central Italy, cities were the centers of power, still reflecting, if feebly, the political organization of ancient Rome. Italian lords tended to construct their family castles within the walls of cities. From there they the controlled the land and people in the surrounding countryside. Italian cities also served as marketplaces where peasants sold their surplus goods, artisans and merchants lived, and foreign traders offered their wares. These members of the lower classes were supported by the wealthy elite, who depended, here more than elsewhere, on cash to satisfy their desires. In the course of the ninth and tenth centuries, the peasants in the countryside became renters who paid in currency, helping meet their landlords’ need for cash. Families in Italy organized themselves quite differently from the patrilineal families of France. To prevent dividing its properties among heirs, the Italian family became a kind of economic corporation in which all male members shared the profits of the family’s inheritance and all women were excluded. In the coming centuries, this successful model would also serve as the foundation of most early Italian businesses and banks. Kingdom of Alfred In contrast to Italy, most of England was rural. Dependent on Wessex To Alfred in 878 Having successfully repelled the Viking invaders, Alfred the Great, king of Wessex (r. 871–899), developed new mechanisms of royal government, North Sea instituting reforms that his successors continued. He fortified settlements throughout Wessex and Northumbria divided the army into two parts, one with the duty DANELAW of defending these fortifications, the other operating as a mobile unit. Alfred also started a navy. East Mercia Anglia The money to pay for these military innovations Wales came from assessments on peasants’ holdings. Along with its regional fortifications, Alfred Wessex sought to strengthen his kingdom’s religious integ0 50 100 miles rity. He began his program of religious reform by 0 50 100 kilometers bringing scholars to his court to translate works by church fathers such as Gregory the Great and England in the Age of St. Augustine into Anglo-Saxon (Old English) so King Alfred, 871–899 that everyone would understand them. Alfred himself did some of these translations. He had even the Psalms, until now sung only in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, put into

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the vernacular — the common spoken language. In most of ninth- and tenth-century Europe, only the Latin language was used in writing. In England, however, the spoken language became a written language as well. Alfred’s reforms strengthened not only defense, education, and religion but also royal power. He consolidated his control over Wessex and fought the Danish kings, who by the mid-870s had taken Northumbria, northeastern Mercia, and East Anglia. Eventually, as he successfully fought the Danes who were pushing south and westward, he was recognized as king of all the English not under Danish rule. He issued a law code for all of the English kingdoms, becoming, in effect, the first king of all the English. Alfred’s successors rolled back the Danish rule in England even though many Vikings remained. Converted to Christianity, their great men joined Anglo-Saxons in attending the English king at court. As peace returned, new administrative subdivisions for judicial and tax purposes were established throughout England: shires (the English equivalent of counties) and hundreds (smaller units). The powerful men of the kingdom swore fealty to the king, promising to be enemies of his enemies, friends of his friends. England was united and organized to support a strong ruler. Alfred’s grandson Edgar (r.957–975) commanded all the possibilities early medieval kingship offered. He was the sworn lord of all the great men of the kingdom. He controlled appointments to the English church and sponsored monastic reform. In 973, he was anointed king. The fortifications of the kingdom were in his hands, as was the army, and he took responsibility for keeping the peace by proclaiming certain crimes — arson and theft — to be under his special jurisdiction and by mobilizing the machinery of the shire and the hundred to find and punish thieves. Despite its apparent centralization, England was not a unified state in the modern sense, and the king’s control was often tenuous. Many royal officials were great landowners who (as on the European continent) worked for the king because it was in their best interest. When it was not, they allied with different claimants to the throne. This political fragility may have helped the Danish king Cnut conquer England. As king there from 1017 to 1035, Cnut reinforced the already strong connections between England and Scandinavia while keeping intact much of the administrative, ecclesiastical, and military apparatus already established in England by the AngloSaxons. By Cnut’s time, Scandinavian traditions had largely merged with those of the rest of Europe and the Vikings were no longer an alien culture. Across the Channel, French kings had a harder time than the English coping with invasions because their realm was much larger. They had no chance to build their defenses slowly from one powerful base. During most of the tenth century, Carolingian kings alternated on the throne with kings from a family that would later be called the Capetian. As the Carolingian dynasty waned, the most powerful men of the kingdom — dukes, counts, and important bishops — came together to elect as king Hugh Capet (r.987–996), a lord of great prestige yet relatively little power. His choice marked the end of Carolingian rule and the beginning of the Capetian dynasty, which would hand down the royal title from father to son until the fourteenth century.

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In the eleventh century, territorial lordships limited the reach of the Capetian kings. The king’s scattered but substantial estates lay in the north of France, in the region around Paris — the Île-deFrance (“island of France”). His castles and his vassals were there. Independent castellans, however, controlled areas nearby. In the sense that he was a neighbor of castellans and not much more powerful militarily than they, the king of the Franks — who would only later take the territorial title of king of France — was just another local leader. Yet the Capetian kings had considerable prestige. They were anointed with holy oil, and they represented the idea of unity inherited from Charlemagne. Most of the counts, at least in the north of France, became their vassals. But because they were powerful, these vassals’ obligations to the king were minimal.

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Emperors and Kings in Central and Eastern Europe In contrast to the development of territorial lordships in France, Germany’s fragmentation had hardly begun before it was reversed. In the late Carolingian period, five large duchies (regions dominated by dukes) emerged in Germany. When the last Carolingian king in Germany died, in 911, the dukes elected one of themselves as king. Then, as the Magyar invasions increased, the dukes gave the royal title to the duke of Saxony, Henry I (r.919–936), who proceeded to set up fortifications and reorganize his army, crowning his efforts with a major defeat of a Magyar army in 933. Otto I (r.936–973), the son of Henry I, was an even greater military hero. In 951, he marched into Italy and took the Lombard crown. His defeat of the Magyar forces in 955 at Lechfeld gave him prestige and helped solidify his dynasty. Against the Slavs, with whom the Germans shared a border, Otto created marches (border regions specifically set up for defense) from which he could make expeditions and stave off counterattacks. After the pope crowned him emperor in 962, Otto claimed the Middle Kingdom carved out by the Treaty of Verdun and cast himself as the agent of Roman imperial renewal. His kingdom was called the Empire, as if it were the old Roman Empire revived. Some historians call it the Holy Roman Empire to distinguish it from the Roman Empire, but Otto and his successors made no such distinction; they considered it a continuation. In this book, it will be called the Empire. Otto’s victories brought tribute and plunder, ensuring him a following but also raising the German nobles’ expectations for enrichment. The Ottonian kings — including Otto I and his successors Otto II (r.973–983) and Otto III (r.983–1002) — were not always able or willing to provide the gifts and inheritances their family members and followers expected. They did not divide their kingdom among their

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sons; instead, like castellans in France, they created a patrilineal pattern of inheritance. As a consequence, younger sons and other potential heirs felt cheated, and disgruntled royal kin led revolt after revolt against the Ottonian kings. Relations between the Ottonians and the German clergy were more harmonious. Otto I appointed bishops, gave them extensive lands, and subjected the local peasantry to their overlordship. Like Charlemagne, Otto believed that the well-being of the church in his kingdom depended on him. The Ottonians gave bishops the right to collect revenues and call men to arms. Answering to the king and furnishing him with troops, the bishops became royal officials, while also carrying out their religious duties. German kings claimed the right to select bishops, even the pope at Rome, and to “invest” them (install them in their office) by participating in the ceremony that made them bishops. Like all strong rulers of the day, the Ottonians presided over a renaissance of learning. They brought learned churchmen to court to write and teach. To an extent unprecedented elsewhere, noblewomen in Germany also acquired an education and participated in the intellectual revival. Living at home with their kinfolk and servants

Otto III Receiving Gifts These triumphal images are in a book of Gospels made for Otto III (r.983–1002). The crowned women on the left are personifications of the four parts of Otto’s empire: Sclavinia (the Slavic lands), Germania (Germany), Gallia (Gaul), and Roma (Rome). Each offers a gift in tribute and homage to the emperor, who sits on a throne holding the symbols of his power (orb and scepter) and flanked by representatives of the church (on his right) and of the army (on his left). Whydo you suppose the artist separated the image of the emperor from that of the women? What does the body language of the women indicate about the relations Otto wanted to portray between himself and the parts of his empire? Can you relate this manuscript, which was made in 997–1000, to Otto’s conquest over the Slavs in 997? (bpk, Berlin / Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Germany / photo: Lutz Braun / Art Resource, NY.)

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or in convents that provided them with comfortable private apartments, noblewomen wrote books and supported other artists and scholars. Despite their military and political strength, the kings of Germany faced resistancefrom dukes and other powerful princes, who hoped to become regional rulers themselves. The Salians, the dynasty that succeeded the Ottonians, tried to balance the power among the German dukes but could not meld them into a corps of vassals the way the Capetian kings tamed their counts. In Germany, vassalage was considered beneath the dignity of free men. Instead of relying on vassals, the Salian kings and their bishops used ministerials (specially designated men who were legally serfs) to collect taxes, administer justice, and fight on horseback. Ministerials retained their servile status even though they often rose to wealth and high position. Under the Salian kings, ministerials became the mainstay of the royal army and administration. Hand in hand with the popes, German kings created new, Catholic polities along their eastern frontier. The Czechs, who lived in the region of Bohemia, converted under the rule of Václav (r.920–929), who thereby gained recognition in Germany as the duke of Bohemia. He and his successors did not become kings, remaining politically within the German sphere. Václav’s murder by his younger brother made him a martyr and the patron saint of Bohemia, a symbol around which later movements for independence rallied. The Poles gained a greater measure of independence than the Czechs. In 966, Mieszko I (r.963–992), the leader of the Slavic tribe known as the Polanians, accepted baptism to forestall the attack that the Germans were already mounting against pagan Slavic peoples along the Baltic coast and east of the Elbe River. Busily engaged in bringing the other Slavic tribes of Poland under his control, Mieszko adroitly shifted his alliances with various German princes to suit his needs. In 991, he placed his realm under the protection of the pope, establishing a tradition of Polish loyalty to the Roman church. Mieszko’s son Boleslaw the Brave (r.992–1025) greatly extended Poland’s boundaries, at one time or another holding sway from the Bohemian border to Kiev. In 1000, he gained a royal crown with papal blessing. Hungary’s case was similar to that of Poland. As we have seen, the Magyars settled in the region known today as Hungary. Under Stephen I (r.997–1038), they accepted Roman Christianity. According to legend, the crown placed on Stephen’s head at his coronation (in late 1000 or early 1001) was sent to him by the pope. Stephen was canonized in 1083, and to this day the crown of St. Stephen remains the most hallowed symbol of Hungarian nationhood. Symbols of rulership such as crowns, consecrated by Christian priests and accorded a prestige almost akin to saints’ relics, were among the most vital sources of royal power REVIEW QUESTION After the dissolution of in central Europe. The economic basis for the Carolingian Empire, what political systems the power of central European rulers was developed in western, northern, eastern, and largely agricultural. As happened elsewhere, central Europe, and how did these systems here, too, centralized rule gradually gave differ from one another? way to regional rulers.

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Conclusion In 800, the three heirs of the Roman Empire all appeared to be organized like their parent: centralized, monarchical, imperial. Byzantine emperors commissioning learned books, Abbasid caliphs holding court in their new resplendent palace at Baghdad, and Carolingian emperors issuing their directives for reform all mimicked the Roman emperors. Yet leaders in the three realms confronted tensions and regional pressures that tended to put political power into the hands of local lords. Byzantium felt this fragmentation least, yet even there the emergence of a new elite, the dynatoi, weakened the emperor’s control over the countryside. In the Islamic world, quarrels

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The clear borders and distinct colors of the “states” on this map distort an essential truth: none of the areas shown had centralized governments that controlled whole territories, as inmodern states. Instead, there were numerous regional rulers within each, and there were oftencompeting claims of jurisdiction and conflicting allegiances. Consider Sicily: it was conquered byMuslims in the tenth century, but by 1060 it had been taken over by the Normans — adventurers from Normandy (in France). Its predominantly Greek-speaking population, however, was Greek Orthodox in religion, a legacy of its Byzantine past.

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between Abbasid heirs, army disloyalty, economic weakness, and the ambitions of powerful local rulers decisively weakened the caliphate and opened the way to separate successor states. In Europe, powerful independent landowners strove with greater or lesser success (depending on the region) to establish themselves as effective rulers. Local conditions determined political and economic organizations. Between 900 and 1000, for example, French society was transformed by the rise of castellans, the formation of patrilineal families, and the spread of ties of vassalage. These factors figured less prominently in Germany, where a central monarchy remained, buttressed by churchmen, ministerials, and conquests to the east. After 1050, however, the German king would lose his supreme position as a storm of church reform whirled around him. The economy changed, becoming more commercial and urban, and the papacy asserted itself with new force in the life of Europe.

Chapter 9 Review Key Terms and People Be sure that you can identify the term or person and explain its historical significance. dynatoi (p.283)

Treaty of Verdun (p.295)

Peace of God (p.303)

Basil II (p.284)

fiefs (p.299)

Alfred the Great (p.304)

Abbasids (p.285)

feudalism (p.300)

Capetian dynasty (p.305)

Fatimids (p.287)

castellan (p.302)

Ottonian kings (p.306)

Carolingian (p.290)

primogeniture (p.303)

Charlemagne (p.291)

patrilineal (p.303)

Review Questions 1. In what ways did the Byzantine emperor expand his power, and in what ways was that power checked? 2. What forces contributed to the fragmentation of the Islamic world in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and what forces held it together? 3. What were the strengths and weaknesses of Carolingian institutions of government, warfare, and defense? 4. After the dissolution of the Carolingian Empire, what political systems developed in western, northern, eastern, and central Europe, and how did these systems differ from one another?

Making Connections 1. How were the Byzantine, Islamic, and European economies similar? How did they differ? How did these economies interact? 2. How did the powers and ambitions of castellans compare with those of the dynatoi of Byzantium and of Muslim provincial rulers? 3. Compare the effects of the barbarian invasions into the Roman Empire with the effects of the Viking, Muslim, and Magyar invasions into Carolingian Europe.

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Important Events 750–c.950

The Abbasid caliphate

751

Pippin III becomes king of the Franks, establishing Carolingian rule

768–814

Charlemagne rules as king of the Franks

786–809

Caliphate of Harun al-Rashid

800

Charlemagne crowned emperor at Rome

843

Treaty of Verdun

871–899

Reign of King Alfred of England

929–1031

Caliphate of Córdoba

955

Battle of Lechfeld

962

King Otto I (r.936–973) of Germany crowned emperor

987–996

Reign of King Hugh Capet of France

c.990

Peace of God movement begins

1000 or 1001

Stephen I (r.997–1038) crowned king of Hungary

1001–1018

Byzantine conquest of Bulgaria

Consider two events: Peace of God movement begins (c.990) and Stephen I (r.997– 1038) crowned King of Hungary (1000 or 1001). How do these events illustrate Christianity’s ability to unify and mobilize people in this era?

Suggested References A few books, like Brubaker and Smith’s, try to bridge the divides between the Byzantine, Islamic, and western European worlds. Nevertheless, for the most part these regions are treated separately. For Byzantium, Whittow is essential. For insight into the Islamic world, see especially Cooperson. For the Carolingian world, De Jong provides a new approach. Becher, Matthias. Charlemagne. 2003. Berend, Nora. At the Gate of Christendom: Jews, Muslims, and “Pagans” in Medieval Hungary, c. 1000–c. 1300. 2001. Brubaker, Leslie, and Julia M. H. Smith. Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900. 2004. *Chronicle of Zuqnin, Parts III and IV, A.D. 488–775. Trans. Amir Harrak. 1999. Cooperson, Michael. Al Ma’mun. 2005. De Jong, Mayke. The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814–840. 2009. *Dutton, Paul Edward, ed. Carolingian Civilization: A Reader. 2004. * ———, ed. and trans. Charlemagne’s Courtier: The Complete Einhard. 1998. Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. 1996. Garver, Valerie L. Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World. 2009. Jones, Anna Trumbore. Noble Lord, Good Shepherd: Episcopal Power and Piety in Aquitaine, 877–1050. 2009. Kennedy, Hugh. The Armies of the Caliphs: Military and Society in the Early Islamic State. 2001. *Psellus, Michael. Fourteen Byzantine Rulers: The Chronographia. Trans. E. R. A. Sewter. 1966. Whittow, Mark. The Making of Byzantium, 600–1025. 1996. *Primary source.

Commercial Quickening and Religious Reform

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bit after the year 1100, sculptors were hired to decorate the inner walls of the cloister porch at Moissac, a monastery in southern France. For one wall they depicted the New Testament story of the poor man Lazarus and the rich man Dives. Their fates could not have been more different. While the soul of Lazarus was carried to heaven by an angel, the rich man was shown plunging down to hell. The sculptor’s work reflected a widespread change in attitude toward money. In the CarDives and Lazarus olingian and post-Carolingian period (up to, At the time this sculpted depiction ofDives and Lazarus was made, the say, 1050), people generally considered wealth nearby city of Toulouse was expanding a very good thing. Rich kings were praised for commercially. The parable of the rich their generosity; expensively produced manman and the poor man (Luke 16:19uscripts, illuminated with gold leaf and pre31) spoke to the concerns of a money cious colors, were highly prized; and splendid economy. At the top right, Dives, the rich man, feasts. To his left, the poor churches like Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen man, Lazarus, lies dying. Above Lazawere widely admired. Such views changed rus is an angel who carries his soul over the course of the eleventh century. to heaven. Further to the left, LazaThe most striking feature of the period rus’s soul lies in the lap of Abraham. from 1050 to 1150 was the rise of a money This is an image of heavenly bliss. economy in western Europe. Agricultural proBycontrast, under the left-hand arch below Abraham, devils are welcoming duction swelled, fueling the growth of trade the soul of Dives into Hell. The monks and the expansion of cities. A new class of of Moissac, like the townspeople of well-heeled merchants, bankers, and entrepreToulouse, by 1100 were attuned to neurs emerged. These developments were met moneymaking and well aware of both with a wide variety of responses. Some people its pleasures and dangers. (South Portal, Church of St. Pierre, Moissac, France / fled the cities and their new wealth altogether, Bridgeman Images.) seeking isolation and poverty. Others, even the participants in the new economy, condemned it and emphasized its corrupting influence. Many people, however, embraced the new money economy. 313

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The development of a profit-based economy quickly transformed the landscape and lifestyles of western Europe. Many villages and fortifications became cities where traders, merchants, and artisans conducted business. In some places, town dwellers began to determine their own laws and administer their own justice. Although most people still lived in sparsely populated rural areas, the new cash economy touched their lives in many ways. Economic concerns helped drive changes within the church, where a movement for reform gathered steam and exploded in three directions: the Investiture Conflict, new monastic orders emphasizing poverty, and the crusades. CHAPTER FOCUS How did the commercial Money allowed popes, kings, and princes revolution affect religion and politics? to redefine the nature of their power.

The Commercial Revolution A growing population, cities, long-distance trade networks, local markets, and new business arrangements meshed to create a profit-based economy. With improvements in agriculture and more land in cultivation, the great estates of the eleventh century produced surpluses that helped feed — and therefore make possible — a new urban population. Commerce was not new to the history of western Europe, but the commercial revolution of the Middle Ages spawned the institutions that would be the direct ancestors of modern businesses: widespread use of money, corporations, banks, accounting systems, and above all urban centers that thrived on economic vitality. Whereas ancient cities had primarily religious, social, and political functions, medieval cities were centers of production and economic activity. Wealth meant power: it allowed city dwellers to become self-governing.

Fairs, Towns, and Cities The commercial revolution took place in three venues: markets, fairs, and permanent centers. In some places, markets met weekly to sell local surplus goods. In others, fairs — which lasted anywhere from several days to a few months — took place once a year and drew traders from longer distances. Some fairs specialized in particular goods: at Saint-Denis, a monastery near Paris that had had a fair since at least the seventh century, the star attraction was wine. Most fairs offered a wide variety of products: at the Champagne fairs in France, there were woolen fabrics from Flanders; silks from Lucca, Italy; leather goods from Spain; and furs from Germany. Bankers attended as well, exchanging coins from one currency into another — and charging for their services. Local inhabitants did not have to pay taxes or tolls, but traders from the outside — protected by guarantees of safe conduct — were charged stall fees as well as entry and exit fees. Local landlords reaped great profits, and as the fairs came under royal control, kings did so as well. Permanent commercial centers (cities and towns) developed around castles and monasteries and within the walls of ancient Roman towns. Great lords in the

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countryside — and this included monasteries — were eager to take advantage of the profits that their estates generated. In the late tenth century, they reorganized their lands for greater productivity, encouraged their peasants to cultivate new land, and converted services and dues to money payments. With ready cash, they not only fostered the development of local markets and yearly fairs, where they could sell their surpluses and buy luxury goods, but also encouraged traders and craftspeople to settle down near them. Some markets formed just outside the walls of older cities; these gradually merged into new and enlarged urban communities as towns built new walls around them to protect their inhabitants. Along the Rhine River and in other river valleys, cities sprang up to service the merchants who traversed the route between Italy and the north. Many long-distance traders were Italians and Jews. They supplied the fine wines, spices, and fabrics beloved by lords and ladies, their families, and their vassals. Italians took up long-distance trade because of Italy’s proximity to Byzantine and Islamic ports, their opportunities for plunder and trade on the high seas, and their never entirely extinguished urban traditions. The Jews of Mediterranean regions — especially Italy and Spain — had been involved in commerce since Roman times. That trade had centered on the Mediterranean; now it extended to the north as well. For Jews living in the port cities of the old Roman Empire, little had changed. But for many Jews in northern Europe, the story was different. They had settled on the land alongside other peasants, and during the Carolingian period their properties bordered those of their Christian neighbors. As political power fragmented over the course of the tenth century and the countryside was reorganized under local lords, many Jews were driven off the land. They found refuge in the new towns and cities. Some became scholars, doctors, and judges within their communities; many became small-time pawnbrokers; and still others became moneylenders and financiers.

Synagogue Inscription from the City of Worms This inscription is the oldest artifact we have from a synagogue in Europe. It says that Jacob ben David and his wife, Rahel, used their fortune to construct and furnish the synagogue, which was completed in 1034. They express the belief that this act of piety is as pleasing to God as having children. (Jüdisches Museum im Raschihaus, Worms, Germany.)

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By the eleventh century, most Jews lived in cities but were not citizens. They were generally serfs of the king or, in the Rhineland, under the safeguard of the local bishop. This status was ambiguous: the Jews were “protected” but also exploited since their protectors constantly demanded steep taxes. Regular town trade groups, craft organizations, and town governments often rested on a conception of the common good sealed by an oath among Christians — and thus, by definition, excluded Jews. Nevertheless, Jews had their own institutions, centered on the synagogue, their place of worship. Although they often lived in a “Jewish quarter,” they were not forcibly segregated from other townspeople. In many cities they lived near Christians, purchased products from Christian craftspeople, and hired Christians as servants. In turn, Christians purchased luxury goods from Jewish long-distance traders and often borrowed money from Jewish lenders. The fact that Jews and Christians could live side by side had less to do with tolerance than with lack of planning. Most towns in medieval Europe grew haphazardly. Typically, towns had a center, where the church and town government had their headquarters, and around this were the shops of tradespeople and craftspeople, generally grouped by specialty: butchers, for example, lived and worked on the Street of the Butchers. The look and feel of such developing cities varied enormously, but nearly all included a marketplace, a castle, and several churches. The streets — made of packed clay or gravel — were often narrow, dirty, dark, and winding. Most people had to adapt to increasingly crowded conditions. Even so, most city dwellers tended a garden and perhaps livestock as well, living largely off the food they raised themselves. Cities were part of a building boom. Towns put up specialized buildings for trade and for city government, charitable houses for the The Building Boom One example of the new building boom fueled by the wealth of the commercial revolution is the grand cathedral complex at Parma. Begun in the second half of the twelfth century, it consisted not only of the cathedral (the Duomo) but also a bishop’s palace, baptistery, and freestanding bell tower. Most of the interior of the cathedral is today decorated with paintings from a later period, but westill have the original capitals (tops) ofthe pillars, which were carved by Lombard craftsmen. Here, on one of thecapitals, a winged angel drives Adamand Eve out of the Garden of Eden. (Galleria Nazionale, Parma, Italy / Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita culturali / Art Resource, NY.)

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sick and indigent, city halls, and warehouses. They To Milan also expanded their walls. Workers at Piacenza, for example, first pulled down the late antique wall and replaced it with a more extensive one in 872. Then, in 1169, Piacenzans took down the ninth-century wall and replaced it with one that was still more expansive. Before the eleventh century, Europeans had depended on boats and waterways for bulky longdistance transport. In the twelfth century, carts could haul items overland because new roads through the countryside linked the urban markets and strength- To Genoa ened governments could protect overland travelers. Late antique Textile wall makers Still, although commercial centers developed through(hypothetical) Smiths out western Europe, they grew fastest and most Wall of 872 Leather Wall of 1169 workers densely in regions along key waterways: the MediterWall of 1265 Fishermen, ranean coasts of Italy, France, and Spain; northern kiln workers, Church shipwrights Italy along the Po River; the Rhône-Saône-Meuse and/or monastery river system; the Rhineland; the English Channel; the shores of the Baltic Sea. During the eleventh cenThe Walls of Piacenza tury, these waterways became part of a single interdependent economy. What did townspeople look like? We can get an idea from a twelfth-century baptismal font cast in Liège (see below). It shows Jesus speaking to the soldiers and publicans (tax collectors): the soldier is dressed as a medieval knight, while the publicans wear the caps and clothes of well-to-do city dwellers. Baptismal Font at Liège, 1107–1118 This detail from a large bronze baptismal font cast at Liège (a city today in Belgium) illustrated the words of Luke 3:12–14: “Tax collectors also came to be baptized, and said to [Jesus], ‘Teacher, what shall we do?’ And he said to them, ‘Collect no more than is appointed you.’ Soldiers also asked him, ‘And we, what shall we do?’ And he said to them, ‘Rob no one . . . and be content with your wages.’ ” In this representation, the tax collectors are dressed like twelfth-century city dwellers, while a soldier is dressed like a knight of the period. (Bildarchiv Monheim / akg-images.)

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Organizing Crafts and Commerce In the Middle Ages, most manufactured goods were produced by hand or with primitive machines and tools. Though not mechanized, most medieval industries, crafts, and trades were highly organized. The fundamental unit of organization was the guild. Originally guilds were religious and charitable associations of people in the same line of business. In Ferrara, Italy, for example, the shoemakers’ guild started as a prayer confraternity, an association whose members gathered and prayed for one another. But soon guilds became professional corporations defined by statutes and rules. They charged dues, negotiated with lords and town governments, set the standards of their trade, and controlled their membership. The manufacture of finished products often required the cooperation of severalguilds. The production of wool cloth, for example, involved numerous guilds — shearers, weavers, fullers (who thickened the cloth), dyers — generally working under the supervision of the merchant guild that imported the raw wool. Within each guild was a hierarchy, starting at the bottom with the apprentices, who were learning the trade, moving up to the journeymen and journeywomen (that is, male or female day laborers — the word comes from the Middle English for “a day’s work”), ending with the masters at the top. It was hard to become a master. Young people might spend many years as an apprentice and then as a day laborer hired by masters who needed extra help. But most journeymen and journeywomen aspired to be masters because then they would be able to draw up regulations for the guild and serve as its chief overseers, inspectors, and treasurers. Most masters eventually had a chance to serve as guild officers. Occasionally they were elected, but more often they were appointed by town governments or local rulers. In addition to guilds, medieval entrepreneurs created new kinds of business arrangements through partnerships, contracts, and large-scale productive enterprises — the ancestors of modern capitalism. Although they took many forms, all of these business agreements had the common purpose of bringing people together to pool their resources and finance larger initiatives. Short-lived partnerships were set up for the term of one sea voyage; longer-term partnerships were created for land trade. In northern and central Italy, for example, long-term ventures took the form of a family corporation formed by extended families. Everyone who contributed to this corporation bore joint and unlimited liability for all losses and debts. This provision enhanced family solidarity because each member was responsible for the debts of all the others, but it also risked bankrupting everyone in the family. Pooling resources meant that money had to be available. Small silver coins were excellent for small-scale transactions; larger ones were also minted. The widespread use of coins meant that entrepreneurs got rich from mines and minters from stamping the coins. Where rulers were strong, they insisted on controlling or at least authorizing both mines and mints. Only in the thirteenth century did gold coinage become important in the West.

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But commerce needed credit as well as coins. In the Middle Ages, as now, entrepreneurs had to take out loans to finance their projects. Creditors were induced to give out loans in return for interest. But the church banned usury — lending money at interest. This led to various ingenious ways to get around the prohibition. For example, often contracts specified a “penalty for late payment” rather than an interest charge. The new willingness to finance business enterprises with loans signaled a more positive attitude toward credit, risk, and profit. Contracts and partnerships made large-scale productive enterprises possible. In fact, light industry began in the eleventh century. One of the earliest products to benefit from new industrial technologies was cloth. Water mills powered machines such as presses to extract oil from fibers, and flails to clean and thicken cloth. Machines also exploited raw materials more efficiently: new deep-mining technology provided Europeans with hitherto untapped sources of metals. Simultaneously, forging techniques improved, and for the first time since antiquity, iron was regularly used for agricultural tools and plows. Iron tools — which were more durable than wood — made farming more productive, which in turn fed the commercial revolution.

Communes: Self-Government for the Towns In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, townspeople did not fit into the old categories of medieval types: those who prayed, those who fought, or those who labored on the land. Just knowing they were different from those groups gave townspeople a sense of solidarity. But practical reasons also contributed to their feeling of common purpose: they lived in close quarters, and they shared a mutual interest in laws to facilitate commerce, freedom from servile dues and duties, reliable coinage, and independence to buy and sell as the market dictated. Already in the early twelfth century, the king of England granted to the citizens of Newcastle-upon-Tyne the privilege that any unfree peasant who lived there unclaimed by his lord for a year and a day would thereafter be a free person. This privilege became general. To townspeople, freedom meant having their own officials and law courts. They petitioned the political powers that ruled them — bishops, kings, counts, castellans — for the right to govern themselves. Often they had to fight for this freedom and, if successful, paid a hefty sum for it. A type of town institution of self-government arose called a commune; citizens swore allegiance to the commune, forming a legal corporate body. Communes were especially common in northern and central Italy, France, and Flanders. Even before the commercial revolution, Italian cities had become centers of regional political power; the commercial revolution swelled them with tradespeople, whose interest in self-government was often fueled by religious as well as economic concerns. At Milan in the second half of the eleventh century, popular discontent with the archbishop, who effectively ruled the city, led to numerous armed clashes. In 1097, the Milanese succeeded in transferring political power from the

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archbishop and his clergy to a government of leading men of the city, who called themselves consuls, recalling the ancient Roman Republic.The consuls’ rule extended beyond the town walls into the contado, the outlying countryside. Outside Italy, movements for city independence took place within the framework of larger kingdoms or principalities. Such movements were sometimes violent, as at Milan, but at other times peaceful. For example, William Clito, who claimed the county of Flanders (today in Belgium), willingly granted the citizens of St. Omer the privileges they asked for in 1127; he recognized them as legally free, gave them the right to mint coins, allowed them their own laws and courts, and lifted certain tolls and taxes. In return, the citizens supported his claims to rule Flanders. Whether violently or peacefully, the men and women of many towns and cities gained a measure of self-rule.

The Commercial Revolution in the Countryside The countryside, too, was caught in the web of trade. By 1150, rural life in many regions was organized for the marketplace. Great lords hired trained, literate agents to administer their estates, calculate profits and losses, and make marketing decisions. Aristocrats needed money not only because they relished luxuries but also because their honor and authority continued to depend on their personal generosity, patronage, and displays of wealth. In the twelfth century, when some townsmen could boast fortunes that rivaled the riches of the landed aristocracy, the economic pressures on the nobles increased as their extravagance exceeded their income. Many went into debt. The lord’s need for money integrated peasants, too, into the developing commercial economy. The increase in population and the resultant greater demand for food required bringing more land under cultivation. Sometimes lords sponsored land clearance. At other times peasants acted on their own to clear land and relieve the pressure of overpopulation, as when the small freeholders in England’s Fenland region cooperated to build banks and dikes to reclaim the land that led out to the North Sea. Villages were founded on the drained land, and villagers shared responsibility for repairing and maintaining the dikes even as each peasant family farmed its new holding individually. On old estates the rise in population strained to the breaking point the Carolingian period’s manse organization, in which each household had been settled on the land that supported it. Now, in the twelfth century, twenty peasant families might live on what had been, in the tenth century, the manse of one family. With the manse supporting so many more people, labor services and dues had to be recalculated, and peasants and their lords often turned services and dues into money rents, payable once a year. The commercial revolution and the resulting money economy brought both benefits and burdens to peasants. They gained from rising prices, which made their fixed rents less onerous. They had access to markets where they could sell their surplus

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and buy what they lacked. Increases in land under cultivation and the use of iron tools meant greater productivity. Peasants also gained increased personal freedom as they shook off direct control by lords. Nevertheless, these advantages were partially canceled out by their cash obligations. Peasants touched by the commercial revolution ate better than their forebears had eaten, but they also had to spend more REVIEW QUESTION What new institutions money. resulted from the commercial revolution?

Church Reform The commercial revolution affected the church no less than it affected other institutions of the time. Typically, kings or powerful local lords appointed bishops, who then ruled over the city. This transaction involved gifts: churchmen gave gifts and money to secular leaders in return for their offices. Soon the same sorts of people who appreciated the fates of Dives and Lazarus were condemning such transactions. The impulse to free the church from “the world” — from rulers, wealth, sex, money, and power — was as old as the origins of monasticism; but, beginning in the tenth century and increasing to fever pitch in the eleventh, reformers demanded that the church as a whole remodel itself and become free of secular entanglements. This freedom was, from the start, as much a matter of power as of religion. Most people had long believed that their ruler — whether king, duke, count, or castellan — reigned by the grace of God and had the right to control the churches in his territory. But by the second half of the eleventh century, more and more people saw a great deal wrong with secular power over the church. They looked to the papacy to lead the movement of church reform. The matter came to a head during the so-called Investiture Conflict, when Pope Gregory VII clashed with Emperor Henry IV (whose empire embraced both Germany and Italy). The Investiture Conflict ushered in a major civil war in Germany and a great upheaval in the distribution of power across western Europe. By the early 1100s, a reformed church — with the pope at its head — was penetrating into areas of life never before touched by churchmen. Church reform began as a way to free the church from the world, but in the end the church was thoroughly involved in the new world it had helped create.

Beginnings of Reform The project of freeing the church from the world began in the tenth century with no particular plan and only a vague idea of what it might mean. The Benedictine monastery of Cluny (today in France) may serve to represent the early phases of the reform. The duke and duchess of Aquitaine founded Cluny in 910 and endowed it with property. Then they did something new: instead of retaining control over the monastery, like most other monastic founders, they gave it and its worldly possessions to Saints Peter and Paul. In this way, they put control of the monastery into the hands of heaven’s two most powerful saints. They designated the pope, as the

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successor of St. Peter, to be the monastery’s worldly protector if anyone should bother or threaten it. The whole notion of “freedom” at this point was vague. But Cluny’s prestige was great because of its status as St. Peter’s property and the elaborate round of prayers that the monks carried out there with scrupulous devotion. The Cluniac monks fulfilled the role of “those who pray” in a way that dazzled their contemporaries. Through their prayers, they seemed to guarantee the salvation of all Christians. Rulers, bishops, rich landowners, and even serfs (if they could) donated land to Cluny, joining their lands to the land of St. Peter and the fate of their souls to Cluny’s efficacious prayers. Powerful men and women called on the Cluniac monks to reform other monasteries along the Cluniac model. The abbots of Cluny came to see themselves as reformers of the world as well. They advocated clerical celibacy and argued against the prevailing norm, in which parish priests and even some bishops were married. They thought that the laity (all Christians who were not part of the clergy) could be reformed and become more virtuous. In particular, they sought to curb the oppression of the poor by the rich and powerful. In the eleventh century, the Cluniacs began to link their program of internal monastic and external worldly reform to the papacy. When bishops and laypeople encroached on their lands, they appealed to the popes for help. The causes that the Cluniacs championed were soon taken up by a small group of clerics and monks in the Empire, the political entity created by the Ottonians. They buttressed their arguments with new interpretations of canon law — the laws decreed over the centuries at church councils and by bishops and popes. They concentrated on two breaches of those laws: clerical marriage and simony (buying church offices).* Later they added the condemnation of lay investiture — the installation of clerics into their offices by lay rulers. In the investiture ritual, the emperor or his representative symbolically gave the church and the land that went with it to the priest or bishop or archbishop chosen for the job. At first the emperors supported the reformers. Many of the men who promoted the reform lived in the highly commercialized regions of the empire — Italy and the regions along the northern half of the Rhine River. Familiar with the impersonal practices of a profit economy, they regarded the gifts that churchmen usually gave in return for their offices as no more than crass purchases. Emperor Henry III (r.1039–1056) took seriously his position as the anointed of God. He felt responsible for the well-being of the church in his empire. He denounced simony and refused to accept money or gifts when he appointed bishops to their posts. When in 1046 three men, each representing a different faction of the Roman aristocracy, claimed to be pope, Henry, as ruler of Rome, traveled to Italy to settle the matter. There Henry presided over the Synod of Sutri (1046), which deposed all three popes and elected another. In 1049, Henry appointed a bishop from the Rhine*The word simony comes from the name Simon Magus, the magician in the New Testament who wanted to buy the gifts of the Holy Spirit from St. Peter.

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Investiture of a Bishop This plaque, made of champlevé enamel around 1180, shows a seated ruler on the viewer’s right. He holds an orb of the world in his left hand, while with his right he gives the monk on the left a cross-standard. The inscription at the top says “E-P FIT,” meaning “He becomes bishop.” What is depicted here, then, is the investiture of a bishop by a king. In the eleventh century, this practice came under heavy criticism by church reformers. By the time this plaque was made, the reformers had made their point. The artist put the focus on the monk who was about to become bishop: he wears a halo and looms insize over the king. In addition, the inscription makes him — rather than the king — the subject of the story. (Museum for the Arts and Industry, Hamburg, Germany / Interfoto / akg-images.)

land to the papacy as Leo IX (r.1049–1054). But this appointment did not work out as Henry had expected. Leo set out to reform the church under his own, not the emperor’s, control. Under his rule, the pope’s role expanded. He traveled to France and Germany, holding councils to condemn bishops guilty of simony. He sponsored the creation of a canon law textbook — Collection in 74 Titles — that emphasized the pope’s power. He brought to the papal court the most zealous reformers of his day, including Humbert of Silva Candida and Hildebrand (later Pope Gregory VII). In 1054, his last year as pope, Leo sent Humbert to Constantinople on a diplomatic mission to argue against the patriarch of Constantinople on behalf of the new, lofty claims of the pope. When the patriarch treated him with contempt, Humbert became furious and excommunicated him. In retaliation, the patriarch excommunicated Humbert and his party, threatening them with eternal damnation. Clashes between the two churches had occurred before and had been patched up, but this one, the schism between the eastern and western churches (1054), proved insurmountable.* Thereafter, the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox churches were largely separate. *The mutual excommunications led to a permanent breach between the churches that largely remained in effect until 1965, when Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I made a joint declaration regretting “the offensive words” and sentences of excommunication the two sides had exchanged more than nine hundred years before, deploring “the effective rupture of ecclesiastical communion,” and expressing the hope that in time the “differences between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church” would be overcome.

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R hi

Leo also confronted a new power to his south. North Sea 0 150 300 miles Elb e R 0 150 300 kilometers Under Count Roger I (c. 1040–1101), the Nor. mans created a county that would eventually POLAND R .GERMANY stretch from Capua to Sicily. Leo, threatened by Worms . BOHEMIA be R D anu this great power, tried to curtail it: in 1053, he sent a military force to Apulia, but it was soundly FRANCE Milan Po R. defeated. Leo’s successors were obliged to change A Canossa P Ad their policy. In 1058, the reigning pope “invested” — ITALY r ia ti c Rome Se in effect, gave — Apulia, nearby Calabria, and even APULIA a Capua the still-unconquered Sicily to Roger’s brother, The Empire even though none of this was the pope’s to give. Under Norman Sicily The papacy was particularly keen to see the Norrule mans gain Sicily. Once part of the Byzantine Empire, the island had been taken by Muslims in The World of the Investiture the tenth century; now the pope hoped to bring it Conflict, c.1070–1122 under Catholic control. Thus, the pope’s desires to convert Sicily meshed nicely with the territorial ambitions of Roger and his brother. The agreement of 1058 included a promise that all of the churches of southern Italy and Sicily would be placed under papal jurisdiction. No wonder that when the Investiture Conflict broke out, the Normans played an important role as a military arm of the papacy. The popes were in fact becoming more and more involved in military enterprises. They participated in wars of expansion in Spain, for example. There, political fragmentation into small and weak taifas (see page 288) made al-Andalus fair game for the Christians to the north. Slowly the idea of the reconquista, the Christian “reconquest” of Spain from the Muslims, took shape, fed by religious fervor as well as by greed for land and power. In 1063, just before a major battle, the pope issued an incentive to all who would fight — an indulgence that lifted the knights’ obligation to do penance, although it did not go so far as to forgive all sins. ne

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The Gregorian Reform and the Investiture Conflict, 1075–1122 Historians associate the papal reform movement above all with Gregory VII (r.1073– 1085) and therefore often call it the Gregorian reform. Beginning as a lowly Roman cleric named Hildebrand, with the job of administering the papal estates, Gregoryrose slowly through the hierarchy. A passionate advocate of papal primacy (the theory that the pope was the head of the church), Gregory was not afraid to clash head-on with Henry IV (r. 1056–1106), ruler of Germany and much of Italy, over leadership of the church. As his views crystallized, Gregory came to see an anointed ruler as just another layman who had no right to meddle in church affairs. At the time, this was an astonishing position, given the traditional religious and spiritual roles associated with kings and emperors.

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Gregory was, and remains, an extraordinarily controversial figure. As pope, he thought that he was acting as the vicar, or representative, of St. Peter on earth. In his view, the reforms he advocated and the upheavals he precipitated were necessary to free the church from the evil rulers of the world. But his great nemesis, HenryIV, had a very different view of Gregory. He considered him an ambitious and evil man who “seduced the world far and wide and stained the Church with the blood of her sons.” Modern historians are only a bit less divided in their assessment of Gregory. Few deny his sincerity and deep religious devotion, but many speak of his pride, ambition, and single-mindedness. Henry IV was less complex. He was raised in the traditions of his father, HenryIII. He believed that he and his bishops — who were, at the same time, his most valuable supporters and administrators — were the rightful leaders of the church. He had no intention of allowing the pope to become head of the church; he didn’t see that new religious ideals were sweeping away the old traditions. The great confrontation between Gregory and Henry that historians call the Investiture Conflict* began in 1075 over the appointment of the archbishop of Milan and a few other Italian prelates. When Henry insisted on appointing these clergymen, Gregory admonished the king. Henry responded by calling on Gregory to step down as pope. In turn, Gregory called a synod that both excommunicated and suspended Henry from office: I deprive King Henry [IV], son of the emperor Henry [III], who has rebelled against [God’s] Church with unheard-of audacity, of the government over the whole kingdom of Germany and Italy, and I release all Christian men from the allegiance which they have sworn or may swear to him, and I forbid anyone to serve him as king. It was this last part of the decree that made it politically explosive; it authorized everyone in Henry’s kingdom to rebel against him. Henry’s enemies, mostly German princes (as German aristocrats were called), now threatened to elect another king. They were motivated partly by religious sentiments and partly by political opportunism. Some bishops joined forces with Gregory’s supporters, a great blow to royal power because Henry desperately needed the troops supplied by his churchmen. Attacked from all sides, Henry traveled to intercept Gregory, who was journeying northward to visit the rebellious princes. In early 1077, king and pope met at a castle belonging to Matilda, countess of Tuscany, at Canossa, high in central Italy’s snowy Apennine Mountains. Gregory remained inside the fortress there; Henry stood outside as a penitent, begging forgiveness. Henry’s move was astute, for no priest could

*This movement is also called the Investiture Controversy, Investiture Contest, or Investiture Struggle. The epithets all refer to the same thing: the disagreement and eventually war between the pope and the emperor over the right to invest churchmen in particular and power over the church hierarchy in general.

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Matilda of Tuscany How often is a woman the dominant figure in medieval art? In this illustration, made around 1115, Matilda, countess of Tuscany, towers above the king (Henry IV) and upstages the abbot of Cluny (Hugh). Matilda was a key supporter of Pope Gregory VII. It was at her castle at Canossa that Henry IV did penance. The words underneath the picture emphasize Henry’s abjection. They read: “The king begs the abbot and supplicates Matilda as well.” (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, TheVatican, Italy / Flammarion / Bridgeman Images.)

refuse absolution to a penitent; Gregory had to lift the excommunication and receive Henry back into the church. But, as Henry stood in the snow, Gregory had the advantage of enjoying the king’s humiliation before the majesty of the pope. Although Henry was technically back in the church’s fold, nothing of substance had been resolved. The princes elected an antiking (a king chosen illegally), and Henry and his supporters elected an antipope. From 1077 until 1122, papal and imperial armies and supporters waged intermittent war in both Germany and Italy. The Investiture Conflict was finally resolved long after Henry IV and GregoryVII had died. The Concordat of Worms of 1122 ended the fighting with a compromise. Henry V, the heir of Henry IV, gave up the right in the investiture ceremony to confer the ring and the pastoral staff — symbols of spiritual power. But he retained, in Germany, the right to be present when bishops were elected. In effect, he would continue to have influence over those elections. In both Germany and Italy he also had the right to give the scepter to the churchman in a gesture meant to indicate the transfer of the temporal, or worldly, powers and possessions of the church (the lands by which it was supported). Superficially, nothing much had changed; the Concordat of Worms ensured that secular rulers would continue to have a part in choosing and investing churchmen. In fact, however, few people would now claim that a king could act as head of the

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church. Just as the concordat broke the investiture ritual into two parts — one spiritual, with ring and staff, the other secular, with the scepter — so, too, it implied a new notion of kingship that separated it from priesthood. The Investiture Conflict did not produce the modern distinction between church and state — that would develop slowly — but it set the wheels in motion. The most important changes brought about by the Investiture Conflict, however, were on the ground: the political landscape in both Italy and Germany was irrevocably transformed. In Germany, the princes consolidated their lands and their positions at the expense of royal power. In Italy, the emperor lost power to the cities. The northern and central Italian communes were formed in the crucible of the war between the pope and the emperor. In fierce communal struggles, city factions, often created by local grievances but claiming to fight on behalf of the papal or the imperial cause, created their own governing bodies. In the course of the twelfth century, these Italian cities became accustomed to self-government.

The Sweep of Reform Church reform involved much more than the clash of popes, emperors, and their supporters. It penetrated into the daily lives of ordinary Christians. It inspired new ways to think about church personnel such as the priests and about church institutions such as the sacraments. It brought about a new systemization of church law, changed the way the papacy operated, inspired new monastic orders dedicated to poverty, and led to the crusades. The sacraments were, in the Catholic church’s terminology, the regular means by which God’s heavenly grace infused mundane existence. They included rites such as baptism, the Eucharist (holy communion), and marriage. But this did not mean that Christians were clear about how many sacraments there were, how they worked, or even what their significance was. Eleventh-century church reformers began the process — which would continue into the thirteenth century — of emphasizing the importance of the sacraments and the special nature of the priest, whose chief role was to administer them. Marriage, for example, became a sacrament only after the Gregorian reform. Before the twelfth century, priests had little to do with weddings, which were family affairs. After the twelfth century, however, priests were expected to consecrate marriages. Churchmen also began to assume jurisdiction over marital disputes, not simply in cases involving royalty (as they had always done) but also in those involving lesser aristocrats. The clergy’s prohibition of marriage partners as distant as seventh cousins (since marriage between cousins was considered incest) had the potential to control dynastic alliances. At the same time, churchmen began to stress the sanctity of marriage. Hugh of St. Victor, a twelfth-century scholar, dwelled on the sacramental meaning of marriage:

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Can you find anything else in marriage except conjugal society which makes it sacred and by which you can assert that it is holy? . . . Each shall be to the other as a same self in all sincere love, all careful solicitude, every kindness of affection, in constant compassion, unflagging consolation, and faithful devotedness. In other words, Hugh saw marriage as a matter of Christian love. The reformers also proclaimed the special importance of the sacrament of the Eucharist, received by eating the wafer (the body of Christ) and drinking wine (the blood of Christ) during the Mass. Gregory VII called the Mass “the greatest thing in the Christian religion.” No layman, regardless of how powerful, and no woman of any class or status at all could perform anything equal to it, for the Mass was the key to salvation. The new emphasis on the sacraments, along with a desire to distinguish the clergy more clearly from the laity, led to vigorous enforcement of an old element of church discipline: the celibacy of priests. The demand for a celibate clergy had farreaching significance for the history of the church. It distanced western clerics even further from their eastern Orthodox counterparts (who did not practice celibacy), exacerbating the east–west church schism of 1054. It also broke with local practices in places where clerical marriage was customary. Undaunted, the reformers persisted, and in 1123 the pope proclaimed all clerical marriages invalid. Clerics found other ways to distinguish themselves from the laity. Even before the Investiture Conflict, bishops made their power, prestige, and holiness visible by wearing gorgeous clothing when they carried out their ceremonial roles. Their donning of beautiful garb did not end once the Conflict was over. In fact, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the practice was extended to members of even the lower clerical orders, such as deacons and subdeacons. What were the foundations of this new power? Some of it came from the consolidation and imposition of canon, or church, law. These laws had begun simply as rules determined at church councils. Later they were supplemented with papal declarations. Churchmen had made several attempts to gather together and organize these laws before the eleventh century. But the proliferation of rules during that century, along with the desire of Gregory’s followers to clarify church law as they saw it, made a systematic collection of rules even more necessary. Around 1140, a teacher of canon law named Gratian achieved this goal with a landmark synthesis, the Decretum. Collecting nearly two thousand passages from the decrees of popes and councils as well as the writings of the church fathers, Gratian intended to demonstrate their essential agreement. In fact, his book’s original title was Harmony of Discordant Canons. If he found any discord in his sources, Gratian usually imposed the harmony himself by arguing that the passages dealt with different situations. A bit later, another legal scholar revised and expanded the Decretum, adding ancient Roman law to the mix.

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Dalmatic This vestment, called a dalmatic, is made of thirteenthcentury textiles and was used atRoda, in Spain, as a garment for a cleric.Made of red, white, and blue silk threads woven with gold, it was further ornamented with panels of tapestry. In the wake of the Gregorian reform, even members of the lower clerical orders such as deacons began to wear splendid vestments. As they put on each layer of clothing, they said prayers to remind them that each piece of clothing signified a virtue. (Museum of Costume and Textiles, Barcelona, Spain / Ramon Manent / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.)

Even while Gratian was writing, the papal curia (government), centered in Rome, resembled a court of law with its own collection agency. In the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the papacy developed a bureaucracy to hear cases, such as disputed elections of bishops. Churchmen went to the papal curia for other purposes as well: to petition for privileges for their monasteries or to be consecrated by the pope. All these services were expensive, requiring lawyers, judges, hearing officers, notaries, and collectors. The lands owned by the papacy were not sufficient to support the growing cost of its administrative apparatus, so the petitioners and litigants themselves had to pay. The pope, with his law courts, bureaucracy, and financial apparatus, had become a monarch.

New Monastic Orders of Poverty Like the popes, the monks of Cluny and other Benedictine monasteries were reformers. Unlike the popes, they spent nearly their entire day in large and magnificently outfitted churches singing a long and complex liturgy consisting of Masses, prayers, and psalms. These “black monks” — so called because they dyed their robes black — reached the height of their popularity in the eleventh century. Their monasteries often housed hundreds of monks, though convents for Benedictine nuns were usually less populated. Cluny was one of the largest monasteries, with some four hundred brothers in the mid-eleventh century.

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In the twelfth century, the black monks’ lifestyle came under attack by groups seeking a religious life of poverty. They considered the opulence of a huge and gorgeous monastery like Cluny to be a sign of greed rather than honor. The Carthusian order founded by Bruno of Cologne in the 1080s was one such group. Each monk took a vow of silence and lived as a hermit in his own small hut. Monks occasionally joined others for prayer in a common prayer room, or oratory. When not engaged in prayer or meditation, the Carthusians copied manuscripts. They considered this task part of their religious vocation, a way to preach God’s word with their hands rather than their mouths. The Carthusian order grew slowly. Each monastery was limited to only twelve monks, the number of the Apostles. The Cistercians, by contrast, expanded rapidly. Their guiding spirit was St. Bernard (c.1090–1153), who arrived at the Burgundian monastery of Cîteaux (in Latin, Cistercium, hence the name of the monks) in 1112 along with about thirty friends and relatives. St. Bernard soon became abbot of Clairvaux, one of a cluster of Cistercian monasteries in Burgundy. By the mid-twelfth century, more than three hundred monasteries spread throughout Europe were following what they took to be the customs of Cîteaux. Nuns, too — as eager as monks to live the life of simplicity and poverty that they believed the Apostles had enjoyed and endured — adopted Cistercian customs. By the end of the twelfth century, the Cistercians were an order: all of their houses followed rules determined at the General Chapter, a meeting at which the abbots met to hammer out legislation. Although they held up the rule of St. Benedict as the foundation of their monastic life, the Cistercians created a lifestyle all their own, largely governed by the goal of simplicity. Rejecting even the conceit of blackening their robes, they left them undyed (hence their nickname, the “white monks”). As shown in Figure 10.1, a diagram of Fountains Abbey in England, their monasteries were divided into two parts: the eastern half was for the monks, and the western half was for the lay brothers. The lay brothers did the hard manual labor necessary to keep the other monks — the “choir” monks — free to worship. Cistercian churches reflected the order’s emphasis on poverty. The churches were small, made of smoothly hewn, undecorated stone. Wall paintings and sculpture were prohibited. Their buildings cultivated a quiet beauty. Cistercian churches were bright, cool, and serene. The white monks dedicated themselves to monastic administration as well as to private prayer and contemplation. Each house had large and highly organized farms and grazing lands called granges. Cistercian monks spent much of their time managing their estates and flocks, both of which were yielding handsome profits by the end of the twelfth century. Although they had reacted against the wealth of the commercial revolution, the Cistercians became part of it, and managerial expertise was an integral part of their monastic life. At the same time, the Cistercians emphasized a spirituality of intense emotion. They cultivated a theology that stressed the humanity of Christ and Mary. They regularly used maternal metaphors to describe the nurturing care that Jesus provided to humans. The Cistercian Jesus was approachable, human, protective, even mothering.

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Fountains Abbey’s floor plan shows the key features of a Cistercian monastery. The eastern halfof the monastery was reserved for the monks, who were dedicated to contemplation and prayer. The western half was for the lay brothers, who worked in the fields. The lay brothers slept above their storeroom and refectory, the monks above their common room. No one had aprivate bedroom, just as the rule of St. Benedict prescribed.

Many who were not members of the Cistercian order held similar views of God;their spirituality signaled wider changes. For example, around 1099, St. Anselm wrote a theological treatise entitled Why God Became Man, arguing that since man had sinned, only a sinless man could redeem him. St. Anselm’s work represented a new theological emphasis on the redemptive power of human charity, including that of Jesus as a human being. As Anselm was writing, the crusaders were heading for the very place of Christ’s crucifixion, making his humanity more real and powerfulto people who walked in the holy “place of God’s humiliation and our redemption,” as one chronicler put it. Yet this new stress on the loving bonds that tied Christians together also led to the persecution of non-Christians, especially Jews and REVIEW QUESTION What were the causes Muslims. and consequences of the Gregorian reform?

The Crusades The crusades were the culmination of two separate historical movements: pilgrimages and holy wars. Like pilgrimages to the Holy Land, the place where Jesus had lived and died, the crusades drew on a long tradition of making pious voyages to

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sacred shrines to petition for help or cure. The relics of Jesus’s crucifixion in Jerusalem, and even the region around it, attracted pilgrims long before the First Crusade was called in 1095. As holy wars blessed by church leaders, the crusades had a prehistory. The Truce of God, begun in the late tenth century, depended on knights ready to go to battle to uphold it. The Normans’ war against Sicily had the pope’s approval. Already, as we have seen, the battle of 1063 in the reconquista of Spain was fought with a papal indulgence. European crusaders established states in the Middle East that lasted for two hundred years. A tiny strip of crusader states along the eastern Mediterranean survived — perilously — until 1291.

Calling the Crusade The events leading to the First Crusade began with the entry of the Seljuk Turks into Asia Minor (Map 10.1). As noted in Chapter 9, the Muslim world had splinteredinto numerous small states during the 900s. Weakened by disunity, those states were easy prey for the fierce Seljuk Turks — Sunni Muslims inspired by religious zeal to take over both Islamic and infidel (unbeliever) regions. By the 1050s, the Seljuks had captured Baghdad, subjugated the Abbasid caliphate, and begun to threaten Byzantium. The difficulties the Byzantine emperor Romanus IV had in pulling together an army to attack the Turks reveal how weak his position had become. Unable to muster Byzantine troops — which either were busy defending their own districts or were under the control of dynatoi (see page 283) wary of sending support to the emperor — Romanus had to rely on a mercenary army made up of Normans, Franks, Slavs, and even Turks. This motley force met the Seljuks at Manzikert in what is today eastern Turkey. The battle was a disaster for Romanus: the Seljuks routed the Byzantine army and captured the emperor. The battle of Manzikert (1071) marked the end of Byzantine domination in the region. Gradually settling in Asia Minor, the Turks extended their control across the empire and beyond, all the way to Jerusalem, which had been under Muslim control since the seventh century and most recently had been under the rule of the Shi‘ite Fatimids. In 1095, the Byzantine emperor Alexius I (Alexius Comnenus) (r.1081– 1118) appealed for help to Pope Urban II, hoping to get new mercenary troops for a fresh offensive. Urban II (r. 1088–1099) chose to interpret the request in his own way. At a church council in Clermont (France) in 1095 he addressed an already excited throng, telling them to “wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves.” The crowd responded with one voice: “God wills it.” Urban offered all who made the difficult trek to the Holy Land to fight against the Muslims an indulgence — the forgiveness of sins. The pains of the trip would substitute for ordinary penance.

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The First Crusade was a major military undertaking that required organization, movement over both land and sea, and enormous resources. Four main groups were responsible for the conquest of Jerusalem. One began at Cologne, in northern Germany; a second group started out from Blois, in France; the third originated just to the west of Provence; and the fourth launched ships from Brindisi, at the heel of Italy. All joined up at Constantinople, where their leaders negotiated with Alexius Comnenus for help and supplies in return for a pledge of vassalage tothe emperor.

Why did Urban make this call to arms? Certainly he hoped to win Christian control of the Holy Land. He was also anxious to fulfill the goals of the Truce of God by turning the crowd at Clermont into a peace militia dedicated to holy purposes. Finally, Urban’s call placed the papacy in a new position of leadership, one that complemented in a military arena the position the popes had gained in the church hierarchy. Inspired by local preachers, men and women, rich and poor, young and old, laypeople and clerics heeded Urban’s call to go on the First Crusade (1096–1099). Between 60,000 and 100,000 people abandoned their homes and braved the rough journey to Jerusalem. They went to fight for God, to gain land and plunder, or to follow their lord. Although women were discouraged from going, some crusaders were accompanied by their wives. Other women went as servants; a few may have been fighters. Children and old people, not able to fight, made the cords for siege

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engines — giant machines used to hurl stones at enemy fortifications. As Christians undertook more crusades during the twelfth century, the transport and supply of these armies became a lucrative business for the commercial classes of maritime Italian cities such as Venice, strategically located on the route eastward.

The First Crusade The armies of the First Crusade were organized not as one military force but rather as separate militias, each commanded by a different individual authorized by the pope. There were also irregular armies. Some of these, not heeding the pope’s official departure date in August, left early. Historians call these loosely affiliated groups the People’s (or Peasants’) Crusade. Some of the participants were peasants, others knights. Inspired by the charismatic orator Peter the Hermit and others like him, they took off for the Holy Land via the Rhineland. This unlikely route was no mistake: the crusaders wanted to kill Jews, who, like the Muslims, did not accept Christ’s divinity. By 1095, three cities of the Rhineland — Speyer, Worms, and Mainz — had especially large and flourishing Jewish populations with long-established relationships with the local bishops. The People’s Crusade — joined by local nobles, knights, and townspeople — vented its fury against the Jews of the Rhineland. As one commentator put it, the crusaders considered it ridiculous to attack Muslims when other infidels lived in their own backyards: “That’s doing our work backward.” The Rhineland Jews had to choose between conversion or death. Many Jews in Speyer found refuge in the bishop’s castle, but at Worms and Mainz hundreds were massacred. Similar pogroms — systematic persecutions of Jews — took place a half century later, when the preaching of the Second Crusade led to new attacks on the Jews. After they had vented their fury in the Rhineland, some members of the People’s Crusade dropped out. The rest continued through Hungary to Constantinople, where Alexius Comnenus promptly shipped them to Asia Minor, where most of them died. In the autumn, the main armies of the crusaders began to arrive, their leaders squabbling with Alexius from the start. Considering them too weak to bother with, the Turks spared the arriving crusaders, who made their way south to the Seljuk capital at Nicaea. At first, their armies were uncoordinated and their food supplies uncertain, but soon the crusaders organized themselves. They managed to defeat a Turkish army that attacked from nearby; then, surrounding Nicaea and besieging it with catapults and other war machines, they took the city on June 18, 1097. Most of the crusaders then went toward Antioch, which stood in the way of their conquest of Jerusalem, but one led his followers to Edessa, where they took over the city and its outlying area, creating the first of the crusader states. Meanwhile, the main body of crusaders took Antioch after a long stalemate. From there, it was only a short march to Jerusalem. Quarrels among Muslim rulers eased the way. In

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Crusade Warfare This battle scene, painted on paper (already common in the Islamic world) in the twelfth century, depicts an Islamic garrison defending against Western knights. At the center is a Muslim warrior wearing a large turban. Fully clad in chain mail, he sits atop a horse and wields a sword and shield. Behind him to the left are archers, also in mail armor and turbans. Above him and to the right are Muslim foot soldiers protected only by large shields. Their enemy, the knight on the black horse, has been defeated and is falling to the ground. (Early-12th-century paper fragment, Cairo, Egypt / British Museum, London, UK / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.)

early June 1099, a large force of crusaders amassed before the walls of Jerusalem; in mid-July, they attacked, breaching the walls and entering the city. “Now that our men had possession of the walls and towers, wonderful sights were to be seen,” wrote Raymond d’Aguiliers, a priest serving one of the crusade leaders. “Some of our men (and this was the more merciful) cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames.”

The Crusader States The main objective of the First Crusade — to wrest the Holy Land from the Muslims and subject it to Christian rule — had now been accomplished. The leaders of the expedition did not give the conquered territories to Alexius but held on to them instead. By 1109, they had carved out several tiny states in the Holy Land.

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Because the crusader states were created by Crusader states conquest, they were treated as lordships. The rulCOUNTY Byzantine Empire OF EDESSA ers granted fiefs to their vassals, and some of these LITTLE in turn gave portions of their holdings as fiefs to ARMENIA Edessa SELJUKS s R. their own vassals. Since most Europeans went PRINCIPALITY Antioch OF ANTIOCH Cyprus home after the First Crusade, the rulers who SYRIA Tripoli COUNTY OF Eu Mediterranean remained learned to coexist with the indigenous ph TRIPOLI Sea Damascus population, which included Muslims, Jews, and KINGDOM OF Jerusalem JERUSALEM Dead Greek Orthodox Christians. They encouraged a Sea ARABIA FATIMIDS lively trade at their ports. 0 100 200 miles The main concerns of these rulers were mili0 100 200 kilometers tary. They set up castles and recruited knights from Europe. So organized for war was this soci- The Crusader States in 1109 ety that it produced a new and militant kind of monasticism: the Knights Templar. The Templars vowed themselves to poverty and chastity. But unlike monks, the Templars, whose name came from their living quarters in the area of the former Jewish Temple at Jerusalem, devoted themselves to warfare. Their first mission — to protect the pilgrimage routes from Palestine to Jerusalem — soon diversified. They manned the town garrisons of the crusader states, and they transported money from Europe to the Holy Land. In this way, the Order of the Templars became enormously wealthy (even though individual monks owned nothing), with branch “banks” in major cities across Europe. i

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The Disastrous Second Crusade The presence of the Knights Templar did not prevent the Seljuks from taking the county of Edessa in 1144. This was the beginning of the slow but steady shrinking of the crusader states. It sparked the Second Crusade (1147–1149), which attracted, for the first time, ruling monarchs to the cause: Louis VII of France and Emperor Conrad III in Germany. (The First Crusade had been led by counts and dukes.) St.Bernard, the charismatic and influential Cistercian abbot, was its tireless preacher. Little organization or planning went into the Second Crusade. The emperor at Byzantium was hardly involved. Louis VII and Conrad had no coordinated strategy. A chronicler of the crusade wryly remarked, “Those whose common will had undertaken a common task should also use a common plan of action.” All the armies were badly hurt by Turkish attacks. Furthermore, they largely acted at cross-purposes with the Christian rulers still in the Holy Land. At last the leaders met at Acre (today in Israel) and agreed to storm Damascus, which was under Muslim control and a thorn in the side of the Christian king of

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